If you haven’t done so yet, check out Twitter.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool that allows users to send out short messages that can be read on the Twitter website, or on a desktop program (or “client”) like twhirl, or via text messaging. It also integrates with things like Status Updates on Facebook (in case you were wondering).

It’s similar to instant messaging in that you can keep in touch with your friends, but it has a significant advantage over instant messaging because you can follow messages from people you don’t know or haven’t (yet) met - provided they let you do so, which most Twitterers do.

So, for instance, I can follow the “tweets” or short messages of renowned marketing authorities like Guy Kawasaki, or of entrepreneur search marketers like Andy Beal and Danny Sullivan.

Some Twitterers are better sources of useful information than others. Sometimes people just make idle chit chat. Sometimes they share a link to a blog post or story they think is important. But, in general, it’s great to get these folks’ take on what’s going on in the world.

Online marketer Jennifer Laycock calls Twitter “acceptable evesdropping”. And - let’s be honest - who doesn’t like evesdropping?

You can “follow” (connect with) Mark McLaren and McBuzz. Just create a profile on the Twitter website and login to the site, then go to the mcbuzz profile (click here), click on Follow (to connect with McBuzz), and send me a “tweet” (a message) that starts with @mcbuzz, which directs the message to me.

You’ll get the hang of it quickly.

But wait! Twitter does more: just like blogging or LinkedIn or Facebook, it establishes your brand. It can help to establish or strengthen your reputation as an authority in your field. It gives you greater visibility online. (Do a Google search for “mcbuzz” and you find the McBuzz Twitter profile on page one.) And it can create or foster connections between you and other professionals you might not have met.

In short, Twitter has got some serious mojo. It has characteristics that the early World Wide Web and blogging had way, way back… Not long ago, there was a time when it wasn’t clear that those two things had much to do with marketing and communications. And Twitter is more immediate, more concise. In a day and age when twenty-somethings use text messages and Facebook instead of email, and fewer and fewer people take time to read a newspaper, immediate and concise is where you want to be.

Of course, Twitter itself may not necessarily be the tool people are using in a year or two, but the tool (or some part of the tool) we are using then will be a lot like Twitter. Better to get aquainted with the technology now than two years from now.

If you like Twitter, try the desktop client I mentioned, called twhirl. It’s got more features than the Twitter website - just like your desktop email client (Outlook, Thunderbird) has more features than web mail - and it’s easy install and use.

Here’s one success story’s take on why Twitter: Penelope Trunk on Twitter

As webpronews.com puts it, “Anyone with a desire to connect with others in a quick way, while reinforcing one’s name and personal brand, will find [Twitter] useful.”

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If you would like to find out if a page or document on your website has been indexed by Google, use the query modifier “site:url” like you would to see how many pages on your site have been indexed (and which ones), but instead of using “site:mcbuzz.com”, for example, use “site:mcbuzz.com/wordpress/what-is-wordpress” or whatever the entire URL or file name is that you want to check.

In other words, say I have a PDF on my site called “mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” (which I don’t - this is just an example). I can do a search using Google for “site:mcbuzz.com/pdf/mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” and Google will tell me whether is has this file in its index or not. Remember to use the entire path or URL for the page or document. If you keep your PDFs in a directory on your site called “pdf”, then you need to include that in the URL as shown in this example. (If you have quesitons about this, send me a comment.)

This post follows along the same lines as an earlier one called “Are PDF Files Indexed by Google?” But I also wanted to talk about this topic for a couple of reasons related to Search Engine Optimization and WordPress.

1. In WordPress, it is possible to specify the URL of a page or post — independent of the title you give the page or post — using the “Page Slug” / “Post Slug” feature. If you don’t specify a slug, WordPress will make one automatically using “Permalinks“. I told WordPress to give this post the URL “mcbuzz.com/2008/document-webpage-indexed-by-google”. If I hadn’t done so, WordPress would have called it “mcbuzz.com/2008/how-to-see-if-a-page-or-document-on-your-website-has-been-indexed-by-google”. Shorter is better as long as the relevant keywords are included in a URL, so I made it shorter by tweaking it a bit and removing words I don’t think are as relevant for SEO as the ones I kept.

2. Google is indexing pages and posts very quickly these days, sometimes in under an hour. The post you are reading right now was indexed in less than 7 minutes. If you have a URL indexed by Google, you may not want to change it because if you change it, the link to the page that’s in Google’s index will be broken. Someone might find your page or post by doing a Google search, but when they click on the listing, they will get a “Page not found” error from your site.

So, if you want to use the Page Slug / Post Slug feature in WordPress to customize your URLs, do so before or shortly after you publish a page or post. If you are thinking of changing a URL, you can check to see if your page has already been indexed before you change it. If it has been indexed, you need to weigh the possible long-term SEO benefit of changing the URL so that it is more likely to show up on page 1 or 2 of Google for your target keywords — because Google will eventually re-index it. But if it has been indexed already and you want people to find it for some searches right away (in the next week or two, say) then you are probably better off leaving well enough alone.

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The importance of landing page load time for positive user experience is widely acknowledged. People don’t like to wait for web pages to load. Given the choice between a quick-loading page and a slow-loading page with similar content, people will naturally prefer the quick page — even if it’s only a subconscious part of their experience on a site.

Google AdWords now gives website owners one more reason to take this seriously: AdWords Keyword Quality Scores now include landing page load time. Hence, advertisers whose landing pages have long load times will pay more for keyword bids than those with faster-loading landing pages.

For more, see Google AdWords Help article “How does load time affect my landing page quality?” Thanks to Web Pro News for their post on this topic.

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The most popular search engine is still Google by a large margin. The latest numbers from Nielsen Online say that Google’s share of the search market is nearly three times Yahoo! or 56.9% to Yahoo!’s 19%. That’s why, when web marketing professionals talk about optimizing a website for search engines, they mean optimizing for Google. In general, ranking well in Google search results will bring more visitors to your website than ranking well in Yahoo! search results will. And a paid advertisement on a Google search page will typically be seen by more people than a paid advertisement on a Yahoo! search page.

However, more people clicking on your ads and more visitors to your website does not always mean better results. One way to measure results is by the number of “conversions” on your website, that is, the number of visitors doing what you want them to do, like picking up the phone and calling your business. It’s always good to remember that people searching on Yahoo! or MSN.com might be of different demographics than those searching on Google. For every 100 visitors that come to your site from a Google search, you might get one phone call. (Just a hypothetical example.) But for every 100 visitors that come from a Yahoo! search, you might get 5 phone calls. With that information, you may want to advertise more on Yahoo!

Then again, even conversions, like the number of phone calls you get for 100 visitors to your site, are not the final measure of results. What if almost every phone call you got from a Google search resulted in a sale, whereas only a small fraction of the calls you got from a Yahoo! search resulted in a sale? In that case, even though more calls are coming from ads on Yahoo!, it would still be smarter to do most or all of your advertising Google. (Again, these are just hypothetical examples.)

Ultimately, more traffic is good, but more qualified traffic is really what you want, whether it’s from Google or Yahoo! or whatever. And you need to use website traffic tracking software like Google Analytics (which is free and easy to install) to collect this information. Combined with other techniques, such as putting a special 800 number on your website so that you know which inquiries and sales are coming from your site as opposed to through other marketing channels, you can get a good idea of which online marketing channels are working well and which are not.

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Yes. PDF files are indexed by Google and other search engines.

Following up on a question from a reader (Optimize PDF Files For Websites and Search Engines), as I note there, one way to see if a PDF on your website has been indexed by Google is to copy a long line of text from the PDF, and then put it into the Google search box — with double quotes on either end. You can do this to find any particular document or page available on the Web — as long as it has been indexed (scanned or “spidered” and catalogued) by Google.

For example, if you Google “Enter an estimate of your 2008 nonwage income (such as dividends or interest)” with the double quotes on either end, Google offers you a link to a PDF of IRS Form W-4 for 2008. This shows that the 2008 W-4 PDF document has been indexed. (Incidentally, Google also offers you a link to the mcbuzz.com page you are reading right now since it contains the same string of text.)

Another way to see if a PDF has been indexed by Google is to use the “site:url” query modifier. This is a handy trick when you want to narrow your search to one domain. If I Google [site:mcbuzz.com] - without the brackets, Google lists every page in my site that has been indexed. If I Google [site:mcbuzz.com web] - without the brackets, Google lists every page in my site that contains the word “web”. And, as a helpful reader points out below, you can Google [site:mcbuzz.com filetype:pdf] - without the brackets, to see if there are any PDF files on the mcbuzz.com website that have been indexed by Google. (Be sure not to put a space between “filetype:” and “pdf”.)

I don’t have any PDFs on my site. Try it with another domain to see an actual positive result. To see if a particular PDF on my website has been indexed, I can Google [site:mcbuzz.com “some word or phrase in the PDF”] - without the brackets. Of course, you can also Google [site:mcbuzz.com myfilename.pdf] to do the same.

Returning to the Form W-4 example, Google [site:irs.gov “Enter an estimate of your 2008 nonwage income (such as dividends or interest)”] and Google lists one and only one result: the PDF on the IRS website.

Something fairly amazing: Google knows every phrase in that PDF and in any other document or web page it has indexed. That’s a lot of information.

The other question in the mcbuzz.com post mentioned above was whether a PDF would be indexed if it were encrypted or had other security settings applied to it. If you have Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, you can answer this question yourself.

Open a PDF and then open the Document Properties dialog box (File > Properties…). Click on the Security tab, and you see the various security options. There are different security options depending on which version of Acrobat Reader you want your PDF to be compatible with. The dialog box tells you if search engines will be able to read all or only some parts of the PDF (e.g. metatags or attachments) when you select the various options. If the PDF can’t be read by search engines, it won’t be indexed.

For those interested, here is more information about Google query modifiers like “site:url”.

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