Picture this week is themed ‘Why the long face’ from Swamibu.  Did you know that people spend all their money in a boom and lots of companies make money in a recession.  There’s a good thought for the week!

Here’s the most interesting articles and tips that I have come across this week.

1. 10 Apps for monitoring social media

Social Media can be very time consuming.  This article includes 10 good applications you can use to monitor/manage your social media activity.  One of my preferred tools is Hootsuite, you can’t go too far wrong with this.

2. Bing and Facebook Just made search social

When Google indexes results on a search page it uses machines to work out what appears first but that is not really a good way of indexing content.  Bing are Microsoft’s search engine and they have just announced a partnership with Facebook for their search results.  Soon when you start searching on Bing it will give some weight to the fact that some of your friends/followers have ‘liked’ certain content.  For example, if I was searching for a movie it would be better to show me some movies in the search results that my friends liked.  Social search is going to become increasingly important and you will see lots of changes happening in this area.

3. 6 Ways to optimise your blog for search engine ranking

An interesting article about how you can really focus your blog posting on search engine ranking and ensure any articles get maximum exposure.  Without quality content there’s no point in optimising!

Tips

1. Did you know that most users don’t scroll to see information so you hear people talking about ‘above the fold’.  This is the area you see without scrolling and it’s more important than below the fold because most people don’t scroll.  So place your important information up top.  If you want see what other people generally see without scrolling have a look at Google’s Browser sizing tool.

2. Go to Google and type in site:’your home page’.  If you see duplicate titles/descriptions that is not good for Google when it tries to index your content.  The title displayed is very important.  Imagine naming all your books the same in a library!

3. Google assigns a ‘Page Rank’ to your website and to each page on your website.  This ranges from 0 to 10.  Typically if you want to get a link back from a website if their Page rank is high then it’s more likely that the link is more valuable (there are tons are combinations but this can be used as a guide).  Check out PRChecker to check out your page rank.

Tips were weighted towards SEO this week as I had to write a guide to SEO!

Events Coming Up…

1.  The Dublin Web Summit is starting on Thursday.  It’s the best technology event in Ireland and over 600 people booked in.  All tickets are gone.  I’ll be keeping notes and will pass on the best information.

2. Horizon Speakers have brought over Kerwin Rae for a masterclass on Marketing.  It’s highly recommended by Ian Lawlor so it must be good!