SEO in the Snow

This past Friday at the San Diego Comic-Con, the House of Ideas and costume designers at Disguise held a fashion show debuting some of the hottest new styles based on Marvel heroes.

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This afternoon I was reading a very interesting post by Diane Aull, about small business blogs called,Should Your Business Start a Blog? And it started me thinking about how every now and then I come across blogs that really aren’t fit for human consumption.

I’m not saying a blog should be a literary experience (if that’s were true I’d be in trouble) but the author should put some effort into it. For example, I was looking for some information about a ski resort near where I live, when I came across a blog for a cottage rental agency, this blog consisted of 14 links to PDF’s of fuzzy scanned images of the original article, talk about worthless. How do you expect to get your reader to be interested in your site when you don’t even pretend to take the time to do some research and write worthwhile articles, which offers readers pertinent information? The owners of this site have no excuse to put up such lazy, worthless content. Fuzzy Scanned PDF images of five year old magazine articles add no value to your site and therefore, bring no useful information to your potential customer. These country homes located five minute from one of North Americas premier tourist traps, this resort has events planned all year round, all these people would have to do, is pick the big monthly event and write a couple of articles about them, and voila instant added value for your visitors.

As Diane Aull mentions in her article, most small businesses today either have or are considering adding a blog to their web sites, without giving any thought to the logistics behind maintaining a quality blog. I’m a firm believer that a bad blog that isn’t maintained regularly and is left to wither away and die will do more harm than good to a site. Rather then starting something you’re not going to put some effort into by writing good quality content for, don’t. Think about hiring a firm that can help you with the conception and writing of articles for your blog. A well thought out blog, written by someone who takes the time to do a minimum of research about the subject they are writing about, can be a valuable asset for your business, but you have to put in the time. Blogging takes a lot of work and requires some patience, just because you start a blog tomorrow don’t think that you will have hundreds of new visitors the next day. It takes time and perseverance to build a blog that your visitors will want to read. But if you take your time, do the work and have patience, you will reap the rewards a blog has to offer

A few months ago I started using Twitter; I have to admit that when I first started twittering I thought it was kind of stupid. I would go and read other people’s blogs to see what this was all about. And I saw that most people were using Twitter as a way to broadcast every little mundane detail of their day to day lives, like the color of the blouse the saw in the window at the mall. Ounce I got by these people and found the people I wanted to follow, people who had something to say that interested me, I started to see its usefulness and enjoying it.

I then found myself communicating with people in my industry from different areas of the continent, not all our conversations are about work or are even conversations for that matter. The people I follow don’t always post things that are interesting sometimes they post, about the green blouse in the window at the mall, but this is part of building relationships. I also have to admit that my posts aren’t all business either, I post about the weather (if you are living in Montreal this winter you would bitch about it too)and I reply to others, put up links to interesting sites and just put up anything that comes to mind.

Ounce I had joined I started to discus Twitter with friends in different industries and how they used Twitter. One of my good friends told about how he had started a Twitter account to keep members of his team informed on the progress of their projects. He keeps the blog updated as often as need be, he can Twitter from his mobile device making easy to transmit all the pertinent information as soon as he gets it , He keeps his posts locked so only members of his team get read and reply privileges. He tells me that this has cut down on the amount of emails he gets asking for information by members of his team. He also uses Twitter to keep his customers informed about deliverables and possible delays via Twitter. This has cut down on questions from customers by giving them a forum to get information and post questions about their project. The use of micro blogging in this case make access to information easier and keeps information flowing to everyone concerned quickly and efficiently not to mention saving everyone time saves time.

Last but not least one of my customers was at the Omniture conference in Salt Lake City last month; he used his Black Berry and Twitter to post the condensed version of every conference he attended (that include the ski conditions). This requires the person posting the updates to be able to understand and condense the subject they will be posting about in a coherent manner. This type of blogging is a little more difficult to master due to the nature of micro blogging. You only have 140 characters to get your point across, this just adds to the effectiveness of Twitter, you get nothing but the meat of any given subject a speaker maybe speaking about. To illustrate my point I was at SES NYC this past week and I attended several conferences, I tried to blog about them but I was unable to reduce the subject matter into a small enough package that I could post and be interesting for people who might read what I had to say.

In my mind the important thing about using Twitter, is to find you niche, follow people who interest you, and participate, whether that’s posting about a joke you heard or trying to post something informative. Twitter is all about participating in the community you chose, if you do that, you will learn to enjoy Twitter and see what it has to offer. So whether you use Twitter to keep in touch with friends, network with people in your field or keep everyone you work with informed as to the status of a project, use it well and enjoy what it has to offer.

I ran into a problem with URL Structure and having images indexed by Google. Two weeks ago I received an Email from one of our company’s largest customers asking why none of the pictures in the photo gallery section of their site had been indexed. This customer happens to be the largest French language news paper publisher in North America.

They had put together a very nice picture gallery and filled it with pictures from all the news papers they publish as well as photos from many other sources, such as wire services, subscriber submissions and political cartoonists, on the whole this part of the site was poised to bring them large amounts of traffic from Google image searches. But after having spent all this time and effort, none of the pictures in this section were being indexed by Google. The only pages that were making it to the SERP’s were the index pages and they contained no pictures, it’s like the spider got to the index and moved on without going one step further to the picture pages, but why?

A quick look at the picture pages and the culprit was found, it was all in the URL’s. Most of the pictures had URL’s that if pasted into a word doc occupied over four lines of text, not mention the fact that each URI had no less than 9 variables. I had to explain that the spider would never index a page with a URI that contained that many variables. I remembered reading somewhere that Google wouldn’t index a page that had more than 3 variables in the URL, so I had to spend a morning trying to justify to my customer Google’s reasoning. I don’t know why, but when Google does something, my customers seem to think I have the power to change it, so that they won’t have to make changes to their site, like I control Google’s policies (this isn’t directed at you Radu).

I finally explained to them that when creating a new site they should put themselves in the user’s place. If when they looked at the part of the site whether it is the Title, the URL or even the text on the page, it should make sense to a human being. By keeping you’re on page efforts as simple looking as possible, even if it requires a little work on the back end, in the long run these efforts will help the engines crawl your site effectively. By keeping things simple and creating quality content people will find your site and the spiders will follow and reward your efforts.

I still have some work to do with this customer, regarding the titles and the text they use to describe the picture. The date the picture was taken isn’t a good title, but ounce I produce a publisher’s check list and have some changes made to the CMS that will require the person uploading the picture to include a description and title they will be well on their way to having thousands of pictures included in Google’s image index and reaping the rewards the increased traffic will bring.

Ok here we go. I thought I would start slow with a post about Facebook. Recently Facebook announced its new advertising program, where they would let you announce you affiliation to a certain brand, music group or even stars. They have also said they would allow site such as ebay for example to insert into your mini feed what you last purchase on their site was. I’m not sure this will work, for the simple reason that as a Facebook user I don’t want all the people I have in my Facebook profile to know that I bought the 1983 Luke Skywalker action figure with the KungFu grip. When I’m using Facebook I’m not looking for a product or a restaurant, I’m looking to connect with people I know and that’s all. I think the people at Facebook are going to find that making money with advertising on their site, is going to be much harder than they might think. Facebook is not conducive to selling products. But I do think that if Facebook can find a way to add a local flavour to their content they might be on to something. I don’t know about you but since I found myself on Facebook, I use the site to invite friends to group dinners, activities and so on.