How I Use Twitter

First off, don’t follow me. If you don’t already have my phone number and email address, you’ll probably be disappointed by my Twitter stream, and even if you do know me well enough to have those things, you still might be disappointed. If you’re thinking of unfollowing me, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t stay on topic unless the topic is "random thoughts that cross Tom’s mind". I see my audience as my wife, some friends, and strangely, myself. My Twitter stream is a bit of a diary — a cool link, a random thought, a quote I like, a local event. I don’t expect to have an army followers and I’m not trying to build up a Twitter empire that I can leverage to get you to buy my açai berry treatment for flatulence. Just recently, I found out that a local non-profit that I think does great stuff is in rough financial shape (Yosemite Assocation). I tweeted in hopes that my few followers would retweet my donation reminder to their many followers and get some money rolling in. Other than that one time, I’ve never wanted anyone other than a handful for friends to follow me and I only follow a few people who are not friends.

Who I follow is another matter. If you’re trying to use Twitter to connect, here’s how I do things. I’m just one guy, perhaps completely atypical of the average Twitter user, but if you are looking to create a Twitter empire that includes me, you might want to read this.

Why I Might Just Block You

In a word: spam. At first it was a complete mystery why people who don’t know me would follow me. How were they finding me? As near as I can tell, most of them have alerts for some keyword and they habitually follow anyone who triggers their alerts. Some of these people trigger on words relating to Yosemite. That’s fine. I expect they’ll be fundamentally disappointed and unfollow me eventually because, as noted above, I do not stay on topic, but that’s their decision. I certainly don’t hold it against them and some people don’t mind a low signal to noise ratio. If that’s you, welcome aboard.

When I do hold it against them is when they clearly don’t even read the update that triggers the alert. For example, after Ben Bernanke said the economy could recover in late 2009, I said that a pterodactyl could attack New York. A spammer who triggers on New York started following me. At the height of it’s absurdity, I mentioned "browns" as in non-native brown trout that are eating native frogs in Sierra lakes and I immediately got followed by someone who Twitters about the Cleveland Browns. Of course, this didn’t help his brand because I thought "What a [expletive deleted] idiot". I block these people and can see that eventually Twitter will need real spam filters.

Why I Will Follow You

A lot of people are marketing via Twitter and some outright are spamming. I suppose that’s their right, but you have to know how to do it.

Personally, I like to only follow as many people as I can read, so at a certain point, if I follow more people, I have to get rid of some. Second, if I follow you, it’s because I want to follow you and not because I care, at least initially, whether you follow me back. I’m not interesting to 99.9999% of the planet and I’m certainly not interesting to everyone that I find interesting. I don’t expect you to reciprocate just because I follow you and, frankly, I probably won’t reciprocate just because you follow me. You have to be interesting in some way and here’s what makes you interesting to me:

• You are a friend of mine or perhaps my wife. If you were in town and didn’t call me would I be bummed? If yes, then I probably do want to know that you’re enjoying your morning tea or are frustrated at work and all the little details of your life that I’m otherwise missing. Thanks for being better about keeping your friends in the loop than I am. If you’re not my friend and you tweet about everything that passes between your lips, I won’t follow you.
• You are inherently interesting even to strangers. Maybe I don’t know you, but you’re just plain funny like Tim Siedel, aka @badbanana or you have a high percentage of your tweets on topics I care about. I’m interested in hiking and wildflowers in Yosemite, so I follow several Yosemite Twitterers I don’t know.
• You engage. If you have no @replies, you had better stay on topic (like SkiingExaminer, who does engage a lot, but I would follow him either way because he sticks to skiing. No posts about his morning cup of Joe there). The importance of engagement surprised me. I didn’t really see it until I started thinking more carefully about my behavior. I enjoyed Mike Linder’s presence on Twitter, so we started trading @replies. Then I finally hunted him down and cornered him at his workplace. I’m glad I did. Nice guy. And he said he was glad I did too, but would I please lower my weapon.
• You update occasionally rather than constantly. I’m not sure what my limit is, but if you update more than 10 times per day over the long term, I’m probably going to unfollow you unless you’re fricken brilliant. If you’re updating every fifteen minutes, you must be bringing me closer to enlightenment, riches or ice cream with every update.

One last comment on auto-responders. Somehow, you may have decided that you should send a welcome message to everyone who follows you. I find that getting an automatic message from a computer is a sweet and wonderful experience.

• Matt Cutts, the head of search quality at Google, has a nice overview on how to make the most of Wordpress.
• Tubetorial series on Wordpress SEO.

I know, I know. Some people say it’s foolish to give Google all that data for free. All my sites are (at least in my opinion), content-rich, above-board sites, so I’m not really afraid of Google seeing who comes and goes. I do understand that this is not a free service provided by Google, though, it’s a data exchange: I let them see my data and they keep track of it for me. Fine.

So now that I’m paying them so richly with my data, I wish they would make their service a bit less annoying. What’s annoying? Two things principally:

• No full referrer data. When someone visits from a forum, the URL is often something like http://someforum.com/index.php?page=123456. Unfortunately GA does not bother to record the part after the ?, which means that you can’t possibly find out where people are coming from. I’m not exactly running the most high-profile, highest traffic sites on the net, so I try to stop in and say hello is a forum is having a substantive discussion of what I’m saying. Unfortunately, GA doesn’t capture that data unless you put some extra work in.
• Tabbed-browser unfriendly. What’s wrong with Google? Don’t they use Firefox? They must, because if you click on THIS LINK and download and start using Firefox (that is, you switch from another brand of browser), they’ll pay me $1. So obviously they’ve heard of Firefox. Now when I surf in Firefox, I don’t click a link, read a page, click a link, read a page. I get to a page, click every interesting link to open in a new tab, and then go through them and close the tab as needed. GA doesn’t let me do that. Let’s say that I do this:
  • Open a page that lists all the sites that sent traffic to my site. I want to drill down and see which pages from some of those sites actually sent the traffic.
  • I CTRL-click on each link that interests me and it opens the page in a new tab, but it opens the root page, not the one I’m drilling down to! Come on!

  So why is that a problem? Simple. If it worked my way, I would go to the root page, open five links in new tabs and then work from there. Total pages viewed: 6. Total clicks: 6. If I do it the GA way, on the other hand, it’s down to the subpage, back to the root page, down to the sub page, back to the root page. And here’s the really bad part: if the root page lists sites ten at a time and has 200 sites, I need to keep navigating back to where I was. So to see those five pages, I might need to view 15 pages or more. What a hassle.

I’ve given up filling out the GA feedback form since they seem to be all about tab-unfriendly AJAX. Well, I only pay with my data and everyone else with anywhere near the same capabilities require me to pay with my data and my money, so I put up with the hassle, but if I had a site that was making me a living, I would rather spend my time building the site, not wrestling with analytics. So I suspect that GA is a bottom-feeder service that targets people like me with little traffic and no commerce, which is giving Google a somewhat skewed view of traffic on the net. I guess they’re getting data for the big-guy sites by using the ad revenue.

The Touchgraph search utility is a Java app that loads from their website and shows related pages and their degree of relatedness. This is not a link map, but more or less like the Google related pages concept. It’s pretty cool to give a visual sense of the weight of a given site and how Touchgraph thinks it fits in with the term or site you search on. The screenshot (click to enlarge) is a search on Yosemite National Park, because I’m an avid Yosemite Explorer as it were. What the screenshot doesn’t show is that there is also a sort of sidebar that lists all the related sites and gives you some info on those sites.

Quintura is a different deal. It shows the relationships between words. It is a fun idle pastime for linguists and perhaps for people who want to buy pay per click ads (i.e. Google AdWords and the like). Unlike Touchgraph, it’s a tool you download and run on your desktop.

Both of these are excellent time sponges for procrastinators and thus highly recommended. Actually, they’re more like novelties that you’ll play with for a while and discard. If you know of anything similar, please make a mention in the comments.

This means that you effectively have duplicate content, that is identical content that appears on multiple URLs. In a bad case, this will get some semi-random URL listed in the search engine instead of the one canonical (that is “authoritative, recognized, accepted”) URL that you want the search engines to use to get to that specific page on your site. It might also list both your preferred canonical URL and one or more of the others. That sounds good, because you could just take over the Google listings with your ten different URLs for your page of elephant jokes, but the problem is that it will split the power of those pages (call this Page Rank if you want). This might be even worse than listing the wrong page, because rather than one page in the top-10 in Google, you’ll have a page back at number 50 and another back at number 75 and so on. Nobody reads those pages. Why? Because you’ve ended up dividing up your inbound links and confusing the search engine robot. It’s just a robot—don’t make it think too hard!

For example, let’s say you just wrote a post on The Big Bad List of Elephant Jokes and you assign it a post slug of “elephant-jokes” and you put it in the categories “elephants” and “jokes” and you tag it as “humor”. You write it in June of 2020. This means that Goohoo! finds it at

• http://raisedbyturtles.org/ (b/c it shows up on the home page as the most recent post)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/elephants (b/c it’s the most recent post in that category)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/jokes (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/tag/funny (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/archives/2020/06/ (because it’s at the top of your June 2020 archives)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes (because this is the actual URL).

You don’t really want to do this. You want one canonical URL that reaches any given chunk of content. It’s better for you, your visitors and the search engines. So basically, you want to only index the “real”, that is canonical, URL.

Sorting the Canonical URL and Duplicate Content Issues

How do you do that? You could disallow the search engines from your archive and category pages using a robots.txt file. This will work, but the problem is that if you don’t get crawled before a post gets pushed off your home page, you might never get that post indexed (unless you generate a sitemap perhaps).

So what do you do? Simple, you install the incredible Headspace2 plugin. I used to use and recommend a hacked combination of the SEO Title Tag plugin and the All-in-one SEO Pack. That’s a powerful combo too, but not as powerful as Headspace2 and they need a minor hack (actually just a manual database change) to work together. I don’t say Headspace2 is incredible lightly, but this is just a great idea that is well-executed.

I got a fatal error when I installed H2, version 3.3.16, but that’s because the headpsace/plugins.php file needed to be executable by “owner” and I had the wrong file permissions on it. You can change that simply from your FTP client (try Filezilla if you don’t have an FTP client). If you’ve been using AIOSP, by the way, you can import all your data via the Headspace2 options.

Once you install this plugin (installs like any WP plugin; instructions in the readme file that comes with the download), you need to go in and enable some modules. This is a complex and powerful plugin and not all of it is enabled by default.

• From your Wordpress admin area, go to Options » Headspace2 » Modules
• Look over at the “Disabled” list. Drag and drop any of these modules into the “Simple” section. I have the following activated currently:
  • No Index/No Follow — essential for sorting the duplicate content issue
  • Page Title — essential for the second part of this how-to.
  • Page Description — Let’s you create a custom meta description, which will get to in a second.
  • More Text — Instead of a generic “Read more” for a continued article, you can customize the text so it’s something like “Read more about sorting out duplicate content…”
  • Tags — lets you tag your pages and puts these tags in your meta keywords.
• Now that you have the modules enabled, you’ll be able to control the indexing of all your pages. At edit or creation time, you can keep a single page out of the search indexes, which is useful for things like Contact pages and things like that. More importantly, though, we’ll get rid of all those category and archive pages and make them more or less invisible to the search engines.
  • Go back to the Headspace2 “Page Settings”. You should see a list that includes:
    • Archives
    • Categories
    • Search Pages
    • Tag Pages
  • For each of those listed above (not all the ones listed by Headspace2), click on it and, at the bottom of the options, you can see two check boxes. Check the No Index box, but not the No Follow box. Save. This tells the search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc) that it shouldn’t even bother to keep a record of the content of that page, but that it should follow those links on through to the actual pages you want indexed. If you check the No Follow box, you would prevent the search engine from even finding those pages that you really want indexed.
  • Note that you can also edit the page title and other information for those pages. We won’t bother right now, but it’s something to keep in mind in case you want to customize any of this.

Sorting out Meta Titles

H2 has another great utility: it lets you set unique meta titles (that’s the one that appears in the upper browser title bar, not the one the reader sees on the page) that are different from your H1 heading title. You can also craft meta descriptions and meta keywords and, in fact, any meta information. It will add additional text entry boxes that let you set your keywords, description and title on the post edit/creation screen.

The meta title is really key and the only one that really really really matters. This is what appears in the big bold text in the search results. This is the first thing about your page that most people will see. You want to make it count and you don’t want to simply duplicate what you have for the post heading. Above all, under no circumstances should the average blogger have a site where the meta title looks like this: My Site Name | Name of My Post. Nobody cares about the name of your stupid site and it’s also not descriptive in the least if you have a name like mine. It makes your titles look less unique and harder to tell apart if your visitor has several pages of your site open in different browser tabs or windows.

Why would you want your meta title to be different from your post title? Well, Google’s top search quality engineer, Matt Cutts, pointed out in his Wordpress SEO video that varying these two gives you two chances to match terms. You can use subtly different wording, looking to use alternate spelling (changes and changing in Matt’s example) or related terms (photos and pictures and images for example).

This is actually not why I do it, though.The meta title appears in the search results, so it needs to give the user some information scent. There’s only so much room to be clever. However, in your RSS feed or on page, where you’ve already got the users there, you might want to just give them something funny or clever, but perhaps that does not make the general idea of the article immediately obvious. In many cases, such as a how-to article like this, my two titles might be similar. But when I write some humor or political commentary, I might want to have an H1 heading that is engaging, but not necessarily descriptive in the same way the meta title is.

Meta Title

Longer, more descriptive title that should say: “I answer your question. I am the page that you’re looking for. Come look at me.”

H1 Heading Title

Might be even longer (on this page I’ve added the “Wordpress Setup Part 2″) or very short. It might be pithy, ironic or a mystery whose real meaning is only revealed as the reader goes down the page. The user is on the page already and has a view of the text that follows. The H1 text should say “Read on! I’m funny. I’m interesting. I’m good for a laugh or a solution.” It’s not necessarily a summary.

What if I already have pages without unique titles?

So now if you’ve never written a post and you don’t want to set titles for categories, you’re all set, but what if you are trying to fix up an old site, or you want to attach titles to category pages? Simple. Just leave the Options panel and head on over to Manage » Meta-data. You’ll see that H2 gives you a list with the Post Title (what appears on the page) fixed and the Page Title (what appears in the browser bar) editable. Now, look at the upper right corner of the screen. Headspace lets you mass edit almost everything—page title, post-slug, custom “more” text and everything. This is an amazing management tool.

Other Meta Tags

Meta Keywords

Who cares about these? The search enignes don’t pay attention anymore, so it’s just a waste of bandwidth, right? Perhaps, but things change and you may someday find these useful for your own internal search algorithms or what have you. I do this for my benefit, not the search engines. I write my title first, which keeps me on topic. I write keywords last, to see how I did. But of course you can ignore it. Since you’re using Headspace, you just generate your tags, which have uses for helping your visitors find related posts and so forth, and these will become meta keywords, so why not (if it’s not worth being a tag, I don’t bother to add extras).

Meta Description

Search engines don’t use this either, right? Probably not for ranking (how high you are in the results), but they might use it for relevance (trying to figure out the actual content of your post, assuming the description matches the rest of the page). More importantly, the will use it for the snippet that appears in the search results in some cases. An example would be where the algorithm tells the engine that your page is on elephant jokes, but it doesn’t find the word on the page so it can’t find a relevant snippet. What does it use? If you have no meta description, it might use nothing or it might just start grabbing your navigation text (I’ve had that happen on image pages). If you have the description, you control what appears in these cases instead of depending on SE magic.

Recap

By using Headspace2, you save yourself tons of headaches, lots of theme-hacking, and make your site more usable for visitors and search engines alike. If done right, your duplicate content issues and duplicate title issues will be totally resolved.

The Problem with the default Wordpress URLs

By default, every page in Wordpress will have a URL like http://site.com/?pid=31. What you want is a URL like http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes for your collection of Elephant Jokes because of course there is nothing funnier than elephant jokes and nobody who sees that URL will be able to resist the urge to click it. Nobody. Some Wordpress user add additional parameters (and I did so in the past), so that it looks like http://site.com/2020/06/07/elephant-jokes if it’s posted on June 7, 2020 (I predict a resurgence in the popularity of elephant jokes in the 2020s). That’s fine, but there is a drawback in that you probably don’t want people navigating back up to http://site.com/2020/06 by editing your URL because that URL may be a dead end or, at best, list the articles published on that date. So Google’s top “search quality” engineer, Matt Cutts, suggests simply using the post name. If you will have a carefully categorized, hierarchical site, where posts will typically belong to just one category, it may make sense to have the category in the URL (again, more information for your visitors and in your search results). Otherwise, probably not.

Why Change Your URL Schema?

Some people call these type of URLs “search-engine friendly” but in reality, the search engines can handle a URL in the default form just fine. However, this method lets you achieve a few things:

• You give keywords and context to the search engines (SEs). This isn’t going to automatically rocket you to the top, but it will help the SEs a lot in determining what the main point of the page is. I’m not smart enough to game the search engines and I also believe that long-term, it will just become harder and harder anyway. That said, like any writing, you don’t want to make it purposely difficult for the reader. So you use this to give one of your “readers”, aka Googlebot or the Yahoo! Slurp or the MSN engine, a little help in understanding your message.
• You give keywords and context to your users. I often look at a URL before I click on a link. I use this information all the time and appreciate a well-chosen URL, whether displayed at the bottom of my browser or in search results. However, where this really helps your potiential audience is in the case where someone does something like paste a URL into an email or forum. Which of the following is more useful to you as a reader:
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this – http://example.com/?p=34″
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this – http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes“

  Definitely the second one. It saves you time—if you don’t want to read elephant jokes (and why would you so hate elephants?), you don’t waste your time clicking.

• Easier to remember and to give out verbally.

How do your Change Your Default URL Schema in Wordpress?

This is very simple. In your WP admin area, go to Options » Permalinks and choose Custom. Now for your custom structure, you can enter in the text box:

• /%postname%/ — This is the Matt Cutts style.
• /%category%/%postname%/ — This is my preferred style for a site that is meaningfully hierarchical and categorized (i.e. if you expect people to use drill-down navigation).
• /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ — use this if you really don’t want any duplicate paths, but realistically all you need to do is add a number at the end of the post slug and you’ll get the same effect.

By default, Wordpress will just use your-very-long-post-title-with-little-words-included. Sometimes that’s okay, depending on the title, but as a general rule, write custom post-slug on every post. The other important thing to remember here is to write a custom post-slug on every post. In the post edit/creation area, there’s a box on the right called post-slug that determines the last element of your URL. By the way, if you don’t already, write a custom post-slug on every post. Did I mention that already?

Recap

Wordpress gives you a nice facility for creating intelligent and readable URLs for your site. Taking a bit of time to restructure the default URL and to write useful post-slugs on every post will be beneficial to your readers, will attract more readers and will help the search engines determine the focus of your page.