Archive for April, 2007
Friday, April 20th, 2007
There's a big discussion going on now among SEOs (search engine optimisers) about Google's pronouncements about paid links. Basically Google has banned them and promised penalties for using paid links. This is a kind of totalitarianism - Google is free to do what they want with their own algorithm but that does not give them the right to dictate how and when you should advertise.
People have been warning of an impending Google oligarchy and it seems to be coming true faster than planned.
There is some confusion about how much Google knows about your website and your incoming links. Don't be confused.
Touchgraph-Google-Seo-Vertical
A site called Touchgraph.com will show you a lot about what Google knows about your vertical in a java application which loads directly in your browser.
Touchgraph runs off of the similar pages data in the Google serps's (look for it).
Particularly useful is the simplicity - click on a link and see the home page in a new window.
What is frightening in the new Oz is that Google has much better technology behind the curtain. I'm sure Google has a similar chart but with the spam and trust numbers for each website popping up. As they analyse a single vertical forensically, to improve the SERPS (at this point that's pretty much what they'd have to do, as SEO spam is getting better), they can apply the algorithm tweaks across dozens of verticals hypothetically. If they like what they see, new algorithm gets rolled out.
Even as a client you will find it interesting to plug in your key search terms and have a look at the results. Who is in your group?
Ideally you'd want a link from nearly every site in the vertical to your website.
By Alec
SEO |
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
There is a raging debate right now about the sponsored themes at themes.WordPress.org.
Given the garbage currently being submitted with up to five credits including anchor text like web directory (x 3), Make Money Online and bid for links (a real single example), this is no surprise.
Matt Mullenweg has come out hard against all theme sponsorship.
Guidelines (strict ones) are what we need here, not an absolute ban.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
WordPress |
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
WordPress.org has an amazing feature which I hadn't noticed before. It's a New Ideas section which lists any registered user's idea. Registered users simply vote the new ideas up or down (one registered user, one vote). They can also give their feedback if so inclined.
Sometimes inviting user feedback can yield unanticipated or even unwelcome results.
The latest idea is to revamp the default blogroll install in WordPress. Right now it features links to the personal websites of Matt Mullenweg, Michel Valdrighi, Alex King and others. Needless to say, all of the above have enormous Google juice (strong backlinks) to these personal websites. Some of the above are selling text links on their websites (Alex King please stand up).
Wordpress default Blogroll
The issues is that the blogroll has stood still since WordPress 1.0 but WordPress has not. Many people have given enormous hours to the project since. Even more importantly, WordPress resources have expanded. There is a codex, there are hosted WordPress.com weblogs, there are support forums, there plugin guides. These are the links that a fresh install of WordPress needs both in the blogroll and in the dashboard.
Instead of crediting the founders on the blogroll, there should be a single link in the blogroll to a Credits page similar to the existing About page or Copyright page. That page is Google PR 9 so none of the original creators will be short of PR. Those people who have contributed substantially in the last two years could aslo be recognised there.
For the moment, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has come out tersely against this proposal, "Not so inclined". Hopefully in time, he will listen to the users as the voting is 4.7/5 in favor of changing the blogroll.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
The web is undergoing another major shift right now.
The first shift was from direct navigation and directories to search.
SEO was all the rage and we are Foliovision were and are very good at it.
The next stage now is Online Communities or The Social Web.
Manifestations of online communities:
- social websites like MySpace and LiveJournal (perhaps the more exotic AdultFriendFinder could be included in this group)
- forums (countless, for every industry there are usually a few big ones: one of the originals was slashdot)
- social bookmarking sites (delicious and digg spring to mind)
- specialty topic sites like WikiPedia or Squidoo
What's bad about this is that all the black hat search guys are coming up with ways to pollute these communities. At one webmaster forum there are hundreds of paid forum posters available to go out and sign up accounts and start spewing out whatever you want in mainly broken English for literally pennies per post. These guys are harder to catch than the black hat forum and comment bots so the human version must be considered worse.
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By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing |
Friday, April 13th, 2007
I've finally found some simple javascript for affiliate or other links you want to partially cloak. It works well in IE 6 and hides the destination altogether in Firefox. It does not work in Safari. I'd like to know if it would work in IE 7 but as 60% of all visitors to my client websites are still running IE 6, that's already a good start.
Why would you want something like this on your website?
- If you are selling anything via an affiliate link people don't like the strange syntax and will often avoid clicking on the link, even though clicking on your affiliate link does them absolutely no harm. In general, having control over one's display URL. It will also help you with the search engines. They judge a website by the content of its outbound links.
- So this way you can link to the top level address of any given domain, rather than to a convuluted affiliate link, making Google happy.
I'd like to show you the code but alas Xstandard is acting up again and won't seem to respect the code tag.
Without Xstandard, I'm back with the basic example:
<a href="http://www.affiliate-link.com/" target="_top" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.company-name.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">Shop at Company Name!</a>
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Friday, April 6th, 2007
A very interesting discussion on Aaron Wall's SEOBook about whether Google is contributing to web spam. The best part is in the comments (sorry Aaron!) where two readers to the numbers on AdWords for relatively high priced PPC words.
Basically they just don't add up.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing, SEO |
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
We've been contending with a pricing model for our clients at Foliovision. As Foliovision has grown outside its old bounds as a single person company doing relatively contained projects, our rates have had to rise.
It's not such a problem as we are a lot more productive.
There are two primary models: flat fee and pay-per-hour.
In principle, flat-fee is more profitable (if you charge $1000 but through automatisation can get your time to render the project down to 2 hours from 12 hours you've just made $500/hour instead of $80/hour.
On the other hand, we mainly do made-to-measure work. There is rarely the opportunity to automatise to that extent. We get exponentially better results in our markets than the competition so made-to-measure clearly works.
With made-to-measure work one can spend more time quoting and negotiating spec back and forth than working.
Gradually the client can grow to hate your emails demanding expansion of project scope and budget. Generally the (busy) client would prefer to pay more for something delivered with no hassle, complete and working. Then he or she only pays once for the project, instead of twice.
Twice is their time spent micromanaging what ends up costing more or less the same anyway.
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By Alec
Business |
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
Contrarian business advice from Trizle is always a thrill.
For a taste, Why You Need a Chaotic Business:
Order = Bad Advice
The dude’s well-intentioned “let’s-order-everything, cuz-we’re-like-the-world’s-nerdiest-businesspeople” mindset stands as one of the several “bad, bad, bad” advices we received when we started.
Why? The mindset drives you to do nothing. Nada. Standstill. Blah.
- Instead of moving forward, you’re documenting.
- Instead of increasing sales, you’re recording every little detail of your past order.
- Instead of improving employee morale, you’re entering data of past employee feedback.
- Instead of fattening your bottom line online, you’re trying to perfect every freakin’ detail of your freakin’ website that’s going to take a freakin’ looooong time.
I think the Trizle guy has the E-Myth myth guy clearly in his targets. Michael Gerber is obsessed with turning every company into McDonalds, turning every company into a turnkey franchise.
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By Alec
Business |
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
I am having to learn copywriting (quite a bit of the poetry I wrote in my twenties was published so I have hope of managing copy too).
I wish I had more clients who could write copy as well. What any website needs is more great copy. As opposed to machine generated or offshore article spam (most of the article spam comes from the Philipines and India; why? both countries have large populations of fluent if not particularly literate English speakers for higher for pennies on the dollar).
In any case, one of the keys to great copy is the headline.
How does one make a good headline even better
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By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
Sometimes a website can be setup to help one party and instead help another.
For one of my websites, I need to license some photos.
I haven't had the right language for the contract. I looked at the contracts from the stock agencies but they were way too elaborate. I tried to find a local lawyer but none of them were competent in intellectual property. I sent somebody to contact the international law firms but they wanted thousands of dollars.
Thanks to Carolyn Wright, I now have my new contract by piecing together the parts which are supposed to worry photographers.
I did rewrite my contract to make it more fair to the photographer, allowing exhibition and print rights.
My main concern is to ensure that these images don't turn up on other websites.
By Alec
Business |
