International SEO is surely getting more important nowadays, and it is not anymore just something well known Brands are taking care of.

In fact, we can find even small companies trying to expand their markets in foreign countries, in order to counteract the economical crisis or as a more ambitious and safer commercial strategy.

But what about the SEO professionals. How many are actually doing International SEO on a daily base or really know what  International SEO really is?

In order to answer to these questions and to have a snapshot of the International SEO most used best practices (or their lack of use), I kindly ask you to fill this survey.

It is anonymous, so – please – be honest

The results of this poll will be published on SEOmoz.

I Love SEO

I Love SEO

I am a patient man. More than 10 years in the television industry made me so, and the last 8 in the Internet marketing one reinforced that facet of my character.

But sometimes something happen that really piss me off, and then I get infuriated and I am lucky I work at home, if not I would be really hard to stand for my co-workers.

Today it happened that something and it is your fault, Google.

I was working when in my Twitter stream I saw a curious tweet by Ani Lopez, a great Spanish SEO living and working in Vancouver. His tweet was referring to a strange Adwords Ad by Google promoting Adwords itself. The ad says this (translation is mine): “Forget about SEO. To be visible in Google today, try Adwords”.

The ad is published when you search “SEO” in Google.es

I am used to see Google advertising its products via Google. A classic is the ad that is published when you do a site search and which is promoting the use of Google Webmaster Tools. That is a consistent ad, related somehow to the search done; therefore acceptable. But this one? I don’t think so, dear Google.

The Search is about SEO, search engine optimization, organic search results… what ever you mean with the word SEO, but it is not about PPC.

If I am not wrong, one of the Adwords Guidelines is to not publish misleading ads, and I believe that your ad is misleading. If someone is searching for SEO, he is probably looking for informations about what does SEO means, what companies do SEO in Spain (being the search done in Google.es) or if there are Guides about SEO.

And this is not just the only ad. If I search for “Posicionamiento Web” or “Posicionamiento en buscadores (which are the same as saying “Search Engine Optimization” in Spanish”), and you will see Adwords promoting itself again with an ad saying this:

Your site in the SERPs – Receive the help of an Expert and put your site in Google. Call us!

I mean… someone is looking for information about SEO and you, Google, are saying to him to call you in order to have his site in the SERPs? If it was me promoting myself under SEO and finally selling Adwords, I would be considered a con-man (or directly a shit man).

But the most incredible ad is this one I see in Google.it doing a search with “SEO” (again, translation is mine).

SEO with Google – www.google.it/adwords – Put your TV and Print Campaign side by side with your Adwords Campaigns!

WTF!

I searched for SEO and your ad:

1. is pointing me to a landing page about Adwords;
2. is talking about Adwords explicitly
3. is saying that SEO is the same as saying Adwords

I Love SEO

Psst… before reading click the Play button.

H ow many times we have seen clients coming to us asking to help them with their sites? Every day, no? And the majority of those sites are desperate cases, not because of the sites themselves, but due to the poor execution of the idea its owners had when creating them.

Just think it: eCommerce one identical to the other, hotel booking sites using the same hotel database, apps site which difference is only the color of the WordPress template used. Or gems buried in the SERPs and that you have discovered just by chance.

The Internet is a tough battleground

You have an idea, you maybe have a wonderful idea. And just because it is wonderful you believe it will conquer the World. The Internet will be yours. But hardly you will have success.

When you have an idea and Internet is where your idea must engage in the battle for customers, the idea is not enough, even if your battleground is a niche market.

The question is: how can make my idea become a successful one for real?

I invite you to take a step back in time with your imagination.

The time: eighth century before Christ. The place: Italy.

Rome was just a small farming village.

Let’s do jump forward in time… second century before Christ: Rome is ruling the Western side of the Mediterranean and it is quickly conquering the eastern part. Soon Julius Caesar will submit to the dominion of Rome the actual territory of France, Belgium and part of Germany.

How could those farmers conquer the world? Because they were organized, they were an army, they learned to do better what others already did and because they build such a myth of Rome that the nations they conquered soon after being conquered were proud to be Roman.

Ok, but what all this has to do with sites and web marketing? A lot.

Prepare the battle

You have an idea… be firm with it, never regret it. Be consistent with that intuition. But before choosing the battleground, you have to know it perfectly.

In marketing that means to know your end users even before you start creating a product. Do your homework, do a work of Intelligence: what people is saying of your competitors? Use Social Mention to listen. What the people you want to be your end users is looking for? Do a keyword search, not with the purpose of simply knowing how much traffic could your site attract, but to craft your strategy, which should be giving to them what they do really need. Or try to previews the trends in your market and contrast with them the correctness of your idea with real data. You may want to monitor Twitter with tools like Trendistic, but also study the how people tastes have radically changed in your market in the past and try to understand why and who were the first welcoming and driving those change to the mainstream.

Before you decide to start the battle you have to know the personas your going to battle for.

A good way to know them is, for instance, creating a small site, an beta “niche” one: that is your small farming village. Don’t go for the biggest competitors at first, go for the middle ones. Go local, also if your idea is there to conquer the world market. That is what FourSquare did, conquering the New York market and from there trying to conquer the global market of the location-based mobile platform. Or go niche as Facebook did, being beforethe social network of the university students to then jump out and go to the conquest of all the internet users and become the Social Network.

Now you have the tools to classify and distinguish clearly what kind of persona visit your site, combining neutral data like keywords with demographic ones. And with those information now you can understand the different behaviors of those persona while visiting your site using the tools Conversion Rate Optimization and Analytic may offer.

Train your army

You and the people working with you are your army. The local/niche wars are the prelude to the biggest one you will combat. Use them to train your army and to create your cohorts. Don’t be stupid and make them the protagonists of the victories your site is obtaining. Just that way you will be able to start creating your own myth of Rome.

And share the benefits of your site success with your users, because them too are your army. Prize them, make them feel indispensable and part of the success of your site. Make them feel part of your myth. This way they will become your best ambassadors and help you seeding your vision in every place and help mining the foundations of your future bigger competitors. They are your newly conquered people proud to be Romans.

And train, train, train. Remember? You’re still a small farmer village, even though you  have conquered your first territories and slices of market, as Rome did conquering Italy battling one after the other every other nation. Being small you must excel in every field: SEO, Social, Content, Analytic, Programming, Web Design. Learn from your competitors, not just from their mistakes but also, if not even more, from what they do well… and do it better.

Seed your vision, gain allies

When you feel secure, scale the battle and go for the big competitors. But before gain allies.

Yes, because just if you have allies you can have a huge chance to win. Rome needed allies to win against the Gauls, and allies to win against Hannibal, and allies to win its last historic victory against the Huns.

To gain allies you must seed your vision… and in Internet the allies are the influencers.

At this time you and your site are probably already know, but maybe still considered as interesting case and an outsider. Or, depending by the market your acting in, your are well know but just locally or in your small niche.

This is the time to start doing inbound marketing at large scale.

• Go to Followerwonk and find the people who can become the ambassadors of your vision at large scale. Engage with them, befriend them, offer yourself to help them;
• Go on Topsy and find the most shared and popular blog posts and discussions about your market. Propose yourself as thoughtful voice;
• Become the most trusted content curation source in your market, following the example of KISSmetrics in the Analytic field;
• Start guest blogging… at first in the blogs of those ones who, as you, are commenting in other bigger blogs… conquer the linkpins trust first. Then ask and start guest blogging in the influencers’ blogs;
• Revamp your Social Media activity and create a real back and forth channel between your social media presence and your site;
• Re-analyse constantly the persona your site is targeting and explore new ones.

Win the battle, and the war

Now you are ready.

Your army is trained and you have gained new powerful allies… and you know that the big competitors usually have very slow reactions, but can still win you thanks to their own mass.

Time to launch a campaign: maybe with a new product, or a new design, or a new community platform inside your site… or maybe with all of them. But be sure to orchestrate the campaign in every field:

• Search
• Social
• Content

I Love SEO

Do you know what is the best solution to not get stressed out by all the updates Google does?

To not depend on Google.

Ok! Google (and Search Engines) are essential for the health and succes of any site. To be in Google and having your site leading the highest number of SERPs is strategic and the best way to rule in your market. But when I see that more of the 70% of the traffic of a website is from Google, I start screaming in terror.

It is like relying all our business to just one client… if that client drops out, we are doomed.

SEO is…

Let’s try to remember what SEO is. Search Engine Optimization, that’s what surely you are saying. Yes, but not only.

SEO is an imperfect definition right now… as Rand Fishkin told in this interview, because the final objective of an SEO is to obtain the most relevant organic traffic, and organic is not synonymous of SERPs. Any kind of traffic that is generated by a not paid tactic is organic. Therefore an SEO should be optimizing a site and not thinking just to search results.

That is one of the most important mantra for a web marketer. And for any SEO. Why? Because the Google of today is not the Google of yesterday and the actual Google is just a preview of the Google of tomorrow: a very different Google.

I am not just talking about the blended search… I’m talking about authority, authorship, entity and brand.

Since Vince Google proved its unconditional love for Brands. An Entity is a more generic definition of Brand. Both see in authority an essential element to be considered so. To build authority you need to go out of your site, be active, to create content that people love to share and link. And now, with the increasing importance of the social signals, authority is related to authorships… as the rel=”publisher” present in the Google+ for business badge proves.

Yes, we still see exact matching domains ranking very well, but we know that Google is working on that issue. More over, we can infer from experiments like this one, which show that partial matching anchor texts are better correlated than exact matching ones, that the same is what the Google of tomorrow will do.

What SEOs must start to understand is that Google is slowly but firmly moving from the pure LinkGraph to a mixed Trusted-Social-Link-Graph. That means that SEO now (and even more in the future) must not rely to the old classic tunes and has to finally move from just technical SEO to a wider concept of SEO, which includes content and social marketing… and this is Inbound Marketing.

What conclusion: that Inbound Marketing is not just a nice definition, is not just a rebrand of marketing online, is a necessity in order to be a better SEO. Inbound marketing not only will give your site new sources of traffic (and be less dependent of Google), but also it will make you rank better, because spreading your content outside of your site you will be acquiring authority and if you’re not a brand/entity you will start being considered a brand/entity, and if you are an authoritative brand quite obviously you are going to be liked, shared, plussed one because you are the thoughtful leader in your market.

What about Black Hat? Yes, it will exist still, but the Black Hat job will start to be so hard in order to create sites/bots more human than the human, that it will probably become easier to spend the same amount of energy and resources being really real and White Hat.

So, dear SEOs, think Inbound to gain the SEO war.

I Love SEO

In the first days of the Panda Update, one thing of the many Matt Cutts said caught my attention: that Google were cooking the update since more than a year before its launch. That note, somehow told in a breath, passed unnoticed as it was something obvious: no big change can be prepared in few weeks or months, it needs time. So, me included, we forgot that “time” indication and started finding what were the Panda Factor.

But today… today Google has announced to have started giving fresher results in search results pages. And that phrase by Matt Cutts echoed in my mind.

What happened in the Google world more than one year before of Panda? Not an update, but a revolution: Caffeine. With Caffeine Google was refreshing the SERPs almost instantly and not in a two weeks frame as before. But such a revolutionary innovation came with a genetic problem; let’s read from the announcement post by Google:

As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published

No matter when or where it was published, [...] add straight … to the index. It is not strange that after few months people were starting complaining about the increasingly worst quality of the SERPs.

Google started to fix the problem, or maybe he already had a plan to follow, having the previous May Day Update probably to be considered the first brick of the Google we know today.

As I was reflecting in Deconstructing Google published in the beginning of March 2011 in the SEOmoz blog (but written few days before the launch of Panda), the problem Google was not only related to thin/duplicated/useless/scraped content, but also to the practical untruthfulness of the trusted seeds. Panda solved, or is trying to solve the first issue, but the second one not yet. I remind you, in fact, that Panda has nothing to do with the Link Graph and technically it is not an update of the algorithm of Google and I remind you how much many of us still complain about the bad quality of SERPs.

So, while we were all stressed out by recovering from the several updates of the killer Panda, Google was following its route.

Why am I saying this? Let’s check out the chronology of the events, helped by the Google Algorithm Change History curated by Dr Pete for SEOmoz:

1. As a fundamental premise, on December 2010 Google officially confirmed in an interview with Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land that it was using the social signals in determining rankings;
2. Around the same days Panda is launched, Google changed the interface of the Google users’ profile page;
3. On March the 30th Google announced the launch of the +1 button. As Tom Critchlow wrote in this post, that little button was meant not just as a frontal attack to the Like one of Facebook, but also a potential strong social signal, therefore able to influence rankings;
4. On June the 2nd Google, Bing and Yahoo! announced Schema.org, a clear indication of the semantic web (and SEO) of the next future. This decision may seem having little relation with our theory about the Google Master Plan to fight search spam, but – apart from being the cause of future changes – but…
5. Just four days after, on June the 6th, Google announced the adoption of the author markup. Are you starting to see the bigger picture? As Google wrote, this markup is meant to help searchers identify high quality, authoritative content. The authors (and the publishers, with rel=”publisher”) are becoming the new trusted seeds. But that is not enough to solve the problem;
6. June 28th: Google+ is launched, still with limited access, but finally Google jump seriously on the social arena. A social network is a place where people talk and share easily stuff, and stuff in the web means links. More important: Google+, as every social network, is based on the users’ profiles; and the profiles in Google are connected to the authors’ content. That means that more the author is active also in Google+ (and in the other social network Google verifies through the rel=”me” tag in the profile) and added to circles (followed, having friends…) and her content shared, linked in social webs like Quora and others social sites, the more authoritative she will be considered and – hence – trusted.
7. Along the year, then, Google realized several “updates” to Google News, the main sources for trusted seeds, the most interesting being the evolution of the “Original-Source” tag: “Standout” and the “Syndication-Source” ones. These news are important because help refining not only the quality of Google News, but also the organic search, as site like Search Engine Land (not a traditional newspapers/magazine) use them;
8. Starting on July the 31st the Google Profiles are all public;
9. On September 21st Google+ is free for all (remember the big arrow?);
10. October the 27th, Google Apps users can finally use Google+. That means that businesses (like Ford is testing) soon can start interact with “normal” users on Google+ and see their content shared and +1 ;
11. That same day, Google allows searchers to interact with the authors’ snippet in the SERPs. Now they can +1 and add them in their Google+ Circles. Another way to add social signals to the authority of a potential trusted seed;
12. Today, November the 3rd, Google launch “Freshness Update” (or Caffeine 2.0)… the circle seems closed, or maybe we are going to start again this play.

I Love SEO

I love Google and I hate it.

I love it because it offers me a Search service that I like and find useful (mostly), a great and “free” way to analyse the traffic to my web, a wonderful email service, tools, a social platform that I start using more and more every day…

I hate it because it is making my life as an SEO harder and because, even though it says the contrary, it is acting on us SEOs were pariah.

The keyword apocalypse

Yesterday Google announced that, under a privacy justification, it will encrypt the navigation of any logged in user in Google.com. As a consequence, Google Analytics won’t show anymore what keywords were used by a logged in user to find a site and click in its organic SERPs’ snippet. Just the organic searches… because if that same logged in user clicked on an Adwords ad, then you will still be able to know what keyword generated that visit and, therefore, what keyword converts or not.

As Yoast explained in SEObook, to block the referrers just for the organic searches is a nonsense, because if it is privacy the reason of this decision, then for the same reason (and even with more reason) also Adwords users would not be allowed to see referrers. But to block that information would be a deathblow for the Adwords system: if an advertiser cannot know what keywords are the ones giving him the best ROI, then there is no reason to use Adwords scientifically or to use Adwords at all.

But what surprises me the most is that actually Google Analytics is not telling me who is the real person that used a keyword that generated a visit and, maybe, a conversion. And even if the conversion has been originated just by one keyword used by just one user, it is not Google Analytics what provides me the personal information of that user, but the user himself in the same conversion moment.

Said that, Google tried to defend itself saying it that just a small subset of data is what is going to be lost. But even though that subset represents just a one digit percentage, what really matters is the attitude, the blatant injustice to an area of web marketing: SEO. and this is what caused the furious reaction of the vast majority of the Search industry.

Objectively, not that much has changed for me. The encryption is just for Google.com, and not for Google.es or .it (for the moment) and right now the logged in searches are a minority.

But it is the future that worries me…

The Google roadmap

Google has a problem. A big problem: it is not a site where people usually stay a lot. It is a search engine, and the nature of a search engine is to send out people to other sites, the ones it lists in its SERPs.

But this can be a problem when it comes to ads… because the shortest the time on site the shortest the opportunities are that an user clicks on an ad.

And this is were Facebook is winning… and Facebook, just in the USA, is used by more than the 90% of the Internet users.

This need, probably, is the foundation upon which many of the latest news from Google are based: from Google Travel to the invasive presence of the local search in the SERPs, just to cite two cases. Surely, they can offer a better search experience to the users, but, finally, they are instrumental to the objective of keeping the users in its properties.

But the real weapon Google is using and with which it believes it could win the time spent online war is Google Plus. Being a social network, Google Plus is a place where users stay in, talk, discuss, see videos, share photos… and are exposed to ads… and Google has the most perfect advertisement platform: Adwords

Actually ads are not displayed in Google Plus, but this it how they could be presented in the future:

To use Google Plus, you must have a Google Profile and be logged in. Once logged in, as all the services in Google are connected thanks to the grey head-bar, if a Google Plus user wants to do a search, he will do it as a logged in user… in an SSL enviroment. That means that in a future, if Google Plus will have the success we all want it has, every click on an organic search result will be generated by one keyword: “not provided”.

But advertisers will still be able to see what keywords they bid for are converting or not. Adding this to the new Flow Visualization and surely a future better integration with the demographic data of Ad Planner, Google will have an advertisement platform that will compete with the Facebook one.

SEO is only a collateral victim in this war.

That is what worries me, the future that may be, not the present.

Is this meaning that SEO is dead? No, absolutely. This means that Google is changing the rules very fast, because it has to act fast. Therefore that SEOs have to act faster, or they die.

In what direction SEOs must move? This question deserves a post to be answered properly, so wait for a follow up.

I Love SEO

This post is the English translation of Le 10 cagate SEO di cui non si dovrebbe parlare più by Lowlevel.it

FOR NEVER AND EVER AGAIN

Years are passing and new people start their SEO adventure into Marketing World, and punctually we can see some old questions coming out like never dyeing zombies.

The problem is that also some SEOs who supposedly should know that those are no no questions, start having doubts.

IMO it is the time to finally shot a silver bullet to those mythical questions, remember why they are crappy questions and proceed discussing about more important and relevant things.

This one is my personal list of the ten crappiest mythical SEO questions. Feel free to refer to this post if in the future if someone (a newbie or a client or your Marketing VP) will ask you one of them.

1. Is PageRank important or not?

Every time I hear or read this question, I noticed that none specify important for what?

We SEOs often have a monothematic state of mind, and for many of us this function is usually referred to rankings; therefore what implies to rank higher.

In a Search Engine reality things are more complex and PageRank is used by Google in more than just one context.

And even though its direct influence in how Google rank a page in the SERP is not as strong as in the beginning, Google still use it as a factor that helps it in taking important decisions.

For instance, it has been noted that sites or sections of a site with more PageRank are those ones that are crawled more deeply by Googlebot. In the case of big sites, this cause that a bigger number of pages are cached by Google, therefore there is a higher probability for them to be visible and ranking in the SERP.

But we are talking about PageRank and not the Google bar PageRank. That green bar has never been a real measure of the PageRank of a page, but simply a sort of “simulation”. Google gave it like a gadget to the users, but many SEOs and webmasters transformed it in a sort of phallic totem to use to show to the world that they have it bigger than others.

It is not strange that in the last version of the Google bar the green bar has been removed from the default tools.

And I think it is time to start saying: who still talks about PageRank has a small dick.

2. Is it better the hyphen or the underscore?

I Love SEO

It seems years ago, but Search Engines has recognized the importance of the Social Signals as ranking factors less than one year ago. And that announcement has to be considered a milestone in the history of Search, officially opening what we could define as the birth of Social SEO (or SEOcial as we say in Spain).

Because of this I believe that us SEOs need to understand the theory behind Social Media, and not just limit ourselves in becoming social media tools experts.

When it comes to Social Media as a marketing tactic, what really matters in most cases is to interpret the users action in an online context with the people who they are socially connected to and how they influence each other. Undoubtedly, the social influence in its purest essence is what leads us to use this type of services that most of our friends are already using; we succumb to that social pressure and move our interactions online.

In this sense, the influence our friends have on us (and vice versa), is amplified to a new horizons of contacts. The influence our environment has on us, for instance, leads us to buy a product because one of our friends recently purchased a product. Moved to the online life, the influence would lead us to consider the recommendations on a particular brand, campaign, product, service, etc., our contacts/friends or those people who we believe are experts do.

The influence that certain people have on us in our digital life, push us also in shaping a certain circle of friends, circle based on common affinities. In this sense, to identify the situations in which the social influence is the cause of this correlation is crucial. The social influence determines that an idea, a behavior or a product are virally disseminated through the social networks.

The key is to not underestimate the power of the social nature of the human being in favor of the social network platforms themselves. In its broadest sense, as stated by Nicholas A. Christiakis and James H. Fowler in their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives: Social networks spread happiness, generosity and love. They are always there, exerting a subtle influence while determining our choices, actions, thoughts and feelings. And our desires too. Moreover, these connections do not end up in the people we know. Beyond our social horizons, friends of friends of our friends can promote chain reactions that ultimately reach, like waves, coming from foreign lands, and break into our beaches.

Here I share a Ted Talk by Nicholas Christakis to better understand his vision of social networks:

Before delving into the concept of influence is therefore necessary to really understand what “social networks” mean in the field of human relations and what elements make them up, because understanding that we will understand better the basis of the concept of influence.

Communities are defined by structural connections and not necessarily for any particular trait that can connect its members. Stated very simply, a social network is an organized group of people formed by two types of elements. However, the organization of natural social networks is not imposed from above. Social networks evolve organically from the natural tendency of everyone to establish relationships and make few or many friends, to have a large family or small… (again from “Connected…”)

For the authors, the social networks have two aspects:

1. Connection, which has to do with who is connected with whom;
2. Contagion, which flows into the social network.

Thus, they identify some basic rules:

• It is we who give shape to our network. Humans organize and reorganize social networks continuously. As an example, homophily, the tendency to consciously or unconsciously associate with people like us. We also choose the structure of our networks:
• Deciding how many people we are connected to;
• Modifing the way our family and our friends are connected;
• Controlling where in the social network we are: to the center or toward the margins of the Graph (if you want to know more about the graph theory check the Wikipedia entry on social network).
• Our network determines our way of being;
• Our friends influence us. The shape of the network that surrounds us is not the only important thing; what flows through the connections is also crucial. One of the things that determine the flow is the tendency of humans to influence and copy one each other;
• The friends of the friends of our friends influence us too. For instance, if we want to transmit to a group of people to quit smoking, we wouldn’t put them in a row and ask the first one to quit smoking and pass the message to one following her. On the contrary, we would ask a lot of people who do not smoke to surround a smoker. This is the real basis of all real influence certain people have in the social networks: sometimes it is not the volume or the distribution medium what draws the influence, but the contacts someone has within the network as a whole that determine the success of a message, a content flow, a product is spread on the net;
• The network has its own life. Social networks can have properties and functions its members neither control or perceive. To understand these properties we must study the entire group and its structure, not just isolated individuals.

Thus it is obvious that the influence others have on us to act similarly, whether in fashion, in the adoption of a technology, in a viral marketing action, in a word of mouth sequence…

And few have expressed so clearly this series of concepts such as Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, which does an excellent analysis the nature of “social epidemics”. For him, the answer is that the success of a social epidemic depends greatly on the participation in a certain type of person, endowed with some special and unusual features.

Sometimes we place great emphasis on content and forget that what matters for its propagation is a number of elements and fundamental rules as:

• The law of specials or class of persons who play a crucial role in the spread of any information:
• Connectors: They are very adept at bringing the world together. Knows a lot of people who believe in him, the right people, and influential people belonging to different groups. He has great imagination and likes to check things out for himself. Often gregarious and friendly. He is very sociable and likes being in the center of events.
• Mavens: They are information specialists. They are the kind of people you turn to when you have a problem. The “insiders” are constantly seeking and sharing information. They are very sociable and all everything entices their curiosity. The characteristics of the mavens are:
• they consume information and content,
• they love to give advice without expecting anything in return,
• they take seriously the challenge of providing good advice,
• they are motivated in helping and teaching.
• Sellers: They are the ones who convince all the world. The “sellers” want others to do as they recommended. An effective salesperson is naturally exuberant, fun people find and listen. Enjoys helping others. He is charming and charismatic. He is passionate and loves his job. Knows how to use all his skills and techniques of persuasion. It is very expressive: knows how to transmit ideas and thoughts. He is gregarious and friendly.
• Connectors, Mavens and Sellers are required to trigger a social epidemic.
• The bait factor: the importance of what is catchy and what not. To cause an epidemic, the ideas must be memorable and prompt us to act.
• The power of context: any social epidemic is subject to the conditions and circumstances of the time and place at which it occurs. In this sense, we are extremely sensitive to what happens around us.

With that, we approach significantly to the factors we must take into account when measuring the influence of certain people in social networks, something strategic for our actions also as an SEO. Factors which go far beyond the number of followers on Twitter and Facebook.

As suggested by framework established to date, we should not worry so much about the number of followers but about those who are following us and how to take care of spreading our messages. In social networks, as in life in general, relationships and take care of them is everything.

Social media has revolutionized many things, but one of their greatest impact has been, without doubt, to enhance the influence and role certain people play over others. Through the process of democratization, the transition to the self-mass or our role as micro media, the role of authority of certain individuals has grown to a limit not previously considered . What is important is to try to understand how messages are filtered and transferred to several people and what role each one of them plays within the social network (not as service but understood in its sociological concept). We need, therefore, to understand the map of the influence aura.

To this I would add this other series of fundamental ideas:

• The influence without context is irrelevant;
• Popularity is not the same as influence;
• Connecting and chatting has nothing to do with the activity and management of the various social web tools and platforms.

To this I’d add four key areas identified by Ian Delaney:

• The nature of influencers;
• The nature of the audience;
• The nature of the network or the media through which the information is moving;
•  The nature of the information and the content itself.

In this scenario are emerging interesting specific tools that allow measuring the degree of influence of people on the social web. Of these, one is growing significantly above the rest: Klout ( with more than 100 million active accounts ), a service which originally was created to measure the influence of the Twitter accounts and has been adding platforms to integrate Facebook and YouTube, among others.

Following its steps other services have started to appear, which include various specific platforms or are specific to just one, and existing tools have evolved to measure and provide statistics to help put a value on our “Social Score”.

Some of them are:

• Booshaka : specific to Facebook.
• PlusClout : Google + specific.
• PeerIndex : analyzes the user profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Twentyfeet : cross-platform monitoring tool that calculates influence.
• Crowdbooster : an interesting monitoring tool that is actually hype.
• MyWebCareer : more oriented towards the labor market, as it analyzes the potential of employees based on their social networking profiles (your digital identity)
• PostRank : more oriented to measure the influence of a certain website or blog based on content, relevance, author, history …
• Twitter Grader, specific for Twitter
• Followerwonk, a twitter bio search engine that also include a fantastic followers analyzer;
• TweetStats, specific for Twitter.
• Twylah : adds value to Twitter selected topics based on users and their influence.

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A lot has been already talked about Content Curation, meant as the capacity of filtering and adding value to the content we receive and are exposed to everyday from all the online sources (Search and Social).

Content Curation is certainly more necessary than ever, a critical task in the business environment, not only in Marketing, Communications or Advertising, but it is especially so in areas such as Product, Innovation, Customer Service or Human Resources.

Its impact goes far beyond the content we may generate. Really it is a state of mind affecting the monitoring, research, investigation and the way we listen to people and are able to discern what affects us what not.

But what could be a definition of Content Curator? A generic definition could be this one:

A content curator is a critical knowledge broker who seeks, collects and shares on a continuous base the most relevant content in her area of expertise.

If you think it, it is not a new “profession”, but something that exists since the invention of literature; simply, now the astonishing exponential growing production of web generated content makes this figure even more important.

Initially, the term is attributed to Rohit Bhargava, who developed a Content Curation Manifesto in which he states:

In the near future, experts predict that content on the web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. To satisfy the people’s hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators. The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.

Rohit Bhargava has gone farer in the definition identifying 5 models of Content Curation:

1. Aggregation. The act of curating the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location;
2. Distillation. The act of curating information into a more simplistic format where only the most important or relevant ideas are shared;
3. Elevation. Refers to curation with a mission of identifying a larger trend or insight from smaller daily musings posted online;
4. Mashups. Unique curated juxtapositions where merging existing content is used to create a new point of view;
5. Chronology. A form of curation that brings together historical information organized based on time to show an evolving understanding of a particular topic.

But how is it possible to curate content efficiently?

1. Finding the best content. Content Curation works only if the person who publishes the curated content knows extraordinary well his industry target too. This knowledge allows the content marketer to become the most reliable filter of quality content. The more content is discarded, the more relevant the final content is;
2. Adding value. It is imperative to provide comments and perspectives that add value to the curated content. Trying to educate the reader and provide context for each element are also key. It is this additional author value what makes the content more interesting and relevant to the consumer and what differentiates this approach from other more basic collection (aka: scraping collections);
3. Crediting. It is critical to properly credit, providing clear links to additional sources that underlie the final content. It is worth to remember how those links are useful also for basic SEO reasons (outreach, trustrank aura…).

Nowadays we have a large number of tools that allow us to filter content, but we are human beings and human beings are curious by nature, and curiosity makes us change topics and at the end, or we have an excellent memory, or we don’t know how we have archived our sources on Delicious or we do not optimize our RSS feed reader.

Some of these tools are:

RSS READERS: Google Reader, Netvibes, Feedly…

SOCIAL NEWS: Fark, Reddit, Hacker News…

BOOKMARK: Delicious…

CONTENT “REPOSITORY” SITES: Posterous, Amplify…

But the ideal is to move toward an optimal management of RSS, eliminating duplicate entries, filtering by content or keywords. And nothing can beat Yahoo! Pipes. Or just see what you can do with it.

Beside Yahoo! Pipes, there are new powerful tools that help optimizing the use of web contents:

• Curata by HiveFire Inc., specifically for business use. Accordingly to their own words Curata Curata helps marketers maximize their content curation efforts with web-based tools to easily find, organize and share online content – helping them build thought leadership and grow their qualified leads;
• Summify, maybe the best social news feed, that collects only the most relevant content share by your social circle;
• Paper.li, somehow similar to Summify, but based on the links you have shared in your Social Networks;
• Trunk.ly. A tool for collecting all the links you share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and many others sources;
• Cadmus. A real time service that lets you manage your Twitter Stream, FriendFeed and RSS Feeds to display the most relevant since the last time you accessed to them;
• Keepstream. Tool that lets you organize the content you share on Twitter by category and embed it on a site or blog;
• Storify.  Similar to Keepstream, but on steroids.

And then so many others that I invite you to explore and play with:

• BagTheWeb;
• Faveous;
• Qrait;
• Pearltrees;
• Postpo.st;
• CurationSoft

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