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SEO News and IdeasA Conference for Self-Made Internet Millionaires 30 May 2009 at 4:39pm Posted by Stephan Spencer My insane speaking schedule has made it difficult for me to keep this blog up-to-date, so apologies for that. This year I've spoken at Internet Retailer Web Design, SMX West, Elite Retreat, AMA SEO Training Series, Web 2.0 Expo, Shop.org Marketing Workshop, Catalogue Exchange, eMetrics Summit, and now, in a few days, SMX Advanced. However, I am going to get back up to a normal posting frequency here quite soon -- especially now that my co-authors and I have finished the draft of The Art of SEO which is coming out later this year (publisher is O'Reilly). One conference in particular I want to call out as being truly remarkable -- the Elite Retreat, put on by the self-made Internet multimillionaire Jeremy Schoemaker (aka "Shoemoney"). It was an intimate gathering: Jeremy capped the attendance at 35 registrants. Many of the attendees were successful internet millionaires in their own right and were easily qualified to take the stage and offer their own session chock full of content. I felt quite privileged to be amongst them, to learn from them, as well as share some of my expertise and experience with SEO. Also in attendance was my daughter, Chloe, owner of the Neopets Fanatic blog, who had an amazing time. She learned a lot about affiliate marketing; but even more importantly, she became inspired by the attendees’ successes. One of the first things she did when she got back home was to share her thoughts on the Elite Retreat with readers of the Huffington Post (where she has a column). It was a fitting follow-up to her earlier post about conferences being real-world learning for kids. The super affiliates really have a secret sauce; it is so much more than hard work. They know the right places to buy traffic. They know the right people to talk to get the best offers and the best payouts. They are able to do deals that the rest of us couldn't hope for. The sessions covered SEO, paid search, affiliate marketing (of course!), conversion, website acquisitions, and more. Day 2 consisted of one-on-one tactical brainstorming sessions with your top choices of the previous day's speakers (along with some concurrent session presentations). I was busy that whole day giving one-on-ones. At the end of it (Day 3), we had a field trip to the Facebook headquarters. We got some face time (no pun intended) with some of Facebook employees who were surprisingly giving with information. Unfortunately, NDAs from Facebook and The Elite Retreat prevent me from going into any details whatsoever. The price tag for the Elite Retreat is steep, it's $5000, but it’s absolutely a worthwhile investment. I heartedly endorse it and think you'll find it to be one of the best conferences you've ever attended. I don’t know if it could rival the TED conference, where you'd get to hobnob with folks like Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But of course the Elite Retreat is a different kind of conference from that. I am hopeful to attend TED one of these years (it's invitation-only). I don't know that I'd call the Elite Retreat a conference. It is more of a think tank than a bunch of interesting talking heads. And it's a peer group. The alumni get together over the phone every week to share successes, challenges and questions in what they refer to as the Elite Retreat Mastermind Group. There's value to be had at traditional conferences as well, of course. Don't stop going to them. But you should also add an event like the Elite Retreat to your conference travel schedule. The New Age of Computational Engines 24 May 2009 at 12:03am Posted by Stephan Spencer I have to say, I am impressed with Wolfram Alpha. I think it's a game changer. It provides a powerful new way of interacting with the large repositories of data available on the Web. For instance, instead of googling for "number of google employees" (incidentally, it isn't until the 4th result down that you get the answer), then googling for "number of yahoo employees", then doing the math to compute the ratio, you would simply input into Wolfram Alpha "google/yahoo employees". (The answer is 1.487:1, if you're curious.) Welcome to the brave new world of computational engines. What's a computational engine, you ask? The best definition I can think of is: an online data mining and analysis tool. What can a computational engine do? A lot. It can segment the population by gender ("u.s. male population, u.s. female population"). It can tell you what that ratio is ("u.s. male population / u.s. female population"). It can graph the growth of the U.S. population over the last several decades ("population u.s."). And it can calculate population density in the U.S. ("population density u.s."). It's a simple matter to do head-to-head comparisons and generate comparative charts. Just separate the terms with commas. For example, type in "google, yahoo" and you'll get a bunch of charts and graphs comparing the two companies' financials, stock performance and price history. And wow can you drill down into the data easily. For example, start with the query "google.com" and you'll see all sorts of pertinent facts about the site and the company. To see a report of all the subdomains of google.com, click on the "Subdomains" link. From there you can click on "More subdomains" to get a more exhaustive list: I just wish I could have typed "subdomains of google.com" or "google.com subdomains" to get to the answer. Neither of those queries works. Wolfram Alpha can even tell you how long you'll live. I queried "life expectancy age 38 male u.s." and it returned 77.54 years. Then I queried my birthdate and learned that was 38.45 years ago. Then "77.54 - 38.45 years" returned not only 39.09 years, but also 14,268 days -- which feels a lot longer to me! Finally, "39.09 years from now" gives the time and date of my demise: 5:31:06 pm CDT on Thursday June 25, 2048." I'm loading that in my iPhone's calendar with an alarm 10 minutes beforehand, so at least I won't get caught offguard. I also tried "(77.54 - 38.34) years from now" but Wolfram Alpha choked on that one. However "now + (77.54-38.34) years" did work. If you're curious which countries have the longest life expectancy (or shortest), type in "life expectancy". Here's the answer: Perhaps I can buy myself a bit of extra time by moving to Macau? Exactly how much time is anybody's guess. Oh wait, Wolfram Alpha can answer this too! Not only is the output interesting, the presentation of it is really slick, with great-looking charts and graphs. Note that the charts are rendered as images, not as text. If you want to copy and paste the data within the chart, simply click on it and a "Copyable plaintext" popup box will display. I find the overly critical comparisons with Google unfair. Remember, Wolfram Alpha is a computational engine, not a search engine. Comparing Wolfram Alpha to Google is like comparing a cell phone to a TV remote. Sure a cell phone and TV remote may both be about the same size and they both have buttons, but the functions they perform are vastly different. And it's very early days. We need to cut them some slack. Yes it is frustrating to get so many "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input" messages, but when Google debuted in 1997 it was pretty rough too, right? Watch Stephen Wolfram's screencast demonstration before trying to use the engine. Otherwise it'll frustrate you when you get so many failed queries. One piece of feedback I would offer to the engineers at Wolfram Alpha is to provide segmentation options to users. In other words, suggest the various ways the requested data can be sliced and diced. For example, the following queries all work properly: life expectancy male life expectancy age 38 life expectancy u.s. life expectancy u.s. age 38 male ldl 100 nonsmoker age 38 male u.s. but these queries do not: life expectancy nonsmoker life expectancy ldl 150 life expectancy wisconsin life expectancy wisconsin age 38 ldl 150 male nonsmoker even though Wolfram Alpha is properly interpreting the syntax of the query and its components ("life expectancy", "male", "age 38", "u.s.", "nonsmoker", "wisconsin", and "ldl 100"). I kept running into trouble when I attempted to further refine the life expectancies from U.S. residents to Wisconsin residents, from males to non-smoking males with slightly high cholesterol levels. Teasing out subgroups within a population could be facilitated by an intuitive visual interface for viewing and selecting from the available segmentation properties. Or by better error messages, like: "Life expectancy data is not available segmented by state, only by country. Please try a broader query, like life expectancy u.s.". Talking Like a Google Insider 21 May 2009 at 3:44am Posted by Stephan Spencer Using Google engineers' terminology will help you look like a search industry insider. For example, talk about "signals" rather than SEO "factors". Describe weak, undifferentiated content as "thin" (as in a "thin affiliate"). Work "canonicalization" into a sentence at least once every 5 minutes. Share your enthusiasm for "shingles" (yeah, NOT the disease). Speak in TLAs (three letter acronyms) like QDD (query deserves diversity) and QDF (query deserves freshness). And so on. At Google's Searchology conference this month, some new buzzwords were bandied about. Here are a few pulled from this post and this post by Matt Cutts: Chameleon = internal Google codename for the algo that does mid-page suggestions (like search for "labor" and get in the middle of the SERPs "See results for labor and delivery") Spellmeleon = internal Google codename for the algo that preempts the first natural result with 2 results from what Google believes is the correct spelling of your query (like search for "ipodd" and get "Did you mean: ipod Top 2 results shown" Google Squared = a not yet launched Google Labs project that returns search results in a structured format (i.e. as a spreadsheet). Search for "small dogs" and get a matrix with breeds, descriptions, sizes, weights, origins, etc. Rich snippets = search listings with addition info in the snippet, such as star rating and number of reviews. Google gets this extra data hReview and hCard microformats - simply put, it's semantic, agreed-upon markup in your HTML pages. Kinda reminiscent of Yahoo's SearchMonkey. More about it here. (Incidentally, Dries - of Drupal fame - has an interesting take on what this could mean for SEO.) Canonical Tag Not Yet Reliable 20 May 2009 at 12:49am Posted by Stephan Spencer I'm a big fan of the new canonical tag (er, element, to be more technically correct). It's a powerful tool for dealing with duplicate content. But it's not exactly reliable yet. Google wants us use it as if it were. Unquestionably, it's a signal. But it can be ignored, even when it should clearly by obeyed. Case in point: Northernsafety.com. Many thousands of non-canonical URLs are indexed. For example click on some of the listings on this SERP and compare the URLs you were led to by Google... Arrrgh... Google Still Isn't Recognizing Underscores as Word Separators in URLs 19 Apr 2009 at 1:09pm Posted by Stephan Spencer Although it isn't a primary "signal" like the title tag or anchor text, keywords in your URLs can help with your Google rankings. But ONLY if Google can see the actual words in the URL. Turns out that separating the words in a URL with hyphens allowed Google to see the individual words, but using underscores did not. And this, unfortunately, continues to be the case today. Not quite two years ago at WordCamp, Matt Cutts made the following statement that Google was imminently going to be trea... "Thin Slicing", a Powerful SEO Tactic 30 Jan 2009 at 6:50pm Posted by Stephan Spencer In my Search Engine Land column last week, I describe a powerful SEO tactic that we at Netconcepts call "thin slicing". The term originally comes from Malcolm Gladwell (as used in his best seller Blink) and has no origins in the online world. Gladwell uses the term in the context of "rapid cognition"; where one makes snap judgments in their field of expertise. Surprisingly, those snap judgments are often times more accurate than considered opinion, i.e. assessments that have been labored ov... Ferrit, RIP 30 Jan 2009 at 5:46pm Posted by Stephan Spencer New Zealand comparison shopping engine Ferrit is no more. They blew through an incredible amount of money, had their day in the sun, and now they are gone. I'm sad about that. Not because they were a past client of Netconcepts (back when they had money). But because they were a comparison shopping engine that had a shot at making it - of successfully crossing over into the mainstream. Indeed, much of New Zealand knew of Ferrit, due in large part to the series of funny TV commercials they be... Roomba Rider 24 Jan 2009 at 9:07pm Posted by Stephan Spencer Ending the week with such a deadly serious post (after all I was talking about your mortality), I thought I'd better lighten the mood a bit. Enjoy... Roomba robot vacuum? Check. Cat? Check. Roomba-riding cat? Doh! I want one of them! (watch the vid) Maybe I can teach Hazel to ride my Roomba. I'll have to get a new battery for it first. In fact, I'd probably need a pile of replacement batteries. Roomba would go through batteries pretty quick with Hazel atop it!  About Susanna | Testimonials |
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