The other night I was talking with a new friend, who challenged a pedantic fact I threw out. With the help of Google I told him that I had found an answer. “From where? Wikipedia?” he asked.

“No, from a medical journal.”

“Yeah, but how do we know that this medical journal is legitimate?”

“It’s the first hit on Google!”

“Yeah but how does Google know that this journal is legitimate?”

Here I smiled. “I’m glad you asked. As a matter of fact, this is my industry, I work for an SEO company. Google used to determine legitimacy through links on the internet. But after a few years people figured it out and wound up spamming links onto forums. That’s why Google changes its algorithm every couple of years so no one manipulates it.”

“So what’s their algorithm now?”

“Well, it’s based on quality, of course. And quality often means fresh new content that’s well-written and accurate, links to other sites around the web, general popularity in terms of Twitter and Facebook, and a bunch of other factors no one except Google really knows.”

“So if I do those few things, my website will start to show up and eventually could be number one on Google?”

“Well it’s a lot of work, and it helps to have a search engine agency doing it since they have a better idea of what to do, but yeah, eventually you could be number one.”

I think I made a new friend.

If you’re just getting into the online marketing game, Twitter can be especially daunting. It doesn’t work like Facebook; you can’t just add people and expect to look cool. In fact it’s just the opposite — to get people to follow you, it helps if you have fewer followers. So is becoming successful at Twitter a catch-22?

Not really. The key is to keep your tweets relevant and engaging. No one cares what you had for breakfast, unless it was at the Ritz Carlton as a result of the small business conference you were invited to because you’re a leader in the internet marketing business.  Keep tweets to the point, try to be funny, and if all else fails, just retweet the headlines that you’re reading. Chances are some people aren’t up with the latest, don’t read that newspaper, and aren’t informed about it — the faster and more clever you can be about interpreting that news the better your chances of gaining followers.

Consistency is another factor. Try tweeting at least a few times a day. And if you want to quickly build a following, search for people who are in your field, in our case online marketing. Follow them, and chances are they’ll follow back. At this rate, in a few weeks you’ll feel pretty comfortable on Twitter.