A good video that isunder 5 minutes long, and explains a load about social media and how to make a mark on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alexis_ohanian_how_to_make_a_splash_in_social_media.html

The video features Alexis, one of the founders of reddit, and he talks about the Greenpeace whale naming vote. That they backed.

There are 2 messages that Alexis mentions:

• Let go, don’t be afraid to let the audience have some control.
• Have fun, if you want to do well in viral or social media, then you need something that is fund.

Have a watch and share your thoughts.

Six Revisions have posted an artile looking at how to optimise your wordpress website to get more traffic from Google. If you have a wordpress website or want to know more about SEO and what is involved then the article is worth a read.

Here are the main points that the article makes.

1) Make sure that the titles are optimised. If your wordpress is putting the title of the site before the article title then you need to change that round. So that mysite – the article title, becomes, the article title – mysite.

2) Using meta descriptions. For this you need a plugin that allows you to wrtie your own meta descriptions.

3) Make sure your site uses permalinks. This means that the website is not using mysite.com/p=123 but something like, mysite.com/the-article-title. This can be done in the permalink section of wordpress.

4) Using breadcrumbs. This is not only for seo but also helpful for the readers as well. So an exmple maybe, mysite.com >category >pagetitle. Using this will allow users and search engines to find their way round your website easier.

5) Use sitemaps. You can submit your sitemaps to Google using the webmaster tools. If you use a plugin, then this can also help Google know when the latest post has been submited.

6) Describe your images. Using proper names for your image names and also good alt tags that describe the image.

7) Link to related posts. This not only helps with your seo but also helps readers see other posts that may interest them.

8 ) Use good keywords in the post headings. If you research your keywords and use them in the headings of your posts then that is a sure fire way to get them ranked better.

9) Avoid duplicate content. Using the correct htaccess file setup and also not adding duplicate content onto your wordpress site will avoid problems with the search robots.

To read more detail about these steps the full article is here: http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/optimizing-wordpress-for-search-engines/

Google has started offering real time search results for searches. If you try searching for “Copenhagen”, then you will find a search box like the image below that updates with the latest web results, comments and posts about the Copenhagen summit.

The results box is updated every couple of seconds with new results from Twitter or from blogs. It is worth keeping an eye on this change from Google. They said it is the beginning of the real time web.

A good article on what are the primary ranking factors for websites is here http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/update-to-seomoz-seo-ranking-factors/ The sumary was that the following percentages were what was though the search engines placed most weight on:

24% Trust / Authority of domain name
22% Link popularity of specific page
20% Anchor text of external links
15% On page keyword use
7% Traffic and click through data
6% Social
5% Hosting and registration data

Also out of the on page factors title tags carry the most importance, followed by keyword frequency then headings like h1 and h2. The bottom of the list of on page factors was the meta name and keyword tags which are not used that much anymore. Plenty more information in the article.

I am working on the SEO for a site about Irish fine art prints called perquisites. We have changed the website to have a faster loading front page and changed the title and meta tags to reflect what the website is about. Working with different projects is always interesting and it will be interesting to see if we can get this website to rank higher on Google.