Wednesday Web 2.0 Q&A

The idea for this new feature, and the questions for this week are from Ben Hodge, of Kansas Progress. If you have questions you would like answered in upcoming posts, or if you have additional story ideas, please e-mail Jenn.

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Q. Can you explain twitter to me? My understanding is that if I really thought way too highly of myself and thought that people would care about what I was doing every 10 minutes of the day, that I would “twitter” them. But why are other groups on twitter, when RSS does almost the same thing?

A. Twitter is a developing phenomenon. Yes, there are some people that literally use it to keep in touch with their “friends” throughout the day, but there are a bunch of conservatives there now that are using it for legitimate networking purposes. Check out TCOT, (the feed is here)and TCON (feed).

 Even if you don’t really do much with your account there, however, any posts you do rank very high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You can use Twitterfeed to have your Twitter account automatically updated with your blog posts, too, which is a very convenient feature. You do NOT have to tell anyone what you’re having for lunch or where.

In fact, for general networking, it’s probably better not to do a lot of “small talk” (a little is fine – lets people know they’re dealing with a real person). Also see: Twitter, Twitter Everywhere

Q. Which [social networking] sites should I join…How often must they be updated?

A. It’s really a good idea just to at least “reserve” your name on the major social networking/bookmarking sites. It usually takes just a few minutes, and you really don’t have to keep MOST* of them updated. It’s amazing what a political adversary can/will do to ruin your online reputation. The added advantage of these is that many of them give you a chance to enter your own blog URL, and that will help you with linkage.

Facebook, Linked-IN, and Twitter are the “Biggies” right now. YouTube is great, even if you just set up an account there for the purposes of watching (not uploading). Naymz and Plaxo rank high on the search engines, too.

 Beyond that, it’s just really up to you. There are hundreds of these sites, and you have to draw the line somewhere. The next tier down would be del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Propeller.  Stay tuned for an upcoming study to be released soon on which news, indexes, and social networking sites rank highest on Google.

*How often to update? Well, keep in mind that with the social networking sites, you tend to get out of them what you put in, so it’s good to be active in at least a couple. We have received (unconfirmed) information that Twitter may soon start deleting accounts that are over 180 days old. Also, some search engines give less weight or refuse to count links that are over six months old, so it’s a good idea to check on your accounts, even the ones you’re not “active” on at least twice a year.

 Q. [In terms of Search Engine Optimization], if [the links I put on Social Networking sites] don’t “look like” links, but merely show the URL, does that matter?

A. Some social networking sites, such as Facebook and Digg.com, don’t allow “hyperlinks,” (text that points to another URL) or any text that contains html. You won’t need to worry about this for SEO, because the search engines are reading the source code, and will recognize the link, anyway.

This is a valid question to address, however, because on your own blog posts, you can maximize the benefit of internal and external links by properly using “anchor text.” In a nutshell, this means that it is better to format a link to your blog like this: Ft. Hard Knox, rather than like this. For more information on anchor text, see Don’t be Link-Lovin’ in Vain (Judiciously using ‘Anchor Text’).

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