For a while now I've been collecting SEO (search engine optimization) info. I've used some of those tips on this site andothers. A few months ago I put together a presentation with what I'd learned to share with some folks. After recently digging it up again, I cleaned it up a bit and decided to post it on SlideShare. However, as I was playing around with Keynote (my presentation tool of choice), I noticed a nifty feature: You can record yourself doing a presentation and export it to video.
So, I figured why not give it a shot. Now this video is a bit long at around 7 mins (and maybe a bit boring), but hopefully it's pretty informative. If you guys are into it I'd love to go back and record one for my power law presentation as well.
Anyway, without any further ado . . .
And, if you prefer not to hear my voice . . . here's just the slides.
In some cases optimizing pages for search engines might be more important to a company's PR than regular PR.
This morning I had breakfast with Noah Glass of Mobo, a mobile payment service he started. He was telling me about some of the press they've gotten and said something that immediately sparked an idea in my head: The majority of articles where we're mentioned came from journalists Googling for something like "mobile payment."
Obviously this makes sense. Journalists are just like everyone else, they get their info from Google. But it's a big deal for the PR industry, who need to figure out how to include search engine optimization (SEO) as part of their offerings. After all, what good is it to pitch a journalist with a story about fried ice cream only to find the other guy's company is listed first in a Google search. (For the record I have no idea why that example came to mind.)
Anyhow, I need to think a lot more about this, but I wanted to throw the idea out there. I'm going to give it more thought, but would appreciate feedback. Eventually I'd like to turn this into a story for PR Week. I'm not sure whether the angle is that this is an opportunity or a danger for the PR industry. Is SEO something that PR agencies could take on? Does that make sense? If you work in either industry, do you ever work with each other?
At the end of the day the question to ask yourself is where you want to spend your money. If you've got $1,000, is it better to spend it optimizing your website or pitching stories? Obviously there can't be a single answer to this, since it depends so much on the context and type of business, but it seems like a reasonable idea. I need to think some more about where in the life-cycle of a business this makes sense, though. Clearly in the case of a cutting-edge application like mobile payment, SEO for PR purposes is viable. But for something more static, a journalist is less likely to be searching so generally . . .
How can it be that nothing has changed about search since 1998?
Microsoft's newest version of Internet Explorer will finally include a built in search box (like all the other browsers out there). Unlike the other browsers, however, IE will default to MSN not Google. Here's a description of the IE7 situation from a New York Times article (via Michael Gartenberg):
The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors. The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990's.
Everyone knows Google, everyone uses the search engine, but how strong is their position? If every IE user in the world used MSN for search, that would probably put a pretty big dent in Google's market share (considering IE accounts for over 80 percent of the browser market). Yeah, Google's got lots of other stuff going on, but the core of their company is the engine and the marketing they sell as a result of it. Without that, where would they be? More interesting, to me, though, is that since Google revolutionized search with pagerank, there have not really been any serious advancements. It's been the other engines catching up and then everyone just scurrying for position. To be honest I don't even know if Google's the best engine out there since its the only one I ever use.
The whole issue was summed up well in an interview I read with Alex Galloway. "At the end of the day Google is still a modern answer to a postmodern question: it is a massive, centralized hub enlisted to parse and catalog the universe of human endeavor." It's an idea I've gone back and forth with, and search is certainly a good way of finding information in a giant database. But with a structure as unique as the internet, how is it possible that there's only one point of entry?
I've been talking to the people over at Filangy a fair amount lately and I'm testing out a couple different things to see how they work. One of them is a public display of my WebMarks (which are essentially just entirely searchable, cached bookmarks). I have to admit that I don't use it much since I am a del.icio.us addict, but I have imported my del.icio.us bookmarks in there, so you can at least see what it looks like. Here it is:
UPDATE 3/27/05: I had to get rid of this because Filangy became unreachable and it was slowing down my page too much . . . not a good sign.
There is also an option to make webcache searchable, though I'm not quite sure how that works (or how comfortable I am in allowing that to be searchable). Although it combines your information with general information, it still rubs me the wrong way. Thoughts?
Otherwise, I've been messing with Filangy some more and I'm getting the hang of some stuff. There are definitely some improvements that could be made, but I think they're going in the right direction. I'm still waiting on that highlighter (which would be amazing). Also, I would prefer if my del.icio.us and RSS feeds were added constantly instead of just when I reload them.
Last, but not least, I have some invites. So if you're interested in giving Filangy a try, let me know. Drop me a comment or an email (nb [at] noahbrier.com).
UPDATE 3/27/05: I had to get rid of the javascript links to my Filangy WebMarks because Filangy became unresponsive and my webpage got slowed to a standstill.
I was looking at my page stats tonight and noticed a huge amount of searches for "tom wolfe catchphrase 1970's" and other combinations of those words. Now this is odd because I've only written one entry that even includes the name "Tom Wolfe". I've definitely never written anything about Tom Wolfe's catchphrases. In fact, I didn't know Tom Wolfe had catchphrases. (Is that blasphemous?)
Anyway, while browsing the stats a little more, I also noticed a disproportionately high number of referrals from Yahoo!. So I clicked on over to the ugly step-sister search engine (which, as a side note, has remained my homepage for about eight years) and searched for "tom wolfe catchphrase 1970's," only to find my site listed fifth. It's a link to my December archive and includes this summary:
December 31, 2004. New Years Best Wishes ... The holiday evolved during the 1970's, when the elder Mr ... Stewart, Al Franken and Tom Wolfe reflect on the race ... to that 'lifelong learning' catchphrase to which so many school ...
So my big question is what are all you Tom Wolfe fans looking for? Please do me a favor and clue me in using the comments. Maybe I can even help.
Thanks and best of luck finding that catchphrase you were looking for.
UPDATE: Turns out it was a New York Times crossword clue from March 18, 2005 (thanks Trubright!). So now for the big question: does anyone know the "Tome Wolfe catchphrase popularized in the 1970's?"
If you know the answer, please leave it in the comments. I will do my part and search for the answer. Also, if anyone knows how many letters it is, that would be helpful too. Thanks!
UPDATE 2: Thanks to Irene, we've gotten to the bottom of this problem. The answer is Radical Chic. Hope that helps!
For about two weeks now I've been using Filangy. I've been thinking about writing about it for a while, but I wasn't quite sure how. Problem is that I can't really describe it well. It's kind of like a desktop search tool for your browser. It caches all the pages you look at and makes them searchable. It also allows you to add your own bookmarks and import RSS feeds and del.icio.us bookmarks. In the FAQ, it's explained like this:
Filangy is an intelligent search tool integrated with a search engine to make searching productive. We offer features that allow users to personalize their search experience. Two of the features that we have launched in our beta products are WebMarks and WebCache. Over the coming months we will be integrating numerous other helpful features. To get more information about our products and services please see the keep me posted section.
Anyhow, today I got an email from them thanking me for using it (it's still in beta) and telling me they had some exciting features coming up. The end of the email asked people to submit any thoughts they had. Of course, when I get an invitation like that I can't refuse, so I mentioned the one big thing I had thought of: a web highlighter. You see, the Filangy toolbar already has this highlighter icon, but it only highlights terms on a page you're looking at. I want something that allows me to highlight and save specific words from a page.
About five minutes after sending my email I got a response . . . from a real person. Imagine that! She agreed that would be a great feature and we emailed back and forth a few times. In an email she mentioned that I should blog that I had spoken to a real person (which I am right now, I guess). In response to that email I wrote her this (keep in mind I'm still kind of reeling from today's big entry):
Hi,
You know, to be completely honest I've been thinking about writing
about Filangy on my blog for a while but I'm having trouble defining
just what it is. I know that it caches everything I look at (right?)
and allows me to bookmark things and then stores it all in a
web-accessible database. But what really makes it different than other
tools out there? Essentially you're creating your individual search
engine, right? It's kind of like an online version of Google Desktop.
But why doesn't it have some of the tools that make sites like
del.icio.us and Flickr so powerful, specifically tags? I love the idea
of Filangy, but I feel as though del.icio.us is a superior system for
bookmarking things at the moment. It allows me to annotate my
bookmarks (with the "summary" section) and then tag it appropriately.
While the highlighter tool would be a huge advantage, there's still
something missing in my mind (although I'm not sure what).
Essentially I want software that not only complements my brain, but
gives me a better understanding of how it functions. I think this is
what separates regular software from the revolutionary stuff.
Can you guys help?
Thanks a bunch and sorry for burdening you with all my thoughts,
Noah
PS - This will be going on my blog
About five minutes later I got another response telling me she had forwarded my email on to the CEO and thanking me for sharing my thoughts. "And thanks for taking the time to send us your thought. It's appreciated and welcomed," was exactly what she wrote.
You know what? When a company has customer service like Filangy, it makes me believe they'll be revolutionary. They've earned a customer.
First, let me start off with a quote from a friend of mine after I told him I was writing this.
Jeff: You realize you're saying that your worlds are search engines and The OC.
Maybe in Geekland everyone lost their homes because your world's collided.
So here's the story. I was planning on writing a bit about Amazon's new features for it's A9 search engine yesterday but I didn't get around to it. Then this morning I was doing my regular RSS reading and ran across this entry from Capn Design titled "So, I A9.com'ed Him Last Night". It turns out that last night on The OC, a show for which I am quite fond, Lindsay was quoted saying "so, I A9.com'ed him last night," about Kaleb (or is it Caleb? Anyway, for those of you that don't watch, is her father as well as her boyfriend's grandfather via adoption).
Yesterday, A9 introduced a new Yellow Pages that has a ton of cool features, the coolest of which lets you see the business you're searching for. For example, if you search for Spring Lounge in New York City (which happens to be one of my favorite bars), you see this picture:
You can then move up and down the street with the pictures. It just adds a new level of local knowledge to local search. I'm not exactly sure how useful it is, but there's no denying it's very cool. Here's A9's explanation of how it was done:
The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,� which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.
The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.
This, however, is not the only cool feature. Along with the photos is a "Click to Call Business" button. All you do is click it, put in your phone number and it rings your real phone and connects you. Once again, not sure how useful it is, since you could easily dial the number, but it's definitely a cool feature.
In the end, I'm very impressed with the stuff A9 is doing. Though I don't think they have taken ideas as far as they need to go (as I wrote about in this entry), they are definitely bringing some much needed innovations to search. For that they should be commended. Big ups to A9.
I check my usage statistics on the site fairly obsessively. I like to keep on top of how many visitors I'm getting and more importantly where I'm getting referrals. It's a good way for me to get some idea of how many people the site is reaching (and just part of a certain general obsessive nature of mine). One of the things that shows up on the usage statistics is the popularity of different search terms on the site (this is using my search box, not Google's). This gives me an interesting picture of what people are looking for on the site when they get here and what's been jumping out is just how many people are looking for information on Zubaz (the tiger print football pants I wrote about in a post aptly titled "Tiger Print Football Pants"). Although they are really called Zubaz, the most popular search on NoahBrier.com is for 'zoomba pants,' the name I thought they had when I was searching for the real name (this term accounts for over 22 percent of total searches on the site). On top of this, the "Tiger Print Football Pants" entry is the most popular entry page, which leads me to believe that a majority of my Google referrals are for people looking for information on the pants whose name I could remember and the answer I couldn't find on Google. For those who don't remember the post, or don't care to click through, here's what I wrote:
Today I was trying to remember the name of the bad 80's fashion that put tiger print stripes in the color of your favorite football team onto a pair of parachute-like pants. When I did a Google search for the terms 'tiger,' 'print,' 'football' and 'pants' I didn't come up with any relevant results. In order to remedy this for the next person that might be interested in the topic I have decided to put all those words into one entry so hopefully they'll be able to get right to the answer. (I'll throw in 'bad 80s fashion,' just in case that's in the search. While I'm at it let me add 'zoomba,' which one person told me they were called and 'ugly,' which they were.)
What I've also noticed is a number of people who have searched the site for 'bears zubaz,' because I mentioned an eBay interview. All of this made me decide to do a little experiment in search engine optimization (SEO). I'm curious what will happen if I include all the terms from the original post but include this time the names of all 32 teams in the NFL (which I'm writing from memory, if that earns me extra points).
New England Patriots, Buffalo Bills, New York Jets, Miami Dolphins, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Houston Texans, Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, Denver Broncos, San Diego Chargers, New York Giants, Washington Redskins, Philadelphia Eagles, Dallas Cowboys, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Carolina Panthers, St. Louis Rams, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, Minnesota Vikings, Detroit Lions and everyone's favorite Chicago Bears. (I purposely left one team off the list because I'd prefer if fans from a certain cheese nation stayed out of here.)
Anyway, thanks for bearing with me and I'll let you know what comes of all this. If you did come from Google and you're reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a comment and let me know what you searched for or email me at nb@noahbrier.com. (Let me also add the terms zoombas, zoombaz and zubas to this post.)
For those regular readers (or just those interested) who have made it all the way to the bottom of this entry, can I recommend checking out the comments on my “Youth Evolving Online� post, an interesting dialogue developed that even my mother jumped in on.
I just read Marc Canter's brief thoughts on the A9 user interface. For those that don't know, A9 is the new search engine by Amazon that has been met with some hype. Not only does the engine save your search history and allow you to display image, movie and book search results simultaneously, it also allows you to keep a diary and bookmarks on searches. Those diary and bookmark entries can then be searched alongside your normal web or image source. They've essentially created a web search application, rather than just another engine. Here's the description from Why Use A9.com:
The web is easy to use, but using it well is not easy. We are inventing new ways to take search one-step farther and make it more effective. We provide a unique set of powerful features to find information, organize it, and remember itâ€â€all in one place. A9.com is a powerful search engine, using web search and image search results enhanced by Google, Search Inside the Bookâ„¢ results from Amazon.com, reference results from GuruNet, movies results from IMDb, and more.
Beyond just the features, the user interface is very straight forward, including resizable windows for your different searches and buttons on the right side of the screen that allow you to turn on or off different options such as image, movie, etc.
One thing I am a bit annoyed about is that the bookmark and diary functions are only available to users of the toolbar, which is currently only available to Internet Explorer users. I know it must be hard to develop multiple toolbars at once and IE is certainly the most popular browser, but if you're trying to get adopted by an early adopter crowd wouldn't it be a smart move to include a non-IE toolbar? Just a thought. I know I would have installed it and at least given the features a spin for my own curiosity, but instead I'm left to guess what it must be like.
Finally, I have some non-review thoughts on A9 and the future of search. I really like moving all these different features into one realm, but I must admit that I'm disappointed that none of them are social. Wouldn't it be amazing if A9 used del.icio.us for it's bookmarks and a blog-like application (or even Pasta, which allows people to write plain text diary-like entries and post them to del.icio.us). Add RSS feeds to the different functions and it's an incredibly powerful tool that could really transform the web. (Hell, if you threw an RSS aggregator into the mix I can't imagine I'd ever go anywhere else.) A9 has created something really interesting, but I would expect Google to take the reigns on this one being that they already have something like Blogger in place. It's especially interesting in the face of all the Google browser rumors. I am impressed by Amazon for taking the lead and developing an innovative, thoughtful and somewhat-useful product, but I can't imagine they'll be able to keep up in the search game for long.
Today I was trying to remember the name of the bad 80's fashion that put tiger print stripes in the color of your favorite football team onto a pair of parachute-like pants. When I did a Google search for the terms 'tiger,' 'print,' 'football' and 'pants' I didn't come up with any relevant results. In order to remedy this for the next person that might be interested in the topic I have decided to put all those words into one entry so hopefully they'll be able to get right to the answer. (I'll throw in 'bad 80s fashion,' just in case that's in the search. While I'm at it let me add 'zoomba,' which one person told me they were called and 'ugly,' which they were.)
In all seriousness, it is fairly interesting that there's no good way to annotate a search result to help people who may be searching for that same thing in the future. When you do a search for something it would be nice if you could add search terms to existing webpages so that others can more easily locate them. I'm not sure there's a good way to do this, but it would be very interesting. I've been checking out A9, the new search engine from Amazon.com and they allow you to makes notes and hold onto bookmarks from your searches, but I don't think these are open to anyone but you. It would be much more interesting if they had incorporated a system like del.icio.us. What if there was a search wiki where anyone could edit the entries, or at least search terms that allow people to reach a page. I know this would cause all sorts of problems with spammers who would take advantage of this open enviornment, but what about situations where people find holes in search? Just a thought that came out of trying to find the name of an amazingly ugly pant.
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Mostly random thought (from Twitter): Wow, I am now getting Ground Zero Mosque comment spam ... I don't know whether to be impressed or disturbed. (31 August 2010, 11:54 am)
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 