SEO Eclectic – Web, Google, Etc.

A friend of mine always says “SEO is a very deep rabbit hole.” I find that to be more and more true the more I learn about Search Engine Optimization and the millions of ways you can spend your time trying to optimize you or your clients sites. My team and I have recently started looking into writing guest blog posts and what all that entails.

Guest Blog Posting Background
Guest blog posting was inspired by how hard it is to blog regularly. (Look at the consistency, or should I say inconsistency of how much I blog here). Bloggers are always looking for more content and more ways to spin that content as something new and interesting to their readers. Featuring a guest blogger solves both problems:

• more content: the main blog writer gets a day off from writing
• something new and interesting: the blog gets fresh, interesting content from a new perspective

Usually as a thank you to the guest poster, the guest is allowed to include a sign off reference to their own blog or website, link and all.

Our Journey to Guest Posting Oz
We don’t necessarily need the content but we could definitely use more exposure to readers of other blogs and the gratuitous links pointing back at our site. So our journey is to become guest blog posters. I quickly realized that the hardest part about guest blog posting was finding blogs to post to, then upon finding them, figuring out how to contact the author. As each blog became it’s own research project, I started to think the Guest Post idea was not worth the time involved.

Then I heard an interview on WebmasterRadio.fm with Ann Smarty about her site: MyBlogGuest.com guest blog posting community – an open forum for bloggers to connect and share content ideas and unique/original posts with each other.

Regular bloggers go there to post guest authoring opportunities when they need a break from writing, and writers go there to earn valuable content placement in front of high-readership blog audiences. What a great free place to connect with other bloggers – thanks Ann!

He got 4.8 million views on a video (see above) of his son crying because he wanted to jam out to Single Ladies by Beyonce.

Then he got boat-loads of people to vote for that video, garnering a spot in the list of People’s Choice Awards Winners for Favorite Viral Video Star.

Now if that’s not a great combination of timing, SEO, social marketing, and cute-crying-kid-anomolyism, I don’t know what is. Well done Carlos Whittaker.

As I went to login to my Google Places account this morning, I arrived at a very different place than I normally do. A completely redesigned landing page with a big bold graphic and an invitation to “Discover Yours – Local recommendations powered by you and your friends” and a button asking me to Start Rating now with Hotpot. So Google has entered their offering into the local-check-in-review-social-community-ratings race.  Took them longer than the others, but here’s to hoping it’s better than the others (not like the Nexus One Google phone).

Will Google Hot Pot (or Hotpot) incorporate Google’s mobile check-in app SCVNGR?  Probably.

And is the choice of the name really just a coincidence given the recent California legislature voted down, to legalize marijuana? Or is Google keyword stuffing?

You be the judge, but one thing is certain – Google maps has changed.

I was catching up on some reading, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and found something he wrote that made me laugh.

Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. :-)

I think my favorite part was the apologetic smiley face at the end. Wow.

Way to point the finger Matt. Don’t worry I’m not offended. It is funny, though, that advances in search technology have brought us farther than users can even appreciate. Are we (meaning the web and technology – obviously not people) going too fast? Isn’t it sometimes beneficial to take a second to think about your search as you type it in? Or maybe just to breath in between keystrokes, haha. I’m starting to really like Bing’s slogan – “What has search overload done to us?”

So if every time I type a letter into the Google search box it brings up a search. And each additional letter brings up a new search… what’s telling Google the difference between my normal search behavior and automated search result requests coming from a program or computer?

Apparently nothing…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’d say neither. He’s just doing his job. He made a guest post announcement Wednesday, the source of which – Google Instant Search – has created quite a panic among SEO professionals and noobs alike. I even got an email from my boss checking to be sure I was up on the news. I just wanted to post a few thoughts… Read the rest of this entry »

So the Bing Yahoo search extravaganza has begun. Bing now provides all the search results for Yahoo’s searchers – both paid and organic. The funny thing is I haven’t tried it out yet. I mean, there’s not much to try out – Bing’s results have always been there. But regardless, I needed to see it with my own eyes. So I went to yahoo.com and put in a search (after being distracted by an article on the World’s Fastest runner, Usain Bolt and his dreams of playing soccer) for the term ‘movers’ and got this:

I went back to the yahoo.com homepage 2 more times, trying the same search query Read the rest of this entry »