Editor’s note: I couldn’t hunt Mr. Ploppy down this weekend, as I was moving houses. Thanks to those who were kind enough to help with the move. Now back to shuffling crap around.
Critical tool - Caffeine
My favorite forms:
If you have seen Mr. Ploppy, or just have some good ideas or a request for a tool list, please let me know.
If you’d like to see REAL tools, check out the compiled list of internet marketing tools.
Continued from:
SEO Makes You Smarter Part I: Abundance Mentality and the “Progressive Effect”
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SEO Makes You Smart Part II: Searching Better Makes You Smarter
We’ve already covered a bit about why being a better searcher makes you smart. If you can’t see the image on your desktop, this post is specifically for you. You can actually improve on your searching skills by accelerating the process of the retrieval of your important information. At some point, I became extremely anal retentive about bookmarks, and realized that this had actually become an asset. When I want to know about a certain subject of search engine marketing, I generally have a repository of information socked away someplace for easy access.
A testament to obsessive information retrieval was the first few editions of Mr. Ploppy’s Tools. These were just piles of tools that I had organized on certain topics for when I needed them. Now I have a nice list of tools to use for most any situation. Rather than going back and finding them individually, I had them in one nice place for easy access. Easy information retrieval was actually early rationale for blogging as well.
The extra few minutes to organize and bookmark has been well worth it when I go back to expand on ideas as well. When developing lists of resources, or writing an article on a specific topic, this is extremely handy. I’ve used this for SEO/SEM, but I’m sure it would be quite useful for other industries as well, and for those who have learned that sharing is smart. Information storage and retrieval is almost as important to long term learning, as deciding who to listen to. Since we’re talking about tools, here’s my favorite information retrieval tools:
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search
Continued from: SEO Makes You Smarter Part I: Abundance Mentality and the “Progressive Effect”
The web is the great information equalizer
How to become smarter by learning to use the web effectively:
I may not really be incredibly intelligent. I think the ability to seek out good information, and use it to my advantage in other areas of life has certainly helped to make me a smarter person in other areas besides just SEO though. It has benefitted me by giving me the ability to find valid information quickly and learn a new skill with a much lower learning curve. Kind of like Trinity learning to fly a helicopter in 20 seconds on the Matrix (except much less cool and extreme of course). If I REALLY wanted to do my own plumbing or cook a souffle (or even spell souffle), I would know very quickly and easily how to find good information on the subject. If I were shopping for a new car, I would know which things to look out for, and be able to find techniques for negotiating with the salesperson. I think the ability to do good research on the web has given us a distinct advantage. Research has always been important, but with the quick, easy access, it is now essential.
So my questions become…would you sacrifice a bit of intelligence if you could improve your ability to harvest and regurgitate information much more efficiently? Does being able to search effectively give us a distinct informational advantage over others? Isn’t an informational advantage about the best kind you can have in any situation besides Ultimate fighting?
There are definitely arguments made all the time that technology makes us dumber. I would imagine this is true in instances. I would without a doubt give up some spelling ability for being able to ease the learning curve of an entirely new trade or skilled craft substantially. It’s true I won’t know rocket science in the near future, but if I REALLY wanted to learn about it as a hobbyist, the entry level information is much more accessible than it used to be. My initial learning curve would be substantially less than it would have been 10 years ago, and most likely also less due to my learned ability to search more effectively for information and validate what is most likely quality information on new topics. Yes, I may be a bit dumber in areas. I know that I don’t have to remember pi to 73 places now because the information is at my disposal of my fingertips at near a moments notice.
I wonder if “better searching” will be taught in school anytime soon. I really think there could be some very good value in this. Not only in searching, but in learning to validate information and try to suss out potential bias in it. We don’t realize how good we have it as SEO’s by understanding what WHOIS and the Wayback Machine are.
Learning the telltale signs of bias and questionable information are increasingly important skills in the age of information overload I think. I find many times that I wish I could explain to a friend or relative (and often do explain) how to search more effectively for something that will be quite valuable for them to find. Perhaps when SEO dies in a year or two (like it is always predicted), we can all become “information tour guides”.
Resources for to give to your non-SEO friends for searching smarter
Local Search
Search Tutorials
Intresting related read for anyone who has ever THOUGHT “LOL” when not online: I speak search by Gord Hotchkiss.
If you have favorite search tutorials that you give to friends and family, be sure to let me know so I can add them to the list.
Coming soon -
Part III: Search Information Storage and Retrieval
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search
I like to read about usability and accessiblity when I get the opportunity, but I pretty much suck at most of it.
After receiving a few inquiries from folks about changing the light on dark text, I decided to give it a shot. There are some areas that still need polishing up, and the links are still light, but I’m pretty much a hack when it comes to CSS.
Please let me know if you think the overall readability is better. If so, I’ll continue to cobble my way through the CSS to fix the rest of the things that look goofy now (including the very light and difficult to read links).
Thanks in advance for your feedback, to those that voiced their concerned (I probably wouldn’t have known otherwise), and to those that offered some help on my question at SEW. Stop by there and vote if you get a chance too.
Everyone these days wants to be smarter or sexier. I can’t really help you much on the latter, but if you’re reading this site, you’re probably interested in SEO…in which case, I have good news for you…SEO makes you smart! When I started the original draft of this post, it went on so many tangents that I decided to break it into a three part series with “SEO Makes You Smart” being that is what evolved as the thesis.
I think we are really lucky to be SEO’s sometimes. I’m pretty bad at a lot of things. Namely - cooking, cleaning, and anything “handy” among plenty of other things. Luckily I have this great advantage of being able to find out information on the internet extremely well. I also consider myself extremely lucky that I get to learn about and do competitive analysis on a multitude of different industries. In the last month alone I’ve learned about psychotherapy, sports psychology, various aspects of Christmas, knives, sleeping products, insurance, travel destinations, private investigations, staffing and a whole bunch more. What a nice variety of things to keep the days interesting!
Taking a broad view of all kinds of different industries and how they work sure helps to understand how business in general works by getting such a random sampling of what makes a business successful or unsuccessful. What I’ve found at the top of search results in most industries is someone who decided to share what they knew. A lot of the time they unintentionally became an expert in the process by sharing that information. Maybe this is why bloggers think they’re so smart, and blogging has become the new SEO?
If there is one thing the internet has done, and continues to do…it is to take away the informational advantage of many of the folks who were formerly “experts”. The new experts, ironically enough, are the ones who are willing to share all the former “secret information” with the rest of the world. This abundance mentality seems to be the mark of someone who is confident enough with their expertise in the craft to give the knowledge to the world. They share what they know, and see if others are willing to challenge it or affirm it.
In my own mind, I sometime refer to this as the “Progressive Effect”. The rationale behind this, is that Progressive Insurance was one of the first web sites that allowed you to look up the prices of all of their competitors along side their own rates (note: not sure if this is historically accurate, I didn’t double check). This seemed very strange at first, mainly because a lot of times they were not the cheapest. What it did for people, however, was put all the cards on the table in front of them in a world full of lots of stacked decks. This made consumers and competitors alike think twice as to if cheaper really was better. It also showed an extreme amount of confidence in their services. The “Progressive effect” was what resulted from this incredibly ballsy move. Similar ballsy moves are being made by (pun intended) progressive thinkers in their own fields who are willing to give away the information that makes them valuable.
Magazines that publish their entire articles online is an example of such a move. They realize that even if subscriptions go down a smidge, the costs associated with them will go down as well, and ad revenues could potentially rise substantially. The abundance mentality tends to have incredible results online (this site being a testament to the abundance mentality). To me, this is one of the biggest benefits that blogs offer for people who truly have some expertise in their respective fields.
Many SEO’s have learned the importance of sharing. SEO’s face the dilemmas of the abundance mentality everyday in our little sewing circle blogosphere. Anyone who shares a secret that they didn’t really want public, and has it made public quickly learns their lesson. We have embraced blogs to the point they are almost a plague, and everyone wants a story for some link love. We all share a TON of information online, because that’s where we all learned most of our craft. Learning to find the specifics of what we are looking for helps to make us smarter. When we need specific information, we have become quite adept and finding it quickly and storing it and retrieving it quickly for future use (more on this in part III).
I know that if I make a completely ridiculous claim with complete arrogance that I would be called out on it quite quickly by my industry peers on their sites. Other industries will still probably be catching up for years to come on these trends. The power of sharing information to become an expert is enormous in many industries. There are people that have already managed to do it in many, many niches and this trend will absolutely continue. Quality content (especially user-generated) and the ability to monetize it is what’s driving the second bubble. Encourage your clients to prove their expertise by giving away that which they would normally hoarde to themselves. The “abundance mentality” is the new “shameless self promotion”. Use the progressive effect wisely.
Coming soon - Part II: Searching Better Makes You Smart
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Part III: Search Information Storage and Retrieval
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search
I tend to have pretty much an abundance attitude with sharing information about SEO in most regards. I really don’t try to create smoke and mirrors around my work like it is some insanely difficult task. It’s not EASY, so I’ll be happy to give out lots of information to those willing to learn. There are of course tips from time to time that I come across that are not appropriate for public consumption because I’d like to make a little money from them first myself, or to respect the wishes of those I learned them from (check out Barry’s great post on when to blog vs. when not to blog).
Most “algo holes” get plugged within a reasonable amount of time, however, so it is not very advisable to rely on exploiting algorithm holes in order to attain good search rankings (I really can’t believe how whitehat I sound right now). This leaves us with best practices to create websites for better rankings. Andy the link builder recently posted about quality indicators which I wholeheartedly agree with. While the specific points are certainly debateable (if you really like wasting your time on that sort of thing), the overall concept is extremely sound. If you establish a total list of quality indicators and best practices, and check each one off on every site that you build you will be in very good shape. Why don’t more people do this? It’s damn hard. Validating a site for W3C standards alone is not an easy thing when you’re dealin’ with Uncle Fester’s nephew’s frontpage code.
My apologies to Andy for not responding to his great post earlier, but sometimes ya just gotta get some work done. This got saved as a draft post about one-third complete, and I thought it had enough potential to save it from falling into the abyss of unpublished half written posts.
I think it must be said that quality indicators are kind of like search engine ideals. Whether or not it is possible to actually gauge these areas of measurement is certainly far from my area of expertise. These are areas that would potentially allow to determine “quality” levels of given websites. Any area where a webmaster can potentially put a little more care into their website would be a logical place to reward for more positive search rankings. This does not however mean that any of these areas are currently being factored into algorithms (nor that they ever may be). This is only speculation to what some things that exemplify relative high standards of quality in a website that MAY be measured at a qualitive level and perhaps converted to a quantitive metric.
Quality Indicators
In addition to the Lou Holtz of Link Development’s fine list of quality indicators which included:
* being hosted on a dedicated IP
* outbound links (these might be the biggest IMHO — not only to put your site in its topical neighborhood, but also just a plain old GOOD neighorhood)
* doctype and language metadata in your header
* valid code
* invalid code but linking to the W3C validator (”we tried!”)
* existence of a print stylesheet
* a file named privacy.*
* the existence of Access keys (accessibility best practice)
* a ’skip navigation’ link (accessibility best practice)
I would also like to add:
Again, I’m not saying that these variables could or could not be easily spammed, or that they could or could not be used as search variables for any given reason. I am only saying that if I were to gauge the quality and relevance of a web page, these are a lot of the things I would take into account as “quality indicators”.
As for the definition of “quality”…It is a great topic to study extensively. Robert Pirsig, of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence” fame studied quality extensively. It’s a fascinating topic to to study along with the metaphysics of relevance, if you really enjoy twisting your mind into new and exciting dimensions.
Best Practices
Could be said to be along the same line as quality indicators
The only algorithm an SEO needs to know is:
Prepare for budgeting for an online business, and plan a realistic growth strategy and a site has a much higher likelihood for success.
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Quality Indicators
SEO/SEM has really become project management. While their are certainly still tips and tricks that work in the short term, the overall longterm strategy of a site and its search engine rankings is very dependant on good project management - doing the right things at the right times. Timelines and management are very important to the success of sites in the search engines. Some folks have a natural knack for this, but tools definitely help to stay organized and on track.
Probably the best approach is to pick one system that has a lot of support/ popularity and stick with it. Be sure that you are able to export data to another system if necessary. It is also quite important to find the software that fits your application. If you choose an open source option, you may be able to pay developers to customize the code to fit your application.
Tags: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Tools, Google, Project Management, Management, Business
SEO/ Internet Marketing Training
