Google Gadgets & SEO

I live in a good neighborhood.

Just to the left of the above picture (taken from a kayak) is my house, and just to the right of this pic is where the monk seal comes up in the mornings and if you go a mile up the road you will find the trail to Kalalau.

The picture however is of the restaurant next door to me. The regulars of the restaurant include Pierce Bronson (one of my neighbors) and Matt Damon showed up as well, both of whom I have talked with in the last couple of days.

I just like to drink here. The view is spectacular as you can imagine and as it is surrounded by ocean, every seat in the house has an ocean view, including my favorite seats…

Those at the bar

In any case, I overheard the owners talking about websites and marketing and I mentioned I might know a thing or two about such things and got them to agree to allow me to use their restaurant as a case study for GetListed.org and a tutorial for other restaurant owners in return for my services.

My goal is to only do things that are free as far as the marketing goes. So I built them a website, and I will be taking advantage of local resources like Google business center, Yahoo local listings, Bing, and other places like Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc.

Long story short, we are going to see what can come of a brand new website and how many diners we can bring to a restaurant using only free techniques. It is one of the most comprehensive guides I have ever made. It will come out soon.

Also of note GetListed.org is about to launch a new Enterprise version which features more platforms, accuracy checking, and things like a one stop place to enter your business info and be listed everywhere, and of course if you have 5000 locations, no problem, we will allow batch uploads and you will be able to get a summary of which locations are listed the best and worse.  Which listings have incorrect addresses? We have that covered. Which listings have inaccurate Business names? We check that too. We check everything and report it. It is impressive, David Mihm and I have been working on it for months. I am really looking forward to the launch of it.

Until then I will sip my beer and look at the sea, and wait for the damn Bing mail verification process so I can finish my guide to marketing a local restaurant.

The guitar and voice of my old friend Anjela is in the background right now, some of her music can be heard here. It is good stuff, take a moment to listen. I have been gone for five years and she is still here. Yum. She plays here at the restaurant.

I live in a good neighborhood.

The first big change is the reporting dashboard which is described by Google in a video targeting SMB owners:

Another change is that it looks like Google is playing with not allowing anyone but the business owner to change the listings, which if they follow through with will come as a great relief to business owners who have claimed their listings. To illustrate this let’s go to a business listing like the one shown in the image.
It used to be that if you clicked “edit” you would get another screen that would allow you to do so, but look what I encountered this morning when I clicked “edit”…

It is not often that I start a company, I have only done it once:  GetListed.org . I started it with David Mihm.

This blog post is somewhat long, but I feel it asks an important question.

Should developers get a stake in the company that they helped create?

We are a good crew, me and David. He is the consummate professional, I am the kinda crazy guy with ideas (not that David doesn’t - he does, I am just more flexible [goofy] in identifying and communicating them).

We both were horrified by what the search engines and other platforms expected from a business owner, and we both had some great concepts of how to simplify the process a business owner must go through to replace the old (paper yellow pages) with the new (a balanced set of entries on the web that allowed the business to be shown in local results of places like Google and Yahoo). We both recognized the need to improve and simplify the process of a small business owner must take to be listed effectively on the web.

We will soon unveil some new things about GetListed that are quite simply, amazing.

Getlisted.org will soon be providing some impressive and logical things that are centered upon the business owner, rather than one platform or another platform. David and I have discussed for over a year how to solve some of the basic problems a small business owner faces. We have created some great solutions, which we will announce soon.

None of these solutions would be possible with out our development leader.

Long story short, we want every business on earth to understand the importance of online listings. We want small business owners not to get screwed or be made to pay ridiculous amounts of money for things  that should be free, or damn near free. We also wanted to create a way for a business owner to submit their business information once, and have that one time commitment of the business owner to count for something by having their correct and current business info displayed across all platforms, where ever they may be found. We wanted it to be free or very economical. We wanted to show that the new “yellow pages” was the internet, and show that the internet is not only often more effective, but also often cheaper than print media choices.

Some of the next announcements from GetListed.org will show how we have identified, and solved, many of the basic problems that face a small business owner (or hospitals, police stations. or humane societies).

Until then, I just want to highlight a third person in the GetListed.org equation.

He is our developer lead.

In my several years on the internet, I have only overtly highlighted one particular person (Lisa Barone) for their individual merit.

Today I am going to highlight another person, he is our development lead.

He has successfully taken the dreams of David Mihm and I and made them reality. I wouldn’t mention him or waste your time is he was nothing less than a miracle worker. This is not just a “hire this person” post. Trust me. I don’t want you to hire him. I want him all to myself.

But I do want to highlight an issue that I have, it is my rather strong opinion that people who bring value to a project should be justly rewarded. I do not like that developers are seen as a “one time expense” or a contracted person.

The reason that Daid Mihm is a great ying to my yang is because he is so incredibly professional.

I am not professional. I get crazy,  see solutions and then draw them up. I seek ways to implement my solutions, I do not give a rats ass about professionalism. I care about solving problems. I see things a bit un-bussiness like.

Yet I want to highlight ur development lead not only as an incredible developer (which he is, you would drool if you knew his full development history), but as a pleasant and incredibly important part of our team.

I want to highlight the importance of developers here. I want to crush the all too common assumption that developers are some sort of “hire by project” person.

A good developer can make or break a project, and an extraordinary developer can literally change the entire reality of what can or can not be accomplished.

Ours is one such developer. He is now, and to every extent that I can make possible, will always be part of GetListed.org.

He has not only over come every technical barrier we (me and David) have faced, but he has also extended our knowledge of what is possible.

I am the CEO of GetListed.org and I can tell you, he will always be part of GetListed.org if I have a say so.

Which brings me to an interesting question. As regular readers of SEOish know, I do not often present questions, or ask opinions. But I hope to hear opinions on this…

Should developers get a stake in the company they are essentially creating?

My answer is yes, but I want to know what others think.

I see it as a common sense thing, but I have been surprised by some opinions I have heard (even from developers) about this issue.

I see it like this. You have a goal, but perhaps limited ability to reach that goal. Yet you move on. As you jump the hurdles, you find people along the way who can help. You and these people collectively combine your strengths and weaknesses and head towards that goal. If someone has joined my team, then they are part of the team. Period.

This means they should have the benefits.

I do not like what I see out there, where developers are being paid “x” amount of dollars and then forgotten.

It seems stupid to me.

I would recommend sharing the wealth with your developers, every one of them. I am simple in my ways and thoughts, and perhaps this isn’t the wisest thing, but to my gut, it is the wisest thing.

I am extremely fortunate that I have David Mihm as a partner, as many of you know, I am an utter failure when talking about prices or details. I just don’t care. I care about solving problems, and if the person who is solving the lions share of the problems is a developer, then why the hell should they not receive the benefits?

Back to our Development lead now.

He has indeed solved the lions share of our difficulties and he will absolutely receive an on going, recurring, and lifetime long reward for it. I also want to highlight that he is one of the most professional people I have dealt with and his capacity to solve problems is amazing. His website would not wow you. It is in text, and simple, but his abilities are anything but simple. I can not recommend you to this person enough (and again, just to be clear, I do not want to recommend him since I want him all for myself). I want him with me ten years from now, and I want to pay him, a [gasp] developer, equity in our company.

Am I dumb for this? I don’t think so, but how often do we think our decisions are dumb?

If you have read this whole post, thank you. I appreciate it and know this is a longer post than normal.

Should developers be a “pay per project” deal or be shareholders of a company’s future?

Let me know what you think. I am genuinely interested in what your opinion is here.

Thanks.

When you promote your Google gadget, you may also be unintentionally promoting your competitors gadgets as well.

Google wants to provide suggestions to their users of other gadgets they might enjoy. The problem this may cause for you is that those “other” gadgets may just well be your competitors. Here is a way to keep Google from showing your competitors gadgets during promotion. Let’s look at one of the places that Google suggests other gadgets and see how to get around this problem.

1) Google gadget directory description:

In this example, the gadget description page for a Travelocity gadget is shown. On this page Google suggests other gadgets from Expedia, Kayak, etc. and therefore promotes Travelocity’s competitors.

To avoid this you can choose not to send people to the gadget description and instead use the “add to Google” option instead. If you do then you won’t be sending your customers to this page and they will therefore never see Googles suggested gadgets.

The “Add to Google” page shows only the gadget sceenshot and the description that you wrote of your gadget:

Here is the “add to Google” page for the Travelocity gadget, this page can be displayed for any gadget by adding the gadget xml file location to the end of a google url. Here is the url for the travelocity one:

“http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/travelocity/travelocity.xml”

Don’t let the length of the url scare you, just replace the location of your gadget.

If your gadget is at “http://www.example.com/gadget.xml” then the add to Google url would look like this:

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.example.com/gadget.xml

By sending your customers to the add to Google page for your gadget rather than you gadget description page, you can easily avoid promoting your competitors.

My next article will show you how to avoid doing this in another place within iGoogle, the canvas page.

Hulu Has begun integrating show specific widgets into their navigation. The Hulu video widget is quite nice and well made, though there were a couple of hiccups when it first came out. Each show description page now has a Widget tab, as shown below on the Daily show Hulu page:

Hulu is offering two types of widgets, one that plays the video locally and the other is just a display of the latest thumbnails of videos available that then link to the the Hulu page hosting it. Here is a widget for the Daily show:

The widget can be displayed horizontal or vertical, and has many choices of how to display thumbnails, for example you can choose latest clips, or most popular clips. You can even have it just display the latest full episodes. The widget can display 1 to 4 different thumbnails. To choose these settings just follow the instructions under the widget tab of each show.

Widgetbox has an enormous gallery of user made widgets. There are around 150,000 different widgets and they are about to achieve a benchmark in their widget distribution: 10 billion widgets served over 3 and a half million different domains.

Your widget will be removed from this gallery soon if it is not “ad compliant”.

Part of the reason that Widgetbox has succeeded where others have not is their relationship with other platforms.

Displaying widgets can be tricky however when dealing with different platforms and providers and one the biggest issues is where and how ads are displayed within the widget. Different platforms have different rules for this.

Widgetbox has solved this problem well by their new requirement for widgets to be “ad compliant”. Basically, Widgetbox needs the ability to turn off ads when widgets are displayed in certain environments.

This does not mean that they are saying no to ads, it just means that ads must be coded in a certain way.

Below is the text of an email Widgetbox is sending to developers:

Widgetbox Developer,

We’re writing to inform you that action may be required to keep your widget listed in the Widgetbox gallery. We are enforcing our policy of ‘Ad-compliance’. This is to prevent Widgetbox Pro users from seeing ads in widgets. You can find detailed information on how to implement any required changes here:

http://docs.widgetbox.com/2009/05/making-your-widget-ad-compliant/

Starting Monday, May 18, 2009, we will be reviewing the gallery for any widgets displaying ads. These widgets will be delisted until the widget is Ad-compliant. Moving forward, only Ad-compliant widgets will be approved for gallery listing. Additionally, Widgetbox Pro users have a mechanism to inform Widgetbox of ads in widgets.

When a user reports a violation of Ad-compliance, Widgetbox will review your content and your widget will be delisted with a clear message regarding Ad-compliance. When you’ve made the required changes, you can resubmit for gallery approval.

You can feel free to contact us regarding the implementation of Ad-compliancy here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/widgetbox/

Thanks for your continued support of Widgetbox,

Widgetbox Team”

The URL mentioned in this email is a guide to make your widgets ad compliant, and seems to be a very good guide.

Learn how to make your widgets ad compliant here because if you don’t, you will be booted from their directory.

We often hear of great reasons to have catchy and dramatic titles, but I would like to explore the very real advantages of boring and descriptive titles.

This post will tell you how to significantly increase the amount of traffic your blog receives by following a few small steps that will likely take less than a couple of hours.

The internet is used by millions and millions of people everyday who are just looking for an answer to a question or to learn about a specific subject. People on the internet search Google for things like “how to change a diaper”.

The people searching for “how to” do something often are not seeking to be entertained, they are seeking an answer. Search for a “how to” type question on Google and you will find many similar titles. Descriptive ones.

The main benefit of descriptive titles is long term, constant traffic.

If you are a blogger and you want to increase traffic to your blog you can do so today within a few hours by simply reviewing your titles and changing them to more descriptive ones.

Most bloggers measure success by how well their posts were read in the first day or two they were up.

If you are measuring your success by that standard, consider judging your success by how many times your posts are read a week after they were written, or a month, or a year.

Creating blog posts need not be solely for temporary traffic. If you want to increase the sustainable amount of traffic that your blog receives, you can do so by reviewing your titles.

As bloggers, we tend to write things to be fresh, including titles. If you have written a post about how to use wikis for creating traffic, but you called it “You Rock My Wiki” as a fun title then you have missed out on any real chance for receiving long term traffic from search engines for the very subject your article was about.

No one who is seeking to learn about how to use wikis for traffic are going to search for “rock my wiki”. They will search for “how do I use wikis for traffic” or some combination similar to that.

We are SEOs right? We wouldn’t make such a silly mistake as not considering such things would we?

I can tell you I was amazed when I went through my titles and saw what blatant mistakes I was making with them, you may too. I went through my titles several months ago and changed many and I receive tens of thousands of visitors per month to my old posts because of it.

There are two different sets of rules of how to receive traffic to your blog.

1) Blogosphere rules

2) Traditional SEO rules

To have a successful post about a timely subject and to spread it around the blogosphere, you might give it a funky, timely, or funny title and then twitter it creatively. You might use words or phrases in your title that make some timely sense because of a news event or a celebrity oops or something that happened that day.

An example would be Oprah using twitter. Someone probably wrote a useful article about how to create a new twitter account but then gave it a title like “3 Mistakes Oprah Made on Twitter”.

Because of that title it may have gotten alot of views and interaction. That was a blogosphere move, it got traffic! Yum!

Now let’s look at it from a search engine view (long term). Remember how the post was a useful resource about how to create a new Twitter account? Well with that title, it will never actually reach an audience of people searching for “how to create a new twitter account”.

This is a shame, particularly if it was a well written and useful resource. If they changed the title to “How to Create a New Twitter Account in Five Minutes” they would actually have a chance at long term traffic for those seeking to learn the very thing the author is trying to teach, especially armed with those links they got from the blogosphere.

The good news is you can work your titles for both the blogosphere world and the search engine ranking world by simply reviewing your titles every couple of months and changing the bloggy titles to more descriptive ones. Keeping a bit of an eye on the future when writing your posts doesn’t hurt either.

For the blogosphere, go crazy on those titles, but later you may want to remember the Google guidelines which state

“Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.“

A great tool to review and change your blog post titles is Stephan Spencers Title Tag Word Press Plugin.

With mentions in Mashable and SearchEngineLand this Digg like gadget is off to a very good start. The What’s Popular gadget shows stories, videos and images that are popular. You can submit your own stuff to the gadget and these things can be voted on.

What’s Popular? How about What’s Probable?

There are some notable things about how this gadget is made. First off, this gadget is a URL gadget, meaning it is using type=”url”. This is very interesting to me since Google has not really used this type of gadget for any of it’s official gadgets. This type of Google gadget simply displays content from a url, which means the content behind this gadget is at a live web page…

http://www.google.com/labs/popgadget/world

This means that the about url is searchable, indexable, etc. Here it is in the Google results:

This is a full swing, functioning website and will likely serve as the home page of this service at a later date. In other words, expect this service to be a web based feature of Google. This is not a gadget only project by any means.

This service will become popular itself among iGoogle users. In fact, if history serves as a guide, I can almost assure you that this gadget will become a default gadget on new iGoogle pages.

Virtually all competitors to Digg lack one common thing, distribution.

Guess what? By making this a default Google gadget on iGoogle this gadget (and therefore this service) will have around 8 million users almost overnight. iGoogle is a distribution monster.

I am willing to bet three things about Google What’s Popular

• It will be a web based service soon
• It will be a default Google gadget on iGoogle
• It will definiately be a contender to other voting sites, even Digg.

This is how Google distributed the Gmail gadget and the YouTube gadget, I see no reason why the same won’t be true of the “What’s Popular” service as well.

It is really easy to watch the new TV shows and movies that are now available on Youtube without those pesky ads.

Simply embed them! Here is the full episode of new CBS show Harper’s Island with no ads…

I doubt that content losing their ads while embedded is intentional, and is likely breaking an agreement with CBS and their advertisers.

When this show (Harper’s Island) is shown on the YouTube site it displays a 30 second pre-roll ad and several ads during the show. Here is a screenshot of the above video when viewed on YouTube…

You can also do this with the feature length films that YouTube is now offering. Here is the full length movie Fitzcarraldo from Starz Media which, like the TV show above, does not display ads when embedded…

As far as I can tell this is a big error on Google’s part.

Getlisted.org has a new tool that examines web pages for street addresses. It is like a spider simulator that checks street addresses to determine if they can be seen by spiders and if there are any potential problems. It is based on address formats in the USA only at the moment.

Addresses are very important for small businesses when it comes to search engines and local SEO. We all know that, but there are many businesses who still do not put an address on their website. Many more still do display addresses, but use an image to do so which search engines can’t read.

This tool is a small piece of functionality that GetListed.org will use for some of our upcoming projects (GetListed has alot of things in the pipeline). I felt that this functionality could be a useful stand alone tool.

The algorithm it uses is quite robust and this tool also breaks down the addresses it finds into their natural or expected pieces (”city”, “street number”, etc.) and the lists warnings or potential problems with the address found. We will be offering an API in the future to use this functionality (and other Getlisted functionality) in your mashups and local SEO projects.

See the tool in action here

Please note that this tool currently examines single web pages, not websites. This is a beta project.