Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

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Sorry Google, YouTube Captions Aren’t for the Deaf. They’re for Your Robots.

March 5th, 2010 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Google, who owns YouTube, rolled out auto-captioning for English language videos yesterday.  All videos with a clear English audio track will have automatically-generated captions.

At the press conference a deaf engineer did the product demo and students from the California School for the Deaf in Fremont came on stage.  Google is painting this development as a service to the hearing impaired.

But that’s not Google’s true motivator.

Changing audio into text lets Google spiders index the content of YouTube videos.

The spiders don’t understand audio so they can’t index videos for search.  But with YouTube audio available in text form, a huge and invisible chunk of the web is opened up to Google’s search technology.

This will be a watershed for Google.  It is a good time to buy Google stock.  The company will make a lot of money selling advertising on these newly-indexed videos. Here’s what to expect:
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The Flywheel Concept and Your SEO

November 6th, 2009 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

A massive flywheel

A massive flywheel

In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins examines the traits and habits of 11 companies that achieved massive growth over a short time period.

He found that each company’s success came not from a ‘defining moment’ or ‘revolutionary event’, but as a culmination of years of doing the little things right.

One company, the Kroger Co. grocery chain, did nothing remarkable for 80 years. Then their stock price beat the stock market average by over 100% from 1973 to 1998.

Collins calls the phenomenon the ‘flywheel concept.’  This awesome flash animation by blogger Jimmy Zimmerman illustrates it perfectly:

The Flywheel Concept Animation

Get Adobe Flash player

If you make good choices for long enough they will snowball into a force to be reckoned with.

The flywheel also applies 100% to search engine optimization.  But you’ve got to lay the foundation first.

For SEO the foundation means links and a cleanly-coded site with your information in all the right places.

But after all of that’s in place your long term strategy will make or break you.

When you sacrifice the ‘quick wins’ and stay focused on your core services over the long term, one day you’ll look up and lead the market.

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Wikipedia, TED and SEO

October 9th, 2009 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Once a year the smartest people on the cutting edge of everything get together to speak and amaze each other at TED.

Through some random acts of philanthropy and sponsorship they release a sampling of these talks to us normal people. They’re well worth the time and change how you think about the world.

The video below is the story of Wikipedia from the mouth of its creator, Jimmy Wales. It was shot in 2006 so it might be a bit dated.

It’s relevant here because Wales might just be the best SEO in the world: Wikipedia dominates nearly every search result. And he has people write his entire, massive site for him, for free.

Your thoughts?

Have a great weekend!

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Headlines - Balancing Google and Accessibility

October 2nd, 2009 posted by Josh Lasdin 12:08PM | View Full Story

This past week Xander and I got into a fairly heated debate regarding the use of headlines in sections of a page other than the main content (i.e. Sidebars, Footers, etc.).

fight

We each came at the problem from a different angle, but soon found that we were searching for the same end-goal. This meant it was time to put the baseball bats and brass knuckles away and come up with a solution. We knew what we wanted our pages to accomplish:

  • Full accessibility to all users
  • Easily indexable content for Google
  • Meaningful, semantic mark-up

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2 Online Audiences You Can’t Afford to Ignore

September 25th, 2009 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Who should you write your website text for?

If you say your best customers, you’re only 1/3 right.

You want to convert your visitors into sales. This is the most obvious goal of the text on your website. So you target your text to someone considering buying your product.

But more great prospects will come to your site if you cater to 2 more audiences.

Who are they?

The linkerati and search engines.

The Linkerati

Brains

The “linkerati” are the people discussing your topic on the Web. We call them that because they are smart, and have the power to link to you.

When they link to you they are saying, “This site is a great resource on my topic.” A link from a leading site on your niche does wonders for your search rankings.

To get those new links flowing you need to impress your peers and show them you know your stuff.

The best place to do that?

A blog. Like this one.

Search Engines

Robots

Search engines are stupid. They need to be told exactly what your content is about or they will get confused.

This is why keywords are so important. Put the two- or three-word topic of your page in all the important places, like:

  • Title tags
  • Meta tags
  • Body copy

This makes it easy for search engines to understand what you are trying to stay. Don’t go overboard, but make it clear.

And you get bonus points for correct semantic markup. Search engines use HTML tags as clues; if your team knows flawless standards coding you will be rewarded.

Are you writing for all 3 audiences?

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Geo-targeting Terms With SEO

August 21st, 2009 posted by Leona 12:08PM | View Full Story

When selecting the keyword phrases for your SEO campaign, it is important to use the same terminology that searchers use when typing in search queries.

We compared the trends over the past 4 years of visitors who use the search term “Dauphin County” vs. Harrisburg. Overwhelmingly, visitors use the term “Harrisburg” much more than “Dauphin County”.

geotargeting-seo

Red = Harrisburg
Blue = Dauphin County
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