July 2010 Archives : Bruce Clay Blog
July 30, 2010Friday Recap: Hand-picked Goodness Edition
Happy Friday, friends! Doing anything cool this weekend? You say you’re reading the recap? Excellent choice. The menu of the day is search news, (not-so-shameless) self promotion, and then dessert!
Ask.com launched the private beta of their Q&A community. It’s a fresh new search offering, but one that leverages the search engine’s question-and-answer roots. The social search feature will be integrated into search results, and if the answer’s not yet available, the searcher will be able to get in touch with a subject-matter expert in Ask.com’s Q&A community.
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YouTube’s Closed Captions – a video ranking signal
As ReelSEO has discussed, there is evidence to suggest YouTube and Google Video are incorporating Closed Captions into their video ranking factors. Closed Captions are a feature that provides textual information for the audio of videos. They can communicate the words spoken, the person speaking and environmental sounds like a phone ringing and knocking at [...]
July 29, 2010
How to Give Your Video a Case of the Virals
You want your video to get viral. That means it has to touch a LOT of people. So, how do you take an innocent video and turn it into the life of the party? No, not through massive amounts of alcohol; through the right mix of charm and skill.
What does it mean to go “viral”? In terms of the online video, it’s the ability of a video to “copy” itself through its spread across the Internet and/or to morph into other similar things (e.g., parodies and spoofs of the original video), both of which advance the impact of the original video.
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July 28, 2010
Connected Marketing Week: A Marketer’s Dream Festival — SEM Synergy Extras
SES’s summertime conference on the West Coast has always been a stunner. Formerly SES San Jose, the conference sits in the backyard of technology’s mecca and hosts respected search engine representatives and thousands of the Internet marketing industry’s foremost experts. While the conference already had one of the richest resumes on the conference circuit, it’s raising the bar this year. Incisive Media, producer of the SES conference series, is presenting fresh new features with the first ever marketing festival.
Who doesn’t love a good festival during the summer? And the line up that Incisive Media has pulled together for Connected Marketing Week is pure rockstar.
Read more of Connected Marketing Week Brings the Party — SEM Synergy Extras.
July 27, 2010
White Hat SEO Sans Smoke: All the Fun, None of the Filler
Everyone’s been raving about Mad Men for years now. I keep promising myself I’m going to rent the first season and get in on the series while the getting’s still good. I still haven’t seen the show yet, but thanks to the good folks of Boing Boing, this week I got a brief introduction via scenes of people smoking cigarettes on the show.
If you think about it, smoking cigarettes is a lot like doing black hat SEO. Sure it works now. It’s fast, sexy and cool. No one complains about the burn if it brings in the big bucks. But what about in time? Think you’ll look as hot when your smoker’s ways are banned from public places, kill your stamina or disintegrate your body? In SEO terms, that equates to being kicked out of the index, wrecking your site or brand’s longevity, and ignoring site quality at the expense of the next clever exploit.
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SEO Hot Tub – 16th July 2010
Our latest Hot Tub was a long one, over 2 hours of SEO goodness, so I suggest you get comfy because there’s much to discuss. The big topics that arose this session were search engine movements and testing, approaches to link building and some new features in optimising for social media. The Big Three Search [...]
July 26, 2010
Is It Possible to be Successful and Suck? (And Tips to Avoid the Latter)
If Facebook has anything to show us, the answer to the question above is yes. As SEOs, we’ve seen our fair share of sites that suck come to Bruce Clay, Inc. for help. And while it’s always gratifying to pretty up a site and make it shine, I realize that it can sometimes be hard to predict future success when there’s evidence to the contrary.
The Globe and Mail has synthesized the issue of Facebook’s success-to-suckage ratio about as well as anyone. The latest news coming out of the social behemoth is that it’s reached 500 million users, putting its population on par with the third-largest nation in the world. It was a conveniently cheery outlook for Facebook considering current concerns regarding privacy and spam and fading consumer satisfaction.
(My favorite line: “it’s hard to be unreservedly supportive of something so huge, so tentacled, so hungry for data, kind of like a blue Kraken owned by a pimply billionaire”. What a fun way to look at inevitable destruction!)
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July 23, 2010
Friday Recap: Positively Peachy Edition
Hi-ho! Welcome back to your favorite day of the work week. I can tell you’re crushing it in the hours left, but take a load off for a hot minute and savor some recap.
Or don’t and stay busy. Because busy equals happy, according to recent research. Unfortunately, our instinct is to idle. The researchers found that people report feeling happier when they’ve been busy, even doing tasks categorized as “futile busyness,” and yet we’re hard wired to try to save energy by doing nothing. Thanks a lot, evolution.
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404 error page: The battle between SEO and useability
A 404 error page refers to the page displayed to a user when the page requested is no longer available on the website. 404 error pages provide a way of displaying a user-friendly message to a potential customer when a requested resource (page, image, video, etc) is temporarily unavailable on a website. A 404 error [...]
July 22, 2010
Put on Spindex, Consume More Social Media
Ah, Spindex … just one tiny vowel away from spandex. If you haven’t heard of Spindex yet, it’s a Microsoft FUSE Labs service that was rolled out in beta and announced at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in May.
Spindex is what many people would call an aggregator. FUSE Labs disagrees. In the video posted above, we find out it’s a “personal search engine for social media” that actually analyzes the content within your networks to find out what’s trending and who’s who among your entire social audience. Presumably, it brings you the information you’d be most interested in with regards to only your communities online.
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