Many find this to be so scandalous because these “celebrities” are thought to have true status, true influence, so it’s surprising to discover the their follower base is comprised mostly of empty Twitter accounts.

These ‘fake’ accounts are determined by SocialBakers as having the following three characteristics:

1. The accounts has never made a single tweet.

2. Have less than one follower.

3. Follow fewer than 50 other accounts.

We got a a bit curious about this phenomenon and wanted to see what other celebrities have a large number of fake followers, so we did a bit of digging using StatusPeople.com to verify the findings.

Here’s the list of the top 9 celebrities with highest percentage of fake followers.

1. Mariah Carey- 54% fake (approximately 5,483,651 fake followers)

2. Jennifer Lopez- 51% fake (approximately 8,636,385 fake followers)

3. Jordin Sparks- 50% fake (approximately 1,743,151 fake followers)

4. Taylor Swift13- 50% fake (approximately 13,209,030 fake followers)

5. Britney Spears- 48% fake (approximately 12,392,098 fake followers)

6. Tyra Banks- 47% fake (approximately 4,199,695 fake followers)

7. Ellen DeGeneres- 47% fake (approximately 8,699,128 fake followers)

8. Katy Perry- 47% fake (approximately 16,513,184 fake followers)

9. Alicia Keys- 46% fake (approximately 5,922,960 fake followers)

Top 9 Celebrities With Highest Percentage of Fake Followers is a post from TrafficZoom

A classic example of this would be the recent meltdown by Applebee’s in which Applebee’s single-handedly flushed their reputation right down the toilet right in front of the Internet. Regardless of one’s opinion on the incident that spawned this conversation and uproar, the key takeaways for social media managers are clear. Better to learn from the mistakes of others, than to learn them yourself from experience.

Here are 4 key principles of social media that everyone should be aware of (if you aren’t already):

1. Never argue, especially on social media.

Of course we all know that engagement and conversation lies at the heart and foundation of interacting with one’s audience and market. In these kinds of instances not everyone is going to agree, but arguing isn’t going to convince anyone or persuade people. It actually has the opposite effect, not only invigorating the original commenter, but also attracting other like-minded peeps. So what you end up with is not any kind of reconciliation, but instead a group of disgruntled people unified in their feelings. Instead of arguing it’s best to simply acknowledge the comment, or ignore the comment. Arguing only adds fuel to the fire.

2. Don’t delete comments.

While no one likes to get lam-blasted, deleting comments always looks tacky. All of these conversations are happening in a virtually-public setting so attempting to sweep them under the rug isn’t going to solve anything. Those same individuals will know they’ve been censored and will likely come back for revenge armed with more negative energy and an even bigger megaphone with which they will release their full “fury”.

It’s also a bit of a faux paux in that it communicates to your audience that you’ll tolerate what they say, as long as it’s good. If it gets a bit nasty, your stuff gets deleted, this never empowers empathy or understanding within the audience. Instead, people feel they’ve not been heard, not been listened to, and that their opinion in fact doesn’t matter – all of which are the exact opposite of what successful interactions with the audience should foster.

3. Copy and paste responses don’t help – fast is slow with people.

Almost as bad as simply deleting comments is to copy and paste the exact same statement repeatedly. It might be “efficient” in that you can cover quite a bit of ground without having to actually think or invest the time or thought of composing a unique response, but this “efficiency” will end up costing you more. This kind of behavior will always backfire because it clearly demonstrates that the audience is not being listened to in a quality manner. Copy and paste responses are for robots, not active members. If people care enough to take the time to comment, they are also going to care enough to want a legitimate response.

Rather than copying and pasting the exact same response it would have been better to allow people to express their opinion and collect those concerns to find the common themes, and then address those. In the case with Facebook, individuals can be tagged so that they know you are responding to them, and will walk away feeling treated more with respect than simply a robot receiving an automated-copy-and-paste reply.

4. If/when you make mistakes, don’t deny them and lie about them.

Denial doesn’t work, and the members of the Internet won’t forget it. These are not isolated, secret interactions. In fact, they can be quite the opposite, so it’s important not to try to squelch the situation and do “damage control” by lying about it. Again, this only adds fuel to the fire making it seem as though you have something to hide and are desperate – so desperate in fact that you’re willing to lie about a mistake rather than facing the situation.

Lying and denying won’t work. In the ever-so-public medium of social media everything is happening under a potential spotlight, so better to just face the music rather than try to be a coward and deny it. It does more damage than any good.

These are 4 key principles everyone should keep in mind regardless of your industry. I’m sure there are more that could be extracted from this most recent debacle.

What are some of the other lessons that could be learned from the Applebee’s meltdown? Tell us your thoughts by continuing the conversation on Twitter.

4 Key Principles Never to Violate in Social Media is a post from TrafficZoom

In short, the Disavow Links tool allows webmasters to submit a list of links that they wish for Google to “discount” when evaluating search engine rankings. It comes with the strong caution that you need to be very sure about which links you are disavowing, as you may be discounting links that are actually helping you.

The tools comes largely in the face of the public attention being brought to “Negative SEO” – the ability to impact a site’s rankings by building “spammy” links to it. In the past, it was generally accepted that Negative SEO was difficult to do – spammy links of the past may still have helped that site climb the rankings, or were otherwise simply not counted either way. But with the Google Penguin algorithm impacts coming in through 2012, it has been clearly seen that spammy links can indeed cause penalties. This caused some outrage at the apparent new ability to attack other websites, and appears to be the main driver for Google’s decision to release the tool.

The point has to be made that Google should perhaps have been providing this ability before they allowed thousands of websites to tank in the rankings through the Penguin updates. Over 700,000 webmasters were emailed about “Un-natural Links” earlier in 2012 despite Google knowing fully well how difficult (if not impossible) it can be to remove a link that is on someone else’s website. One might almost wonder if this was deliberate – Google perhaps wanted to punish those sites it saw as “cheating”. This causes some heated opinions from SEOs and internet business owners in general – Google has a tendency to treat businesses like criminals for taking advantage of a situation that Google itself created. When certain SEO methods were helping businesses generate more traffic and make more sales, what did Google expect would happen? Those that were willing to take advantage, took advantage. Those who were not, watched everyone else take advantage while they wallowed in the depths of low traffic volumes and struggling businesses. Those who chose to invest higher amounts of money on pure white hat SEO can remain immune and take the moral high ground, but how many small businesses could really afford that? How many even knew the difference?

So, some might say that this tool shuts the gate after the horse has bolted. Or more accurately, to some website owners this tool is like putting airbags into the car that Google had already driven a monster truck over.

With the tool being so new, what remains to be seen is whether removing these links actually remove the penalties that were applied from those links. The obvious answer everyone hopes for is yes; but if Google has actually applied a time-based penalty because of the links found earlier in the year, there is no guarantee that these penalties will be removed. Many experienced SEOs expect that there will be lingering impacts to those sites who were “caught with their hand in the cookie jar”. Time will tell!

Google Disavow Links Tool is a post from TrafficZoom

Here are 5 tips on how to improve your website conversions -

1. What is your Call To Action (CTA)? This is a commonly used term, but not everybody thinks enough about what it is. It is quite simple: what do you want your customers to do when they come to your site? Make that thing obvious and easy. If you want them to click a button, make it big and bright. If you want them to call you, display your phone number large, obvious, and connected with a message that tells customers you want them to call! It sounds obvious, but we have actually had clients tell us they aren’t getting enough phone calls from their website, to find that the phone number was a small piece of text buried away on one page of their site.
2. Review your content’s focus. What messages are you sending your potential customers? One common mistake is from website owners who use all their website content to talk about themselves, putting themselves on a pedestal. But what are your customer’s needs when they come to your site? Are you showing them that you know who they are, that you have a product that solves their problems? Your website isn’t all about you, it should also be about your customers and what you do for them. As the saying goes, Bob doesn’t want a drill, he wants a hole.
3. Long content tends to be the enemy of conversion. While this isn’t a hard and fast rule – it does depend on your product and your market – as a general rule, if your page looks like it is going to be an effort for the customer to figure out that they are in the right place to get what they want, then the chances are that they will leave to go somewhere “easier” – especially for smaller purchase items. The idea of conversion is to remove as much “friction” as possible, and a friction point can be that your page looks like the customer needs to read an essay or news article. Write down what you think needs to be said, then strip out everything that isn’t truly necessary for the customer to know at this point in time…. and then halve the text! That is usually how much text you need. Exceptions to this rule are usually when you are chasing buyers for bigger ticket items (ie they want to be educated on the item before buying it) or buyers for products who tend to do more research first. Even then, your content still needs to be clear, well-spaced, and to the point. Use bold, headings, and images to break it up.
4. Reduce the fields on your contact forms. If your CTA is asking people to fill out a contact form, strip this down to only what you really need to know to make contact with them. Ask yourself if you really need to request all those fields – each one you ask for is more time you want them to spend in order to reach out to you. Strip it down to the bare essentials and you’ll find that people are far more likely to get in contact. You can use your forms as a “funnel” – less fields is a wider funnel for leads. If you find yourself getting a high number of lower quality leads that are wasting your time, tighten the funnel – include some more “qualifying” fields on your form, such as asking the client’s budget range.
5. Videos. If you have a video that can concisely and accurately explain your offering, this tends to help conversions a lot. In the same way that content can hurt conversions (because people don’t want to read too much), if you can help them by summarizing everything in a video then you’ve gone another step further. This can also help build trust and credibility – you aren’t just a faceless website, you are more “real” because the customers can see and hear you. Make sure your video is in the same style as your content should be – focusing on the customer needs and the results they want, not just all about you and how great you are.

5 Tips to Improve Your Website Conversion Rates is a post from TrafficZoom

This kind of data is very important to SEO, and this change attempts to make search engine optimizers blind to some of the effects of their work. What makes it somewhat hypocritical is that Google of course does not strip keyword data from Google AdWords searches, meaning that the claims this move was to protect user privacy are a little hollow.

The claim was that these changes would only impact around 10% of queries – something that has since been shown to be at best an underestimate from Google, and at worst a blatant lie. As Google expands it’s presence by tying together its product set, not least of all their attempts to expand Google+, more and more people are logged into a Google Account when performing a search (whether they know it or not).

We are now seeing clients where the “Not Provided” keyword is almost always the highest grossing “keyword” for traffic; at it’s lowest, it sits around the 10% mark claimed by Google, but for some clients we see this sitting as high as 70-80%. Websites that tend to get much of their traffic from professionals seem to have the highest impact – B2B companies will tend to suffer from this the most as their customers are business people who are using computers more frequently, therefore having a much higher chance that they are logged into products such as Gmail.

What can be done about it? Sadly, not much. Google did not suffer a large public backlash from this, as it is mainly SEO people that are aware of the impact. As SEOs, we can still deduce data from the rest of the keyword data and project this out over the full traffic volume.

“Not Provided” keyword data in Google Analytics is a post from TrafficZoom

Volume SEO Companies

These are the SEO companies that aggressively look to get as many customers as possible. They will tend towards having the following traits -

– Lots of advertising – you see them online a lot, they have bigger marketing budgets

– Pushier and less knowledgeable sales staff (as they have bigger teams with aggressive goals)

– Set pricing on their packages

– You will have an Account Manager, but they are not likely to be doing any of the actual work on your account

– Automated / streamlined reporting systems – a necessity when you have hundreds of customers

– Higher customer churn rates

This is not to say that volume driven SEO companies are always a bad thing. Many people find greater comfort in working with bigger companies, and understandably so. In theory they will not be disappearing anywhere, and sometimes this volume model means that the services are more affordable… although whether the results will deliver an ROI should still always be questioned. Historically, many volume SEO companies outsource the actual technical work overseas, to countries such as India, with an internal Account Manager handling the client-facing tasks in the USA. Most will not admit that the work is being outsourced, but having cheap labor doing the work is a key component that allows volume SEO companies to invest more in their advertising & marketing efforts to make the sales they need to reach quotas.

Boutique SEO Companies

Boutique SEO companies are not necessarily just small SEO companies; there are plenty of SEO companies that mimic the traits of the volume SEO companies described above without being in any way “boutique”. Here we mean boutique SEO to mean a smaller SEO company that does not define it’s success based on it’s number of clients and new monthly SEO sales, but rather a more hands-on approach with a smaller number of clients. A boutique SEO company will tend to have the following traits -

– Lower marketing budgets – they aren’t continually trying to win new clients, as they tend to be focused on helping those clients they have rather than looking to new ones

– You will have direct contact with the exact technical people working on your campaign; this usually means that little or no work is outsourced

– Pricing may be higher when compared to volume SEO companies, but not always; volume SEO companies still have a marketing budget they need to fund

– Packages are less set in concrete; they may be customized to specifically suit a client’s needs

– Higher client retention rates, because each client gets a higher level of attention

– May specialize in a number of industries, rather than always applying a single SEO formula to every client

Choose whichever model works best for your business and the way you like to work with your vendors. A good way to do this is to try and get in contact with some clients of the company you are considering working with; boutique SEO companies are often more readily willing and able to do this, as they have usually developed stronger relationships with their clients, but both should be able to provide you at least a few example clients to speak with.

Volume SEO Companies vs Boutique SEO Companies is a post from TrafficZoom

(Of course we recognize that not all negative press should be suppressed, there are a lot of scenarios in which we will not help a company with search engine reputation management.)

The first thing to assess is how much negative press is out there, and how strong that press is. Are we just talking about one website, or many? Do you know which Google searches these websites show up on Page 1 for? Do some research; especially make sure you try all of the “suggested searches” that Google gives you around your core term. People may not originally intend to conduct those searches, but if they planned to Google “joe bloggs” and the suggested searches include “joe bloggs police charges”, you can bet a lot of them will try that search too.

For each search term that is “tarnished”, there are a few key things to identify.

1. How strong is the strongest negative listing?
2. Who owns that site – do we have any control over the content?

Let’s start with #2 because unfortunately it usually has the shortest answer – someone else controls the site, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. However, you should still investigate your options.

• If the website is a review site (like Yelp), you should consider responding to the review either publicly or directly – but consider this carefully, as it can create a storm. However we have seen “fake” reviews dealt with effectively sometimes by the business stating publicly that they will happily refund that customer 10 times their payment if they are able to supply their receipt proving they are a real customer – only do this if you are sure the review is fake of course.
• If the site has something that could be legally defined as slander, consult your lawyer as you may be able to send a “cease and desist” letter.
• If the site contains content that infringes your copyright, you can submit a DMCA complaint to have the page or site taken down.

If those options are still not going to work, then we need to look at what it is going to take to suppress that negative listing. Since we can’t remove it, the next best thing is to hide it. As we all know by now, anything that is not on Page 1 of Google is rarely seen. Starting with the most popular/obvious searches, we need to push the negative listing down off Page 1. If someone is determined to find it, they’ll find it, but to start with we at least want to push the results out of the eyes of the mainstream searchers. The way to do this is by optimizing a whole bunch of other websites – positive or neutral – to “fill the spots” on Page 1 and push the negative listing out of sight onto Page 2 or lower.

This is why we need to look at how strong the strongest negative listing is, because that is the listing we need to out-rank. It there is a negative listing ranking #1 for a search phrase, then anything else on the page will be pushed down when we out-rank the site at #1.

So this is also why a strong negative listing at #1 is the worst possible situation; you would rather have positions 5 through 10 on Page 1 filled with negative listings rather than something at #1.

The resources required for undertaking such a campaign can be quite large – this is why SERM companies are effectively the same thing as SEO companies, because it is their ability to consistently, reliably rank sites on Page 1 of Google that will largely determine the success of a campaign.

Search Engine Reputation Management – A Beginner’s Guide is a post from TrafficZoom

Most of us begin finding keywords by using the Google Keyword Tool, which is very helpful and something you can’t thank Google enough, because their rivals Yahoo/Bing don’t have such a thing as comprehenisve and transparent.   However, the flaw behind using Google’s keyword tool as your first step is that it specifies only search make up from their Adwords platform.  The data presented by Google is too commercial and their sole intention is to provide advertisers with additional keywords they can target and ultimately bid for.  The keyword suggestions are based on the number searches per month and how much on average each click is per advertiser.

When it comes to ranking organically for keywords in the search engines you must consider other factors outside of Google’s Keyword Tool.

First, write a small description of what your company does and what kind of value you provide to your clients.   This small description will help an SEO company or an SEO expert identify the main keyword the company is trying to target, and open the floor to acquire longer-tail keywords or key phrases that help explain what the business does.

Second, if you have any form of analytics properly setup on your website, take a look to see if there is any search terms or search data that gave you organic traffic.  The basis of some of the keywords searched on your site, can help  you think of other keywords that can be used within your website or for blog posts or articles that sit outside of your website.

Third, look at other helpful free resources.  Below is a list of free SEO tools we would recommend looking into before using the almighty Google Keyword Tool:

1. Keyword Discovery Tool – Trellian’s free keyword discovery tool.  Trellian also has a paid version keyword tool.
2. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence – in Beta, but this is Bing’s and Yahoo’s version of Google Adwords Keyword Tool that allows you to determine additional keywords from the main one’s you want to target.
3. Wordtracker – a free keyword tool with training videos.  A paid version is available.

Fourth, use the suggestion bar provided by Google, Yahoo and Bing.  In some cases, you can find long-tail keywords to target and write articles or blogs around it.  Simply type in one or two words inside the search bar and see what the search engines suggest.

Fifth, invest in an SEO company.  An SEO company can provide realistic expectations and guide you throughout the process.  The key in SEO is to find the right keywords and the right SEO company, where both the SEO company and the client are on the same page and equally work hard to achieve great results.

Choosing the Right Keywords for SEO is a post from TrafficZoom

In 2010, Google quietly introduced a concept called “Personalized Search”, and for many users this was set to ON by default. What does it do?

Personalized Search uses Google’s data in your “Web History”, which contains information about the things you typically search for, and the websites you like to look at. They use this data to influence the search results you see. This means that the search results you see, are not necessarily the same results that everybody else sees – they have been personalized by Google to suit you. And if you are seeing your own website rank surprisingly highly, the answer is very likely that Google has “boosted” your rankings just for you, because it has noticed you visiting that particular website a lot. Sadly, that doesn’t mean everyone else is seeing the results that way!

If you think you are ranking highly for a popular search phrase, but you aren’t getting many email inquiries and the phone isn’t ringing off the hook, you should check whether Personalized Search is fooling you into a false sense of security. We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but maybe you are the only one who sees your website ranking so highly.

How to turn off Personalized Search

Follow these simple steps to turn off your “Web History” and see the Google results the same way everyone else sees them -

• On Google, in the top-right there is a picture of a cog/wheel that you can click on and select “Search Settings”
• On the page of settings that brings up, look towards the bottom for the “Google Instant” section for a link to Web History. Click that.
• (Google might ask you to sign in at this point) On the next page you can Pause Web History and Clear Entire Web History.

Is Google Web History & Personalized Searches fooling you? is a post from TrafficZoom

Hiring an SEO consultant who works from their own home is much like hiring an SEO company, because they aren’t sitting there in your office. But an external SEO consultant works with much less accountability. The most common complaint we hear about companies that tried this is “we hired an SEO guy, and then he disappeared”. These businesses learn the lesson the hard way that what they really wanted was a long term partnership with someone that could bring quality, ongoing results – which is hard to expect from someone who works for you out of their basement.

Other businesses turn to an in-house SEO person to look after their SEO needs. Typically this is a more expensive option, as full time employees aren’t cheap, but these businesses like the idea of “keeping an eye” on their SEO. Logic also suggests that the team is dedicated to their needs, so perhaps results should be better. But this isn’t necessarily the case, and here is why -

One of the major reasons we recommend against hiring an in-house SEO person is that they are an isolated resource with one set of experiences and only one website (or few websites) to work on. It is difficult for them to monitor trends or updates to the search engine algorithms (of which there have been major updates this year) other than to hear stories from other SEO people on the internet, which should always be taken with a grain of salt because there is a lot of misinformation out there. Comparatively, SEO companies have multiple SEO resources (at TrafficZoom we have a multiple full time SEO professionals, plus their assistants, plus a link building team, plus web designers and developers separate to that) and have the experience of literally hundreds and hundreds of websites. There is no text book on SEO, because it is about influencing Google and they don’t tell you how to do that – you have to learn it through experience. A single resource or small team will rarely have the same experience when compared to a company (unless you spend big money, like $500k plus, hiring the best individuals in the industry).

The above point is particularly important this year because Google have made major, major changes to the game with the Panda algorithm updates. These can be difficult to deal with and require more expertise than ever. A single SEO resource is highly unlikely to have even encountered or dealt with Panda issues yet, but for an SEO company, working on solutions is part of our daily bread.

Another reason is that effective SEO involves two important sides; updates to the website itself, and linking. There is only so much you can do with the website itself, and then that biggest SEO effort comes from the linking, and that is very tedious, time consuming, and difficult for a single resource to do. Finding sites to get links from is difficult, but to full time SEO companies, that is our life blood so we not only know every trick in the book, we already have a huge number of link resources available from Day 1.

Companies that hire an in-house SEO person virtually always get amateur results, at TrafficZoom we probably speak to 1 or 2 companies every week who are in that situation. Hiring for good SEO people is difficult, because anyone can say they know what they are doing, and you need to know more than them to prove them right or wrong.

As we’ve said before… the best indicator of future performance is to look at your past results. At TrafficZoom, we can show you example clients with top rankings – companies that are the same size as your’s, or bigger.

SEO Companies vs SEO Consultants is a post from TrafficZoom