03.30.08

Friends or “Friends”?

Posted in Social Media at 5:15 pm by MoseySphinn

Laurel Papworth posted a follow-up story on the Facebook “stalking” case. Short version of this, British courts ruled that facebook friends aren’t the same as real life friends. Duh?

It should seem obvious but anyone who has spent more an a couple of hours on MySpace, Facebook, Irc, Compuserv BBS, or pretty much any chat medium has come to learn that there are some people who take chatting way, way, way too seriously. I don’t just mean that one person who pretends they are a cat, I mean like any hello is the same as they just invited you into their house.

Somewhere there is a market for this… some sort of paranoia “friend cleaner” or “friend rater”
or “HNG-free” tag you can slap on ye olde profile that you are indeed a real person, relatively stinky free and are not a regular visitor to Cell Block D. Think of it as a “only allow bids from people with positive rating” for social apps, which are more and more sharing information.

First one to make this app for facebook gets 10,000 downloads and a free mention in a dozen blogs!

Oh and you can friend me, I don’t mind and I don’t think it means you love me back.

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03.29.08

The Government Knows What Now?

Posted in Social Media at 10:55 am by MoseySphinn

Jeremiah Owyang in his usually excellent semi-inquisitive style has a thought provoking post on if the social media world will know more about Generation Y than the Government.

I think there is little doubt that the collective “social internet” knows more about a person than whatever government rules over you right now. However, any single one probably knows just a fraction. Think of all the places you may have put your credit card numbers, date of birth, social preferences, dating preferences, identity numbers, resume, friends lists, etc. Even with tapped phones I don’t think “anyone” cares to collect all that.

But how many sites have you put all of those things in to one spot? I am hoping none.

That is the one great worry about Open Social. Until it is tried and true tested by a few million people using it on a dozen or so apps, what is to say there isn’t a still-unknown bug that lets you API all that information into one giant database. Not as a design of Open Social but, as a malicious backdoor. Scary, isn’t it?

Some day there will be that massive terrabytes upon terrabytes of information sniffer that can grab all your information from a dozen social networks, shopping carts, and blogs.

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03.27.08

The Snake Oil Continues

Posted in SEO at 2:48 pm by MoseySphinn

I have always had an issue with SEO farms. Since the inception of the word SEO has always seemed sleazy and unethical. Oh, not that SEO isn’t incredibly important, it is huge. Yet, there are, and always will be underhanded ways of “beating” SEO or tryingto trick Google. I am a firm believer good content gets linked. Getting linked means getting better search ratings. There isn’t really an “optimize” strategy you can pay someone $1000 for and magically float to the top of the search rankings.

If there was a way to just vault to the top, everyone would do it and then we would start over.

That said, 90% of the websites are not even taking the basic steps, to SEO work, and maybe the legit SEO consultants and just fixing mostly that. I see SEO work as an extension of social marketing. If you do good work, people will notice, they will comment, link back, point to you, talk about you in blog postings, etc. You will get noticed for being good.

I know, that is the long tail and not the quick hit, but sometimes you have to work that way. If that is what you want to do, take your time and do it right, great. Here are a few basics to pay attention to.

  • Get your text out of graphics. I know, that outer glow looks great against that sweet photo you found, but search engines can’t read graphics. You are “hiding” your most important text from them.
  • Properly use H1 and H2 tags. Search engines notice these first. Don’t over do it, but make sure every page has one. If you don’t know what an H1 and H2 is, find someone who does (and close Dreamweaver). This isn’t 1996, apply some CSS to your H1, make it nearly the same size as the rest of your text.
  • Be friendly, link and link back to people. “In partnership with…” is fine. Links pages… not so much.
  • Encourage people linking to you using key phrases. 70% of web traffic to most sites is by search engines. 70% of that traffic uses the company name as the keyword. What that means is if people know your name, you will already be number 1 in their searches. Don’t encourage people to link to you using “mysite.com” because if they know mysite.com then you already won. Using key phrases, the things you want people to know you for is far more important for example ask for links like fantastic website design by mysite.com (link gores nowhere).
  • Comment, expose yourself on the web. I don’t mean in a getting-you-kicked-off-myspace way, I mean go find friendly blogs (with lots of feeds!) and comment. Don’t troll, don’t look like an uneducated schmuck, ask and answer and comment, and always have your link in your signature (with keywords linked if possible).
  • Make sure your content makes sense. “add to cart” is weak, it looks like everything else. Short directional copy doesn’t just help usability, it adds to the things search engines notice. “add your cool designs to your cart for purchase” is one more hit of “cool designs.”
  • Be careful what you write. Don’t be too verbose of obvious or your usability goes down. I once blogged with the words “tranny midget porn” and got search hits for weeks. Luckily none of them comments in my blog.
  • Content is always king. Sometimes, forget your SEO, forget your page rank and just give a good chunk of content. All the snakeoil link farms, blog farms, share-a-lots and exchanges in the world don’t matter if your content sucks. If your content rocks like an old-school Kiss concert people will find you, and they will link back and that is worth more because Google is never going to outlaw it or ban you because of it.

Hopefully this is helpful. All these simple things are probably 80% of SEO work, the rest is the gravy on top of an already good set of pot roast.

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