Archive for 2009

Creative Commons image by ahisgett

No matter if you like it or not when the old year fades away and the new year arrives most of us think about the past and the future.

  • Was it a successful year?
  • Where did we succeed, where did we fail?
  • Which of the mistakes do we want to overcome next year?

Most people tend to plan for the upcoming year. Plenty like to be very specific about these plans so they come up with new year’s resolutions they want to fulfill. We’re in the SEO industry are not exempt from it.

Christmas isn’t Christmas without someone butchering a much-loved song to make a marketing point and this year it’s our turn. Brace yourselves for the SEOptimise Twelve Days of Christmas Special…
12 Days of Christmas

Image credit: krisdecurtis

iranian-cyber-army

Why does the “Iranian Cyber Army” use the red star, a communist symbol from the soviet era?

It’s Twitter Friday again! Welcome back to my weekly column. Apparently Twitter or rather its DNS got hacked. DNS is that little thingy that assigns real Internet addresses (like Twitter.com) to those so called IP addresses or rather numbers websites hide behind. This is what we know. The rest of the story is quite questionable though.

To be honest I don’t believe the “Iranian Cyber Army” is real, like there is an organization of hackers behind it.

Also the footprints they’ve left neither look like real hackers nor like real Iranians. I’ll explain why.

robert-scoble-alex-de-carvalho

Robert Scoble by Alex de Carvalho

In the attention economy the attention rich win over those who get less attention. As controversy and ignorance creates more attention than common sense and boring expertise we have to deal with the phenomenon of SEO bashing every now and then. People pointing fingers saying “look at that, how stupid they are bashing SEO again” create even more buzz.

Web 2.0 celebrities can use this attention gap in order to push their own interests. Failed entrepreneurs like Jason Calacanis have done that in the past repeatedly to ride the wave of negative hype. So this time I was a little bit astounded to hear it from Robert Scoble the web pundit everybody seems to listen to.

Many people read a huge amount of blog posts each day in order to learn and stay ahead of the game in SEO. I used to read loads of posts myself from the industry leading blogs all of the time. But I think you get to a point where, despite it being great to know what’s going on out there, there’s probably only a very small percentage of this information which directly benefits how you do your job. This post from Todd Malicoat about the important things which change in SEO is definitely worth a read.

Bloggers
Image credit: Flickr

I’m certainly not saying don’t subscribe to these blogs – if you’re learning about search marketing you definitely should – but I’ve found that I now skim over far more posts than I used to in order to grab any information which I may find useful, new or interesting. One of the main reasons for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and interacting on sites like Twitter and Sphinn is often to build relationships and a reputation online.

December time is predictions time. Here are my predictions for PPC advertising next year. Bookmark this post so you can have a laugh at the end of 2010 (or bow down before my mighty foresight).

2010
Image credit: Flickr

1. CPCs will rise

A pretty safe bet to begin with. The recession, apparently, is coming to an end and more and more businesses are getting involved with PPC advertising. I believe that some verticals are already saturated; those that aren’t will see a large rise in CPC bids

Twitter Global Traffic Stats 2009

In this week’s Twitter Friday column I want to dissect the news that Twitter traffic is dropping for a few months in a row. Is it true?

Hosted by imgur.com

Google changes faster than you can blink right now. Just some buzzwords that will bug you in 2010:

  1. Google Caffeine
  2. Google Real Time search
  3. Google Personalized search results
  4. Google Living Stories
  5. Google Phone

I could go on like for a while. It’s not my intention to confuse you even more though. I want to shed some light on the near future of Google, search and SEO. It’s a daunting task as I’m overwhelmed as well.

Thus I picked 30 resources on Google, search & SEO changes in 2010 from around the search industry and some main stream sources.

Jonathan Allen’s been behind the camera again with another great video from Search Engine Strategies. This follows up from the very popular SES London video earlier in the year with the latest 50 SEO’s from SES Chicago.

Some great comments from lots of search guys and Dave Naylor is very funny, representing the british contingent!

value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RMcW75JVjT0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"> type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340">

Plus it’s SEOptimise’s Christmas party day today so we had to have a Santa themed post! :D

Claiming a Twitter profile name seems to be the new domain squatting, so I thought it would be interesting to see how many top brands have claimed what would be their first choice Twitter handle.


Image credit: Flickr

So for example, Sky would presumably like to have claimed twitter.com/sky – but missed out on this to another user.

← Older Entries