Twollow.com Review

September 27, 2009 by
Filed under: General 

Quality is key in off-page optimization in foreign markets

Search engine optimization can be divided into two broad categories: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

The on-page stuff is reasonably straight-forward, in that the optimizer has full control over what they write and what is uploaded to the website. In the simplest possible terms, they have to incorporate key search phrases into the main copy of their website so that Google – and other search engines – can match the site to searches made by the world’s internet users.

The off-page aspect of SEO, however, isn’t so straight forward as it’s often not possible to have full control over the related optimizing activities, as too much depends on the cooperation of external parties.

According to Google, link-building determines around 80% of a website’s placement within its rankings. But it’s all about quality rather than quantity for modern-day optimizers. Whilst there was a time when ‘link exchanges’ were commonplace between website owners to boost their search engine rankings, this is no longer enough. Links must form part of a broader piece of content that is useful. Isolated links have little value, especially on a website that isn’t ‘trusted’ by Google.

So a link from CNN, BBC or Reuters will have considerably more impact than a link from a low-level website at the bottom-end of the Alexa ranking scale.

With international markets, the ‘how tos’ of link-building are much the same as domestic markets, but there is a few additional issues worth considering.

For example, keywords and anchor text go hand-in-hand. So a business that ranks highly on Google for, say, ‘car insurance’, will more than likely have a number of links placed around the Web with ‘car insurance’ linking back to the company website.

When the business launches its foreign language website to target new international markets, there may be a temptation to translate the keywords directly. But even a correct translation by a professional, native-speaking translator might not be what people use to search for ‘car insurance’ locally. Indeed, a quick search of Google’s keyword tool for France reveals that people tend not to use the (correct) translation ‘l’assurance automobile’ to search for ‘car insurance’, they tend to use the abbreviation ‘assurance auto’ or even the variant ‘assurance voiture’. So, a little research can avert a major link building travesty.

As with domestic SEO techniques, there’s no substitute for quality content with your foreign link-building initiatives. Fresh, relevant content with a liberal smattering of industry keywords will be rewarded by Google.

Organic link-building is the dream of any optimizer and if you produce fantastic, useful text on your foreign-language website, other blogs and website owners will link to you naturally with minimal effort from you. A good example of this is software developers Adobe. You’ll notice that many websites link to the free Adobe reader, which is necessary to view PDF documents. As a result, Adobe has one of the highest in-bound link counts of all websites, more than Microsoft AND Wikipedia. And their Alexa ranking isn’t all that bad either.

For businesses with domestic and international operations, PR is perhaps your most powerful tool in getting quality, organic links. If anything newsworthy or quirky happens within your business, shout it from the rooftops. It’s free to send out press releases to all the top news publications and if they pick up on the story, the chances are they’ll provide a link to your website. It might even be worth hiring a PR guru for a couple of months who can help identify all the newsworthy aspects of your business and who can then pitch this to domestic news sources. If it works, then you can have the press release translated and dispatched to international publications too. A good PR consultant can even identify and tailor stories specifically for international publications.

With international markets, link-building isn’t all that different but remember that localization is the name of the game – treat each country as a separate entity and research each market thoroughly, especially the proper keywords to target.

This post was guest-submitted by reader Nora from Lingo24, a global translation service company.

Comments

9 Comments on Twollow.com Review

  1. Chris M on Mon, 28th Sep 2009 1:29 pm

    2. Incredibly annoying, there are so many of these silly twitter applications which promise the world and return nothing!

    I hope they gave you a refund!

  2. Kristi on Wed, 30th Sep 2009 2:32 pm

    3. If you want an auto following system that requires a little more work, but with better results, try the Greasemonkey Twitter Friend Adder script at Income Diary. Basically, you find a Twitter user in your nice, and the script will add their followers, up to 1,000 at a time in 2 second intervals. You can always just shut the browser window if you want to add less at a time.

    Instead of just following anyone who mentions a keyword, which they may not be that interested in (like someone RT’s a message for a friend that includes SEO, but they themselves do not really care about SEO at all), you follow people that you know are already interested in a topic because of who they are already following.

    So, for example, a wedding photographer in Phoenix could go to the Phoenix Bridal Show’s Twitter profile, and follow all of their followers. That is a highly targeted group of followers who are interested in weddings in the Phoenix area, which is exactly what the wedding photographer is looking for.

    And of course, to keep your follower / following ratio in check, use the Twitter Karma site to identify people who are not following you and then bulk unfollow them after a week or so.

  3. Anon on Fri, 9th Oct 2009 3:54 pm

    4. They’ll regret their bad service, now that you’re publicly showing their incompetence…

  4. Antin on Wed, 21st Oct 2009 3:43 am

    5. Thanks for your publishing this, so we will no more get this bad service.

  5. oes tsetnoc on Tue, 10th Nov 2009 5:41 am

    6. hmmm my friend using twollow and get banned by twitter..

    its not good to use

  6. toilet paper on Thu, 19th Nov 2009 10:41 am

    7. Hey I tried twollo as well when it was free and i have followed about 500 people and maybe got 40 to follow back. I don’t care because I never use my twitter account so it doesnt matter to me. I would agree with you though, get twitter followers through natural methods. If you try to get twitter followers through spammy methods, then you will get spammy people following you.

  7. sockyee on Sat, 21st Nov 2009 12:13 am

    8. Hi Collin,
    Other than this one, there’s actually another application called twittgeek which is basically free although there is a 100 followers limit per day.

  8. heri on Wed, 27th Jan 2010 12:25 am

    9. I never use twollow before.
    Thanks for warn me.

  9. Moose on Sun, 3rd Oct 2010 8:26 am

    10. Service response is horrible, it takes up to a week for anyone to respond, or sometimes no response what’s so ever.

    Some of the auto features didn’t work, even after the so called “upgrade” to version 2.0

    I also had my twitter account suspended for an entire week because it followed over 1,000 in less then 2 seconds.

    So far I recovered some money from paypal, but trying to recover more.

    Stay away from this site

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