Search Engines || Information Architecture

NOTES:

• as always, this article doesn’t apply to promoting regular junk spammy websites. Not because I find it immoral, but it will simply won’t work and you will only loose your time;
• during testing, one of my twitter accounts got suspended for aggressive following so consider yourself warned and try to stay below the radar;

A few weeks ago, Google decided to penalize one of my websites. Instead of jumping to correct whatever Google thought it was inappropriate, I saw this as an opportunity to identify additional traffic sources.
After playing around with twitter and some tools here are the results:

Goals:

• Increase the number of followers on Twitter in a short amount of time

Tools you will need:

TwintIn: In the beginning I used Flash Tweet but this is now a payed service. Buzzom is one of the best free tools on the market. Here are a few important features:

• Cross follow – this allows you to give a twitter ID and start following followed or followers of that account
• Lock - this feature is pretty unique across twitter tools. Basically allows you to mark (lock) a twitter ID to prevent unfollowing a certain group of users or to send multiple requests to the same user (if you repeatedly follow/unfollow users). If I would have used this feature from the beginning my suspended account would be active right now
• Find users by keywords they twit or in their bios

Hootsuite: This is a twitter manager tool that gives you the following:

• Use multiple twitter accounts
• Post a feed to a twitter account of your choice
• Track clicks on the links from the tweets you send

Cotweet: The features that this service has are already implemented in Hootsuite but I like it’s clean interface and the archive options.

Steps:

1. Create a twitter account. Customize it (background/colors/avatar/bio). Don’t forget to add a link to your website
2. Start posting content. Use Hotsuite to post your feed
3. Identify key players on your niche. Wefollow is a good start. If that’s not enough, look on the top blogs on your niche. There is a great chance that they use twitter. Look what people this players follow. Start engaging in conversations. Reply, retweet, participate in the follow friday hashtag
4. Once you have a decent amount of tweets (more then 100 for example), start following users. You will do this by using Cross Follow feature of TwitIn to “steal” the followers of the users identified in step 3. In order to prevent suspention don’t get greedy. Follow a maximum of 3-400 users/day.
5. After 24-72hrs, start unfollowing people that didn’t followed you back. Use the Flush&Lock feature of TwitIn. This will prevent you from sending multiple requests to the same person and get your account suspended
6. Use cotweet to monitor the messages you receive and reply to them. Don’t even bother to reply to automatic messages, and even better you can unfollow those people right away. In most of the cases they are just spam bots
7. Repeat steps 3-4

Conclusions

If not abused, this short tutorial will bring you a nice followers base (4-6000) in apx 1 month and a half (numbers might vary from niche to niche)

If you re new with twitter or if you would like to know more about the subject, check out this books:

[ReviewAZON asin="0470458429" display="inlinepost"] [ReviewAZON asin="0596156812" display="inlinepost"] [ReviewAZON asin="0470479914" display="inlinepost"]

Flickr has find an interesting strategy to capture the visitors that arrive to the website through Google Image Search. Each time you arrive at a photo page using Google, Flickr will provide a yellow note just below the search with the text:

We found 262,353 photos matching [keyword]. Click “search” above to see!

Also the search box is prefiled with the query.

All in one, a simple strategy that could boost the pageviews by a few percents.

Try it for yourself