26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
Jeff Cotrupe, Founder and CEO
One of my favorite comedy lines ever, which in this case emanated from the magically twisted mind of Steven Wright, goes like this: “I bought some batteries. But they weren’t included. So I bought ‘em again…I bought some powdered water. But I didn’t know what to add…”
Open letter to Steven and ROW (rest of world): When it comes to websites, I can tell you exactly what to add.
It’s always a good idea to keep your keywords and metatags complete and current on a website; many search engines still key on that when deciding whether to list you in search…
We’ve been talking about why it’s important to think of search engine optimization /search engine marketing (SEO/M) and Web 2.0 not as the be-all and end-all of your communications universe but as key ingredients in a complete, balanced diet. Of course what we mean when we say “Web 2.0″ breaks out into three areas:
- Rich Internet applications (RIA) including AJAX and Flash
- Broadcast media such as streaming, RSS and mobile SMS
- Consumer-generated media (CGM) like consumer reviews, wiikis, blogs and participation in forums
All of us who post here on SEO Shootout want to talk about best practices, but today is show-and-tell: I’m going to show…
Traditional PR has involved a public relations firm dropping your press release on the wire and hoping somebody picks it up. Sure, they may have conversations with analysts prior to the drop, but in this Web 2.0 era even you can make a huge splash on a ‘Net, grab the attention of thousands, and, perhaps, even get some conversions or sales out of it, all for no added cost to you. All it requires is a little elbow grease and the right kind of thinking.
Ensure that your title, header, and first paragraph include your targeted keywords.
The title of your press…
My musical tastes flash across the spectrum from heart-rendingly beautiful symphonic movie soundtracks to some of the most deliciously vicious hard rock ever recorded, but somewhere in the median is a sultry, radio-friendly-yet-cult-favorite tune by Steely Dan entitled Hey Nineteen. And that’s as good a starting point as any from which today’s ravings about some of the madness inside the “2.0″ methodology may flow.
It’s an honor to be invited to be a blogger here on SEO Shootout. I know when you express that level of candor and humility these days it may seem like a creaky old covered wagon coming…
My work life straddles design and marketing, and corporate vs. small-business approaches to each. And I’m seeing a lot of variation in how people understand and advocate for SEO strategies.
I see larger businesses with a team of marketing specialists are leaning past plain-old keyword optimization. I personally suspect that they were led in this direction by their lust for Flash and dynamic page technologies that cloak content and disorient spiders. And now that bots can better read Flash, along comes Silverlight; the jury is out on the future of rich-media page readability.
So, to compensate for having hard-to-search pages, and relying…
There’s a new form of marketing in town, and if you’re prepared to do some work, a lot of doors will open for you.
[enter social media marketing stage left]
Wikipedia defines social media in its broadest form as “an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.” In essence, social media - or ‘new media,’ as it is often called - encompasses various methods of communication that go beyond the age-old standard of a marketing team talking to potential customers by adding conversation, fluidity, and collaboration into the equation.
Social media…
SEO is leaving its roots behind. It’s not an “in-the-know,” esoteric discipline. Fewer and fewer people are wrinkling their foreheads and saying “What?” when it’s mentioned.
It’s now front-of-mind and on the tip of the tongue for a much larger group of business and marketing strategists. From small business to large, companies with a huge consumer market to those who sell specialized products within a single vertical, the word is getting out that SEO is a necessity.
In a striking move, eDrugstore.MD is branching out of its identity as a the leading online pharmaceutical retailer to offer SEO-based Web site generation software…
Without comments, blogs aren’t conversations, aren’t fulfilling their mission. They’re de-facto old-school articles being published. That works for some of the big guys who turned off comments because they weren’t enriching the dialogue (Calacanis, please do read this). In fact, when bloggers turn off comments for thoughtful reasons, it shows how much they respect and value the role of comments and don’t want their sites to be places where comments detract or are otherwise counterproductive.
But for the rest of the blogosphere, comments are a reflection of the blog’s ability to engage readers. And many bloggers love a lively debate with people…
Sometimes I wish my life had a site map. Imagine how easy it would be to explain your history and experiences to other people. Unlike a resume, people could learn everything and anything without restriction and it would all be organized and categorized neatly in one place. Since life is not an Orbits commercial where we have floating icons to choose from, it seems we are out of luck… but more importantly, what about your site?
When it comes to development, Meta data, content, titles and links are very important, but a lot of designers seem to forget about the site…
