Technology

I just finished the AF track day website. In order to keep the transition seamless I had to make sure the old user database was integrated with a new login controller. Registration was simplified, and I added the ability for site owner to update the static content on the site.

Adrenaline Freaks Track Days

I got this information from our Google Agency Services weekly update newsletter. It has some helpful tips if you use YouTube.com for viral traffic. Be sure to also watermark your videos and/or have a URL slide at the end so users can type-in your website address if they want to visit your site.

Tips to Improve Your Video’s Ranking on YouTube

YouTube video search uses a variety of signals to determine the placement of a video in our rankings, including the video file name, title, and any associated metadata. The more information provided about a video, the better it can be searched. In general, we strive to give the best possible objective video result. However, there are some best practices that clients can use that will help their rankings:

* Add a Descriptive Title to Your Video - When users search for a video on YouTube, they will find your content easier if you include an accurate and descriptive title for your video. An engaging title can also help your video stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
* Make Your Descriptive Content Clear and Specific - Try to determine what content your video contains that will help users find it and distinguish it from other videos. Providing content that is descriptive, accurate, and unique is an important factor. Using complete sentences in your description is also a good idea. For more information, you can reference What should I put in my video description?
* Provide Accurate Tags - Including tags that users may use when they search or browse videos also helps. However, avoid using techniques such as keyword stuffing which will ultimately hurt your videos rankings.
* Community Opinion - Our vast and highly engaging YouTube community is an important factor that can affect the ranking result of your videos. Signals from users who share, comment, rate, watch, subscribe to and embed your videos are also taken into consideration when ranking videos.
* YouTube Embeds and Links - YouTube also takes into account links from reputable websites that point to your video. Web sites that are “important” and point to your video may improve your videos ranking. Similarly, YouTube also takes into the consideration reputable websites that embed your video. For information on how to embed videos, please refer to How do I embed videos on my website or blog? Google has also published webmasters guidelines that apply to all sites that embed or point to video content. This document also provides important quality guidelines that webmasters should take into consideration when linking to or pointing at videos.

Using these and other factors, YouTube strives to provide the most accurate and relative video search results. YouTube also continues to modify and improve its algorithms to ensure accurate results and create a better user experience.

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We all know how much the engines are loving blogs and bloggers these days. If you can’t beat them then join them…sort of.

How can you make your site that isn’t a blog more SEO-bloggish-friendly?

It is pretty simple my friend. Here are 3 tiny steps that you can implement, introduce or tweak to your existing pages to show the relevance of the content on your page or website.

#1 - Title Tags. Keep them short and to the point. Example: The title tag we use for one of our sites Hip-Hop.net is “Hip-Hop.net - Hip Hop Network”

4 keywords, not spammy and to the point including the keyword that we are trying to rank high in the SERPs for: “Hip Hop”

#2 - URL Re-Writes. I believe this is what gives the bloggers the one up on the competition because the URL usually matches the title of the blog post and the H1 header title on the page. 1+1+1 = top listing in most cases if your site is relevant to the topic being searched. Example: You knew I would have one for you to see. Do a search in Google for “implementing flash click tags“.

This page should appear as the top result (fingers crossed):
http://internetadpulse.com/design-advice/implementing-flash-click-tags/ <-- Look at the URL, it matches the keyword search string and when you click on the page the header also matches. Wordpress is like Magic huh?

#3 - H1 Tag. The old school header tag makes a comeback to the scene. Headers in old HTML mark-up are very important. Think about newspapers for a second. If they didn't have headers for the articles then you probably would just glance right over them. The Header tag lets the engines know the topic of the page content. I usually recommend using either a breadcrumb trail and having the page title at the end of the breadcrumb.

Example: Home > Design-Advice > Implementing Flash Click Tags (make this your H1 in CSS).

Check out an old client, Bag Borrow or Steal, that I did some SEO consulting for and how they do the breadcrumb trail, the title tag header on the page and the same text from the header in the URL string. Perfect execution! See this example handbag detail page: Betsy Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo handbag page then do a search in Google for the keyword phrase: Betsey Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo

Doesn’t it just look to easy to be true? Remember to keep your content relevant, be picky on your link trades and include your site URL in your press. Google will love you sooner or later.

-Brian Rauschenbach

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According to the latest data from Hitwise, a company which uses data directly from ISP’s to track overall internet usage trends, Google has continued to gain market share over the last three months.

In October Google’s share of searches reached 64.49% based on a sample of 10 million US web surfers. They seem to have largely taken market share from all the major other engines (msn and yahoo) which both saw modest declines in their percentage of the search market share.

The one odd finding was that while both msn and yahoo declined in share against Google the little engine that could (ask.com) actually rose a small amount to 4.76%.

This is most likely largely due to their aggressive television and internet marketing campaigns in which they take direct aim at the lackluster Google search results interface. This however may not be enough to keep them competitive as Google is also heading in a similar direction with their slow introduction of their own version of universal search.

See all the results here

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Stephan Spencer, from CNET’s News Blog, posted an informative entry about a few updates that are taking place with Google’s search algorithm. Of particular interest was the news from Matt Cutts regarding underscores in URLs. Traditionally, underscores were treated differently from hyphens.

Hyphens have long been the preferred method for dividing keywords up in a link. Whereas, URLs with keywords separated by underscores have been ignored by Google — they would only view it as a phrase. Matt Cutts, software engineer on Google’s Webspam team, has stated that keywords separated with underscores are now treated the same as keywords separated with hyphens. This is big news for SEO firms and businesses that have been using underscores and didn’t want to re-write URLs just to adapt to Google’s preferences.

Matt also claims that Google now treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. (As long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL) In other words, you shouldn’t take a hit in your Google position ranks if you have a question mark in your URL; just try not to have more than two or three equals signs in the URL.

Cutts stated that the number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn’t a factor in your Google rankings. He went on to say that although it doesn’t matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). Matt addressed this because Spencer specifically asked the question from the audience.

According to Matt, the file extension in your URL won’t affect your rankings. So it’s inconsequential whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc. The one extension you should avoid for your Web documents? .exe.

Matt stated it was “myth” that Google uses its status as a domain registrar to access domain registration data to use it as a ranking signal. According to Matt, being a registrar doesn’t grant one special access to other registrars’ customer data. Note that Matt didn’t state whether Google is or isn’t using WHOIS data as a signal. I think they are still giving rank preference for older websites.

When asked about how to get one’s blog into Google News, Matt shared one of Google’s requirements for inclusion: The blog must have multiple authors. (Darnit!)

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While defining web 2.0 as mainly a marketing term Eric Schmidt of Google answers what he feels will me the next evolution of the internet, otherwise know as Web 3.0.

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Not only does Google have the largest search engine today it has started to amass a bunch of businesses and technologies that provide them vital user data and what you search for, what websites you go to, how long you stay there and they even record if actions are taken on those sites. If you are logged into any one of their services like Gmail or personalized search then they even know that it was you that creates certain transactions. When you signed up for Google you probably provided them with your date of birth information, gender and location info. Starting to sound a bit creepy? The truth is that Google has recently stopped public records companies from buying “proper name” search terms. I believe this was to make it seem that they were helping to protect your personal information. Why then is it a acceptable understanding that if you are looking for “dirt” or information on someone that you just “Google” them. How important is your privacy to you? Do you mind that LinkedIn, Wis.dm, Myspace and other social networking sites have opened up your personal profiles for Google and other search engines to crawl and include in their search index?

Google Buys Peakstream - PeakStream develops tools that boost the performance of single-threaded applications on multi-core chips.

Google Buys YouTube for $1.65B - YouTube.com had approximately 19.1 million visitors in August 2006 (Comscore)

Google Acquires Feedburner for $100M - Feedburner.com is a RSS feed management company.

Google Acquires DoubleClick -
DoubleClick, the online advertising company, was purchased for $3.1 billion in cash. Read an article on why privacy advocates are concerned with the DoubleClick purchase: Google-DoubleClick deal

Google Acquisition of Urchin - Urchin developed software to help companies analyze the traffic at their Web sites.

How often are web users using Google for search? According to the latest published stats on SearchEngineWatch, Google generates about 90-100 Million searches a day and has 500,000,000 users worldwide (June, 2007).

Google has collected information from their Feedburner RSS aggregator on what sites are the most popular and what topics are most talked about. I heard that Google can basically analyze their search stream data and tell Hollywood whether a movie is going to flop or not before it even hits the theaters. Google has their own toolbar that I use everyday that collects search and click stream data, they have thousands of websites that are part of the Googe AdSense publisher network that have Google content matched ads. If you use Gmail then you’ll see sometimes that the context of your email messages get matched up with advertisers. If you are talking about an upcoming trip to Barcelona, Spain then you might see an ad that has “Cheap Hotels in Barcelona”

Free Wifi Access Data - Google is beta testing free wifi coverage areas in Mountain View right now. I am pretty sure this will allow them to get ISP-type data on users surfing behaviors.

Google Checkout - Google even wants to know what I am buying and to help me streamline my logins and passwords.

Google Even Owns Domains - A lot of people don’t actually know that Google is also a Domain Registrar and they know when you register a domain name and make any changes to it.

Google Maps Street View - They have now started photographing streets in major cities with cars that drive around and take photos in all directions. Here is a photo that one of the Google’s Toyota Prius camera cars took in SF:

So watch your back because Google surely is. How does that saying go? “Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer.” It is always nice to know how big businesses are growing and who owns what and for what reasons. You all didn’t think that Google was still a garage operation? Google also is in the process of building their own power plant on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon.

Now get back to searching and blogging so they can collect some more data from you today.

-Brian

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Here is a top 20 list of SEO Tips and Tricks that I use when doing search engine optimization work for our websites and our clients websites. Some of them are the obvious ones and a few are more creative and gorilla style marketing techniques.

I have them listed in no particular order of importance just so you try them all out at one point or another:

1. Create accounts on social sites like Myspace, Linkedin and Face Book and link to your website. Myspace re-writes outbound links so you don’t get credit for the link back but you can get traffic to your site. Linkedin in has an area where you can edit your profile and specify websites. Choose the other drop down so you can custom name the link. You can put up to 3 websites in your Linkedin profile. (see Brian’s LinkedIn Profile). Make sure you then build your contacts as a dead profile doesn’t do anything for you. Face Book also lets you list a website in your profile. There are a ton of other social sites that have these features. It is important before you go and invest a bunch of time with this to make sure they don’t have “no follow” tags on the outbound links.

2. Create accounts on all of the “Linkerati” websites like Digg, Reddit, Technorati and Del.icio.us and claim or submit your site. Be very clever with your titles and descriptions so you don’t appear to be just spamming their communities. Start engaging with the communities by commenting on articles, posting new topics and voting on stories. Invite all of your office buddies to join your networks as friends too. Add a Del.icio.us button on your home page so people can easily bookmark you in their del.icio.us accounts.

3. Submit your site to the top search engines free submission pages. duh. A list of those can be found here: Search Engine Submission

4. Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds. Submit your RSS feeds to agregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, FeedDirectory, FeedFury, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, and RSSmad.

5. Write an article related to your sites content, publish it on your site and then submit it to article sites.

6. Get an account on StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site. Again, you need to connect to your friends to get some traction with Stumbleupon.

7. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone lands on your site by error they are re-directed to a nicer page with maybe some Google AdSense ads. This is more important for older sites that might have had tons of pages that are now broken or have been removed.

8. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums or bulletin board communities that you post on. This is also called “Sig-Whoring”. It will also help establish yourself as a trusted source if you are a good contributor to the forums.

9. Don’t worry about Google’s PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as using Alexa to determine your sites popularity online. Google has their own internal PageRank that they use for weighting. The visible PR is mostly to drive SEO people crazy when dealing with their clients. Google PR in the toolbar is all about vanity. We have sites with zero PR that still show up in top organic results.

10. Search Engine friendly design - I said that I wasn’t going to order these by importance but I have to emphasize how important this one is. If your site has a bunch of embedded forms, headers with your address and 800-numbers, javascript drop down navigation links, flash movies, frames, or pages with large images and no text then how the hell do you expect the search engine spiders to crawl the content of your site and determine what relevancy it has to certain keywords and categories.

11. Stay away from 2 and 3-way link trading schemes. Build your link backs organically through a few stragegic link trades with sites that have similiar or relevant content as yours. One way links are the best way to go. Get the technorati’s talking about your site.

12. Get a press release written and sent out on the wire about your site and some special feature or offering you have. Be sure to place a nice anchor link in your press releases back to your site. Anchor links still have a lot of weight in scoring if done properly.

13. Title Tags are KING. Make sure your title tags and H1 header tags are matching or close in context of what your pages content is about. The engines are spidering and indexing meta tags but little to no weight is being assigned to them. (I know this one hurts and is hard to swallow but is very true.) Write your description tags so that they are effective in communicating when a person is reading the abstracts in the SERPs. Make sure your URLs are easy to read too and that they correspond to the title or content of the page. (example: look at the title of this page, the URL and the Header of the article)

14. The Algorithm that Google uses is “Markov Chaining” to help calculate scoring & rankings. Do some research on it online and you’ll understand why they are using an algorithm like this.

15. Do NOT use frames. Funny how people still have sites in frames. Their should be some sort of W3 consortium against frame websites.

16. Do I submit my site to DMOZ.org? I personally think it is a big waste of time and an empty community of about 10 editors that actively approve sites. Who has used a directory in the last year anyways?

17. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google, MSN and Yahoo. They are all using the same sitemap protocol. You can submit to Google through their Google Webmasters central and Yahoo through Yahoo Site Explorer. It is a good practice to also have a sitemap linked on your site from the home page to allow users to be able to navigate easily and for the crawlers to pick up your content for indexing.

18. Do your site in CSS and submit your site to CSS communities. CSS goes back to the search friendly design and the engines love how nice CSS renders.

19. Ask the Blog-o-sphere and other websites to review your site and/or products for you on their site.

20. Validate your HTML and CSS. It’ll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.

What engine should I optimize my site for? Well, that is an easy one since Google receives about 50% of all search queries, Yahoo 25%, MSN and Ask about 10% each.

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I picked mine up on the 29th @ 7PM without waiting by going to one of Apple’s flagship stores (University Village)…the great part is people who waited in a 1000ft line waited for nothing…and it only took about an hour to get through all of them. Anyhow…I picked up the 8GB and went home. Since I was on a Cingular family plan prior to my purchase, when I tried to activate it I encountered some problems; some kind of error because I was on a discounted plan through Boeing.

Since it was after hours, I had to wait until the next day until I could get the phone activated. My first impressions of the iPhone were great. Reading previous reviews, I was hesitant about the touch screen, but after using it, honestly, it’s a wierd thing to get used to but I don’t think I’ll have any problems as I continue to use the keypad.

I was able to sync all my iCals, contacts via Address Book, photos, and music without a problem. It’s unfortunate that the iPhone OS is approximately 700MB…

I was a bit worried when I heard there wasn’t a search function in the address book, but the scrolling in contacts is pretty simple. If you want to scroll slowly, you just flick up and down in the center of the screen, but if you want to scroll by entire letter groups all you need to do is flick the scroll bar up and down.

Animations are snappy and the phone is responsive, just like you see in the advertisements. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the iPhone will forget how it is orientated, especially when I’m using Safari…so I have to wiggle it a few times. The keyboard is much easier to use in widescreen. Real browsers > mobile browsers.

EDGE isn’t SUPER fast, but I can hop on google maps or check email without a problem. 75% of the time I was in a free wifi hotspot today. Wifi really took a toll on my battery life though, and I was able to go through an entire charge before the day was over. My only gripes about the phone are that I can’t run certain things like Mail and Google maps in wide screen. I’d be nice because the keyboard is much easier to use in that format.

Mail is simple, and reminds me vaguely of OSX. One quirk I encountered was trying to set up POP access via Google Apps. Since Apple tries to make the iPhone as easy as possible to use, they may have tried a bit too hard. To log in with my GApps account, my ID is “jon@ngsthings.com”, but since the POP server is pop.gmail.com the iPhone thinks I have a gmail account and proceeds to add “@gmail.com” to my login ID (which would be fine if I was ONLY using Gmail). Obviously trying to log in with “jon@ngsthings.com@gmail.com” wouldn’t work.

To work around this problem, I had to delete all the mailboxes off the iPhone, reenter mail on the iPhone, click “Other” when I was prompted for the type of email I planned on using, THEN I was able to enter everything without the iPhone auto-completing. Only then was I able to get around the problem

I do have some gripes about mail…

1. You can’t select all the messages and mark them as read…so that was a PITA since I have 500 unread messages now
2. You can’t select more than one message at a time
3. I can’t create folders to sort my mail
4. It doesn’t do widescreen

And finally, some gripes about the phone in general:

1. When you type, sometimes you are able to move your cursor to edit your words, but in some places, you can’t do it for some reason
2. No widescreen in all applications
3. Dock connector pinout for audio doesn’t seem to work with my dock connector in the car
   It seems Apple has disabled the lineout for anything other than the included Dock connector! This is a GIANT PITA!
4. Can’t sync via bluetooth

Everything considered…it’s basically the best thing I’ve purchased in a while. This is the Rev A, 1.0; I’m excited for the applications and improvements in the future.