Category: Best Posts

Branded3’s study proves tweets do affect rankings

by Patrick Altoft on / no responses

In the biggest study of its kind, Branded3 has revealed that tweets do affect your Google ranking position, with URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets ranking inside the top 5 results.

Using our own online petitioning site, Twitition.com, we utilised a sample of its 7.6m signatures to gather data on the value of tweets on SERPs positioning, and found that the more tweets a URL receives, the higher up the rankings it sits.

If you’ve ever used Twitition.com, you’ll know that when you sign a Twitition, you send a tweet out containing the Twitition’s URL, so we can assume that a Twitition signature equals a tweet.

Our study found that URLs received a significant boost in Google rankings up to 50 tweets, when the effect seems to level out.

The subsequent benefit of gaining tweets is fairly minimal until around 5,000 tweets, when the average ranking of a URL is 31. URLs with over 7,500 tweets enjoy an average Google ranking of 5, whilst URLs over 10,000 tweets are almost guaranteed first page rankings.

Of course, there could be many factors at play here and we only used Google for this study, but what the results have conclusively shown us is that there is a correlation between number of tweets and Google rankings.

Take a look at the post on Branded3’s B3Labs for more information, and get in touch if you’d like to know more about this and how it could affect your SEO strategy.

5 Killer Ways to Promote Your Website Offline

by Patrick Altoft on / 66 responses

Print your url on a fake rocket

Former Dragons Den contestant and winner of North East Entrepreneur of the Year Ling Valentine has a unique method of promoting her car leasing website.

In 2005 Ling had a 6 wheeled military truck imported from the People’s Liberation Army in Shanghai and her husband built a giant nuclear missile to go on top. The truck was parked next to the A1 motorway in North East England for a couple of years before being moved to one of the busiest motorways in Western Europe, the M62, where it remains. Read more →

10 Linkbuilding Tips for Ecommerce Websites

by Patrick Altoft on / 22 responses

Most of the linkbuilding tips on BlogStorm have been focused primarily towards linkbait for blogs rather than ecommerce sites and, after an email from one of our readers, it’s time to redress the balance and offer some help to webmasters who run ‘real’ websites. Read more →

Ultimate Guide to htaccess and mod_rewrite

by Patrick Altoft on / 65 responses

Often described as “voodoo” by frustrated webmasters the use of mod_rewrite and htaccess files is one of the more advanced tasks a web developer has to face.

The good news is that unless you are looking for really advanced solutions you don’t have to fully understand how they work to use them on your website. Most of the htaccess and mod_rewrite tips on this page can simply be cut and pasted into a text file and uploaded to your server. Read more →

Beginners Guide to Linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on / 121 responses

Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image.

Sometimes linkbait is intentional but quite often the best linkbait is conceived quite by accident. Read more →

Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface

by Patrick Altoft on / 156 responses

Update: following lots of peoples questions I have posted Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2 many thanks to SEO agencies and digital agencies for the help on this.

Google Analytics
Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service. Read more →