Tag Archives: RSS
What Google Knows about Google… and a few other things
There is a wonderful saying that one hears in big companies, particularly when discussing Knowledge Management – KM initiatives, “if only we knew what we know“. It is unlikely that Google is exempt from this problem, but their data-driven culture has launched several information dashboards which aim to overcome this problem by facilitating internal and external communication of data, from Google service statuses to internet statistics.
Search engines are great in helping us find something when we suspect that there is an answer out there somewhere, to borrow a phrase from X-File’s Fox Mulder. Yet search engines aren’t very helpful when you don’t even know or imagine a resource exists. This article aims to help insure these mostly lessor known Google tools and resources get the visibility they deserve.
What’s New With Social Media Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing is part of a bigger web ecosystem. At SMX West 2009, three habitués of the social media scene shared tips on successfully promoting a website using social media.
Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors
Speakers:
- Chris Bennett (@chrisbennett), President, 97th Floor
- Brent Csutoras (@BrentCsutoras), Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc
- Gab Goldenberg (@GabGoldenberg), Founder, SEO ROI Services
Brent Csutoras describes the user-generated news site reddit. When logged in, the front page is dashboard of reddits. You can create your own social media site using a CNAME sub domain name and the Reddit platform. (Add a CNAME record aliasing your domain to rhs.reddit.com. Enter this new domain, e.g. social.antezeta.com, in the domain field when you create a new reddit. – Sean)
So many aspiring SEOs! – the SEO Quiz results are in
15 questions, 5 weeks and 5 books: almost 700 people took the 2008 SEO quiz challenge.
Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on December 2nd. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy.
Why a SEO quiz
The idea of the quiz came from reflections on the state of SEO knowledge and usage in Italy, observed from the perspective of a SEO practitioner.
Search engines, with Google in particular (question 1), are the gate keepers between us and the net. We use search engines not only to search for information that we imagine is out there somewhere, but also to navigate to a specific site, such as Fiat, or to perform a task, such as buy a ticket for a Tiziano Ferro concert (question 15).
BLVD Status Analytics in free public beta test
I found an interesting announcement over at 97thfloor.com of a new Web Analytics tool, BLVD Status.
Two significant impediments have historically hindered the uptake of Web Analytics by businesses. The first has been cost. Professional Web Analytics systems have been fairly expensive, both in server and hosted forms. The second issue has been the great quantity and complexity of available reports in commercial systems, sufficiently intimidating many business professionals away from Web Analytics.
Google’s Google Analytics
Google, with their release of Google Analytics in November 2005, removed the first obstacle, cost, by releasing the first free “full featured” Web Analytics system. Previous free tools, such as AWStats, lack robust visitor recognition and click stream analysis, among other things. Yet a significant obstacle still remained to general Web Analytics usage: how to find the “important” data, without getting lost in a sea of confusing and often redundant reports? In May 2007 Google released an updated Google Analytics with a significant focus on the user interface, specifically as a response to this need.
9 SEO Security Tips for WordPress
In theory, this is a marketing blog, focusing on search engine optimization, web analytics and other web marketing topics. So what does WordPress security have to do with Google and SEO?
Well one downside of the extended web ecosystem is that the same idiots who jump the queue in the supermarket will try to exploit your good blog as a way to jump their way to the top of Google’s search results.
One thing is certain, you won’t be feeling very groovy if you have the misadventure of being de-listed by Google as has happened to several of my fellow blogger friends.
I’m not a WordPress security expert, and I don’t play one on TV. That said, there are a few WordPress security best practices worth considering for your WordPress installation.
Remove WordPress version information from your blog and feeds
By announcing to the world the version of WordPress you are running, you greatly simplify the work of a hacker. Peter Westwood’s post documents how to suppress output of the WordPress version number in feeds and blog posts. I’ve packaged his code in a very rudimentary WordPress plugin which will hide the version number in blog and rss feeds. The plugin only suppresses the WordPress version information automatically inserted by WordPress 2.4+.
You may still need to remove any hard coded version information in your theme. Look for a line like this:
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
and remove it.
Installation:
- Download the plugin
- Unzip it to your plugins directory
- Activate it
Use at your own risk.
Related post: 9 SEO Security Tips for WordPress
Google ever present in Desktop Search with release for Linux
More than two years after Google launched its Google Desktop Search for Windows application, limited initial support for the Linux platform is available. Of the top three major search engines which offer desktop search software (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft), Google is the first to try to win the hearts and minds of both Macintosh and Linux users. Yahoo and Microsoft solutions are both limited to Windows.
For Google, search is strategically important, wherever it happens.
Why are the search engines offering free desktop search software?
Desktop search is strategically important to search engines. Personal computer users searching for information with a desktop search application are just one click away from seamlessly integrated web search.
Controlling desktop search means controlling traffic to a web search engine – a very lucrative business as demonstrated by Google’s economic results.
8 Ways to Optimize Video for Search Engine Visibility
If you had not already noticed, there has been an explosion of video on the web. Greater availability of broadband connections, coupled with the rise of video hosting and sharing sites, such as YouTube, has made online video accessible to the masses.
In addition to classic search engine optimization, marketing professionals now need to consider how to best distribute and promote their video content, ranging from viral product promotions to ancillary training and support videos.
Contents
This article offers specific considerations for video search engine optimization (SEO), sometimes called iVOD search engine optimization.
Accented Characters, Symbols and Special Characters in HTML Documents: Considerations for Search Engine Optimization, Usability and XML Feeds.
One issue many international Webmasters face is how to properly manage documents written in languages containing accented and other special, non-English, characters. Does it matter how the special characters are written? Do HTML documents need to contain both accented and non-accented words to be found in search engines?
Continuing our series on website internationalization for search engine visibility, we’ll take a look at how special characters can be specified in a document and how these characters are managed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft’s MSN.
In the early days of computing, engineers mapped each of the letters of the latin alphabet used by the English language to a specific numeric code. This mapping became known as the ASCII character set. Unfortunately, no provision was made for accented and other special characters found in the many languages which share the roman alphabet.
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