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How to Improve PageRank Using 140Plus.com
There are many great reasons for businesses to use 140Plus.com but one clearly stands out: increasing your keyword rankings and growing your organic search traffic.
140Plus.com makes it easy to increase the number of terms that your website can rank for without cluttering your site with extra pages that might make your site bloated and hard to navigate.
Below is a step-by-step guide for using 140plus.com as a highly effective and easy to use tool for SEO and traffic building.
1) What do I write about?
The most common road block to getting started with 140Plus.com is deciding what to write about. The answer is simple: write about your keywords. Since you’ll be using 140Plus.com to write about your industry and niche, it will be a natural place to create content around a wide variety of keywords.
2) Identify keywords (be realistic)
As an example, let’s say you want to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site for searches related to the term “pagerank.” Let’s face it, unless you’re Google or Wikipedia, you’re not going to be taking the #1 search engine result for the term “pagerank” anytime soon. That’s okay, you can still get crafty and take a sizable chuck of traffic by thinking about the way people search.
Most experienced Google users understand that using general terms isn’t going to get the results they want. Instead, people typically search for keyword phrases, for example: “increase pagerank,”, “improve pagerank” or “how to improve pagerank.”
I might never get the #1 spot for the term “pagerank” alone, but there is actually a chance that I could rank for the keyword phrase “how to improve pagerank.” Granted, it may not have a high search volume, but if you can rank for a dozen or more of these kinds of keyword phrases related to the term “pagerank” you’ll end up with a significant amount of traffic.
3) Optimize your post around your keyword (Page Title, URL, H1)
The most important places to included keywords on any page of your site is in the page title, the URL and the H1 tag. This means that if you’re trying to rank for “how to improve pagerank” you need to make sure that phrase, in that order, is in all three places.
You also need to make sure that this phrase appears first. A common mistake is for a company to put it’s name before it’s keywords in page titles. For example “140Plus – How to Improve Pagerank.” Instead you would want “How to Improve Pagerank – 140Plus.”
Fortunately, 140plus.com handles this for you automatically. Once you’ve identified your keywords and ensured they’re part of the title of your post, 140plus.com ensures that the page title, the URL and the H1 tag are automatically optimized for search engines for you.
4) Publish your post
Finally, publish your post. 140Plus automatically arranges your page into a clean, search-engine friendly format, while automatically publishing to the web, to Twitter, and to Google. Depending on how frequently Google and other search engines scan your 140plus.com site, it could take a few days or longer for your pages to be indexed and show up in Google. A simple tip to get your 140plus.com pages into search engines faster is to publish more often. When Google notices that a site is getting updated daily, it will scan the site more regularly.
This is another place where 140Plus.com does some for the work for you, automatically posting to Twitter and posting your RSS feed to Google, leveraging the real-time social web to help your 140Plus.com posts get indexed faster.
140Plus.com gives your site more inbound links, which increases pagerank and improves organic search results to greatly increase traffic to your site. 140Plus makes it astonishingly easy to publish content to the new real-time social web. No set-up or configuration required. Just publish your content and share the link in seconds.
The world’s simplest Twitter-integrated, SEO-optimized pages.
5) Check the results
Try an experiment: If it’s been more than a few hours since your post has gone live, open up a new browser tab and do a quick Google search for “how to improve pagerank using 140plus.com.” Does your post show up on the front page? If so, do another search for “how to improve pagerank.” Does it show up again?
Facebook has just done Google a huge favor
Facebook is rolling out two new features that appear to be a direct reaction to Google+ (and to a lesser degree Twitter). Of course we have no way of knowing how long Facebook has been planning these features, but the timing and similarity to Google+ features certainly makes it appear to be a copycat response to the new Google+ threat. Facebook rolls these features out over time (and without warning), so they may not be on your account yet, but they will be.
The two features are interlinked, in what appears to be an attempt to make Facebook “friend lists” be more like Google+ “circles”.
New Sharing Options
This change started to roll out a few weeks ago and now appears to be site wide, applying to all accounts. The status box used to update your status got a few new controls and widgets.
New facebook status box
First, on the left are two new options. The “who are you with” button lets you tag people in your status update. The second widget adds location to the status. Ok, fine.
But the biggest change is the drop down on the right, next to the “Post” button. This lets you set who the status update goes to (sort of). The normal option (the way Facebook has always worked) would be the “Friends” choice, meaning the status update is seen by your friends only. If you specify “Public” your status is visible to anyone, basically making Facebook more like Twitter, where if you want to, you can publish your status updates for anyone to see. Bringing us to another new feature (described further below) where people that are not your friends, can “subscribe” to your public updates, again, more or less the way Twitter works. I think by default, Facebook has made the new default “Public,” so if you don’t change that, your status updates will be visible to everyone.
In addition to the “Public” and “Friends” options, you can now specify that an update should only be sent to friends on a specific list, one of your old “friend lists” (if you ever used that feature) or one of the new “automatic” lists that Facebook calls “Smart Lists,” which are managed by Facebook automatically for you based on profile information – another case of Facebook telling us “trust us, we know what you want.” Time will tell whether people find these automatic lists useful and trustworthy.
Finally, there is another special list called “Restricted” which is for friends that aren’t really friends 
This is where you put friends when you don’t want them to see your status updates. Friends on this special “Restricted” list will only see your “Public” updates (but I assume they still have access to your photos etc.)
Managing Friend Lists
The other significant change is in managing friends and friend lists. There are new options when you visit someone’s profile:
The new “Friends” widget shown above makes it easier to manage the lists a given friend is on. Every time you visit their profile, you can check or change what lists they are on. For anyone that suffered through the old cumbersome way of managing lists this is much easier than before, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.
There’s also the new “Subscribed” button, which allows you to subscribe to a person’s “Public” updates, so that any status updates they mark as “Public” will show up on your page, even if they are not your friend. This is clearly a case where Facebook wants to be like Twitter.
Why This A Potential FAIL
These new changes are mostly being heralded around the net and in the media as a brilliant move by Facebook. Technically, for being obviously bolted-on, I have to admit they are not that terrible, in terms of the implementation. But here’s where I wonder if Facebook might be shooting themselves in the foot here, and actually helping Google+ (especially) and Twitter (to a lesser degree) which is probably not their intent.
Twitter is essentially still a mainstream failure, with only 8% of online Americans using it. It’s clear that one big reason is Twitter’s complexity and the inability of Twitter to explain what it does and how to use it to mainstream users. It’s too early to tell whether Google+ will reach deep into the mainstream the way Facebook has. One of the points I raised about Google+ is the complexity and that it is too confusing to mainstream users:
Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?” Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.
With Facebook now essentially copying the Google+ “circles” model, they have now introduced the same kind of complexity into Facebook that hinders their competitors, effectively removing a major differentiator of Facebook: being easy to understand for mainstream users.
Facebook has just done Google a huge favor.
In essence, by force feeding this change to its 750 million users, Facebook will be doing something Google themselves may have spent years doing: teaching them how Google+ works. Facebook users have no choice but to accept these new features, and struggle to learn them, which will make all Facebook users more comfortable with the “circles” model, and that level of complexity, ultimately making it that much less painful to switch to Google+.
Before this, if a Facebook user went to Google+, they had to figure out how “circles” and selective sharing work using Google+ itself. Google+ would be their first exposure to this mode of operating. They would have no mental model for it and no prior experience with the ideas of it. Now, a Facebook user will have a direct analog from their Facebook experience – as soon as they hit Google+ they will already have an idea how ”circles” and selective sharing work, removing a huge switching barrier.
Likewise, with the new “Public” and “Subscribe” features, Facebook is teaching those 750 million users how Twitter works too, something Twitter themselves has been largely unable to do. However, I think in this case, Twitter is the loser and Facebook the winner (more on that in a separate post).
But Google+, on the other hand, just got handed an enormously valuable gift by Facebook.
Wow am I happy now that I didn’t deploy serious apps on Google App Engine
First released in 2008, Google App Engine (GAE or AppEngine) was Google’s first attempt to compete with Amazon Web Services in providing cloud computing platform services for developers. In earlier posts, I took some heat for concluding that Google App Engine was not ready for “serious” applications, even when it was “free”.
Recently, Google announced shocking new pricing for appengine that has its users reeling. In short, the new pricing means:
- “Free” quotas have been drastically reduced
- Pricing of paid apps increased significantly
- SLA and operational support available for a premium
Google has provided a tool so customers can compare their current bills versus expected billis under the new pricing and customers report anywhere from 3x to 30x price increases, leaving many scrambling for alternatives.
Two of the most common complaints from customers are lack of notice and the uncertainty of the pricing (lack of control over costs).
In terms of cost control, the only way to know how much your costs are, is to ask Google, after you have already incurred those costs (and built and deployed your app). It’s impossible to map users or usage directly to cost. Google’s pricing scheme is as inscrutible as the worst telephone company billing.
The pricing was originally planned to take effect in September, which only gave customers a few weeks to react. Google has provided optimization guidelines for customers to try to reduce their costs, but given the short notice, customers simply do not have time to make major changes to their apps. Companies already had their development resources planned out. They aren’t sitting around waiting for Google to throw a wrench at them. And it’s not clear how much further optimization will really save you anyway since a lot of apps have already received cost-cutting optimizations.
To me, I think this goes a long way to confirm some of my concerns about Google as a cloud platform vendor and as an enterprise vendor in general. A lot of people think anything Google touches is golden (especially Google, just ask them), but I think this shows how they still just don’t get it when it comes to providing commercial grade services. I have asked before, regarding many Google products, whether Google was serious this time. This is the risk to me of doing any business with Google. All these other non-search products are simply “tests” for them. A few billion here, a few billion there, throw it out and see what sticks. The problem is, if you latch on to one of these products and then it becomes critical to your business, you just never know when Google might, on a whim, go in a different direction, hanging you out to dry.
And that appears to be how a lot of customers feel about this move by Google, such as expressed in this post on the mailing list:
App Engine is finished, here’s why
What has always been the biggest concern about App Engine? Lock-in. You’re at the mercy of Google. Sure there’s TyphoonAE etc… but really those are not alternatives.
What does Google go ahead and do? They do exactly what their critics said they would do and what us GAE adopters hoped like hell they would never do, screw us over.
App Engine is finished not because we’re all going to move off to EC2, but because people who are considering using App Engine will see exactly what has gone on here with the pricing, think about the lock-in argument against GAE, and decide not to use GAE. There will be a drop off in new apps, and eventually Google is going to see GAE isn’t really panning out and pull the 3 year plug.
Thankfully, I don’t operate any services on GAE with high costs, but even as it is, I feel ripped-off for my investment in AppEngine. I do run some services on it, some of which I would rather not have to shut down, so I might have to move those elsewhere. And there are some apps I will simply shut down because they are not worth the trouble to port elsewhere. Some of those apps were potentially interesting and gathering users – in that sense, I’m glad this move by Google is happening now, before these apps got big enough to have to now decide what to do with them.
What’s worse for me though, is simply all the time invested in learning AppEngine. What a waste of time that appears to have been. As one developer says:
The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot. And I really don’t like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google’s engineers and they have utterly destroyed my credibility. THIS more than anything is the cost to me.
Google+ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I’ve been told that nothing we know about Google+ can be criticized because it is pre-beta.
Okay then. Well, here’s some quick takes after trying it out a bit.
1. The Good
This section is the hardest to fill in for me. We already have Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (and others). It makes it hard to identify an obvious place for Google+. There’s the much acclaimed (and sometimes befuddling) “Circles” (to scope the distribution of updates). There’s also “Sparks” (search) “Huddles” (group chat), and “Hangouts”. Of these, “Hangouts” is perhaps the most unique. It is a way to announce your interest in video-chatting. That’s very much like something we did with Phweet back in 2008, so perhaps that’s why I like it.
One other good thing? It’s not Zuckerberg. Google’s famous “do no evil” comment has to be something they regret saying by now, but even so, I still feel that Google is a lesser evil, especially when it comes to handling my personal data. Facebook has a simply atrocious record in this regard. The less they have of my data, the better.
David Pogue gives a number of reasons to like Google+ in Google+ Improves on Facebook at the New York Times. I don’t disagree with his points, so I recommend you check out the article. He concludes with:
Until now, Facebook and Twitter have been the Dominant Duo of social networking. But Google’s less sprawling, more video-centric, better-controlled new service is already too good to ignore. Now it’s the Dominant Duo …+1.
2. The Bad
Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?” Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.
All the cool features discussed above under “The Good” could be put under “The Bad” when it comes to complexity and learning curve. Features are a double-edged sword. Confusion about how it works keeps a lot of people off Twitter, or at leasts keeps them from using it to share and Google+ appears that it is going to suffer from being confusing too.
3. The Ugly
Google will tell you that the coolest part of Google+ is that it is (or will be) integrated with all other Google services and features. I argue that this is the biggest thing that hinders the chances for Google+ to succeed and not just become another Wave or Buzz that people try for a while and then dump.
This is the “Google Account” problem. It’s the assumption by Google that you have one Gmail account that you use for everything. After jumping through some non trivial hoops, Google now allows you to sign in to “multiple” accounts (up to three, if they’re the right kind of accounts) at once, but one of them is the “primary” account and trying to use one of the others is like dancing a tightrope carrying an anvil in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. You’re probably going to get bloody… or hurt someone. You log out of one, and everything you use on Google gets signed out too, even if it wasn’t using that account. This is why people end up running a different browser for every Google account and for every Google product. I could go on and on about this nightmare.
At the moment, you can’t use Google+ with anything but the “primary” Google logged in account.
This is all fine for people that have exactly one Gmail account and it’s all they use. However, with more and more companies converting to Google Apps and more and more people working from home etc. many people are using more than one Google Account at the same time and using different Google Accounts with different Google services. For example. I’m using Gmail with one (or more) accounts, using AdSense with a different account, using Google Docs with another account, Analytics with yet another account etc.
When it comes to Google+ this problem affects you even if you don’t use multiple Gmail accounts and multiple Google services. Requiring and binding by browser session to a “primary” Gmail account means Google+ is limited to people that use Google and Gmail in that way. This means Google has pre-selected which friends you can and cannot find on Google+. If I look at the groups of people I interact with, I have never segmented them into “those that use Gmail and those that don’t.” That segmentation is not meaningful to me. Google might care, but I sure don’t – it doesn’t help me organize my contacts. As @sreejitkk2000 puts it:
One needs to get a Google Account to use Google+ and they have to like it, in that they have to log in with that account and use it for every Google service they will ever use. Quick: What percentage of your friends have a Google Account? Which ones don’t? Is that a breakdown that is meaningful to you? Is that a group categorization you would normally use to divide up your friends? I don’t think so. And yet, that’s what Google has done for us.
For those of your friends without a Google account, do they know how to get one? Would they want one? Is Google+ so great that you would walk all your friends through setting up a Google Account and Google Profile? And what about those friends that you’d like to have in a “circle”, but that simply can’t (or won’t) use Google the way Google wants?
I think this is a fundamental mis-judgement by Google. They see the tie-in to a Gmail account and other Google services as a good thing but I see it as a massive albatross.
Summary
Google+ is kind of a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. It takes some features from Facebook, like rich content, updates longer than 140 characters, and comment threads. And it takes some from Twitter, most notably asymetrical connections as in “Circles”. Then it brings in a few unique features like “Hangouts”.
It’s too early to tell what will become of Google+. For me, it’s a wait and see. I’m using it, but it has not grabbed me yet, mostly because nobody is there yet. The above “Google Account” problem already means I’m using an identity on Google+ that is not the identity that I want to use with it (because the identity I want to use is not compatible with it). And I see the self-selection discussed above coming into play and selecting for me the domain of people that I can connect with on Google+ (and more importantly, who I cannot connect with). This severely limits how I can use Google+ – until everyone I want to connect with converts to using Gmail as their primary login with a Google+ compatible “Google Account” and “Google Profile” it can’t replace Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter for me. Instead, it’s simply one MORE place I have to check. I think this was a key factor in limiting and killing Buzz and Wave and it could easily also be the thing that kills Google+.
