Have you ever thought about using auto tweet software? I enjoy using Twitter a lot, but I don’t enjoy having to update my status throughout the day. I would rather take 30 minutes to make a list of all my updates in advance, and schedule them to post on Twitter, rather than do it all day long. I know that this goes against the grain for many people. But, I don’t use Twitter to tell people when I am brushing my teeth, or when I am going to bed.

In all fairness, I am not saying that these kind of updates are useless. I am more less saying that this isn’t my style, and what I want to use Twitter for doesn’t require me to post updates throughout the day. Instead, I rather batch them out once a day and have them post automatically and at scheduled times throughout the day.

For a long time, I haven’t been able to define a true purpose with using Twitter, yet I know that Twitter can be a very powerful tool. In the past, I have used my account to send updates like “Hey, I am brushing my teeth now.” and “Hey I am going to bed now.”, and I have also used my Twitter account pitch products and services that can earn commission. Additionally, I have used my account to tell people about new content that I have published online. One thing is certain, no matter how I use my account, I get mixed results either way. So something needs to change.

My goal is to buckle down and to start using Twitter in a more consistent manner. I think doing so, will tighten up the inconsistent results I receive. In a nutshell, I’d like to use Twitter as a way to connect with people and help them learn more about the topics I write about online. That includes asking people open ended questions, offering a stream of advice, sending out notifications of new content I have made available online, and recommending and successfully selling products and services. All this can be done automatically without having to break your work routine and daily schedule. How in-depth and how far in advance you make your schedule is up to you.

In order to do all this, you need auto tweet software. I found a site called FutureTweets.com and it seems to work great so far. FutureTweets.com is a free service that lets you schedule your Twitter messages and send them at specific times in the future. Scheduling your Tweets is easy. When you create an account on FutureTweets.com, you’re automatically assigned a private email address. Write your message in an email and send it to the private address assigned. Use the subject line to schedule when you want your Tweet to go live.

Last night, I asked people on Twitter for their advice on auto tweet software and received a lot of help and was directed to a few different programs available. I am going to be looking into these programs and will post some updates on my findings in the near future. Thanks to @bloghologyORG, , @coolcatteacher, and @psimac for your help.

Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.

Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.

What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.

Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.

Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.

To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.

Have you ever wanted to search multiple search engines at the same time? I am sure you can imagine the time it would save if you were able to use one search bar to pull data from popular search engines, social networks, and blogs. Now you can with a site called Addict-o-matic.

Addict-o-matic is a site that pulls data from multiple sources online to help users find the information they desire. Simply use the Addict-o-matic search bar to find what you want and then filtered results from popular sites such as Google, Digg, and Twitter will appear.

Imagine being able to search for something in popular search engines, social networks, and blogs all at the same time. Doing so would save you a lot of time. Addict-o-matic does just that. When you do a search, Addict-o-matic scans 25 popular sites to help you find the information you need. These sources include: Google News, YouTube, Twitter, Bing, FriendFeed, Popular Blogs, Technorati, Flickr, Digg, WordPress, Yahoo! News, and more.

In order to see how Addict-o-matic can help you, let’s assume that you’re in the market for a new laptop computer and have been hearing some great things about Apple’s new 13 Inch MacBook Pro. Doing a simple search for 13 Inch MacBook Pro is an excellent example to see how Addict-o-matic shines. The results produced are outstanding, especially considering the fact we’re trying to gather information about this computer so that a wise decision can be made about possibly purchasing it.

Immediately, Addict-o-matic has produced results from Twitter, Bing News, Google Blog Search, YouTube, Digg and quite a few more sites. What makes this situation beneficial is that finding consumer information about the 13 Inch MacBook Pro comes very real. You’re tapped into Twitter, which we all know, people love to rant and rave on Twitter. Both excellent and poor experiences are communicated on Twitter. And that includes the experiences with the 13 Inch MacBook Pro.

Having Bing News results will give you more official news and press release information. Google Blog Search will give you similar data to Twitter, but the difference is that you’ll find lengthy descriptions of positive or negative experiences. With YouTube and even Digg, you can expect to find excellent reviews on the laptop.

As you can see, Addict-o-matic is very useful in many ways. With me being a professional blogger and freelance writer, it’s important that I have access to multiple resources for article research. Another way Addict-o-matic is useful is it allows bloggers, such as myself, an easy way to research and drill down into topics needed to complete writing tasks. If I happen to be covering a story about airplanes, I can easily use Addict-o-matic to find information, specification, news, reports, and even pictures and videos of the specific airplane I need.

What are some other sites that you use to search multiple sources at once? Are there sites similar to Addict-o-matic that you like to use? Leave a comment and share this information with others below.

Have you seen the People of Walmart website? Perhaps, you’ve already contributed and uploaded a picture or two? I find it interesting how certain things go viral on the Internet. Typically, I see low grade YouTube videos or cheesy webpages hit it off on the web. And so is the case with a newly launched blog called People of Walmart. It went viral, people love it, and the way I see it, for site owners, there is a lot that can be learned.

People of Walmart is very simple self-hosted WordPress blog that allows users to contribute content. In this case, it can be a picture of an unusual person found at Walmart. Users who want to contribute must submit the photo by email and manually include a title, description, and include tags. After editors review the picture, it will be published on a blog post. These are called Wal-Creatures.

With over 15,000 fans on FaceBook, People of Walmart has grown very quickly and has captured the interest of thousands of people almost overnight. The site has been of huge interest to FaceBook users, and with over 700 people following on Twitter, awareness of the site seems to be spreading into other networks as well. But, what about SEO? Once the viral buzz wears off and the sudden spike in traffic dwindles down to a trickle, where will the site stand in the SERPS?

My prediction doesn’t look very promising. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether the owners of People of Walmart make changes or not, one thing remains possible: You can make changes to your own site. Granted, your site might not go viral like theirs, but if it does, you’ll at least be ready. And as I had mentioned above, a lot can be learned from People of Walmart. And no, I don’t think People of Walmart will last very long after the buzz wears thin. The reason why is because of their lack of SEO.

Let’s look at the element of user generated content and how to optimize it for search engines. In the case of People of Walmart, photos that are being sent in manually via email. With that, perhaps WordPress isn’t the best option to use. There are many other open source programs available that are more suitable towards handling pictures such as Coppermine. With proper configuration of the software and some minor SEO tweaks, submitting content into People of Walmart could easily become a fully automated and instant process, and most importantly, a search engine friendly one. Titles, descriptions, and tags could be done without the assistance of an editor. A moderator would only be needed to review the submitted content and to the “Publish” button.

Regardless though, WordPress was chosen and with that, many improvements could be made to help the site in the long term for the years to come, long after the viral buzz. But let’s look at how post titles appear in Google. There are other things that could be optimized, but post titles, along with the process of how user content is being generated are the most important.

As you can see in the screen shot above, all titles appear the same. Let’s take a closer look at this entry:

You wouldn’t know it from the entry, but the entry links to a blog post titled, MISS NEW BOOTY which potentially has the ability to pull rank on the miss new booty SERP. The problem is that the blog post doesn’t and it could if it was displaying the post title before or preferably instead of the blog name. Using the All In One SEO Pack can easily correct this. If the post title is visible then the words used in the post title have the potential of becoming keywords that can be used to find the post in search. Right now, unfortunately those valuable keywords are truncated, thus totally wasting the potential of having INTITLE keyword strength. One last element that should be updated is the permalink structure. The site is using the default (p?=123) style and it should be modified to use the /post_title/ style so that INURL keywords can be used. (Read Google Basic Searches)

All in all, it is great to see sites like People of Walmart find success, but also seeing sites like this show me that there continues to be a need for professional SEOs. In order for People of Walmart to have long term success, their site may soon need to undergo some SEO as well as platform changes.

Yahoo! has had it’s share of struggles over the years. As we are all well aware, the company has been faced with the challenges of keeping up with the trends of social networking. It has been a rough and costly journey. You may recall the closing of Yahoo! 360 and announced the closure of GeoCities happening this October.

I would more say that Yahoo! has been behind the social networking wave and have been struggling to keep up. Recently, Yahoo! made an update to their homepage which made an attempt to attract and retain users to their site by offering new widgets that allow users to access their accounts from some of the more popular sites online such as FaceBook. To drive the company forward even further, Yahoo! has unveiled a new FaceBook style feature in Yahoo! Mail, which gives users the ability to post status updates. These updates have a very similar feel like FaceBook or Twitter. At this point in time, I think Yahoo! is better off continuing to develop ways to cater to social networking rather than compete with the contenders within the social networking.

One of the most breaking news occurred today with Yahoo! announcing the acquisition of a popular Arabic Internet services site called, Maktoob.com (#1, #2, #3). At this time, the price Yahoo! paid is not known. The acquisition is estimated to be fully complete by forth quarter of this year.

On Maktoob.com, Arabic users can get the latest news, keep up with business, socialize online, perform Internet research, follow popular sports events, and even search real estate. For the most part, this portal site has a lot of Yahoo! characteristics. In fact, if you view the site, while not paying too much attention, you’d might even think you were visiting Yahoo.com. One of the most popular services on Maktoob.com is their free email service.

Maktoob.com claims to be the first web based Arabic email provider on the Internet. They offer users the ability to send and receive email, and create and organize folders within the Inbox all in Arabic language. Additional features allow users to change the appearance of their screen when logged in, auto scan email for viruses, and access other web based email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, HotMail.

So what is your opinion? Do you think it was a good idea for Yahoo! to purchase Maktoob.com? Do you think this acquisition will help Yahoo! in the long run, or be another typical Yahoo! acquisition blunder similar to the GeoCities acquisition? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Back in February of this year, Twitter was ranked as one of the fastest growing websites and had a reported growth of over 1300 percent. It’s rival site, FaceBook, reported only a growth of over 225 percent the same month. While a 225 percent growth sounds great, it’s not even in the same league as Twitter. So with the popularity of Twitter, I am sure it comes to no surprise that there are people who create spoofs or parody sites in an attempt to capture some of the attention and traffic. And so we have a site called Woofer.

Woofer is just like Twitter. The only difference is instead of limiting characters to 140, this spoof site forces users to use 1,400 characters or more before being able to publish. A lot of interest has been generated and Woofer seems to be taking off pretty rapidly. The large reason why is because people are using Twitter to tell their friends about it by sending their own Tweets that point links to their Woofer page.

The spoof site is interesting and actually has some short term potential. In terms of being an online publisher, I always look for ways to accumulate user generated content. As an online publisher, content is worth merit. The more user generated content I have, the less I have to write myself or pay someone else to do. Woofer has quite a bit of value simply because users are volunteering their time to write 1,400 characters of unique content.

With that lies a few problems. The first problem is quality. It didn’t take me long to discover that many people were more curious to see if Woofer actually worked and was real. It seems the trend is that users, including myself, copy content already found online, paste it into the form, and publish into Woofer. There isn’t much value in that for Woofer, simply because the content is already credited to another site. Once the Woofer version of the content gets indexed, it’s a matter of time before Google discovers duplicate content.

The second problem is spam and low quality content. It’s obvious that anything online is going to be subjected to spam. But, with woofer, combating spam could be tricky, especially if Woofer is coming into this with the intention of extracting the content from their database and using it for republishing purposes. Google doesn’t like spam, that is a given. However, one thing that some people often don’t realize is that Google really does want quality. If the content from Woofer isn’t high in quality, excellent rankings will cease to occur.

All in all, Woofer definitely has captured the attention of thousands of users. In my short time of visiting, I discovered that the main time line was updating very quickly. At the time of writing this post, woofer has 1904 users and almost 40 million characters published. The problem I see with their stats is their return rate. So far there’s only 2278 woofs (spoof term for tweets) generated from 1904 users. This equates to 1 woof per 1.2 users. In other words, when someone discovers Woofer, they test it out and leave. Perhaps, that may change over time. What are your thoughts?

Yesterday an unknown number of FaceBook users were presented with a link to try a new beta version of FaceBook called, FaceBook Lite. Many of the users who tried to access the beta version of FaceBook were met with disappointment because the link didn’t work. The reason why the link didn’t work for so many people was because FaceBook made a mistake of rolling out the beta version prematurely.

The Lite Version of FaceBook isn’t intended to replace the current. Instead, it is going to be offered as an alternative way to access FaceBook quickly and easily. It serves as a stripped down version of the original, increasing load times, and performance. The idea is to help people make the best of FaceBook who live in areas of the world with slow Internet access.

Some speculated that the FaceBook update was intended to take a stab at their competition, FriendFeed and Twitter, but TechCrunch doesn’t think so. FaceBook Lite doesn’t have many things in common with Twitter or FriendFeed. But, in time, that could change. It’s more thought that FaceBook Lite is intended to help others with slow access similar to the Lite version of MySpace.