Tod Maffin knows how to make Google sing. And he shares his tips for using Google on the Inside the CBC blog.
Tod is posting one video every day this week. He has already posted Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Watch for Part 4 and Part 5 to appear on the Inside the CBC blog Thursday and Friday.
Following his keynote, John Battelle returned for a panel with Tris Hussey and Dave Taylor on Blogging and SEO Strategies.
Dave Taylor kicked off the the presentation with some tips:
SEO Best Practices.
A great place to learn how to do this is on Google’s Webmaster Central.
Is it worthwhile to include keywords in URLs? Notice that when you do a search, if the term is located in the URL it will be highlighted.
Two useful tests to determine that you are showing up in search engines is to type into the google search bar “site:[your domain]” and “link:[your domain]”.
Persistence is also a virtue from the perspective of the search engines. So, when beginning a new blog, recognize that you must blog for a sustained period of time before the search engines will start to rank you.
By installing code from HitTail, you can track the keywords that people search in coming to your page.
John Battelle delivered the Friday afternoon keynote address on Blogs, Search and the Changing Media Landscape.
“Why am I standing in front of you? I went to Berkeley ;-)” The story: Wired. Hotwired. Industry Standard. The Standard. The 4th. quarter of 2000 – out of a job. Back to Berkeley. The Search. Searchblog. Web 2.0 Conference. Federated Media Publishing.
The Internaet Economy is the third wave of tech and culture.
Search is still in its infancy. We use the command prompt/search bar. But the big difference is that we can enter plain language. And that’s a big thing.
Web 2.0 principles:
Search rules.
When it comes to marketing, search has provided an entirely new catchment point for marketing. We declare our intent in the search box. Then search organizes the data and presents it to us. In the old media days, we would buy commercial space on programs/media drawing a demographic. Now, with search we can buy keywords – expressions of intent. Intent drives content.
Search drives content to social media sites … where consumers expect all participatns to understand the mores of those environments. And they expect businesses to know what they want.
Marketing becomes a dialogue, not a dictation of one to another.
Traditional media and marketing is ruled by distribution: if you get that, you get attention. Now, attention is not controlled by distributors, it’s controlled by the consumer. There are now new centers of attention: search and social media platforms.
Content is once again king, and the landing page is queen. All businesses must join the Point-to Economy (links = votes = attention).
The promise of the web is the ability to know who you customers are and what they want and then draw them into converation. This requires business to think differently about retrn on investment. Marketing is about more than satisfying demand. It’s also about creating it. And how do you measure that?
New advertising campaigns must recognize all of these factors and break out of the old mindset (no more dinosaurs, Microsoft!)
In the wake of David Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere post, a number of thoughtful commentators are challenging Sifry’s estimate of 
50 million blogs. A principal line of argument revolves around whether the Technorati numbers create a distorted, inflated picture by including inactive blogs. Some argue that the actual size of the active blogosphere is much smaller, perhaps closer to 1.6 million blogs.
It is important to gain a better understanding of the actual participation in the blogosphere by developing a more sophisticated, refined data on the distribution and actual behaviour of bloggers.
Having said that, some of the discussion reminds me of the debate that political pollsters often engage in. They focus on differences in the results between their competing polls and argue at length about whose methodology is superior.
On the other hand, political pros – the people who actually use the polls – assume from the start that methodology will vary between pollsters and that these different methodologies will yield different results at any given time. What they focus on is the trends over time between polls with known and consistent methodology. This analysis enables them to understand what is really going on and to look for the drivers of behaviour, not simply the manifestation of that behaviour.
When I look at David Sifry’s (or anybody’s) stats, I look for consistency of methodology and trends over time. The ongoing addition of new bloggers. The accelaration of the discussion through both new posts and comments. And the understanding that many bloggers post rarely or abandon their blogs altogether. That’s the real value for me.
And of course, once I’ve drawn everything I can from his results, I will look for other data sets that will show me other things (e.g. active blogs.)
So, I hope the conversation continues. I will be an active follower of it (and occasional participant.) But let’s remember, there is real value in following Sifry’s results over time, regardless of whether we agree with the details of the snapshot at any particular time.
Munjal Shah has posted some screen shots of Riya 2.0.
Munjal’s vision is for Riya 2.0 to be a
web-wide (public) visual search engine that uses face and image similarity to search the web. We are calling this new kind of public web search: Visual Search. Why? Because you will be able to search by clicking on / submitting a photo instead of having to type in text.
The screen shots suggest that Riya will, in fact, enable searches both by image and by text.
Munjal’s post today indicates that face similarity and image similarity will not be turned on at the outset. This is the the crunch capability. We’ll have to wait and see how this works in order to know whether Munjal can fully realize his vision.
Good luck Munjal. I for one am looking forward to using Riya 2.0.
Munjal Shah, the CEO of Riya, recounts how the company decided on a major change of strategic direction, from photo uploading to search – less than six weeks after launch. And along the way, he offers some observations about the prospects for web 2.0 start-ups.
I’m not sure where the story will end. But for anyone who has started a business, the telling of the story is thrilling.
Monday Poll: Should PR firms estabish dedicated blogging practices?
Morgan McLintic asks: “Should PR firms set up specific practice areas to provide ‘blog relations’ or ‘social networking’ services? …. Or should all PR consultants be blog savvy?”
Blog Optimization – Make Your Blog Stand Out
Thanks to BL Ochman for pointing out this great post on Search Engine Journal.
Media Orchard has pointed out that the PubSub stats are wildly inaccurate.
I noticed a few weeks ago that ProPR’s own stats on PubSub were wonky. In fact, PubSub stopped registering any entries or outlinks on February 24.
I wrote to PubSub about this and last week received the following response:
Hi Joseph:
We have pinpointed the problem.
Thank you for alerting us to this issue with LinkRanks. You have indeed stumbled on a problem with our rolling historical data, which are maintained in separate tables to help off-load our database. Somehow an error has snuck into those tables. We plan to just rebuild those convenience tables from our daily information and the error(s) you are seeing with historical counters should go away. This will take about a week to fix
We are also currently experiencing high loads as a result of explosive growth. Thus, some inlinks may not show up as expected. We are working hard to solve the problem and expect to have it resolved as quickly as possible.
Regards,
Steven
Constantin Basturea’s PR List is a great way to help build a sense of community. But to do this, it has to be based on reliable traffic stats.
Let’s hope that PubSub is able to resolve this problem – and quickly.
I’ve come across a couple post that I found very useful in understanding how to optimize my WordPress blog.
DYI Search Engine Optimization
Soup to nuts advice from Lorelle on WordPress covering the basics of optimizing code, keywords and extending through promotion and analysis of site traffic and competitors.
Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips
Nifty coding tips for better permalinks, page titles and post titles from seventeen year old(!) Fintan Darragh
Are there other sources of useful advice on SEO for WordPress that you would recommend?
Ted Demopoulos talks about his experience in the Google Sandbox – “a purgatory like state, in which a new or penalized site is spidered by the Google bots, accumulates backlinks and page rank, but does not appear in Google searches for appropriate keywords. . . .”
Ted reports that four months after its launch, Blogging for Business is finally out of the sandbox and that he is beginning to receive visitors through the search engine.
His advice to new bloggers: “How do you “get out of the sandbox?” Wait, there’s nothing else you can do.”