President Barack Obama gave his first State of The Union Address to the nation on Wednesday night. During the live broadcast and for a long while after, the #SOTU (State of The Union) hashtag and several other related phrases were trending topics on Twitter. The President has his own Twitter feed @BarackObama that had live updates with direct quotes from his address to the nation and to Congress.

During the State of The Union Address, I kept an eye on Twitter through my phone. There were several quotes I wanted to Tweet, but I had trouble typing them and paying attention to what he was saying. I thought I had found a solution to the problem: the @BarackObama Twitter feed. However, to my dismay, I was unable to RT (retweet) his posts because of the 140 character limit. I’m not a fan of the new RT features on Twitter and I’m not alone. Very few people that I follow employ the new retweet feature. The new retweet feature is confusing to those seasoned Twitter users who are used to the original retweet, “RT @mikehalvorsen blah.” In addition to this, the new RT feature does not allow additional comments, such as “I love USA RT @BarackObama I never said change would be easy…”

At the end of his address, I checked out the Twitter feed on my desktop and to my shock, almost all of the Tweets made from his account during the address were near the 140 character limit. Out of 12 Tweets posted during the State of The Union Address, only two were RT-able using the old school retweet method.

For anyone using Twitter as a way to spread their brand or message, you must cover all bases. If you want your message to be spread around the Twittersphere, you must fully understand its limitations 140 characters at a time.

For those in charge of handling Barack Obama’s Twitter account and that of The White House, give us a call at 1-800-310-0317 for free Social Media consulting. Make sure you ask for me.

Google Webmaster Tools created a quiz based on the most commonly asked questions they receive. The quiz will be available until January 27 at 9pm EST.

By taking this quiz and comparing your answers with the answers they will publish at a later date, you should be able to gauge your understanding of Google Webmaster Tools and some SEO basics.

Go take the quiz and remember to print your answers so you can compare them to the real answers when they publish them.

SOURCE: Google Webmaster Tools blog

It seems like everyone has been talking about the Google vs. China scandal, so why can’t I? As almost everyone knows, Google and China have had problems in the past but a situation that occurred a few days ago was the last straw for Google.

The search engine giant discovered that hackers were attempting to access the Gmail addresses of several key Chinese human rights activists. Google has speculated that the attack was coordinated by the Chinese government itself, a claim that the Chinese have quickly denied. Google wasn’t the only business attacked; at least 20 other American companies were targeted as well. China insists that their censorship on the Internet is in the best interests of their people, but can anyone truly agree with that? Google has announced that it has decided to stop censoring its search results in China, but no action has been taken yet.

Is Google overstepping its boundaries in China?

To help you decide, here are some facts about Google and Chinese censorship from the Wall Street Journal.

It looks like the Google Local Business Center has added a nifty little feature to their dashboard. The box is labeled “Post to Your Place Page” and it is almost like “sticky note” that goes on your local business listing detail page.

This feature is almost like a status update that a business can post to their listings page similar to updating Facebook or Twitter. The listing expires after 30 days but can be refreshed more frequently than that. The business owner is limited to 160 characters for this message as well.

It will be interesting to see how/if businesses will start to use this feature and if it has any effect on the local business listing’s ranking. Any creative ideas on how you’ll use this feature?

Search engine optimization is constantly changing. Knowledge and details are very important in the SEO world. In this post, I will continue on from a previous post – ‘Give your New Site an SEO Boost’ and give you 5 tips for creating strategies that will help your site rank better, as well as help increase traffic and conversions.

1. Content – It is important that the content you create is high quality and written by someone that researches the topic before jumping headfirst into writing it. Creating new content throughout your entire site is time-consuming, but will separate and elevate you from the rest.
2. Link Building – Create a custom link building campaign and try to gain links from trusted sites that are relevant to the topic of your site. Link building needs to be an ongoing project and also requires a lot of research. Check out some more link building tips that I recommended in a previous post.
3. Page Titles & Descriptions – Page titles are how the search engines identify the relevancy of your page. Each page title should be unique to what that page is about and try not to over-use phrases, or it might dilute your efforts. Meta-descriptions are what the users see in the Search Engines when your site pops up in the results. They also organically help your site rank.
4. Site Architecture & Navigation – If you have good navigation in place, it not only helps the users click around your site better, but it helps the Search Engines navigate through your site better too. This includes footer navigation, menus, breadcrumb navigation and even how pages are interlinked with each other.
5. Keyword Terminology - In your content, use 2 or 3 keyword phrases that you use in the page title. Don’t over-do-it (may cause KW dilution), but be sure everything is in line and included – keyword title; keyword phrase in description; internal navigation keyword links; fresh keyword rich content.

If you are new to the SEO world, the tips above should give you a nice solid start to the art of SEO!  

I will be joining Anita Campbell, editor-in-chief of Small Business Trends for a free one-hour webinar: 10 Quick Tips to Give a Boost to Your Website & Online Marketing Efforts.  It’s presented by the Verizon Small Business Center.

Details:
Date: Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM, Eastern Standard Time
Cost: FREE!
Registration: https://verizonevents.webex.com/verizonevents/onstage/g.php?d=665731581&t=a