What this means for your small business website is that your customers are probably (*) spending a decent slice of their time searching for stuff (hopefully your stuff) on Twitter, rather than the traditional search engines.

So -  it’s important to keep your tweets as search-friendly as possible. This comes down to using keywords in your tweets and tweeting often about useful stuff.

Drilling down into the numbers a bit, it seems that a lot of the searches are not done at Twitter at all but by Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. There’s also a decent number of searches from widgets on web pages that do continuous search of keywords, users, and so on. This doesn’t change things though and it’s definitely time to start thinking about how search-friendly your tweets are.

(*) Of course your customers may not be on Twitter at all!

So it’s probably a good time to start checking your site speed now and plan any improvements that you’ll need to make.

To get you going, here are a few links to try out:

The Site Performance Tab on  Google Webmaster Tools

Try out the Page Speed extension for Firefox

Definitely look at Web Performance Best Practices at Google!

How fast is your site?

I read this on a forum the other day and this got me thinking. Are people really that confused about long tails when choosing their website keywords?

OK, so what about ‘apple store locator’, or ‘bmw financial services’, or ‘american idol 2009′?

They all have 3 words too, so are they long tail keywords?

I’m guessing you’ve realized that the answer is no. So what makes a long tail keyword?

Long tail keywords are the many hundreds (possibly thousands) of keyword combinations that bring traffic to your website. They usually bring in a very small number of visitors each (maybe only 1 or 2) and they are usually fairly long combinations of words: 4, 5, 6 or more – and yes, even 3 words sometimes!

When you add up the traffic from all the long tail keywords it usually comes to a significant number, often more than the traffic from your main site keywords.

This reflects the real activity going on at search engines too. There are many more searches for each of those main keywords, but a lot more search combinations of the long tail keywords.

There are some great things about long tail keywords too:

• They tend to be very specific, so you can see exactly what people are searching for
• They tend to have much lower SEO competition, so if you choose these for your website keywords, you stand a better chance of ranking well on search results with these terms

So what’s wrong with a 3-word long tail keyword? Take the example ‘american idol 2009′. There’s a huge number of searches for this term (1 million a month). There’s a huge amount of website competition (35 million results on Google). Plus, it’s not very specific – you don’t know whether searchers are looking for TV schedules, iTunes downloads, info on the stars, or pictures of Simon Cowell.

Not a very long tail combination then. A better example might be ‘cheap tickets for american idols live san diego’. See what I mean? There a low (almost zero) number of searches for this term, plus it’s definitely NOT 3 words long…

One of my subscribers asked me about this today. If you know me then you won’t be surprised to hear that I had a simple answer:

1. Get the right niche/keywords
2. Write superb content using these keywords

… and then (only then)…

3. Get started on the SEO tweaks

How can it be this simple? Well, it’s not really. Working out the answers to number 1 and number 2 can be pretty hard. It can take a while to get these right, and you should spend time perfecting them.

My point is that if you get the first 2 parts right, then they can have such a huge effect on your search traffic, any SEO tweaks that you make are not going to make much difference.

The other way to look at this is that if you’ve got the wrong keywords and/or your content is poor, there’s not much point spending a huge amount of time on SEO.

Don’t get wrong though. SEO tweaks are important, and they can help you to get that vital edge over your competition.

So don’t ignore number 3!!

Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?

If you’re thinking of looking into long tail searches (eg vacation rentals) for your site, where do you go to find them? These are the odd combinations of keywords that Googlers look for such as “vacation rental with extra barbeque”. They give you insight into what people are looking for.

There are some great resources for this, such as the free version of Wordtracker or Google Suggest. Just type in your basic keyword (vacation rentals here) and you’ll get a list of combinations. The many long combinations at the end are the long tail.

The problem with this idea is that you get a public list. It’s also a list of general searches, rather than something specific to your site.

It’s better to look at your own website visitors. What combinations are they looking for? Your analytics tool such as Google Analytics will tell you what keywords brought people to your site. That’s the big difference

This information is incredibly valuable and you can use it to find out what makes your site unique. I’ll bet there are some combinations in there that you never expected!!

Just click the picture to download

Does your site provide the profits that you want? Do you get enough visitors? Can you find yourself where you want to be on Google?

If the answer to these is no then I’m guessing you’re not getting the results you want from your site

What do you do about this? There’s plenty of help out there. 1000’s of websites and blogs and books all offering schemes to help you. Did I say 1000’s? Actually I meant millions.

And there’s the problem. Which tips and schemes do you choose? Which do you ignore? Which do you start first?

The solution is to read my guide. I’ve written about the ideas that I have used to make my websites work. They are all tried and tested and they all worked for me.

I’ll show you how to start taking control of your website and getting the results you want.

The guide is free and all you need to do is click on the picture to download it.

In this guide I’ll show you how to:

1. Build compelling content that search engines love and which keeps your visitors coming back for more
2. Get visitors to your site using AdWords without spending a fortune
3. Learn how to shape up your style – including the psychology behind great color schemes
4. Find out how all of this might be irrelevent if you don’t have a unique and compelling product
5. Stop losing visitors – improve your site navigation

Remember: you should be getting the results that YOU want from your site. It’s time to get back in control and get a Better Website

A webiste is an artiste who works with the web. Its correct pronunciation is web-iste. It is often combined with other words like:

Webiste designer: an artiste who designs for the web

Free webiste: someone who does it for free

Family webiste: a webiste who is part of a family

Webiste development: what webistes do as they progress through their career

Do you believe any of this? I thought not. I invented the word purely to demonstrate that common words can often be spelled wrongly on the web. This happens a fair amount when people type queries into search engines such as Google. Why is this worth knowing?

Well, you can probably get a small-ish amount of visitors to your site by targeting a few common keyword mis-spellings. Webiste is just website with two swapped letters. There are a few searches performed each day on the mis-spelled version. Its only a few but this is a fairly common technique referred to as targeting the long tail of search engine enquiries.

Try targeting a few mis-spellings of you website keywords and see if you get any hits from the search engines. Let me know if it works!

1. Obsessively check your website stats

2. Book a round-the-world-tour

3. Go on your round-the-world-tour

4. Set up an AdWords campaign

5. Obsessively check your AdWords clicks and costs

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Watch an entire season of American Idol

What do you like to do while you’re waiting for Google? Leave a comment or you can Vote for your own ideas on my Google Alternatives Squidoo Lens