Seoish - Google Gadgets, Widget Strategy and SEO

GetListed.org Local University – Minneapolis

March 5, 2010 · 2 comments

I will be conducting a workshop at the Getlisted Local University in Minneapolis where local business owners can get answers from me about their specific businesses.
During the sessions and/or after the morning session I will be helping business owners take the first steps to implementing solid best practices for their business.

I want to thank our event sponsors Google, Bing, ReliaCloud, and Deluxe for their support.

Google representatives Ryan Hayward and Ari Bezman will be there. Mikko Ollila, senior product manager for Bing, as well as industry leaders like Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, David Mihm, Mary Bowling, and Ed Reese will be speaking there too.

Aaron Weiche of Five Technology is spearheading the logistics for this one as well as speaking, so a big thank you to him.

Our Minneapolis event on May 13th will be larger than our first Local University we did in Spokane. I do advise, however, for you to get your tickets early (even though this event is two months away, people are already buying their tickets).

To get details, please see: GetListed Local University – Minneapolis

Here is some coverage of our last event:

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Image SEO Tool Improved!

March 1, 2010 · 4 comments

I have added more functionality to the image SEO tool.

The tool now checks, displays and warns about two other ALT attributes.

Dimensions (height / width) are specifically mentioned by the Google image guidelines. Of dimensions they state:

“Specify a width and height for all images.”

So the tool now displays the width and height if it is there, and if it is not there it displays a warning.

I also now have the tool look for a “title” attribute. If one is there, the tool will display it, and if not, it will display a warning.

Give it a look: Image SEO Tool

Here is a screen shot:

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New Google Guideline Tool

February 22, 2010 · 1 comment

The Google webmaster guidelines recommend that you support the “If Modified Since” HTTP header.

It wasn’t easy for most people to figure out if they supported it or not.

I wanted a tool for my webmaster tools page that simply answered the question…

“Does my website support If Modified Since?”

Here it is… If Modified Since HTTP header tool

A screen shot of the tool:

Does your web page support if modified since as recommended by the Google webmaster guidelines? Find out here.

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Get Ranked Higher by Being Better

February 18, 2010 · 0 comments

The real way to rank higher in search engines is to be better than your competitors.

- Great websites have very little need to build links because they naturally attract links.

Great websites are linked to naturally, and rank naturally even without links. I know you all do not want to believe that, but it is true. There are terms like “link building efforts” which I would compare to “pushing a giant boulder up a hill efforts”.
You can push a giant boulder up a hill through effort, but it is always going to try to go back where it naturally belongs.

Link building is exactly the same thing.

Your website will end up at about where it belongs eventually so your time is better spent by making a better website than it is to build links and such because if you have a better site it will rank better.

There are two main possibilities here. You are working on your own websites or you are working on someone else websites.

If you are working on things you have control of, this post is for you.
If you are working on something you do not have control of, it sucks to be you, and you may want to keep reading this post and make stuff you have control of so you don’t have to work on things you do not control anymore.

The definition of “better” is not determined by you, it is determined by the people using your website. If people are not linking to your site, it is not because they are stupid, it is because they see no reason to link to it.

A great website gives people reasons to link to it.

Being better than your competitors requires that your website is one or some of these types of things in comparison to your competitors…

more simple
more comprehensive
more funny
solves problems quicker
more visually stunning

There are many ways to be better, but it all comes down to one thing…

If you are having problems getting links, your website is not as good as it can be yet.

Your link building techniques are not what needs tweaking. Your website does.

Allow that possibility to enter your head as you consider your rankings.

If you wake up each day thinking about how to get more links to your existing websites then it is very likely your existing websites are not as good as they can be.
No matter how much you spend on link building and SEO efforts, you can not make an inferior site superior.
Your web site has to pleasure people.
That pleasure may come by having a better solution, or it may come because you have a faster service, or it may come because your cat photos are cuter than someone else’s cat photos. However the pleasure comes, come it must for your website to succeed.

Successful people do things. Unsuccessful people complain and make excuses. Here are some common excuses and their solutions.

Excuse:

“My website is in a field where I have to link build because it is what everybody else does”

Solutions:

1. Leave that field and enter one that you can dominate.

2. Stay in your current field and stop crying. It is utter bullshit to say that there is no way to be more innovative in your field.

If you are saying that you can not be more innovative, then cut your losses. Move on, you are not the type of person that can succeed in your current field.

At some point you need to decide if you want to try to make a million dollars on the web and make nothing or try to make a thousand dollars on the web and make a thousand. (hint: making 1000 dollars on the web yields you more money than making 0 dollars does).

Excuse:

“My website is already the best it can be.”

Solutions:

Understand that it is not. It may be exactly what you envisioned, it might be precisely what you deem as the perfect website, but it is not what other people deem to be linkable.

This means you can be proud of what you made and keep it exactly the same or you can change it. The ups and down of these options are basically that if you do not change anything, your results will likely not change either. If you change something, your results will change (the whole Newton lawy thingie about: “Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.”)

Excuse:

“I am not succeeding because I am not popular or someone else is bringing me down.”

Solutions:

This is simply not the case. It may seem like it at times, but it is not the truth. This is the internet and in this fabulous arena it matters not what your race is or your gender is or if you are popular or not.

On the internet you “become popular” by having great ideas and executing those ideas well.

You do not need to “know someone” to be successful on the web, the only person you need to know on the internet is you.

The way to rank your website higher is to make your website better.

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“If I Can Dream” – High Stakes Social Media

February 11, 2010 · 0 comments

“American Idol” co-creator Simon Fuller’s next show will not air on TV. It will only exist on the web. Pepsi, Ford, MySpace, Hulu, and Clear Channel are all in on it too.

If I Can Dream

The show is called “If I can Dream” and is touted to be..

Tailor-made for this generation.
It’s entertainment for the social networking set —
unfiltered and unvarnished.
Using the most popular social networking tools,
a global audience can interact with our aspiring artists
as they chase their dreams.
Essentially, everyone is part of this exciting journey.

Right beneath this blurb in their press kit are the logos of several social media sites… MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

What is the show about?
The show will follow five really good looking young people chasing their dreams in Hollywood. Big Brother style, the house in the Hollywood hills where they are to live will be full of cameras that will be on 24/7.

So we get it will have viewers, but how is it social?

IfIcanDream.com – This is where there show will air 24 / 7 the press release says…

If I Can Dream allows viewers to interact with the narrative in real time and offers open access to an entertainment experience in a way that has not been attempted before.

That doesn’t tell us much, but here is a screen shot of a camera preview…

There is a social ticker thing in the bottom that says things like “Amanda just uploaded this, and Giglianne just tweeted that”.

MySpace – Auditions for this show are now being accepted on MySpace (even though there is a current cast, it will change as the show goes on.)

Clear Channel – Here is what they say they are doing…

Clear Channel’s local radio personalities and audience
interaction will spur daily conversations, and through Clear
Channel’s content creation and distribution platform, the
If I Can Dream stories will come to life on-air, online, and
on mobile devices.

Hmmm, mobile.

Hulu – Hulu will be streaming a weekly show that will be more of a “normal” version of the show. What is notable about this however is that this show will be streamed world wide, which Hulu has not done before. For many countries this will be their first view of Hulu. The cast of the show has gone to Sydney, Tokyo, Taipei, Rio, etc. promoting the show. The American promotion starts soon – Hulu has started to air ads about the shows cast.

Facebook – I really do not see anything special right now (just some fan pages). They are specifically mentioned in the press stuff, but if there is an interactive Facebook page, it hasn’t been revealed yet.

Long story short, this is a very high profile “social experiment” (as they put it). It will be interesting to see how effectively they can do this.

It seems that the “social” of this show will mostly be the voting and the heavy use of familiar social platforms.

The main pages are:

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How to Remove Clones of your Google Gadget from the Directory

February 9, 2010 · 2 comments

Google has taken some steps that help you keep you claim your Google gadgets and allow you to remove gadgets that are claiming to be you or your brand, but are not.

This happened often, and made the google gadget directory look strange as shown in the screen shot.
There were over 100 “clones” of my gadgets in the directory alone. This is where someone has copy and pasted your code in it’s entirety and then submitted to the Google gadget directory.

When several people do this it causes many repetitive (spam) gadgets to be returned when someone is searching for a gadget in the directory.

How to remove clones of your Google gadget

iGoogle has a feature called Google gadget dashboard where you can claim your gadgets. This feature allows you to claim any gadget that is associated with emails that are yours. Once you claim all the gadgets associated with your email, you will have the ability to remove gadgets from the Google gadget directory. If there are clones of your gadget (someone pretending to be you) then you can now remove them.

1. To access your dashboard and claim your gadgets go here.

2. Follow the steps (this is basically an email verification process).

3. Claim one of your gadgets. When you do this, it will actually show you all the other gadgets associated with that email address and ask you if you want to claim those too. Claim them all.

Now you have a dashboard and all of it’s neat tools like stats of users worldwide and page views and graphs and such…

5. Now that your dashboard is set up, you will notice that some of the gadgets listed are clones. This can be seen rather easily as shown by this screenshot of part of my dash board….

I remember making that gadget once, but here are like ten different versions of it! These are clones, but now they are my clones and I have the power to remove them!

6. For each gadget clone go to right hand side and click “remove from directory” link.

7. You will now be prompted to go through another email verification process.

8. Once you verify, you will receive a message in your dashboard stating that the gadget will be removed from the directory within 48 hours.

This is a bit of a process, but understandable.

After you are through, you have just made the Google gadget directory a little bit less of a spam cess pool, and your name and email are not associated with spam gadgets anymore.

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Is Paper Stealing Your Content and Hijacking Your Traffic?

February 4, 2010 · 7 comments

This as a parody of a Micheal Grey post…
[click to continue…]

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A Vic-20 Love Story

February 4, 2010 · 17 comments

The first computer I ever used was called the Vic-20.

This was before the internet existed in any real sense that would be recognizable today.

To telephone someone you used a rotary dial.

To drink a soda (like a Tab or a Shasta) you had to first peel off the pop tab.

To play music you had to put a needle on a spinning disc.

Things were different then.

I lived in a group home at the time, one day I met this girl at school and I started walking her home. I, clad in tube socks and cut-offs, would even carry her violin.

The girl I would walk home had a Vic-20 computer.

I liked her…

Vic-20.

I would go to her house everyday and we would talk for hours, if “talking for hours” means “I used her Vic-20 while she read Jack London novels”.

She had “Mole Attack” and “SeaWolf”.

Her father had what could only be described as an insane amount of reference books for computing. I read them all.

To set up a Vic-20 required a screwdriver.

You hooked it up to the UHF screws on the back of your TV. There was a switch and with that switch you could go from TV to Computer land.

Computer land was a nice place for me, the boys in my group home could be mean at times. Let’s just say they didn’t know what an infinite loop was.

The more time I could spend with her…

Vic-20, the better.

She would kiss me sometimes beneath her Benji poster, but I figured this was a small price to pay for computer time (ends up I was wrong about that – women are only attractive to me now if they wear frumpy sweaters and thick glasses).

When you flipped that switch from TV to Computer, you saw a display that would wow anyone…

Are you ready to enter a dream world of magic?

I was amazed by what I could make occur. For example, if I wanted to have the word “hello” show up on the computer screen, all I had to do was program this…

10 PRINT “{SHIFT+CLRSCRN}”
20 PRINT “HELLO”
30 END

Like magic, the word “hello” would appear on the screen, because I, Godlike, had decreed it to be.

Things were so simple, If I wanted to move the cursor all I had to do was use the cursor keys…

You could do anything!

I remember when her Dad told me he had bought something I would like. He had a smile on his face.
I was kinda nervous until he revealed what he had bought…

What am I, a king?

Who on earth could use so much memory?

Okay, back to modern life… I recently saw an ad for a Vic 20 from 1982 and I would like to highlight the selling features of the Vic 20. The ad listed 26 reasons to buy a Vic-20.

Including…

Reason No. 2…

25 K, baby. What you gonna say bout that?

Reason No.3…

This monster can go up to 27 and 1/2 k Ram.

Reason No.11…

This one is a crazy cool…

U to the L. This puppy has the ability to show both upper and lower case letters.

Want some Specs?

That aint all…

This thing roars like a lion

I just turned 40 years old.
I am very happy I met that girl.
She had a lovely Vic-20, and a name.

I don’t remember her name, but her Vic-20 rocked.

People are even still buying and selling these on Ebay!

Need a thirty year old computer to relive your childhood? Here are Vic-20 items on Ebay right now (hilarious, and how my walk down memory lane started in the first place)…

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New Image SEO Tool

February 1, 2010 · 5 comments

This new tool checks images and alt text on a web page to see how well it can be “seen” by search engines.

One Google guidelines states…

Make sure that your title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

My new free image SEO tool lets a user enter a url and check how well images are following the image ALT part of this guideline.

Image SEO Tool

Once you enter a webpage and click “go” this tool will…

Show the images of that page.
Display the ALT text associated with each image.
Notes for each image about how well it is following Google guidelines.

Here is what the tool results looks like…

To check your web page images go to the Image SEO Tool.

How are scores assigned? / How does it know how well the guideline is being followed?
I have seen some tools that tell you if an image has ALT text or not, but I have never encountered a tool that examined the ALT text itself.

So I built this tool which does.

This tools not only sees if ALT text is present, it also examines the ALT text and counts the amount of words contained in that ALT text.

strong, handsome man thinking I thought about it, and the amount of words does tell us alot.

Scores are based on the amount of words contained in the ALT text. Here are some examples:

If an image has no ALT text (o words) then the image is not following the guideline.
If an image has 100 words in the ALT text it is likely spamming or keyword stuffing
If an image has only one word it is likely not “descriptive”. The Google guideline states it should be descriptive.

I am creating free SEO tools which help a webmaster determine if they are following the Google webmaster guidelines. This and other new (and old) SEO tools having to do with Google will be on my webmaster tools page on feedthebot.com, so you might want to check that page every once in awhile.

Update: Some people reported bugs, they have been fixed. Specifically:
-some cases where images were being reported as having alt text when they did not was fixed (this was happening when people used alt=”" )
-dashes and characters are no longer counted as a word (in fact one letter words are not being counted either)
- I changed some of the conditions so that it is more acceptable to show more words (I went up to 15 words before giving a red “x” and saying “could be seen as spam”)

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Nexus One News Flash: Google Sucks at Customer Service

January 18, 2010 · 2 comments

Google does not have the staffing required to support customers. This has been an issue with them for years and won’t come as a surprise to anyone dealing with Google for awhile, but I must say that many people buying the Nexus One phone had no way of knowing this.

Google has a good name. People probably expect that they would have a good experience with them. You can almost hear them say “it’s Google, they will have all the details figured out”.

Well, no such luck for Nexus One purchasers. There is no phone support for the Nexus One.

This is America, and in America we like to talk to people on the phone when we are complaining. It is how we get our aggressions out.

Google may be grumpy about the disappointing sales of this phone (reportedly only around 20,000 the first week) but they should consider themselves lucky. If they can not handle 20,000 customers, how would they have dealt with 1,000,000?

There has been complaints of “spotty 3G”, which Google says is limited to a few users, but there are almost 1000 comments on the support thread complaining about it…

Google risks losing their good name with real customers, they should have things in place before they sell something to non search geeks.

Have a problem with your Nexus One? “No worries”, says Google, “just fill out this long form and then we will get back to you within 48 hours.”

This is not how phones work Google. If you going to sell phones you need to answer phones too.

Nexus One Support options are very limited but they do exist. Here are some options.

Google Nexus One Support Page

Nexus One Support Forum

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