Entries Tagged 'SEO/SEM' ↓

A few days ago I wrote about my early look at the new Microsoft Live Webmaster Tools beta. Microsoft has since removed the beta logo and officially launched the portal and associated forum for public use. Apparently the forum moderators are still passed out from the tryptophan because the same questions I had about the tool, “what do the little green boxes mean”, and “how in the world are you coming up with these indexed pages”, have both been left unanswered as of yet. Maybe Microsoft would have been better off following Google’s lead by leaving the beta suffix permanently attached to the tool so nobody could officially complain. It seems with Microsoft’s recent announcement about their search traffic goals that they would really want to put the best tools in the hands of those who power the internet - geeks. I recall reading an article about why Visual Studio has become so popular and why developers love to code for the Microsoft platform and it wasn’t because they had to work with substandard tools. Come on Ballmer, if you really want a juicier slice of the enormous advertising pie it is time to siphon some money off the bottom of the marketing budget and develop a razor sharp portal that will make Google users actually want to make the switch.

I stumbled (is that phrase copywrite Stumblupon yet?) across a story while listening to the BusinessWeek podcast about a company called Hanger Network. They take 100% recycled paper and forge it into hanger shaped advertisements that are freely distributed to dry cleaning companies. Given the effectiveness of the keyword “free” they have managed to infiltrate enough dry cleaning companies and other consumers of recyclable hangers to reach over 50 million consumers each week. This is a brilliant advertising model that seems mutually beneficial to all including trees and landfills. Unfortunately their support of recycling has gone a bit too far. They are recycling every combination of keyword known to man in their site meta tags. Their site has over 5100 keywords stuffed into the meta tags. Praises to Google for not ranking them on these keywords but shame on Yahoo and MSN. Live and Yahoo rank them in the 7th position for various keyword combinations and Yahoo ranks their press release page number 3 - for shame!

Speaking of shameful, there should be a limit on the number of blog comments allowed on a single blog post. If you haven’t already read Matt Cutts’ 250+ comment post regarding anti-Google claims from Aaron Wall you should. If you have already read it you probably need to read it again. The first time I read it there were a measly 100 posts and I was almost tempted to join into the melee but now there are so many posts I consider myself lucky to find Matt’s latest comment where he give a good explanation of why Google is not evil and how to avoid looking evil in Google’s eyes when using cross-domain links.

SEO’s have the innate desire to find and exploit correlations - it’s in the blood. Often the things being compared are already related and not particularly interesting but once in awhile two vastly distinct topics meld together like peanut butter and jelly to make a delicious blogwich. Today these topics are VMWare and Conversational Networking.

I attended the local VMWare User Group meeting today in Denver. The meeting was heavily focused on security but they spent a fair amount of time discussing the slew of new products and features they are releasing in the very near future. One product in particular, VMWare 3i, created a lot of buzz. 3i is a stripped down version of their ESX Server product that has a reduced footprint (32MB down from 2+GB for the full product) and can be self contained on a thumb drive or flash memory directly on a server main board. Ok that is cool in a supe geeky way. So what if you can add a new node to your Virtual Center cluster in under 5 minutes you say? What does this have to do with Conversational Networking?

Well first off just becoming a member of a user group requires active participation in Conversational Networking. After your friend’s buddy talks you into becoming a member you then proceed to join the forum. Then in theory you get to network with like minded individuals, share powerpoint slides (yee-haw!) and find out when the next free lunch is going to be served. Once you make your way to an event you get to schmooze with the local VMWare big wigs, get insider information on the hottest topics and hear about all the other great social events you missed like VMWorld Florida.

What does VMWare get out of the deal besides an empty box that used to be filled with t-shirts, demo cds and stickers? Increased sales of for one. It doesn’t take an iPhone to get the geeks camping outside of your business at midnight for the next product launch. The people that show up to user group meetings are the hard core elite and getting the pre-release copy of ESX 3.5 is as much a status symbol as any first release, touch sensitive, music playing gadget hanging off your hip. In addition to sales they get to pick the brains of the best users, the ones that push each feature beyond the original design considerations. Forum members ask the tough questions, push the envelope and probably work about as well as Dell IdeaStorm for generating ideas for new product features and trimming the fat from bloated junkware.

John Battelle’s is pitching Conversational Networking really hard right now. He recently made a podcast appearance on this Cisco techcast to specifically address the changing social networking culture. Cisco, by the way, has managed to insert WebEx as a player in the social media landscape (a bit of a stretch) in their frenzy to “2.0-ify” every title of every article, web site and podcast for every product they sell. It is amazing how far reaching Mr. Battelle’s online marketing influence stretches, even into well established and industry dominant corporations like Cisco. It seems the Wikinomics effect may turn out to be a self fulfilling prophecy. If Proctor and Gamble can use 500,000 moms to design and sell Dawn DirectFoam and Barry Libert and Jon Spector can get the intelligent crowd to write a book anyone ought to be able to tap into the hive mind, as long as they are willing to communicate with the hive.

Today Digg banned a front page post that contained a video mash-up of “porn” on Fox News. I caught the story on Reddit as it reached about #2. Typically this type of article is not my style but hitting the top of both Digg and Reddit made my SEO saliva gland crank up production. I came across the Digg link in a fellow blogger’s post and followed it to a surprisingly bland 404 page over at Digg. I was surprised to find that they didn’t specifically mention why the post was yanked or bother to redirect the traffic. The Reddit link did in fact work and took me to an embedded video with a non-stop stream of screen grabs and clips taken from various Fox News shows, each containing fairly graphic yet censored content. I don’t know how long the video lasted but after about 30 seconds I had seen enough to get the point and promptly voted it down (not that it helped, it is currently sitting in the #1 spot). Speaking of getting to the point, I thought it was quite interesting that Digg pulled the “safe for television” footage from their site without a word. Maybe their Revision3 ties bind them to potential future deals with big TV. Maybe Fox has some leverage in pulling content they deem “unfit for Digg” or maybe the article didn’t conform to the stringent requirements to stay on top of Digg’s list.

While on the subject of partial nudity I have to make reference to the Beowulf review that Roger Ebert posted on the Chicago Sun Times site today. First let me say that I am a huge Roger Ebert fan. I saw him speak at Weber State University and was blown away by his writing and speaking skills. Obviously he and his people are brilliant marketers. It is really sad that his health has deteriorated so that he can no longer host his television show and blow the minds of aspiring film geeks at speaking engagements. It is obvious that even though his health keeps him out of the spotlight he still gets really excited when he writes reviews. The Beowulf review is a perfect example. Of course I can’t tell if he is truly excited about how amazing the movie looked in IMAX 3D or how incredible the CG version of Angelina Jolie looked. Mr. Ebert…, care to clarify?

And by SUPER Beta I mean it is still SUPER early in the beta cycle. Someone over at Microsoft must have read my previous post about wanting to beta test the new Live Search Webmaster Tools because I received an invite to try them out today via email. As with most Microsoft product betas this tool is a little rough around the edges - and by “a little rough” I really mean a lot rough. You have probably already read the Search Engine Roundtable or WebPro News posts about the initial launch so I won’t go through every feature. They key tools are centered around your sites SERPs on Live.com. You get a top 5 pages, a top 10 list of inbound links and a top 10 list of outbound links along with a keyword strength tool.

The help file wasn’t very helpful in describing the details of the inner workings of these tools but since each tool is only partially functional, partial documentation makes sense. For example searching the Webmaster Help for “domain rank” brings back one listing about geographic hosting locations and how your web server IP affects your rank in a given market and clicking a link under FAQ drops you on the main help page. Although the help content is currently sparse, I did come across this excerpt that I found quite interesting:

Submitting your site doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed, but it does help us locate your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it. MSNBot doesn’t automatically crawl sub-pages on your website. If you want MSNBot to index other pages on your website, submit URLs for those pages.

MSNBot doesn’t crawl sub-pages? How do I have 251 pages from my site in the Live index then? I have a hard time believing their bot doesn’t do anything other than browse the top 150k of each web site’s home page. No worries, eventually they will get the developers to share with the technical writers and these inconsistencies in the documentation will disappear.

Taking a look at the various tools you will find a domain rank bar. The domain rank bar is pretty much all or nothing in it’s current state. Everything with a listing gets 5 green bars, everything with no listing gets a “no data available.” I spent some time searching around on Live trying to discover how Microsoft selected my top 5 pages to no avail. Two of the pages they list as top 5 are not pages I have been actively trying to rank. One of the pages listed is a thumbnail viewer that has very few related keywords and the other is a testimonials page that has a few product names sprinkled through but doesn’t rank well in Live Search for any of the keywords it contains (i.e. gets outranked by other pages on our site in Live Search SERPs that aren’t in my top 5).

I assume the Top Links From tool is basically a linkfromdomain: query because it matches almost identically although not in the same sort order. Along the same lines the Top Links To tool is probably a link: search but I couldn’t test it because despite what many are saying the link: search operator was not functioning for me today. One issue I have with the Top Links To tool is that it displays links from cached results that are eons old and don’t match what I have seen recently when running the link: command against my own site.

The Keywords tool searches your site for keywords you enter and displays the pages that contain those keywords in some form or another. It did a good job harvesting keywords embedded in PDF files on my site and appears to look in all the standard places for keywords even though the Webmaster Help says Microsoft is not a fan of keyword stuff a page unless the keywords are visible to the end user.

Overall this is a good start for Microsoft. The tool will improve and already offers easier ways to check basic site metrics for entry level SEO’s and webmasters.