gradient zeitgiest
Seth Godin says I need to work on my presentation/graphic skills. Well, not me, particularly — everyone. As a word-focused SEOer, I tend to ignore graphics. In fact, I have an adversarial relationship with graphics. But I’m trying to branch out. On my list of graphics educational material is Presentation Zen — this site and book recommends a particular way of presenting, not just a particular type of graphical presentation. And suddenly I am noticing graphics in a way that I have not before.
But now I am wondering if it is just me, or do all the graphics released this year all look the same?
Help the Oregon Food Bank
Please enter "blog for food" in the tribute field
I stole this directly from Food Dude at Portland Food & Drink because he moved me to donate to the Oregon Food Bank with his post.
When you look at what the OFB achieves, it’s really quite staggering. Less than 5 percent of expenditures go to fund raising and administrative costs. They distributed 792,000 emergency boxes in one year and 4 million emergency meals at soup kitchens and shelters. Imagine!
A large group of bloggers under the organization of Tami Parr have gotten together to raise funds for the food bank. Money is tight, but surely all of us can break loose a few dollars to support this cause: $5.00 - $1000.00… whatever you can afford. Just click the banner on the front page of this site. When you get to the donation page, please enter “blog for food” in the tribute section on the donation page so that it counts towards our campaign. You are also welcome to send checks directly to the Oregon Food Bank at PO Box 55370, Portland, OR 97238. Again, please mention our campaign.
While money does more to help than anything else, you can also drop off canned food. Sarah at Savaveza on 1004 N Killingsworth is collecting food throughout the month. Also, folks have spontaneously started to drop off bags of food at Vino in Sellwood, 1226 SE Lexington.
| Posted in blogging | No Comments »07.30.08Flash: still not good for findibility
I’ve been getting reports from various sources that Google is now indexing flash “for real” this time and we don’t have to worry about using text to make sure search spiders and people with pagereaders can access our content. I did read the Google Webmaster blog post on Improved Flash indexing but I tend to take these types of announcements with a grain of salt. And I will admit, I like text. It works for me. I think 1000 words is worth 1000 words. And also, I am not a flash developer and could not determine if this new method was reasonable. I remained skeptical. But I also did a little more digging and came up with three blog posts that reinforce what my gut was telling me: If you want to be certain your content is findable and will rank well, continue to put valuable keywords in text and not in flash.
For a more indepth understanding, I recommend these posts:
- SEOmoz | Flash and SEO - Compelling Reasons Why Search Engines & Flash Still Don’t Mix
- ickydime: Flash’s New SEO is Over-Hyped
- Google Indexing Flash - Don’t Party Just Yet | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing
I remain a Flash SEO naysayer.
06.30.08Overture Keyword tool discontinued
It’s the end of an era. Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand reports that Yahoo has decommissioned the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool.
Although I no longer use it (I prefer the Google Adwords Keyword tool as my free keyword tool), I think it was one of the first keyword tools I ever used and one I have recommended to novice SEOers about, oh, about a million times.
It’s good news that we have more and better tools to use for keyword research (a very important part of any SEO strategy), but still I am a little sad to see it go.
06.11.08Reflections on SMX Advanced Seattle 2008
This is not a summary of what I learned, just some random thoughts on the conference itself. I am not an SEO insider. I do inhouse SEO and do not mingle with the big players.
First off, this was far better than Search Engine Strategies conferences. I’ve attended 2 SES in the past (last one in December of 2005 — wow, times flies) and those confs are just too broad, too long, and the food is just terrible. At least it was last time I attended.
SMX Advanced was far more focused. Even if there was some serious black hattery, At least now I know what SEOs are really up to.
On the Presenters
- MS Guy — not the right guy for the panel. All I will say is you should not be on the Bot Herding panel if you don’t know whether MS Live search honors the NoFollow tag. Everything he said after that I ignored because he had no credibility.
- Yahoo peeps — very nice, but really did not tell me any thing I did not know or offer anything up that was truly exciting.
- netconcept guys — really enjoyed their presentations and learned some stuff. And I will be mining their http://www.netconcepts.com/tag/articles for data.
- Matt Cutts — OK, even though he makes me mad sometimes and I don’t think he always gives the full story, I was pretty excited to see him talk. Interesting how everyone was talking smack about him, but still his session was packed.
- Danny Sullivan — I brushed past him in one of the sessions. it was like walking past a pop star. Not that I think he acts that way and I have seen him at other conf, but I feel like I should ask for an autograph or have my picture taken with him. I am not so gauche as to ask, though,
- I won’t call out the individual non-search engine rep presenters here, but I have two main comments on the sessions overall
- What about a good user experience?
How about using blogs for something other than spam? Because as the blog manager for dW, I spend a fair amount of my time cleaning up the spam people are using as some sort of sick black hat SEO campaign. How does that improve the user experience?- Some of the black hats were a little too irreverant for my tastes
At one session, someone used an extremely offensive and homophobic example. Not cool. I think that if it had been racist, even in the mostly white audience, someone would have said something and the presenter would not have gotten the laughs and implied approval he did. That example left a bad taste in my mouth about the conf. But then, what do you expect from black hat spammers?Thoughts on Seattle
This is only my second trip to Seattle. Compared to Portland, Seattle is more hilly, bigger, and with more water. Otherwise exactly the same.
To save money, you don’t need to stay right at the conf center. I stayed a mile away and took the free bus (free during all the hours I was riding around and within the area around the conf center).
I also did a fair amount of walking. Pike Place is super sketchy after 5pm and so is the area around the conf center. I still had to walk a few blocks from the bus to the conf center, so I would not recommend public transportation in these areas after dark.
05.13.08iso openid plugin for blog
Not sure what I am doing wrong here. Both OpenID plugins I have tried have blown my blog away. I want to support this technology, but I also want my blog to load.
Anyone have any OpenID wordpress comment authentication plugins to recommend?
04.30.08blogging about twittering and twittering about blogging
Great list of pro and con articles and tools for twittering at SEO 2.0 blog: Twitter Dilemma: To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Pros, Cons, 50+ Links & Tools.
I was late to the twitter party and I admit it can be a huge time waste. The best use I have found for it is site status updates — the text alert functionality. But mostly I use it to report what I am eating for lunch and dinner (and sometimes breakfast). And because most of my team is in another time zone, it takes the place of the rambling hallway and doorway conversations I used to have with co-workers. And now I have these discussions with people I don’t even work with too. So that is fun.
Is there an overall value? From the list on the SEO 2.0 blog, obviously there are a lot of opinions on that. The post has a lot of twitter content I have not yet come across, so it makes a nice reading list for those of us trying to determine the value. Is twitter good for findability? Well, certainly it is good for claiming your online persona and associating hundreds of thousands of posts with your name. And considering that nothing ever posted on the Web can ever completely be removed, do I want what I ate for lunch on a Monday in January 2008 preserved for all time? Good question.
04.4.08SEO Rapper on YouTube
This is why I love the interwebs:
I totally agree, except I don’t get the part about the snicker. But that’s probably because I am not hip.
03.18.08linkbuilding — white hat version
Recently, on my advice, our site turned down a submission for an article on link building. My gut reaction when asked about any article on link building is that is too much a gray area of SEO and we shouldn’t even open ourselves up to that. I admit to an invested interest here in keeping things white hat only. My position has always been if you build good pages with compelling content the link building will happen organically. This is easy for me to say because I work on a large corporate Web site with a huge online presence.
But there is value in link building, if done carefully. My guide has always been Aaron Wall’s post on good link building and bad link building.
And I just saw Eric Enge’s post up on SEOmoz: So Many Ways to Pursue Links and So Little Time and I’ll be adding that to my link building resource list as well.
There are eight solid tips in Enge’s post that reflect the same white hat values as Aaron Wall’s post (and I am sure many many others), with some new ones as well — for example, links on edu and .gov links are often overlooked as a good source for establishing authority. This post covers everything from Social media to PR to the blogosphere. All good stuff. But Enge also doesn’t lose site of the goal. His final paragraph includes this comment :
Match your content to the target and you will have a much greater chance of success.
I concur. Keep your end result in mind and your link building will be successful. Don’t spray your links all over the interwebs and expect your target audience to take the action you want them to take. Instead, take some time to match your link to the audience, get quality links, and good things will happen with your linking campaign.
02.28.08New Yahoo — open search and Yahoo buzz
I hate to be negative about Yahoo. I like Yahoo. I still use their e-mail and I always include it in my list of “other search engines” when giving SEO best practices. Such as, “this will optimize your page for Google and other search engines like Yahoo.” And I do not want them to be eaten by Microsoft or Google. A few years ago I thought Yahoo would be the Web 1.0 search engine to go vertical and reach the niche markets Google seemed to have no interest in. At one point (it was a very small point, I admit) I thought that Yahoo could truly compete with iTunes in podcasting. Their offering had so much more customization and community enablement than iTunes had then (2005 or so) and still has. But I just don’t see that happening now with Yahoo Podcasts or Yahoo Audio search or whatever the name is now.
But now Yahoo has come out with two “new” functionalities that just make me wonder why bother. As for Open search/customizable entries, I tried subscribed links when Google first offered them. The cool factor was very high and creation was really easy. But if I could not get a bunch of people to sign up to get my subscribed links displayed in their results or install it as a gadget and if it would never become part of the standard Google results, then there isn’t much use for it. At least from the basic SEO stand-point, it does not help me reach the unaware user. I am not sure how Yahoo is going to use this or how these links will be developed, but I agree with Philipp Lenssen that at the very least Yahoo should try and take this somewhere if they are going to do it at all. Google can afford to toss something out there with no support; Yahoo is not in a position to do that.
As for the invitation to join (visit?) Yahoo buzz I got in my Yahoo mail today, I will admit I just don’t get it. I have not yet gotten on the bandwagon for sites like Digg and Reddit, so I may not be in the target audience for this. However, I do see the value of existing social news sites, but what I don’t see is the value of yet another site for “buzz.” What I want is a site that will separate the truly valuable news from the random buzz. I get that from trusted sources — that is, blogs and twitter. This is my version of trusted sources, maybe someone else will value Yahoo Buzz.
