Jeromakay

I am excited to announce that the Loopthing social networking platform got an important update today, which mainly has something to do with professionals from the online environment providing consultancy services for SEO, SEM, online marketing and PR.

This major update is part of a long plan that Loopthing has ahead, and enables account managers to manage other businesses’ profiles on the Loopthing business network.

How this can be applied to your SEO, SEM, online marketing, PR consultancy/web development business?

Now you can pitch your customers about a new set of services you added to your business:

• submitting their business to Loopthing
• maintain this profile, where you both have control over the shared content

The reason why this should be included into your business plan is because your company doesn’t need to pay anything to get started, while you can charge your customers the activity you put into developing their Loopthing profile.

Building a profile on Loopthing is simple, the staff is helpful and there’s tips on the way while you use the site. Once you do it for a business, it will be very easy to do it for the other ones inside your portfolio.

Plus, this comes with no obligation from your customers, and they can take control over their accounts whenever they want.

This feature is very useful for some of your customers (probably all) who want to expose more of their brand online, and get seen all over the Internet. Loopthing is there to provide you with the ability to set up and manage profiles for other businesses, while they are still in control.

How can this help my SEO company?

Loopthing has a feature called “websites urls” which displays up to three urls on your customers business’ profile. These links are nofollow free, and you can link to the home page of the company that hired you or/and their blog.

There’s also a feature called “news feeds” where business owners can submit their blog/RSS feed as a news source, or even their Loopthing profile. This is very helpful because the “news feeds” page connects the Loopthing visitors with these pages as well.

There are also SEO related elements that we are currently working on which are going to enhance the effects of sharing your company’s information with the Loopthing visitors.

Why is so important for my customers to be on Loopthing?

Loopthing is a business networking platform which integrates elements of social networking, social media, branding and online marketing.

Joining a site like Loopthing, a service specifically tailored to businesses interacting with individuals, is the next logical step to take for an entrepreneur. This is because two-thirds of the internet users are now involved in a social networking or blogging activity [source: Nielsen wire].

And here’s the good part, Loopthing not only targets businesses, but provides a good share to individuals as well. These people can be easily converted into customers by being on the site.

Got questions?

Read the official blog post announcing the new features and let me know how it goes, I’d be more than happy to hear your comments and opinions.

Loopthing is now a big site, there are over 150.000 pages waiting to be indexed. In order to achieve this indexing as fast as possible, a sitemap of sitemaps has been placed inside the robots.txt file of the service.

I’m going to extract feedback on how Google and Yahoo! manages to process all these feeds and maybe compile a technical report early next year.

The whole process is also supervised thank to Google’s Webmaster Tools service, and Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

The process of indexing the whole site, jumping from link to link it’s very difficult, even for today’s performant spiders. The sitemaps.org website has been put together with help from major search engine market players (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!) to address this issue.

The end result is enabling webmasters suggest search engines where their pages are located. End result is that indexing becomes a much faster process.

Some reading on sitemaps:

• sitemaps.org – the sitemaps standards home page (ironically, it doesn’t have a sitemap)
• sitemaps on wikipedia (syndicated information from everywhere, condensed in a single page)

I was just wondering the other day how much time it takes to get a blog post indexed by Google? The answer is somewhere between 5 and 8 minutes. I think the value can be lower than this but I wasn’t able to find out during my test.

Keep in mind though that the indexing efficiency rate of your blog may depend of few things though: frequency of posting, presence or RSS feeds, the fact that you’re using feedburner (which belongs to Google) and possibly blogging platform (e.g. blogger.com/blogspot posts may be indexed faster than wordpress ones, since blogger.com/blogspot belongs to google).

On the other hand, from my personal experience, I don’t think the number of backlinks influences the frequency of the visits you get from Google’s indexing spider.