SEO News & Interesting Links
I have been spending a lot of time building out other sites, doing interviews, and playing in our member's only forums...this post is a list of some recent interesting links.
Google's Scott Huffman highlighted some of the search quality evaluation process at Google. His post (as well as the older leaked search evaluation documents) should be required reading for all professional SEOs.
I did a quick run down of some SEO tools over at Blogoscoped. Seocracy highlighted a free service called TwitScoop as a cool tool for finding fresh keyword ideas.
Michael Gray on how to figure out what parts of your site are not being crawled regularly. Check out the comments on that post for more tips. If you use Wordpress, you might find this crawl rate tracker plug in handy. Crawl rate is probably a stronger signal of trust than toolbar PageRank is.
Brian Clark launched Lateral Action, a site devoted to using creativity and productivity to drive success. The site looks like it is off to a great start with posts like Innovate or Die: Why Creativity Is Economic Priority Number One.
ChrisG has put together a special pre-launch offer on his new AuthorityBlogger course. At first look it looks like he put a lot of work in creating a great service well worth the layout if you want to become a kick ass blogger and/or get the attention of other bloggers. Nice job Chris.
SugarRae has started posting regularly again. She offers up tips on how affiliate marketing works and the failure of excuses.
IMDB is offering lots of free shows and movies online, which may lead to people becoming more acclimated with watching videos online, but if it does people might start expecting more in terms of production value. I am long on the value of video content, but this article shares some of my hesitation with creating tons of video in a complex rapidly changing field.
Despite the rise of amateur video and the new modes of distribution and discussion, Internet technologies have not been able to change the fundamental character of video. Whether someone watches video on a television screen, or plays it on YouTube, video is a linear, passive experience, designed to be watched from beginning to end without alterations or input from the audience. In this sense, video is still following the model set by film in the late 19th century.
Many things I said in the past later turned out to be incorrect after the market changed. Only with years of experience did I learn how importance the clause it depends is. With text an edit might take 30 seconds, but with video it might take 30 minutes. One way to de-linearize video is to create many small targeted videos rather than one large video.
On the spammier front, it looks like 302 redirects might be back and XMPC offers tips on how to build semi-automated sites.
Marrissa Meyer highlights some of the opportunities and challenges of search in the future. Bob Mass highlighted that her post hints at future opportunities for marketers.
Comments
In other news, google plans to buy Valve software.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/17/google-valve
The post by Bob Mass(a?) made me wonder what opportunities to "spam" the search engines out there. Not because, I'm too much into "blackhat" SEO, but because people often make the assumption that as search will get more efficient there'll be less room for SEO (or whatever it'll be called then).
But if these outlined changes will create room to spam the hell out of the system, I think that would actually mean the opposite, I guess that would sort of mean that there'll be more room for SEO (including "white hat" SEO).
I'm wondering what kind of opportunities he's hinting at. The main thing I notice is that marketers should be able to target users more accurately by building the exact content they want. For example digging deeper into what kind of content people are trying to find on a certain topic (audio?video?) and then creating that kind of content instead of just "making a page about it". Would either allow one to "target visitors" better or spam (because this is sort of like a new kind of web with virtually no competition, yet). Do you think this would sum up those future opportunities (in a very generic way), that can be seen in Marissa Meyer's post according to Bob Massa?
P.S.: I'm wondering if I'll live to see the translation/language thing considering people have been working on this for a (long) while and Babel fish is the result hehe.
Any new vertical or format for search presents
Remember reading some of the stories about people killing it in Google Base with porn? How about people killing it in Google Local with near duplicate entries?
As Google mixes in more verticals there is a wider array of tools you can use to compete for attention...build a site, buy links, open a real or fake offline store, write a book, etc.
I noticed someone the other day had used YouTube annotations to create a 'choose your own adventure' type thing at YouTube - basically a lot of short videos strung together.
Was interesting idea...
>I'm wondering what kind of opportunities he's hinting at<
you need wonder no longer as I will gladly tell you what I was hinting at.
If you can accept the concept that seo as an umbrella for all things marketing is dead, then you can also accept that it is NOT about traffic generation from serps,it is about selling products and services and traffic is only good if it converts.
conversions within the seo community are far too often spoken of as a by product of placements when the fact is that conversion is ALL that makes money and there is a LOT more to conversion than content is king + trusted links = fame and fortune.
Content, as is trusted, are completely subjective terms.So the question then becomes WHAT content is king? and how do we define Trusted links and what does that actually equal?
It equals an expense! Expense without revenue = bankruptcy
So,conversions comes from the right content to the right person at the right time. NOW the question becomes what is the right content who is the right person and when is the right time?
What this situation potentially offers is the opportunity to provide a VERY broad range of products and services. As aaron has told us all so many times, it is analytics,it is data storage and retrieval,it is video,audio,wireless delivery,automatic speech recoginition,dynamic real-time metrics, community based metrics, crowd-sourcing, mesh networks, etc.
Each of these things require knowledge and knowledge is, always has been and always will be a saleable commodity.
To me, didiling meta tags,begging for reciprocal links and cloaking to hide crap text is soooo 2003. Google is getting smarter everyday, NOT about beating seo's. Contrary to conventional wisdom,I don't believe they have ever really cared about seo other than as a scape goat. they are getting smarter about delivering the right content to the right people at the right time and THAT is the death of SEO.
So the opportunities I was hinting about was a whole world of web 3.0 applications,processes and products that will be more in demand with each passing day. for those that choose to keep arguing that SEO is spam or it isn't, those are going to perish because very soon,no one is going to give a damn.
But for those that see the writing on the wall and take the initiative to identify a niche and master it, the world is their oyster.
THAT was what I was hinting at.
Peach Y'all
massa
outsource.techndu.com
PS
thanks for the mention AW!!
Thanks for the lengthy and insightful comment Bob!
sorry about that. It's just my nature. I can't help it. That's why I rarely respond much of anywhere. I'm trying to save the world some time ;-)
massa
outsource.techndu.com
Yeah thanks for the reply!
I just read your article on "basic SEO concepts" and hope I grasp your points, now (those other than new formats = new possibilities). Nice stuff, btw
Aaron, you wrote "If you use Wordpress, you might find this crawl rate tracker plug in handy."
Do you know a similiar plugin for Drupal?
I don't know if there is one...I have not came across one yet, but I have not looked too deep/hard on that front.
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