Digital Snark

Remember how, when you were a kid you would get excited for Halloween because you had mad knife skillz and it was your dream to become a professional pumkin carver? Well, meet the man who just destroyed your childhood dream, you ham-fisted hack.

Congratulations to Ray Villafane, a sculptor for DC Comics on his win Sunday night on the Food Network’s Pumpkin Carving Challenge. The six and half hour event pitted four pumpkin carvers against each other in a three part competition. Part one involved a traditional Jack o Lantern. Part two: 3D sculpture. The final part, which was worth half of the points was the freestyle competition. Ray won every section and blew away the competition. Not only did he get bragging rights and a neat little medal, but he also got a check for $10,000 dollars. (source)

My pumpkins looked kinda like this, except they only had one eye and a boot mark where my dad kicked it off the porch into the yard. He loved Halloween in his own way.

There’s  a new kid search engine on the block and it boasts the BIGGEST INDEX EVAH. It’s Cuil (pronounced “cool”) and it was designed by some of the engineers behind Google’s index.

Built with $33 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, and Tugboat Ventures, Cuil is made up of an all-star team of Web technology veterans. The husband and wife founders are Tom Costello, creator of Xift, and Anna Patterson, creator of Recall, a technology now used by Google. Rounding out the team are ex-Google engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier, also the ex-CTO of AltaVista. (Beta News)

But don’t call it Google killer just yet and definitely make sure you spell it C-U-I-L and not another way or you’ll get something that’s not safe for work - or anywhere (I’m not sure what culi means in Italian but I think that’s Dateline NBC knocking at my office door.)

Google felt it was worth a preemptive strike and even the big boys are talking about it today. So, like it or not, Cuil is launching with some street cred. From Danny Sullivan at SEL:

Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, a unique display presentation and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality “underdog” service. The big questions now are, how’s the relevancy hold up? And can word-of-mouth really still build significant share? (SEL)

Cuil reports an index that is “3 times the size of Google’s index” and also does a little trash talking about Google on their about page.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. (Cuil)

OH NO YOU DINT! Google, meet the curb…

I’m just wondering if that last part about peeking is a wafer thinly veiled call-out by the former Google Engineers who now front Cuil. What’s a salty old SEO to think? Danny Sullivan (from the SEL article quoted above) goes on to describe how in the indexing world that bigger is not necessarily better, because of things like quality pages, and the way duplicate or infinite loop content (think calendar pages with “next page”). The bottom line is the question: What’s Cuil after? are they just another start-up looking for acquisition in 18 months by Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask? Are they a real rival to Google? (In which case, yes they will be acquired, sooner rather than later). Or are they just another well funded geek site that will fizzle to vapor because they have no real value add beyond plain vanilla search?

I’ve asked the top SEO playahs that I know to weigh in on Cuil. I’ll post their responses as they come in. As for what they think of culi.com, well you’ll have to read my other blog for that.

SEO EXPERTS WEIGH IN:

ComScore just released a report this week citing that 12 Billion videos were viewed online in May 2008. That’s Billion with a ‘B’ and a capital OMG, and all in the month of May which was up 45% from May 2007.

Nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 85 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (83.8 million), who watched an average of 50 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (60.8 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (40.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (29.5 million).

***

Other notable findings from May 2008 include:

• 74 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 228 minutes of video.
• 82.2 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
• 54.8 million viewers watched 703 million videos on MySpace.com (12.8 videos per viewer).
• 6.8 million viewers watched 88 million videos on Hulu.com (13.0 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.7 minutes.

If you’re in the web advertising and  publishing world this is good news, because video ad growth is off the charts. Advertisers can now have 10-20 clips as prerolls before videos play on news networks (for example). Or with companies like AdBrite and Brightcove they can have ad space in their embeddable flash video players. Or if you have deep pockets you can spring for your very own branded Youtube Channel. (I’m thinking DSnark may need a channel for all the sweet videos of celebs we make with our cell phones in NYC.) And with all these advertisers loiking for adspace, the publishers are cleaning up. Why run a video for free on your website or blog, when you can get a percentage of the ad revenue for embedding video? This is capitalism at it’s glorious best, now in full color 455×344 pixels.

The takeaway is that yet another consumer generated online channel is being exploited is available for advertisers and publishers to ply their wares. That is until the vox populi gets tired of bounty commercials.

(ed. note: There’s no relevance of the Sleepy Spudgy video to this post. I just think Spudgy is cute as a widdle button!)

Get out your mobile web enabled phones and get ready have your mind blown. In miniature. Like many of you, I was issued a cell phone with data and web capabilities along with my badge and peppy HR orientation speech on day 1 at my company. I’m using a Blackberry 8300 Curve which, despite it’s feminine sounding name, is quite the little powerhouse of data and web goodness (when it’s not crashing or refusing to take pictures of celebrities I see on the streets. But I digress…). All of the utilities featured in this post work on most web enabled phones, but your results may vary.

1) Google Maps Mobile

Can’t afford that GPS dongle for your phone. No worries. Just download this app and you’ll have GPS style location information via triangulation from cell towers. Sound complicated? Well I’m sure the math is, but it boils down to this: if you are within cell range of somewhere, you can pinpoint your location and find directions to somewhere else. Results vary of course. In Boston or Manhattan I can get my location within a few meters (better than a satellite, even on a good day!) but in place like Connecticut which is as famous for their hatred of cell phones as they are for their delicious steamer clams, you may have to make some “educated guesses” now and again. Also, try Johnny Ad’s in Old Saybrook for steamers and lobster rolls. Delish!

1.5) Google Mobile

This is the rest of the Google Mobile package that comes with Google Maps bundled inside. It includes an enhanced (and faster) version of Gmail, Google Maps (see above), access to your Google Docs, SMS texting, Google Talk (text only, no voice yet), Google reader and they keep rolling out new functionality every few months. The package which is available OTA (over the air- meaning you can download and install straight to your phone) also comes with an auto updater that checks periodically for new products and updates.

One thing to note is that although a “mobile” YouTube can be accessed, currently my Blackberry Curve can’t play the videos and according to Google only specific Sony Ericsson phones will at this time.

2) Yahoo Go

Yahoo Go is an application suite that mimics a mobile OS on your phone. One you launch Yahoo Go (3.0 at the time of this article) you get a sweet looking animated scrolling widget interface that allows you to check your Yahoo mail, sports, news, weather etc and has a whole suite of widgets you can add to the home screen. I just added Wikipedia and Daily Dilbert. The only negative is that there aren’t a whole lot of widgets yet. Most of the “good” ones are developed by third parties so you have to “install at your own risk”. I have a feeling as Yahoo Go downloads increase, the widgets will too.

3) MSN Live Mobile

If you want all the functionality and access of Yahoo Go, but don’t care for all those wizzy animations, then MSN Live Mobile is just for you and your Soviet Block sensibilities. This bare bones suite has email, maps, news, sports -all tied to your hotmail or MSN/Live mail account in dazzling two color display. Who needs all that flashy usability to get in the way of your mobile good time, anyway? As far as functionality is concerned, the search funtion is very robust and so is the mapping capability. Neither MSN nor Yahoo have developed the cell phone tower GPS like Google though.

Stay tuned for more swet mobile apps as I try them. I’ve only toasted two blackberry and one Moto Q so far.

Facial recognition software may not be any good at catching criminals (or even software designers dressed as criminals trying to test the system) but it can tell if you’re alive and maybe if you’re wearing a skirt. Get ready for Minority Report via Madison Ave.

Basically, the technology isn’t good at seeing someone walk by and identifying exactly who it is — which is necessary for such security purposes. However, if you dial back the requirements, the technology is probably at least decent for recognizing if someone is male or female, young or old. That’s why we see it being used for age verification in Japan, and now it’s starting to get used for customized billboards around the world. The billboards include small hidden cameras that try to determine general demographic, and then the billboard will play a video add targeted to you. It’s not quite Minority Report where the ads are perfectly targeted — but unlike in using the technology to search for terrorists, these billboards don’t need to be quite as exact. (Techdirt)

In other words, even terrorists will be able to find out about the new flat front, skinny jeans at H&M. Score one for democracy.

Ok. I know. Everyone has one of these Top [insert number here] lists for optimizing your blog for search engines, and this is by no means reinventing the wheel, but we here at Search Matters thought that we would add our list to the fray in case you missed something.

First of all, let’s back up a bit. Why would you want to make your blog more SEO friendly? ‘I thought blogs were inherently search friendly?’, you might ask. Well they are. And they’re not. Although most blog publishing platforms generate beautiful, compliant, cross compatible code there are a few issues that can cause search engines to bog down when they spider your site.

Therefore, making certain that you have an optimized site is essential to maximizing your exposure gaining good positions in the SERP’s. So where to begin? Many of these are best practices for whatever blog platform you use, but we use Wordpress here, so some of these are wordpress specific.

1. Optimize your title tag. By default most Wordpress and Blogspot templates write the title of the blog into the title tag then the post title like:

Your BLOG NAME | Your Your Post Title and Post Date

While that’s good, most of us don’t have to worry about ranking for our domain name or blog title. So it’s best to have the Post Title first and then the blog name. There are many templates now that do this by default but you can also do this with a plugin (in Wordpress… see below).

Also, now that we’re on the subject, you need to use juicy keywords in your titles as well. Placing your keywords at or near the beginning of the title ensures that they carry the weight necessary to get noticed by search engines. Article titles become the de facto permalink title and the description in many templates, making sure these are optimized is germane to SEO friendliness.
2. Clean up your template. Extraneous PHP (or any other server code) can slow down your website. Many templates that lots of optional features like K2 can bog down load times because thee server has to check the presence of modules, widgets or plugins that you may not even be using. It’s best to clean these out if you can to speed up you template. This affects usability more that search friendliness but it’s still a best practice.

Also, search engines have to read through the HTML code generated by your template so making sure that the code is nice and clean is very important. Do a “view source” of your blog’s home page to see how your code looks. If all the sidebar stuff is in before the content, then you may want to think about switching templates. Incidentally here is a good link to some really nice Web 2.0 style SEO friendly wordpress templates.
3. Search Friendly Plugins. Everyone has their favorites here are ours. This bullet got way too long so we gave it its own post here.

4. Move your Blogroll to its own page. This one is a little controversial. As many of us know, reciprocal linking is being frowned upon (even with rel=nofollow) by the search engines. In fact, pages with more than 50 outgoing links are sometimes viewed as spam pages and devalued by the SE’s - especially if a large percentage of those links are reciprocal. However, if you have lots of friends, colleagues and heroes on the web you want to link to them in your blogroll. However, most blogrolls live in the sidebar of every single page on your blog which means that every page runs the risk of being devalued or penalized.

So what to do? Create a single page that has your blogroll on it either using a plugin like this one or manually in wordpress. Also consider banning certain SE bot using robots.txt (especially if you think your site has been penalized). The blog roll is for humans not bots.
5. Get rid of excessive pagination. Pagination is great for users who want to pour through your archives, but for search engines it can be an endless loop of duplicate content; which ultimately leads to dropped pages or duplication penalties. There are several ways around this issue.

The first thing to do is to put your sidebar archives link in a drop down list (I recommend this no matter how your pagination is set up).

The second thing to do is to put your archives on a single static page. It’s okay to use a dynamic archive like ELA but make sure that spiders can only get there from one spot.

Another tip is to adjust your pagination to Previous and Next rather than having a numbered list. This makes the SE’s have to work to get through your archives. To avoid duplicate content you should also make sure that archive results pages (and internal search results pages) only pull snippets of the articles. For deeper info, SEOmoz has a great article on pagination.

6. Write well, do good work. Writing good compelling copy that is search engine friendly is an achievement that everyone in our industry strives for. Therefore explaining in one numbered bullet is quite impossible (well, not impossible - but that would make for one long bullet). Just remember to write for people first, but with search engines in mind, and you should be all set. But don’t take my word for it.

Okay that’s it for now. Do you have any tips that weren’t mentioned here? Want to dispute anything listed here? Weigh in in the comments section.

Looks like the rumors are true folks. Microsoft just officially announced an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! in a move that has been expected for some time; especially with the poor stock performance and 2008 forecast for Yahoo. At the center of this bid is online advertising; specifically how the addition of Yahoo’s network to Microsoft’s would level the playing field that has been dominated by Google thus far. This if from the official Microsoft release:

“The combined assets and strong services focus of these two companies will enable us to achieve scale economics while reaching R&D critical mass to deliver innovation breakthroughs,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft. “The industry will be well served by having more than one strong player, offering more value and real choice to advertisers, publishers and consumers.” (source)

The price that Microsoft is offering is 62% higher than the premium price at close of business Thursday and therefore will probably be accepted. The payouts to stock holders would be $31 a share cash or the equivalent in Microsoft stock.

The Microsoft press release blah blahs about synergies and scale economy, but the bottom line is that Microsoft, for all their money and hype has never been able to compete in the search business. So, they are following the old business adage, ‘if you can’t beat them, buy them’.

Historicaly, one of the biggest issues with running an SEO campaign was trying to convince the client/vendor/webmaster to use the proper keywords in order to rank well in search engines. Nowadays, most savvy marketers realize that keywords are the key to good rankings. But what happens when that user gets to your website? Are they ready to convert or abandon ship? Search Insider had this to say about focusing your content strategy with search.

In the past, advertisers (especially large ones) gave little thought to the unique needs of customers coming in through the search channel. They identified relevant keywords and drove traffic to their existing Web sites as effectively as possible. What these advertisers missed, however, was the opportunity to tailor their Web sites to align specifically with searchers’ expectations. By ignoring user intent, these advertisers did not speak to searchers’ needs and ultimately experienced less effective and less efficient search marketing programs.

What this means in a nutshell is that not only do you have to make sure that you are doing search and that you have a well organized site that helps users funnel through to conversion, but you have to make sure that your content is targeted to the search terms you have worked so hard to rank for. And this isn’t as simple and not using “britney spears nude” to get rankings for your used car website. It’s more about making sure you really pay attention to all the keyword data when designing your pages and writing your content. Making a user work to find the information they came to your site for is the fastest way to e abandonment, no matter how well your site is designed.

This goes for your paid ads as well. Do your PPC ads land on well focused, well designed landing pages or just a main category page (or worse still, the home page)? If it’s the latter then you may not be capturing all the conversions that you should.

The bottom line is that search is only going to get more competitive as more channels are introduced (mobile, social networks etc) and as more people get into the search game, so you have to make sure that your search is not only done well but also your content and design.