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5 important search developments of 2007

December 31st, 2007 Jason

I’m not saying these are the ‘top 5 most important’ changes of 2007, I’m just pointing out some things I’ve seen as significant. There’s certainly more (like the whole paid links debate), but I’m on holiday, so I’m stopping at 5 I find worth mentioning. In no particular order:

1. No more supplemental index
   Supposedly, this means more relevant results for all searches, all the time. (Interesting, since I thought that was the goal anyway…) But probably a key thing here is more relevance for foreign language queries as well, which may ‘translate’ into Google getting a bigger slice of the bits of foreign search they don’t already have. I think it will also mean less confusion about just how deeply/thoroughly a site is indexed.
2. Sphinn
   Sphinn is no Digg. Only SEO’s are going to see any traffic boost from Sphinn; it’s not something that Bob’s Widgets is going to try to game for traffic and links. But it has quickly become invaluable as a means of connecting the vast network of search marketers out there and bringing attention to important and interesting news or opinion…without having to monitor eight hundred blogs every day.
3. Universal search results
   Of course, with Google’s acquisition of YouTube happening this year as well, it followed that YouTube content would start getting a higher visibility in the SERPs, but Google and Yahoo! both started integrating video, news, and image results into the ‘main’ results page this year, and it all seemed conspicuously timed as a response to Ask’s big facelift. But it’s much more than a presentational change; it’s really completely affected how search marketing works and shifted the focus of what’s important to get noticed and rank well.
4. Facebook?
   Sure, Facebook has been around for a few years, but it was this year that anybody with an email address (i.e., not an academic one) could join, and it blew up into the place to be. And now everybody and their dog’s company thinks they need to build a Facebook app. I think it remains to be seen whether a good Facebook app has real SEO benefit, but it can a big deal for brand recognition, which of course can have a real downstream impact on what people are searching for.
5. I got a job
   Okay, this is a cheese-out, but it’s true. Landing in SEO seems to have really taken all the bits of technology and marketing and general geekery I’ve been cobbling together over the years and focused them all into a very clear path.

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Bebo opens up to application development

December 13th, 2007 Jason

It’s all the rage today: Bebo announces the “Open Application Platform” which will allow existing Facebook applications to easily port into apps for Bebo as well.

Good on them. While the article notes Bebo is a “distant third” in the US market, in the UK Bebo is generally seen to have a bigger reach than MySpace (supporting article on NewMedia.com from August 2007, though by some accounts it’s down to how you slice the data – see September article on paidContent.co.uk). For everyone who’s been banging away on Facebook apps being the new “must-have” marketing tool, the opportunity has now just doubled.

Here’s what caught my eye, though:

“Deployments of the same applications on both Facebook and Bebo will have the potential to link up with each other. For example, Facebook users of Bunchball’s Nitro gaming application will be able to play against Bebo users of the same application.”

As I think I’ve said before, needing to keep track of a dozen different online network profiles is a total pain in t’ass. With the recent announcement of Google’s OpenSocial APIs, and the opening of the Facebook platform, we’re two steps closer to having online networks really start mirroring the interaction and crossover that happens between networks in real life.

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Microsoft acquires Multimap

December 13th, 2007 Jason

So, Microsoft has acquired Multimap…which is interesting since I’ve often found live maps to be better than Multimap anyway. Is this acquiring new technology or simply removing the competition?

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The swag that keeps on giving

December 10th, 2007 Jason

When we got our badges at PubCon, we also got handed a decent little tote bag with a bunch of lit inside. I ended up needing to use the bag as my carryon for the flight back to London at the end of the week.

Well, of course, to those who were there, this is like having a big neon arrow above my head flashing “I WENT TO PUBCON!” Sitting in the airport I am approached by at least two different guys from the con who are on the same flight. Now if only I’d hadn’t given all my cards to Justine…

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How quick is Google?

December 8th, 2007 Jason

I was at Pubon’s “Tools of the Trade” session yesterday afternoon. I took some notes, but missed a URL that I found myself wanting to check out this evening.

Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl) was speaking, and mentioned a bookmarklet he used which would give a listing of the sites associated with an IP block. Right, so, Google: “stuntdubl number of sites on IP”

Number two is a blog entry titled “Tools of the Trade,” which is the seoroundtable liveblog entry from the session. With a reference to the tool I’m after: seolog’s Reverse IP domain tool. Boom.

I know that Google has gotten really good in the last few months with basically “instant indexing,” but this is the first time I’ve really seen it in action. Nice. A little scary, but impressive and powerful as well.

Posted in Google, pubcon, seo, tools | No Comments »

10 excuses to use when you don’t have a business card handy

December 4th, 2007 Jason

Day one at PubCon and I’m already feeling the full weight of not having cards ready before the trip. Sure, I can blame work for being slow about getting them processed – I’m sure they’ll be sitting on my desk when I get back – but it’s my bad for not having something to pass around, and it means the onus is fully on me to keep up with people I meet here.

Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing various reasons for not having one available:

1. “Dang, I just dropped my last one in the box for the iPhone drawing.”
2. “They’re in my luggage, which ended up in Las Vegas, New Mexico instead.”
3. “The English don’t really do business cards; should we grab a pint?”
4. “I think the TSA confiscated them, because I know I packed them.”
5. “Dang, I just gave my last one to Matt Cutts/Michael Gray/Rand Fishkin.”
6. “Can you believe it, I lost them all at the poker table last night.”
7. “Y’know, I just got new ones, and they botched the contact info, so they’re really no good at all.”
8. “Cards are so 20th century; would you like a DNA sample? I have a swab right here.”
9. “I can bluetooth you a vcard, will that work?”
10. “I just gave my entire box to Justine.”

Come to think of it, the bluetooth thing isn’t a bad idea…

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Vegas!

November 30th, 2007 Jason

Arrived. Not as tired as I will be, I’m sure. Traveling east-to-west always seems easier. PubCon doesn’t actually start until Tuesday, so I have a weekend to kill in Las Vegas. W00t. My mom arrives from California later tonight; she’s here until Sunday AM. My dad arrives from Phoenix tomorrow, and is here ’til Monday midday. I’m heading off the strip and out into the desert hills with both of them, which I’m sure is the only thing that will keep me from being me completely sick of Vegas before the work bit even starts.

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November wrapup

November 27th, 2007 Jason

Here’s hoping that everyone in the US had a fine, safe, and happy Thanksgiving holiday.

November has gone in a flash. Thanksgiving found us with 10 people around a not-quite-big-enough table, most of whom had absolutely zero sense of tradition surrounding the meal because they’re Brits. But it was tasty.

The UncleFromGermany is visiting, and it has been a crazy week of living London-style: six shows in 7 nights, taking Saturday off only for the making of the large meal. In order: The Country Wife at the Haymarket (totally fun), Billy Elliot (uncle’s choice), Parade at the Donmar (fantastic), a sneak preview of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of The Magic Flute (could have been so much better, could have been so much worse), the RSC’s King Lear (with Sir Ian McKellan, outstanding), and another version of The Magic Flute as done by a South African company tonight. Some would say this is why we moved here.

In more geeky news, I’ve spent some time this month trying to do a facebook app as a work-related experiment, with little success thus far. As in, I can’t get their basic ‘Hello world’ to work. I’m sure I’m doing something dumb. I hope to be making more progress on that as the week goes on.

I’ll be in Las Vegas next week for PubCon. For those of you who know me through other channels, this is a big search engine marketing thing. Assuming I can get out of bed in the morning, which assumes I’ll be getting to bed at all, there are definitely a number of good-looking sessions. I haven’t been to a conference like this in quite a while, and certainly not in this field, so it will be quite an experience, I’m sure. Not to mention…Vegas, baby!

Posted in geek, pubcon, theatre | No Comments »

Experimenting with H1 headers

October 10th, 2007 Jason

I’m driving a little experiment on one of our sites, based on something I noticed on the W3C home page.

With images on, the page looks like this:

With images off, you get this:

“Basic image-replacement CSS,” you may think, but it’s not even that involved. The text is, indeed, just the alt text for the image.

<h1 id="logo"><img alt="The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)" height="48" width="315" src="/Icons/w3c_main" /></h1>

OK, big deal, right?

Well, what caught my eye was the <h1> wrapping around the logo image. With images off, the alt text renders as an <h1>-level heading. In this case, it’s completely proper for the site, since it is at the very top of the page. But in my understanding, this is also what a searc h spider would see when crawling the page.

I did loads of digging around to see if anyone was talking about the potential to exploit this. Surely, if the header logo of your site could be replaced by a big fat relevant <h1> keyword or two at the top of every page, this would be something everybody knew about, right?

Apparently not.

So, we’re trying it out. One of our sites uses an image for the header tagline, and the alt text needed attention anyway. We’ve now wrapped the logo and tagline images in an <h1> tag, so with images off we have a keyword-rich, branded header appearing sitewide. I’m not convinced that this will be any kind of SEO silver bullet, but it will be interesting to see what – if anything – happens with traffic for the keyword. I don’t think it will hurt, although there is some question whether the header logo link will come off as any more spammy than normal. If nothing else, though, it’s a big step for usability.

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Social networking and keeping it all straight

October 10th, 2007 Jason

Like almost everyone I know, I have accounts all over the internet at various ’social networking’ sites: Livejournal, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and so on, some of which I use more than others.

I’ve also got the standard assortment of email accounts at Yahoo!, Gmail, and MSN, which also get used as logins for various other places like Google Reader, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, and on top of that, as I’m doing research for things at work I’ll end up with more logins for more sites, and a lengthy list of sites to try and keep up with.

How the heck do I keep all this stuff straight?

It’s mighty helpful that browsers will remember passwords, I’ll say that. And I have a small stock of regular usernames and passwords I use, so if I haven’t saved the login for a particular site, there’s decent odds I can come up with it from memory.

I also have a private wiki set up for tracking my daily tasks and some other information, so I’ve got a page there with a table of account info.

But keeping up with all the various sites on a day-to-day basis, particularly the networking sites, is a little more tricky.

Google Reader gets a lot of use for keeping up on a load of invdividual blogs all at once. Livejournal has customizable reading groups, so I can hit one page and see the latest posts from a filtered list of my entire network. Most of the sites have some little alertbox or email functionality. But I’ve realized that what I really want is a way to hit a variety of my sites from the same place in a single go, with a minimum of effort. I want a social network aggregator.

Conceptually, the new personalized portal sites like iGoogle and My Yahoo! could do this via gadgets or whatever, but what I’ve seen thus far is at best clunky and at worst would involve building my own custom widgets. Too much work!

Last week I came upon 8hands, which apparently accesses a variety of different social networks all at once. I thought, “Hey! Perfect!” But then I realized it is an installed application and not a web-based service. I can’t for the life of me understand the benefit of this. Not Perfect!

So I started digging around, and came across a really useful article on mashable about social media aggregators. Seems like I am not alone in realizing this would be handy, and it appears to be quite the developing wave in this whole Web 2.0 thing.

So far I have checked out several of the options, and haven’t found a clear winner yet.

Spokeo has a great interface and is pretty easy to use, but I don’t like how it doesn’t allow you to actually interact with the different sites. It is essentially a feed reader of my contact’s activity. Close, but no cigar.

MyLifeBrand seems promising, but if I’m required to acknowledge reading and understanding the TOS, I’m waiting until it’s not a blank page.

Most of the list appear to be more about controlling profiles and assembling links to the various other sites, and most seem to suffer from a lack of interactivity with the source sites. Not so useful, really.

The most promising of the bunch seems to be the as-yet-unrealized SocialStream project, which appears to consolidate all of your online networks into and lets you to post, read, respond, and connect with new people, all in a single online interface.

I am waiting.

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