I’ve been on twitter since sometime in 2008 (I assume, this is as far back as twitter is showing me).

In that time, I’ve added a ton of followers, and constantly sorting through the requests I’ve received. I don’t follow everyone. Particularly “Gurus” with thousands of following/followers. I don’t follow people who primarily use Twitterfeed so it’s just a stream of RSS posts. I don’t follow spammers (naturally) or people that do nothing except hock their site, their product(s) or their friend(s) similar products, and I especially do not follow self-claimed gurus, be it social media, seo, sem, etc.

The people I follow on twitter fall into a few categories:

• I know them personally.
• I know them professionally.
• They are an understood expert in their field(s) like:
  • Web Development (Particularly Javascript Framework Developers)
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Analytics
  • Social Media

Particular niches I subscribe to, and I have developed a small list of experts that I’d trust what they say (and occasionally toss questions to them). I consider this list to be “obvious” experts – they’ve proven themselves professionally, or have written at length in blogs about the topic.

My Obvious SEO Experts on Twitter

1. Matt Cutts (from Google)
2. Rand Fishkin (from SEO Moz)
3. Aaron Wall (from SEOBook)
4. SearchEngineLand (from itself)
5. Jennifer Laycock (from Search Engine Guide)
6. Mark Scholl (from EnginePoint Marketing)

I’ve limited the list to six – because I feel they cover a breadth of knowledge that you could gain, mainly from their blog postings – sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough (some times it is).

I’ll work out additional “Obvious Twitter People to follow” in the future.

You Flashed My Google

So Mark Scholl pulled up this nugget of a gem from an October post from Brian Ussery announcing their intent to start indexing flash.

I recall reading this in October, and quite a few people were excited about this – it means the old argument that “Flash isn’t SEO friendly” would boil down to “if you’re a good Flash developer, your stuff will get indexed because you wrote it properly.”

What’s interesting, is the article dives into the fact that the SWF/Flash files will carry their own rage rank – and as such, if you reuse the same SWF on more than one page, keyword thinning can occur (you’re using duplicate content).

So – it’s been a few months, I was curious just *what* was being pulled in by google in terms of flash content, and what was being shown. I used a simple google query that it seems most people have forgotten about.

Custom Google Search – FileType

search: filetype:swf site:ikeif.net

It’s that easy. Run this with some search terms and see if your site’s flash is being indexed like you hoped it would.

Of course, I felt like playing around and seeing what’s happening in the wide world of flash…

How’s my Flash being indexed?

I ran a couple searches against some sites to see how they were being indexed:

Query: filetype:swf site:nationwide.com – What’s interesting is their flash is being indexed (I’m assuming) properly. The descriptions make sense, until you hit number 8 that says “PLAY AGAIN. PLAY AGAIN. 0%”

Query: filetype:swf loading – I did this out of curiousity – much like how it’s been stated that “click here” is the worst possible wording for a link – over three million results for swf’s that say “loading!” Semi-interesting: The number one link is a flash USA Map Test.

Query: filetype:swf site:remhq.com and filetype:swf site:kanyeuniversecity.com – I figured I would have to do a couple band sites, as bands and labels were usually the number one commiters of flash atrocities. These two were high ranking when I searched for “band sites flash” (simple, yet effective). Kanye? Three links. REM? Four pages, all with some pretty good descriptions.

Query: filetype:swf site:roushhonda.com – As I recently moaned about the fact that so many car sites rely too heavilly on flash (mainly because I couldn’t hit their sites on my iPhone). All those listings in flash, none of it being indexed. I settled on Rousch from a search for “used cars columbus“.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

So – we see some areas of needed improvement. SEO for Flash is something that I feel needs to be addressed more often (by designers and developers!) and it’s something our SEO people need to keep in mind and discuss (I’m looking at you, Mark Scholl and Jennifer Laycock!). As this is slowly moving from the “I wish flash was indexed” to “Oh shit, it’s indexed, but not how I want it!” the discussions need to ramp up and we need to start thinking about it.

Find anything interesting in your own google queries? Let us know!

When you’re developing a site you may find the need to change your pages around. Maybe you didn’t plan it well, maybe you reushed it to production, maybe you’re doing a friend a favor because they were handed a shoddy job by another developer.

Hell, maybe you read this post about dashes and are converting your pages from underscores.

How can I redirect a page and not hurt my SEO?

What we want to do is called a 301 redirect – which means “moved permanently” like I did from my last college apartment. You would, too, if you were there.

The code to do a redirect:

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

Other types of redirects (from wikipedia):

• 300 multiple choices (e.g. offer different languages)
• 301 moved permanently – The SEO Friendly option!
• 302 found (e.g. temporary redirect)
• 303 see other (e.g. for results of cgi-scripts)
• 307 temporary redirect

A coworker and I were discussing whether or not dashes are applicable in domain names – from earlier research, it seems Google has some specific issues when it comes to dashes “-” and underscores “_”.

ikeif_blog is the same as ikeifblog (note the _underscore_!)

That’s not going to do me any SEO favors. The fix is easy enough, fortunately, and luckily WordPress does this by default!

ikeif-blog is read as ikeif blog! (note the -dashes-!)

This includes your file names, image file names, page names, etc.

Why the _underscore_?

Our friend the _underscore_ is left over from earlier coding days and *nix systems. From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s not a space is because of programming functions like mysql_affected_rows in PHP, and many older C functions, pre Hungarian notation.

It just translated to the web as an extension of such. That and it kind of makes sense – keith_baker is more like keith baker visually, and keith-baker is like keithbaker. Got that? Google decided that -dashes- were more SEO friendly, and because Google is “the big one” we’re stuck following their obscure rules, and I’m forced (forced!) to research them ;). Is there a grammar lesson in there? May be!

What about periods?

Now we’re down to talking about keywords, and this could be beneficial to stores – yoga-pants.myyogastore.com is better than myyogastore.com – but the debate is open if yogastore.com/yoga-pants is a better alternative still!

The only danger in this,is you don’t want a convuluted or crowded domain name – then it starts to look spammy. Imagine if my domain was ikeif-blog-seo-mootools-jquery-nigerian-scams.com? We also start to make it a difficult site to remember! However, if you like owning domains, it might be possible to benefit from the keyword rich domain and include a 301-redirect to your actual site (if you have more detail, pass it on!)

As a developer and an enthusiast of metrics and media, it’s handy to help flesh out your numbers and “weed yourself out.” Numbers – especially metrics – can help define success or failure of campaigns.

Why would I filter myself?

Why should you neglect yourself? Ever number counts, right? Well, because as a developer (or author, or editor, or paranoid owner) you can skew your metrics numbers by visiting, testing, reloading, hitting the page again and again – throwing off all your numbers. You need unadulterated materials to work with – so at launch when all the employees are visiting that cool new micro site, you know that those million visits were filtered out, which makes the million other visits a lot more relevant.

How to: filter by IP address

Google makes it incredibly easy – you just need to follow a few basic steps.

1. Collect the IP addresses you need blocked (i.e. the network you want blocked).
2. Log in to Google Analytics and select “edit” under profile, in the same row as your site.
   

   Google Analytics Dashboard Snap-shot

3. Go to the section ‘Filters applied to profile’ and select ‘+Add Filter.’
4. For this example we want to choose ‘Exclude all traffic from an IP address’
5. Enter the IP address(es) you collected, and in true coders fashion, we are going to ‘escape’ the ‘.’ using a backslash  – like xxx\.xxx\.xx\.xx

How to: filter by domain

Working on a recent project, I noticed that their hits were skyrocketing – due to the massive amounts of hits from my testing (and their testing, and QA). They had no filters set up on their development site!

As a developer, this should be standard practice – or, if you have a metrics person to work with, have them set up the filter for you. You don’t want to “comment out” the analytics code – this can cause you to forget to uncomment it, or worse case, find another developer has deleted the un-used code (and if you don’t have a subversion repository, you could lose whatever custom code was being used). Fortunately, it’s just as easy to filter out your test domains – On step four, you just select ‘Exclude all traffic from a domain’ and enter it in – a la ‘dev.test.com.’