social blog roll with tag: sem

Site links for yack yack

Cool - This domain now has site links (not to be confused with subscribed links). A search for the phrase ‘yack yack’ returned this Who searches for yack yack? Answer - no one, but hey - for those who are interested there are lessons to be learnt. I’d like to know how they arrived at those titles ...]

SES London 2008 Day 3

I attended SES London on Thursday, my first since way back in 2002 or was that 2003, Christ I can’t remember! Customers Prospects and Drug users The first session I went to way a presentation by Brian Eisenberg of Future now entitled Redefining the Customer loosely speaking, Brian hit on important aspects to consider when ...]

Google spidering its own custom search results?

I was doing a little search this evening and found this amongst the results on the 1st page. I thought it might be something related to me being signed in to a Google account so I signed out and tried again. Same result. So I opened up IE7 and same result. I tried the same query ...]

SEO’s our own worst enemies and Negative SEO

I just wanted to get this out there and vent a little it’s a little rant fired up by what I keep seeing every single week on forums, blogs etc. It isn’t going to go away, I know that - but I’ll feel better for getting it off my chest. To any SEO who ...]

Google Subscriber links - The Good - The Not So Good and The Reality

Google Subscriber links There’s a little bit of buzz about today over Googles subscribed links feature. I thought it might be handy to share my robwatts view on it. The view being one that is informed from 3 perspectives. A google user a site owner and an SEO. I’ll stick to three classifications, good, not so ...]

Coming Full Circle: Blogging & Journalism

Journalism is a funny beast I don’t pretend to understand. As a consumer, though, I can say that I used to pay a lot of money to subscribe to certain products of good journalism. I paid in advance, and the information appeared in my mailbox. The currency of the information was judged by relative measures… ...]

Why Keyword Domains Are Better for SEO

The DomainRoundTable Conference hosted Matt Cutts of Google and a panel of SEOs, to discuss search marketing and domaining. One topic of conversation afterwards was the value of keyword domains. Is a domain “better for SEO” if it contains exact match keywords? Matt said yes, keywords in the URL can help rankings, but you don’t need ...]

Get Out and Live Life

Via the remarkably inspiring HowToAvoidTheBummerLife.com Topical Tags:Competition societyPost from: johnon.com by John Andrews. Get Out and Live Life

Google does WHOIS, again.

Google’s mission is to make a fortune off other people’s content organize the world’s information, and now Google and DomainTools are joining forces to bring the power of WHOIS lookups to the Google interface. Again. Google started hitting the Network Solutions WHOIS lookup without permission back in 2004 before Netsol promptly shut them out. That seems ...]

What Matt Cutts Said at Domain RoundTable 2008

This is live blogging from matt’s session. It will update as I enter information. Matt said: about his role on the web spam team, he defined spam as sites that “rank higher than they deserve”. Go figure that one out. Matt asked how many people were into domaining because it was like a garage sale, where you ...]

Selling Web sites Domain Assets Ice in Alaska

How do you value a web site as an asset? If your company is closing down, what is the web site worth? Increasingly common questions, for which there are no standard answers. And there won’t be any “standard answers” for some time to come. That’s not how business works at this stage of the Internet ...]

Competitive Webmastering

I’m really glad hardly anyone has the time or patience to read all of this. Security through obscurity, as link bait. Good job! Topical Tags:Post from: johnon.com by John Andrews. Competitive Webmastering

Dan Kaminsky on DNS and Trust

ISPs are placing the security and privacy of their customers squarely in the hands of a third-party ad company Dan Kaminsky is always fun (and scary) to watch, and he is describing how some ISPs are utilizing a 3rd party DNS service in an attempt to monetize user activity. According to Dan, that third party is ...]

Matt McGee: The Last Person on Twitter

Executive Summary: Twitter is not for everyone but if you’re in the web entrepreneuring space you should have been on it last year already. Don’t feel bad if you never heard of it; just join and don’t admit you weren’t aware. Matt McGee is an SEO guy out of Marchex, who is into social ...]

Live Blogging from DomainRoundTable San Francisco

I’m at Domain RoundTable, in San Francisco, with several hundred Internet entrepreneurs. Like other webmasters, these guys own the Internet. Unlike most webmasters, these guys own a significant percentage of the Internet. But besides scale, they have similar interests to other webmasters: managing risk, earning and monetizing traffic, navigating politics and managing cash flow. They have ...]

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 15, 2008

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web....

ISP to Spy on User Activity to Deliver Targeted Ads

United States ISP Charter Communications announced that it will start looking at your surfing behavior to find you relevant ads. While continuing to deliver the same fast and reliable Internet service you’ve always received, innovative new technology in the field...

Yahoo Opens SearchMonkey Doors to Everyone

Are you a developer? You may be interested in SearchMonkey, Yahoo's new open developer platform, which was released to all developers yesterday. The concept behind SearchMonkey is to empower developers to build applications that increase relevancy of search results. Developers...

Google's Malware Review Form Now Working Again

Google's Malware Review form, which was added back in August of last year had some technical issues this week. First reports came via Google Groups at about 1am on May 15th. Webmasters trying to utilize the form received a "oops,...

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Figures From The API Wrong?

A Google Groups thread reports that the numbers reported from the traffic estimator tool within Google's AdWords API interface is reporting different numbers based on the IP calling the data. The AdWords advertiser said that depending on which IP is...

The People Pleaser 2.0

Photo by *sean The People Pleaser 2.0 We have all come across a People Pleaser at one point or another. People Pleasers love making people happy. They seem to become happier themselves by making others happy. They are super nice…. almost too nice, some might say. If you have ever have been a ...]

I am so in Love….. and it is not with Social Media

Photo by Osvaldo_Zoom Since Valentine’s Day is coming to an end I wanted to write about Love. But, not my Love for Social Media and Web 2.0. But, instead my Love for other things in this crazy World. So, take a ...]

I’m Not Only a Social Media Marketer… I’m also the Tooth Fairy.

I have a little secret…. I’m the tooth fairy. It’s true. And, guess what else?! I’m also Santa Clause, The Easter Bunny, and Cupid. Last week my 6 year old daughter, Hannah lost one of her front teeth and just yesterday she lost the other front tooth. She is missing both of ...]

Lymphoma the Victor in IM-NY BOTW SMO Contest For Charity!

Each year coinciding with a major SEM event, The Internet Marketers of NY throw a Manhattan party bash to benefit a deserving charity. This year during Search Engine Strategies New York, the event’s sponsor Best of the Web ran a friendly poll where “advocates” ran unofficial ...]

Are teens today lacking in Interpersonal and Communicative Skills?

� Image by BdwayDiva1 Are Texting & Social Media Platforms causing teens to lack in Interpersonal Communicative Skills? I received a text from my oldest son last week that was very disturbing. He was obviously too freaked out to discuss the topic with me face-to-face and instead ...]

8 Random Things about Me - A Meme

I have been tagged by Julie Joyce, one of my favorite SEO Chicks, to do the Meme, "8 Random things About Me". Being a huge fan of all the SEO Chicks I was more than a little excited about participating in this Meme. So, here are 8 Random things about Me. 8 Random things you ...]

StumbleUpon Changes - Are you a List or Grid?

In the past few days I’ve noticed a few changes on StumbleUpon. They aren’t huge changes, but changes none-the-less. These changes appear on your own StumbleUpon page. What is cool about these changes is that you have a choice. You can choose to keep things the same as they ...]

26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter - Plus 27 More just in Case

A while back I wrote a post about how I just didn’t get Twitter. At that time, It didn’t make sense to me to hear people rave about Twitter. But, I must say….. Twitter is another Social Media Activity that I am really enjoying. As a matter of fact, ...]

Do you want to be my Facebook Friend?? Stop Threatening Me!!

Image by Miky Jpeg I have been a little disappointed in Facebook lately. Well, maybe not Facebook directly, but instead some of the people that I have agreed to Facebook Friendships. And, due to the tactics these people are using on Facebook to pass the word about things they feel ...]

What is “Cross-browser compatibility?”

Here’s the first clue: it’s not creating a pixel-perfect replication of your ideal version of a site in all browsers. In fact, cross-browser compatibility ultimately has very little to do with what a web site looks like, and a lot more to do with how it functions. It also has relatively little to do with ...]

Refining Text Presentation with your Web Browser: Windows

It wasn’t long ago that I wrote an article on authoring an effective text-resizing widget. In that article, I made a point not to espouse the use of text-resizing tools, since it’s generally more effective to allow people to use their browser’s built-in text-resizing functionality. In fact, browser’s allow you a great deal more control ...]

Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2

Use the Color Contrast Tester Some time ago, while pondering whether web accessibility posed limitations on design, the thought occurred to me that there are presumably some colors which simply cannot be used for text or text backgrounds in any site. WCAG 1 does not, in fact, provide any specific guidelines concerning color contrast. The formulas ...]

Best Practices: Writing for Accessibility

Thanks to an off-hand comment from Steve Green while discussing a forthcoming Accessites article, I’ve spent some time today thinking about what it takes to write for accessibility. Most of the time, the primary focus of information about accessibility has to do with making non-text information available as text. Captioning and audio description for video, ...]

WebAnywhere: a Screen Reader On the Go

Hat tip to Henny Swan. “WebAnywhere” is a new screen reading product (available in May of 2008) from the University of Washington and the WebInSight project. The basic concept is simple: it’s a web-based service which provides a proxy service as a screen reader. Fantastic tool for anybody requiring a screen reader at a computer which ...]

Review of “Mobile Web Development”

This new book from Packt Publishing and Nirav Mehta is a quick and effective introduction to developing websites specifically targeted at mobile device users. I say “users” for a reason — one of the strongest advantages to the book is a strong focus on considering your user and their needs as a key element of ...]

Long-awaited update to PHP/MySQL poll

Example Poll Download the .zip archive It didn’t quite take 2 years, at least. But very, very close. The last release of this script was May 25th, 2006 — so I made it just under the wire. But this is also a bit more than just a script update. In fact, this is a complete overhaul. I’m ...]

Guide to Semantic Use of HTML Elements

This is part 2 of 2. Part 1 is Why use Semantic HTML? digg_url = 'http://digg.com/programming/Guide_to_Semantic_Use_of_HTML_Elements'; This guide only deals with elements which have a specific, human-readable meaning. The semantics of elements such as link, which are not seen in normal browsing, have been left out, as have replacement elements like img or object. In some cases, ...]

Why use semantic HTML?

This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is my Guide to the use of Semantic HTML Elements I’ve seen a lot of articles discussing the importance of HTML and XHTML semantics. I’ve seen articles describing what it means for a document to be semantic. Most of these articles, however, don’t provide a serious overview of ...]

Google Site Links for “Joe Dolson”

This is just cool: “Sitelinks” are additional links Google generates from the contents of a site in order to help users navigate your site — they provide these links in their search results for selected terms. Most sites don’t have site links, so I’m finding it pretty cool to notice them for myself! If you can’t see ...]

Search Engine College Celebrates Four Years

Kalena Jordan and her husband celebrate their fourth year as founders of the Search Engine College. What began with a few courses and high hopes has evolved into an online school offering certification for SEO’s. Kalena had the forethought to include web site usability in her course lineup. Like my friend, Jill Whalen, whom ...]

The Key Ingredient for SEO and Web Design is True Passion

While presenting a class on web site usability in New York for Internet Marketing Ninjas Marketing Training, my husband was in the audience as cheerleader and teacher. I wasn’t connected at first and I could feel it. I wasn’t inspired. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be because the first part was the boring ...]

You’ve Got Your SEO in My Usability

I’ve spent the past few years writing about usability to SEO’s and trying to not burn bridges while doing so. Each industry contains skills that benefit the other, and both benefit the client. It’s rare to find good dialog by user experience folks on SEO, however, so I found the following interesting - Seo ...]

New for SES - Search Engine Strategies Awards in August

Every time I see an awards announcement, I always make up categories in my head they haven’t bothered with, like “Best SEO Costume” and “Old, Loud Mouthed and Still Kicking Ass”. Today’s awards news comes out of the folks who run Search Engine Strategies conferences and their awards launch. The San Jose conference coming up ...]

Angry? Destroy Their Reputation Online!

An old friend once told me back in 1995, “Assume that every email you send will eventually land on the lunchroom bulletin board for everyone to see.” It was great advice for email. It’s even better advice for blogs. Miffed at someone? Kill them with words. With the Web as ammo, it’s easy to ...]

Google Turns Black To Go Green

Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something

Google Pushing Local Search?

Today while doing research for a client, I happened to notice something very interesting in Google’s results.

The given search was for “hampton inn” and further research on other geographically relevant, broad terms returned similar results like “restaurant” and “mcdonalds.”

Entering a city, state or zip code returned the Google map and relevant results based on the given entry. This did not appear differentl

The Future of Search is 24 Hours in Advance

So, April Fools 2008 Begins - 1st Up Google Australia

Google Australia offers gDay with MATE:

About gDay technology
The core technology that powers gDay is MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).
Using MATE’s machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed

April Fools 2008

Here is a quick breakdown of April tomfoolery this year:

Search Engine Roundtable becomes - Search Engine Squaretable

MyBlogLog goes… Plaid!

What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

What are you planning for RSS Day?

Post from: SEOpittfall.com

RSS Day 2008

Meta Tags Constitute Trademark Infringement or Not?

A couple of influential court cases in the US have been decided, however, they differ on the overall outcome when it comes to use of trademarked words in META data including keywords constitute trademark infringement.

North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.

But in this case, I do not think Axiom denied placing those terms in their meta tags. The question “snake oil” and even some site search box within results:

Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants

Happy Easter

It has been a long time since I have posted, but as far as moving to Cleveland and getting acclimated to the area (and the weather), we are almost done!

Happy Easter everyone, and there will be more from pittfall in the near future!

Post from: SEOpittfall.com

Happy Easter

Anatomy of Organic Listing Snippets in the SERPs and Outlining Best Practices

When returning results to a user, search engines use various resources based upon the particular search or query. The basic information published on a Web page may not be visible to a user, even when the page is displayed in an Internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox. Some of this information is used by the search engines to determine the topic (content) of a particular Web page.

Search engines use many specific characteristics to evaluate a

Online Marketing Tips: Conversion Types - Purchase, Email Sign-ups, Time on Site, & Page Views
Last week Brian presented our Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing and spoke about Web Metrics for your website. I'm back this week with our next edition of Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing, taking that web metrics theme a little further by bringing the post about Conversion Rates I did to video. This will be a two part series, this week...

WOMMA WOMM-U- Pick a Charity Workshop Results
Following on from the Pick a Charity Workshop sessions yesterday and this morning, the ideas and results for each of the 3 different charities were presented over the lunch sessions. Overall, some interesting solutions were generated and presented, with ideas ranging from generating basic awareness to eco-terrorism. So here's what each group came up with, just to give you an...

WOMMA WOMM-U: Bob Pearson from Dell Keynote
Bob Pearson, of Dell is presenting the first keynote of the morning. He hates podiums so he's actually walking through the crowd. So what Dell's Learned so far? #1 the online world is undergoing the most significant transformation so far. There is growth ever second. A month ago China over took the US with the number of people online. Over...

Fun Photo Fridays: Cindy Krum Doing a Tea Trick at SES Denver Training
At the beginning of this week, I had the pleasure of doing the Social Media training in Denver for Search Engine Strategies Training event there. It was a lot of fun, and was also my first time in Denver. Those of you who follow me on twitter, saw how I was shocked about how far off in the "boonies" the...

Overstock Terminates All New York Based Affiliates
Months before the Former Governor of New York, Elliott Spitzer was in the news for his scandalous behavior he was making news for his potential major impact on e-commerce. The buzz was from his attempt to pass legislation that would make it necessary for online merchants to collect taxes on Internet sales made by New Yorkers. Specifically, the legislature would...

WOMMA WOMM-U- Jordan Corredera Keynote
With the previous keynote running 10 minutes over it's timeslot, and technical issues further delaying the start, this keynote shrank from a 45 minute presentation to a 30 minute presentation, which as it turned out was probably a good thing. Unlike the previous, more polished / rehearsed presentations, this one came off as more like a time filler. Which isn't...

WOMMA WOMM-U: Jen Gulvik Presents Houlihan's WOMM Case Study
Houlihan's went through an entire restructuring, down to even changing the forks and the music. Half the people who live within a 3 mile radius of the restaurants, have never been to a Houlihan's or were lapse customers. The only people who really knew about Houlihan's was employees, current customers and a "few" others. They do limited mass media advertising....

Twitter Policy - Do You Have One In Place?
Twitter is growing at a phenomenal pace. There's no doubt that as more and more companies adopt new communication platforms like Twitter into their marketing strategies, as well as allowing their employees to use them, some rules should be set up along the way. Back in December I wrote a piece about "Is Twitter Really Dangerous?", which was prompted by...

Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference
Shining a bright light on a troll isn't always the wisest thing to do (especially when they are certifiably crazy, or have had issues in the past). You have to be careful because sometimes they will steal your goat, or steal your baby (as those old fairy tales would tell us) or they will flame you in a community or...

WOMMA WOMM-U- Carla Hendra Keynote
The last keynote of the day is delivered by Carla Hendra - Co-CEO Ogilvy North America, Chairman of Ogilvy New York. Her take on WOM - "Brand Marketing: It's all word of mouth now!" There currently exists the opportunity to engage a global network of brand activists, and what's better than having the consumer do our jobs for us?