Now this is really cool. According to Yahoo News, Sweden plans to open an embassy in the virtual world of Second Life. For those of you who are not familiar with it Second Life has more than 3 million "inhabitants". We first blogged about Second Life in December after SES in Chicago. The success of this VR world is an incredibly … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2007
Dennis Mortensen on Analytics and Click Fraud
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dennis Mortensen of IndexTools. IndexTools is an analytics vendor based in Hungary. We are currently evaluating their tool as part of a study we are doing comparing 6 different analytics packages. Dennis has been heavily involved in the analytics business since 1996. Back then the model … [Read more...]
Are you below the radar?
Are you underneath the radar? Do you plan to stay there? This is a really good question to ask when you are thinking about your SEO strategy. Let me talk a little bit about why. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today. He is doing the webmaster work for a local day care center on a volunteer basis. This friend is pretty … [Read more...]
Increase the number of pages Yahoo indexes on your site
Recently we had the chance to speak with Tim Mayer about Yahoo's Search Builder product. Search Builder is the vertical search engine offering from Yahoo, that competes with products such as Google Custom Search Engines, Live Search Macros, and Eurekster. In the discussion, Tim reveals that sites that use Search Builder on their … [Read more...]
High Quality Relevant Links and the Trust Box
I have seen two great posts about link building in the past few days. One of these is by Jim Boykin on the limitations of link bait, and the other is by Eric Ward at the Search Engine Land blog about the "Circle of Trust". Jim focuses on the importance of getting high quality links from relevant authority sites. Doing this takes … [Read more...]
Yahoo Not Showing Site Titles as Search Result Titles
Over at Webmasterworld, they are discussing a situation where Yahoo is not always using the a web page's title tag as the title it shows in it's search results. Barry Schwartz also provides some good data on this situation at Search Engine Land. It's quite easy to spot. Once you do a search, if you see a result that is all in … [Read more...]
Interview of Target Marketing’s Jim Sterne
Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Sterne, President of Target Marketing. Jim is recognized as one of the leaders in the world of web analytics, and is also President of the Web Analytics Association. As for the rest of his background, Jim has spent more than 20 years selling and marketing technical products. He began … [Read more...]
Domain Age and Rankings
Barry Schwartz picked up on a thread over at WebMasterWorld. The thread was started by Brett Tabke, and discusses the affect of domain age on search engine rankings. In it Brett suggests that it's a top 5 or top 10 factor in rankings. That's lofty territory! However, I can confirm from my own experience that domain age is a major … [Read more...]
Interview with Urchin Founder, Brett Crosby
We recently had the opportunity to talk analytics with Google's Brett Crosby. Brett was one of the founders or Urchin, the company Google acquired, and whose software they rebranded as Google Analytics. Brett emphasized that Google's approach to analytics is to focus on easy deployment and ease of use, with an analytics package … [Read more...]
Eric Enge and Eurekster’s Grant Ryan Discuss Social Search
Grant is Chief Scientist and a co-Founder of Eurekster, Inc. Grant founded the Internet search company Global Brain.net in 1998 (acquired by NBCi, now operating as enterprise search company S.L.I. Systems) and social networking company Real Contacts in 2001. He is a director of the New Zealand Government's $150 million Venture … [Read more...]
Basic Tip for Getting High Value Links
Here is a nice post from Jennifer Laycock about Link Building as Relationship Building. Jennifer uses a personal experience as an example. The example features a woman who contacted her and built a relationship before asking for anything. This is right on the money. Here is a simple summary of the process: Focus on high value … [Read more...]
Page Rank Update Underway
Matt Cutts has confirmed that there is a Google Page Rank update underway. In addition, data returned by site:, link:, and info: commands are being updated as well. As always, please bear in mind that Page Rank has very little influence on rankings. It's most inportant impact is that it determines the crawl depth and frequency of … [Read more...]
SEO, Rocket Science, and Web Marketing
Kim Krauseberg picked up on a post by Mike Grehan, titled: SEO: Art, Science, Bollocks Or What? in which Mike discusses whether or not SEO is a difficult art to learn. Mike correctly assesses that "textbook SEO" is not rocket science. The basics of building sites today that meet the mechanical requirements of search engines does … [Read more...]
2007 Predictions for Web Marketing
Now that we are over 1 week into the new year, I have decided to take a moment to record six predictions for the year. Here are the new developments I see on our horizon in 2007: The social web revolution(s) will continue and expand, but will not be a panacea for current limitations in search. Group (mob) behavior simply has its … [Read more...]
Interview of Clicktrack’s John Marshall
The following is the transcript of an interview of John Marshall, CEO of Clicktracks. A Netscape alumnus who is responsible for two other successful software companies, John Marshall brings 20 years of experience in the software industry to ClickTracks. It was while running a previous company that John first understood the benefits … [Read more...]
Interview of IndexTools’ Dennis Mortensen
The following is the transcript of an interview of Dennis Mortensen, COO of IndexTools. Dennis Mortensen joined IndexTools Inc. in 2004 and he is responsible for identifying market opportunities, developing and executing direct client and partner strategies for the company including professional services and technical support. He is … [Read more...]
Eric Enge interviews Eurekster’s Steven Marder
Steven Marder is CEO and a co-Founder of Eurekster, Inc. With significant experience in the traditional media, digital media and technology industries and as a serial entrepreneur, Steven has almost two decades of professional experience as a business development/ corporate development executive, venture catalyst, strategic advisor … [Read more...]
GoogleBot Crawling CSS Files
Barry Schwartz spotted a thread in the Cre8site Forums discussing a report by Ekstreme.com that Googlebot requested a CSS file. This is a very interesting, but not surprising development. It's been known for some time that you can use CSS to hide text. It was also clearly stated by search engine representatives at SES in Chicago … [Read more...]
The 4 Basics of Reinclusion Requests
It's been a long time since I had to deal with a Reinclusion Request, but someone asked me about this yesterday, and it's worth a post, because it's an issue that many people encounter. The outline here should apply to any of the search engines. First, here is where you find the reinclusion form for the Google and Yahoo: Google: … [Read more...]
Interview of Google Analytics’ Brett Crosby
The following is the transcript of an interview of Brett Crosby, Senior Manager of Google Analytics, conducted in several sessions in January, 2007. He has been shaping the Web Analytics industry for ten years as the co-founder of Urchin Software Corporation and more recently as a senior product leader at Google. He is currently … [Read more...]
The Future of Social Media
As the various predictions come out about people's projections for 2007, I am beginning to see more and more impressive predictions about what will happen in the social media space. People are projecting that the power of human input will do all manner of incredible things. But there is a basic problem with all this. Unregulated … [Read more...]