THE BACKGROUND

Reassuringly, Andrew pointed out that search engine optimization is:

• Not Rocket Science or Voodoo
• Not Free Traffic
• Not “Set It and Forget It”

Too true. Managing search is like caring for a useful pet, perhaps a sheep dog. You want to herd the audience to your content. Andrew called it a “funnel to capture intent.” His metaphor is probably better.

THE 3 PILLARS OF SEARCH

Many pundits try to explain the quantum mechanics of search, but Andrew’s summation seems as good as any. Ranking in search rests on three pillars:

1. Accessibility - Can the search engines find you?
2. Relevance - Who related is your content to a particular search?
3. Credibility - How can the search engines tell if you are an expert?

ACCESSIBILITY

Andrew touted the benefits of Sitemaps to create visibility for search engines. These are not the site maps that viewers may use to find pages on your website. Sitemaps (capital “S”) are code documents that index all your content and provide instructions for search engines.

Andrew noted that many tools exist online to help you generate Sitemaps including Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Sitemaps.org.

RELEVANCE

Want to boost relevance - take a look at the stats for your website or blog. What are the entry keywords - that is, what did people search for that led them to you?

Focus your content on the keywords and concepts most dear to your audience. Use your keywords liberally - in links, headlines, body copy and elsewhere.

Write for humans, not search robots, and you will also keep the audience you attract.

CREDIBILITY

Links from other websites to your content, also called incoming links, build cred with the search ‘bots. One sure fire method to build incoming links to to circulate your content widely.

For example, we’ll repost this blog on ActiveRain, the portal for real estate professionals. We also use Feedburner and other services to notify all the search engines when we post and distribute the content to blog aggregators everywhere.

Finally, Andrew mentioned another of our favorite things: deploying an AddThis button on web pages and blog posts. AddThis and other social buttons give your audience a wealth of ways to share and save your content, including bookmarks, email, Facebook and Twitter.

All this enables more sharing of your content and more external links back to you.

SLIDE SHOW PRESENTATION

Andrew conveniently included his slides in an online slideshow.

WordCamp is great for bloggers of all stripes. Thanks to Matt Walters for organizing WCRVA.

Look for more details soon about WordCamp RDU for folks in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

One of the buzz topics last week was Security & Safety. The issue is URL shortening services.

WHAT IS A URL SHORTENER?

Some URLs run to dozens of characters, making them impractical to use. URL shortening services transform long URLs into short ones, thus:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

becomes

http://bit.ly/jphUs

Shortened URLs are particularly important on character-limited status services like Twitter (140 characters max).

4 PROBLEMS AND RISKS OF SHORTENERS

Some shorteners are built in to services like Twhirl. Most can be surfed up on the web or added to your toolbar. Very convenient. But what are you getting? And what are the risks?

1. Transparency - I like to see where I’m going before I click.

2. Who’s monitoring my traffic? By introducing a third party between the user and destination, the issue of trust becomes important. Or, as Ronald Reagan used to say, trust but verify.

3. What if the service goes dead? What happens to my links? All of us use links in our content. It would be bad if those links failed because the service provider went belly up. Is there backup of all transformed links?

4. Bogus redirects - All of us get rickrolled once in a while, but shortened URLs potentially open the door to all kinds of click fraud.

THE SOLUTION: USE BIT.LY

Dozens of services have sprung up, in part to serve the booming Twitterati. Danny Sullivan does an in-depth review in SearchEngineLand.

The short answer: Bit.ly. It’s safe and secure. It also has a couple of very cool features:

LINK STATS - I love stats. Now you can have stats on how often and who clicks on your links. Guess what? This can help shape your content to more accurately match your audience.

PREVIEW PLUGIN - This beta plugin for Firefox gives you a cool Flash popup preview of the destination before you click. Voila! Click fraud defeated.

MORE INFO

Got more questions about URL shorteners or security or using social networks for business? Contact us.

Add-me.com, a site devoted to search and web tools, has a free online link checker. Just enter the url of your home page and Broken Link Checker delivers a report of active and broken links.

The amount of time the tool takes to process your site depends upon the size of your site. For a site of reasonably modest proportions (50 pages or less), the tool might take 20-30 seconds.

You can also try the W3C link checker, but it’s a little more geeky.

For some time now, we’ve been saving the best Web 2.0 sites to the social bookmarking portal del.icio.us. It works like this:

1. We come upon a site we like and click on a link or icon in our browser to “post to delicious.”
2. A little window pops up and we can add notes or keywords or even rename the link (some people give their web pages unfortunate names like “home,” so we change ‘em).
3. Presto - a new link is added to our collection.

We have over 250 links; more than 40 of them are tagged “Web 2.0.” They include design sites, color sites, good examples of Web 2.0 business sites, online tools and touchstones every modern enterprise should know.

Is it really the best collection of Web 2.0 links ever? Well, we’re working on it. If you have any great sites to share, post it in the comments or email us.

———–

Start your own social bookmarking site and share it with others:

Del.icio.us

BASIC WEB 2.0 FOR REALTORS

We’re always going on and on about Web 2.0 for Business. It sounds good in theory, but how does it translate for specific business needs?

Julie’s a Realtor®, so the first thing to tackle was pulling in the MLS listings for her area. No biggie. Basically, it’s a snippet of code you can include in a web page along with a unique ID. See it here.

Next, we bolted on a WordPress blog with an old-time theme by GetTemplate. Don’t forget Askimet for security and Google XML Site Map for search. Naturally enough, realtors have a lot to talk about and share, so we re-published the blog on the home page as html using Feedburner.

ADVANCED WEB 2.0 FOR REALTORS

Here’s where it gets interesting.

• Del.icio.us Feed

Julie’s all about knowing the area. The best restaurant - ask Julie. A place to hike? Julie. So how could we build a links page that would be easy for a busy realtor to update? The answer: set up a del.icio.us site for Julie, grab the feed and re-publish it as her Community Info page.

Kudos to George Gumpert for nailing this down. We really love this feature - Julie’s already using it to help differentiate herself from her competition.

• Web Video Testimonial

We used our favorite MiniDV camera for web video, shot outside and plugged in a mic we borrowed from the band. Video can be so much more persuasive than text on the page - see the video for yourself.

STUFF FOR EVERY BUSINESS

• Google Analytics - Every website for business should have Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s fascinating, it’s vital.

• SEO - it pays to get it right with Meta Tags when it comes to the relevancy with your page text. We like SEO Analysis Tool by SEO Workers.

There ya have it - the birth of a new empire. Thanks again Julie!

se man tics - noun 1.a. the study of meaning.
- Dictionary.com

When is a particular design choice simple and functional and when does it crossover into being self-absorbed minimalism? We’re talking about web page tabs.

We’ve noticed two schools of thought regarding the coloration of web page tabs:

1. Tabs that show a change to indicate a live page
2. Tabs that don’t show a change to indicate a live page

WMBDB (we may be dinosuars but), we like to know what page we are on. We don’t like to hunt around for basic info - is it in the address bar? in the title bar?

SO: Tabs which change to show a live page are simple and functional. Tabs which leave a viewer searching for the information are just minimal.

Google and other purveyors of search are notoriously secretive about how they crawl the web. But the basic parameters are well known.

1. When you first post your website, you can expect the search engines to find and index you within 4-6 weeks.
2. At the time of your initial indexing, the search engine tells itself to crawl your site again, say in another six weeks.
3. If nothing has changed, the ‘bot may instruct itself not to revisit your site for a greater period of time, say 12 weeks.

Static (unchanging) websites invite a self-fulfilling decline in search ranking.

If nothing’s changed in 12 weeks, when will the ‘bots return? 20 weeks? 24?

We offer no examples here, but one needn’t look far.

Dynamic websites (call them evolutionary or organic if you like) change and grow over time. In the B2B space, look at OR-Live, a web portal for physicians. In the B2C market, look at Gayout, an international travel & leisure site by Andre Gayout (he coined the term “nouvelle cuisine” back in the early 1970’s).

Thanks again to our friend Gary for hipping us to one more reason why all small-to-medium enterprises need to have a dynamic, Web 2.0 site.

del.icio.us/hal990/web2.0

In case you’re not familiar with del.icio.us, it’s a site where you can collect and share bookmarks. Simple, functional and useful. Very Web 2.0 in it’s own modest way.

Of course, any attempt to create a definitive Top Ten list of Web 2.0 examples is probably futile. Certainly subjective. But we think these examples showcase a lot of different looks, functionality and audiences, including Last.fm, Skype and the Genetic Engineering News. All good.

BTW - there’s actually 11 links, not 10. It’s one louder, isn’t it?