Web content really IS critical!
Today I had the pleasure to hear web content guru Gerry McGovern speak at a full-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. He’s got to be one of the very best speakers I’ve ever heard! His course material, his sense of humor, his thought-provoking insights, and especially his Irish accent had everyone in the audience mesmerized. […]
The overlap between Google and Yahoo! results is less than you might think
There’s a brand new meta search engine on the block called Jux2. Its premise is to find the overlap between the top 10 results across two major search engines. So far I’m really impressed with it. It even has a toolbar for Mozilla FireFox. Jux2 conducted some tests to determine just how much overlap there […]
Ongoing search engine submission? You’ve gotta be kidding!
I just heard about a supposedly-reputable competitor of ours in the search engine optimization space that’s charging clients recurring fees of many hundreds of dollars per month for “submission services” to major search engines. What a joke! That just goads me, that they would take unsuspecting clients for a ride like that. We haven’t submitted […]
President Carter is a-bloggin’
Guess where the idea came from for President Jimmy Carter, nobel laureate, to start a blog? Yep, it was from yours truly. 🙂 The goal was to generate media attention and garner links to the Carter Center’s website. And it worked like a charm. His recent trip to West Africa, chronicled in a blog format, […]
Someone PLEASE help Jakob Nielsen redesign his website
Oh, nevermind. Somebody already has! Don’t get me wrong, Jakob’s a brilliant guy with a lot of important things to say about website usability. But useit.com is just plain ugly. Design By Fire has come to Jakob’s rescue with Design Eye for the Usability Guy. They’ve given him all the ingredients for a fantastic extreme […]
Your Google listing is a reflection of your brand!
For years, Starbucks didn’t seem to have a clue… the Starbucks.com home page showed up in Google with the title “Cookies required.” It wasn’t even “Delicious, fresh-baked hot-out-of-the-oven cookies required!” Finally now they’ve corrected this to a ho-hum “Starbucks.com.” These guys don’t exactly looked “clued in.” For an offline equivalent, I’d imagine a yellow pages […]
Writing Content with PERSONALITY
Most web copy has no soul… it’s mostly just personality-less drivel. Nick Usborne makes a great point in Net Words about how most newsletter subscription confirmations seem to be written by the same personality-less person and how a company’s personality that comes through from the copy is the ONE differentiator that can’t be easily ripped […]
Buying/selling/brokering PageRank – A slimy approach to SEO
As you may know, a key component to search engine optimization is links from important (i.e. highly PageRank endowed) web pages. I think buying links for PageRank is just plain slimy… the lazy man’s approach to SEO. Here’s one such hawker. Yuch!
Search Engine Optimization as an industry shouldn’t exist
Maybe I’m being a bit provocative here, but I don’t see SEO as a viable industry long-term. Would you hire a company to produce a shoddy TV commercial for you just to turn around and hire a TV commercial optimization company to fix it? If not, why would you be amenable to such a scenario […]
