I recently helped this nice lady out with her WordPress blog. She’s a dog lover (like me) and realtor.
Djuna Woods specializes in dog-friendly real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area and especially the Menlo Park area. I like the idea of people putting their efforts toward something specific like this. It’s smart, helpful, holistic and effective (especially online).
One of Chris Andersen’s “thousand of niches” for sure.
Big Rant.
Using HTML was once a smart move for findability online. Seems obvious to us now, but in case you don’t realize how stupid people were during the initial growth of the Web back in the late nineties, imagine this: People used to send cease and desist or take-down letters to owners of other sites because the other sites were linking to them.
“How dare you link to my site! You have no right to mention my existence and if you do not remove the link, I will sue you!”
In other words, we have a hard time looking beyond the current paradigm. Right now that paradigm is something like, in order to be findable, spend a lot of time working with the wording of your site’s copy, and make sure your metadata and you document structure are written to reflect what search results you want to win.
It’s funny though: Still, one of the best things you can do SEO wise is to have an RSS feed. And in case you didn’t realize this, RSS is a Semantic Standard. Apparently RSS 2.0 is a little convoluted (the adjustments made to the standard since it’s creation are not entirely in line with the Semantic Web school), but the original RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. Blah blah blah. Go look it up.
A little bit of Semantics is potentially way better for your site’s visibility than a whole lot Keyword tweaking.
FOAF, SIOC and the countless other Semantic Markups are a way for you to get your foot in the door now! A bit like the people that realized early on that they needed to have a website at all in the first place.
A little bit of early adoption of Semantics for your information could really pay off as we start moving toward a smarter Web. And we are moving toward a smarter Web. Who will be part of it when it reaches it’s tipping point for large scale adoption? Will you or your business? Or will you wait until some news report announces that the rest of the world has already gone semantic? I know I’ll be there. I already am.
Because what Search Engines are trying to do is provide users with access to what users are looking for, the process of SEO, when it consists of tweaking Keywords and/or document structure around, according to whatever the latest rumors are on what silly and temporary way Google seems to be currently making decisions about relevance, is always going to be flawed and as long as these SEO rumors are floating around, people will be trying to game the engines and in turn, people are collectively increasing the need for the engines to change their parameters, repeat, repeat, repeat. Search engines do not try to index sites based on the sites’ application of SEO techniques, engines index sites based on an attempt at creating an Information Architecture… This is hard to do because most website aren’t presented in a architecture-y way. So we’ve come full circle. Feeds are an architecture-y way to present your content, so it’s no wonder they help with SEO.
You might ask “So what’s next beyond RSS? How can I make Google love me even more?”
My answer is: “Stop lying to them with your SEO, and start helping them with Semantics”
And just remember what happened when a little bit of semantics got put into effect? Remember RSS? Well the blogosphere basically happened and in turn the “Live Web,” Podcasting and all that. Powerful stuff, and Web 2 is just the tip of the iceburg.
For more info, visit From Here To Awesome
Tim Berners-Lee recently posted on his blog about the idea of the “Giant Global Graph,” an alternate name for the Semantic Web which is also called “The Data Web” (as opposed to the “Document Web”) “The Web Of Data” (as opposed to the “Web of Documents”), and even “Web 3.0″
Cool quote from his article:
“The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.
People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over. People making web sites sometimes tried to legally prevent others from linking into the site, as they wanted complete control of the user experience, and they would not link out as they did not want people to escape. Until after a few months they realized how the web works. And the re-use kicked in. And the payoff started blowing people’s minds.
Letting your data connect to other people’s data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don’t have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.
It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.”
SEO, “Search Engine Optimization,” Beyond a Healthy Discipline is a process of trying to trick search engines into endowing your site with findability, as in getting onto the first page of search results for certain phrases. I say beyond a heathy discipline, because its more basic techniques are in line with usabilty, accessibilty, and being standards-compliant. Beyond that, SEO heads down a rickety spiral of uncool tricks, many of which are also considered (by people who consider these things) to be in the realm of “SMO” or Social Media Optimization. SMO often has to do with trying to game
folksonomies by posting and tagging things on sites like our dearly beloved Del.icio.us.
The following is a (very long) quote from Jason Calacanis who is currently the CEO of mahalo, formally co-founded Weblogs, Inc and used to work at Netscape. I like the original post too much to not just steal the whole thing and put it here.
Original Article: “Why people hate SEO… (and why SMO is bulls$%t)“
This video is so cheesy you have to think it’s a fake… but I don’t think it is. (Hat Tip)
The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman. These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not getting it organically so they hire the slimebuckets to game the system for them.
Note: There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means “gaming the system” to 90% of us.
Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you’re gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google closes the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.
PS – And to the SEO idiots trying to “take over my SeRP” on Google you’re proving my point exactly. Grow up.. the only thing you’re ever going to prove by trying to game my SeRP is that you’re low-class idiots.
PSS – This whole gaming of digg/Netscape/MySpace is being called SMO–social media optimization. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. Anyone who hires an SMO firm is an idiot. The whole point of social media is TO BE REAL NOT FAKE!!! Just be yourself and participate… that’s all it takes (and note, participation is not just putting in your own links, it’s voting/commenting on/submitting other people’s content too!).
(this is part of a PR campaign by the soap company Dove)(They’re re-packaging the idea of honesty and natural beauty and selling it back to us by associating their company with the concept)(brilliant)(I don’t mind because it’s good content)
I find it rather interesting that there’s been no substantial mainstream press about the fact that Four Eyed Monsters, which I fully and proudly admit I was involved with creating, is the first full length film to be available on YouTube!!
You’d think there’d some hype about this. “YouTube is moving in on the cable television market…” or “New Horizons for Independent Films…” or “[fill in the blank]…”
It doesn’t take a much more than an average understanding of the traditional ‘channels’ for feature-length content delivery (theatrical, cable, broadcast & satellite tv, dvd retail and rental stores, Netflix etc and of course, illegally, BitTorrent), to realize that this is kind of a big deal. Effin’ YouTube!
Of course, the flash-transcoded version of the film on YouTube is not nearly as high-quality as it could be, but still…An entire film, available for free, commercial-free, online… On YouTube… Surely more films will follow, and this ties in nicely with apple-tv’s approaching youtube offerings…
This IS a news story! But for some reason (fill in the obvious conspiracy theory), beyond a few popular blogs, this is decidedly a non-event.
I was thinking the independent film blogs would cover this at least (indiewire etc, correct me if they have and I’m wrong)…
So it’s 5am and I’m a little buzzed, sending out a message to the Blogosphere. I love you, Blogosphere!!!
I see Four Eyed Monsters’ YouTube debut as a cover-story, the cover-story that wasn’t there.
Sad. Arin & Susan could use the attention. Spout.com is paying them one dollar for everyone that signs up for Spout’s free service because of F.E.M… Visit spout.com/foureyedmonsters and send a little love (free love) to a couple of innovative and damn hard-working filmmakers!!
Loading...
2012 andrewapeterson.com. Proudly Powered by WordPress. Design Based on the "Twelve" Theme.