How to secure and manage your privacy settings  on the major social networks.

Special One Day Class

About The Class

We’ve all heard those stories of people’s “private” data and information on social media being shared with the public without their knowledge. This hour and a half class will address the various privacy settings on the major social networks to help students become confident about what they’re sharing and to whom they’re sharing on the Social Web. Students should bring a laptop with WiFi capabilities. This will be a hands-on workshop.

How To Register and Details

The class will be held on Wednesday, August 17^th at the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney Conference Room located at 4259 W. Swamp Road, Suite 400 – Doylestown, PA 18902 from 6pm to 7:30pm.

The cost is $20. Seats are Limited to 25 people so ACT FAST!

Register by going to http://gmwd.us/k5 (Skillshare) or scanning the QR Code with your phone.

Class Lead by Seth Goldstein of Goldstein Media LLC – Doylestown’s own Internet & Interactive Agency

For More Information Call Us At (215) 352-5216

On the whole engaging in Black Hat SEO techniques might gain a brand a quick burst in the search rankings but over all the fall out is much greater. Getting banned from the Google search results is not work the small and temporary gain you might achieve.

Matt Cutts recently addressed a group of SEOs at Search Engine Strategies and explained that the search giant does in fact penalize big brands for engaging in Black Hat SEO.

Honestly I’m glad to see Google dealing with brands of all sizes the same.

The only true way for lasting results in Google and other search engines is to play by the rules (to an extent) and not push the envelope to the point of ripping.

Image Credit: DeviceMag.co

Yesterday’s big announcement of Google Instant has left many in the SEO and Web community in general with lots of questions about what this new feature means for search engine rankings.

Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, has published a blog post where he attempts to answer some of these questions.

Included in the post Matt highlights one of his YouTube videos where he answers a question about if SEO will still be around in 5 years. His answer, simply — Yes.

White Hat techniques are a good thing, Matt says. People edit their resumes to make them more appealing to to employers. White Hat SEO techniques are just like that. Essentially you’re tweaking your site to be more appealing to both the search engine and to visitors.

He says on his blog:

A key insight behind Google Instant is that if we want to get people answers and solve their problems faster, we can help with that by improving our UI to help you formulate queries more quickly (and then doing a bunch of hard work under the hood to answer that query too). Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Here’s some additional questions, along with my personal take:
Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?”

/…/

Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Essentially, Google Instant makes getting your search results that much faster and that much more adaptable. It might effect SEO in the future, but for now it seems Instant has made searching Google new and exciting again.

Read more about Matt’s take on Google Instant.

What are your thoughts on Google Instant? Do you think it makes much of a difference in how you search? Share you thoughts in the comments.

Google’s Matt Cutts

I totally agree with Matt, the quality of posts is by far the most important factor to having a good blog for both readers and search engines a like.

I always tell clients that they should try and write a quality blog post once a week. Now when I mean quality, I don’t mean that it has to be long. It  just has to be well written and informative.

The reason is that I want people to come to my clients sites not only because Google put the site high in the results but because they find what my clients write interesting. If people don’t like what is being written and never come back they’ll never convert into customers.

So as much as I hate to say it, I agree with Matt about creating quality content is some of the best SEO out there.

Google has released a major revision to it’s search index. They call it Caffeine. At the Search Engine Land conference/expo SMX, SEL founder Danny Sullivan interviews Google’s Matt Cutts about the changes.

Vanessa Fox, a former Googler turned SEO consultant wrote the following in Search Engine Land:

So what is Caffeine and what does its launch mean for searchers and content owners?

Maile Ohye, of Google’s Webmaster Central told me “the entire web is expanding and evolving and Caffeine means that we can better evolve with it. As the ecosystem improves, we improve too and return more relevant content to searchers.” Google’s Matt Cutts added that “Caffeine benefits both searchers and content owners because it means that all content (and not just content deemed “real time”) can be searchable within seconds after its crawled.”

Caffeine is a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure. It is not a change to Google’s ranking algorithms.  It is live across all data centers, regions, and languages.

/…/

How can content owners best take advantage of the new infrastructure?

Content owners will reap the benefits of Caffeine without doing anything at all. In fact, there’s really not much, if anything content owners can do. Some may wonder if this change means that existing best practices around crawl efficiency matter more than before. Is page speed, which Google has focused on more lately, more important? Nope. Google told me that this change doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before. It simply makes crawled content available in search results more quickly before and paves the way for added flexibility in taking advantage of the whatever may come as the web evolves.

Other things that have changed with the Caffeine release are:

• Content is available to searchers more quickly
• Google’s storage capacity has greatly increased
• Google’s flexibility in storing information about documents has greatly increased

What do you think of the new revision to the Google search index? Has it effected your rankings in anyway? Post your thoughts in the comments.

These are my links for January 14th:

• “I’m With COCO” Spreads Like Wildfire On Facebook –
• Twitter Grows Internationally, But Very Few Use Location [STATS] –
• “Pants On The Ground” Becomes A Viral Sensation On Facebook –
• TwitPic Worth More Than $10 Million? –
• Twitter for Teams: Teambox Launches Web-Based Collaboration Tool –

These are my links for January 14th:

• 12 Trends to Watch in 2010 | Electronic Frontier Foundation –
• Facebook unleashes lawyers on Web 2.0 Suicide Machine | NetworkWorld.com Community –
• Google Pulling Out of China? Don’t Bet On It – PC World –
• Official Google Blog: Helping Haiti respond to the earthquake –
• Official Google Blog: A new approach to China –
• NASA Be A Martian – Home –

These are my links for January 13th through January 14th:

• What Can Facebook, Yelp and Microsoft Teach the White House? –
• Survey the Damage in Haiti With Google Earth –
• Complaints rolling in about Google Nexus One – CNN.com –
• Haiti quake relief: How technology helps – CNN.com –
• System of a Down Drummer Boy Will Melt Your Face Off [VIDEO] –
• RUMOR: New iPhone Will Have a Better Camera, Sensitive Back –
• I’m With COCO: Conan O’Brien Tribute Takes Over Facebook –

These are my links for January 12th:

• Ok You Luddites, Time To Chill Out On Facebook Over Privacy –
• Google Now Tracking The Flu, City By City. So Far, It’s Been A Mild Winter. –
• Foursquare Follows The Facebook Model, Takes Its Game To Harvard –
• "Google" Is Word of the Decade –
• Amtrak to Add Free Wi-Fi on High-Speed Trains –
• Teaching entrepreneurial journalism « BuzzMachine –
• Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Microsoft’s Plan to Save Windows Mobile –
• Google Seeks a Deal on China Book Scans | Loretta Chao | Voices | AllThingsD –
• Google Adds Data Storage to Google Docs | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD –
• Google Says Attack From China Was Aimed at Dissidents – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com –

These are my links for January 11th through January 12th:

• Tip: Make Googl URLs without Google’s toolbar | Web Crawler – CNET News –
• Hillary Clinton Hosts Dinner for Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Others | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD –
• Video Interview: Flixster Execs Talk About Rotten Tomatoes Deal | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD –
• CES: How Skype and Cars Are Alike | Yukari Iwatani Kane | Voices | AllThingsD –
• Walk Away From Google Nexus One Superphone Early, Pay Steep Penalty | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD –
• Facebook’s "Reply by E-mail" Feature Now Live For Everyone –
• New Facebook Feature Combats Dodgy Friend Requests –
• The Twitter Flatline: Why Doesn’t Twitter Grow? [STATS] –
• Foursquare Now Seeing A Check-In Each Second –
• The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration –