Photo taken by ClintJCL, Flickr Creative Commons

When I first talked about SEO with Justin, he told me about the influencers, and what their power is on the web. Basically, influencers are folks that people listen to. They have huge readerships on their blog/site, talk at conferences, have many hundreds or even thousands of followers on Twitter, etc. When influencers talk, people listen. And not only do they listen, they also propagate what they heard, leaving ripples on the web (sometimes tsunamis).

Everyone who works in social media is aiming to be an influencer. The more influence you have, the more efficient you’ll be at promoting your brand. That’s a given. But how influential are influencers? Who are these people listening to them? But most of all, can an influencer promote anything to any public?

After reading Mack Collier’s post on the subject matter, I understood something quite critical – influencers mostly have an incidence on specific communities, and not the whole web. Collier talks in his post about his experience with Pepsi, and how inappropriate it was for them to pinpoint him as an evangelist. They should have turned instead towards an influential Pepsi fan, active in the Pepsi communities! If a whole community gets excited about a new product, not only is it good for the brand, but it might also be picked up by outsiders (which will contribute to the ripple effect).

That leads me to wonder if social media influencers have an actual influence outside the social media sphere, and if so, what’s the scope of it? Your input would be greatly appreciated!

Photo taken by Elemenoh, Flickr Creative Commons

When I got back from working and traveling in the UK, I settled down in Montreal and bought my first pieces of furniture at IKEA. Among those was a loft/mezzanine bed, which I thought would be a clever purchase to gain some real estate space in my tiny room. That was 7 years ago. Turns out I hate sleeping up there, so for the past few years I’ve been sleeping on the floor, underneath the metallic platform while the bed itself has become an expensive dry rack.

Last weekend I decided it was enough and unmounted the bed to get rid of it. I’ve been a fan of Craigslist for a while now. I check the Real Estate and Missed Connections almost daily, and other sections sporadically. Even thought its style is raw and primitive, it remains easy to navigate and very efficient at communicating information. I put up an ad to get rid of the bed in the Free Stuff section and less than an hour later someone was at my door to pick up the beast!

Craigslist, with its millions of monthly visitors, is a huge success. It has remained ad and banner free, runs with less than 30 employees, and thanks to its flagging system run by the community, is mostly spam free.

Can the Power of Craigslist Be Harvested for SEO Purposes?

I have researched the question and found this article which details the matter fairly well. Basically there’s 4 things that you need to know:

1. A well written post with at least 100 words has a great code to text ratio.
2. You can add your own H1 tag in the post. The post title is set has an H2 tag.
3. Craigslist adds a “rel=nofollow” to any links added in the post. Still, it makes for juicy links since the ad will be seen by many people and will probably rank high in search engines.
4. It is very likely that your ad will get flagged down (probably by competitors) – Avoid spammy-looking post in favor of organic ones.

I have tested Craigslist’s capabilities for a project I’m working on. Point 4 proves to be a big issue. The first ad I put up got flagged down 30 minutes after being visible to the community. The next day, I tried putting up another ad, which stayed up less than 20 minutes on the site. In both cases, I made sure the ad was as “innocent” looking as possible. Even though they were taken down rather soon, the ads got us a total of 77 hits in less than 45 minutes (in the Toronto area), which is pretty good. Imagine what it would be like if it had been up for a few hours in multiple cities.

Is the World Going Local?

It’s been about 50 years since the expression “Global Village” has first been coined by McLuhan. I now wonder if things are headed in the opposite direction. Of course globalization won’t disappear, but local life will increasingly gain importance in our lives. In a way, Craigslist’s success is due to the sense of community it helps hosting in local areas. A survey of the “Rants and Raves” section of different cities is a great way to experience various cultural specificities.

Geosocialisation applications such as Brightkite are also on the rise. I think once Twitter will go local we might experience a big shift towards geo-specific communities, from communicating with surrounding friends (and follow their whereabouts) to shopping, from walking the dog to exercising. In a way, I believe the future of Social Media might be headed in that direction.

Care to comment? Please do!

Photo taken by Dier Madrid, Flickr Creative Commons

Wow, it’s been a while. It feels like I’ve been hibernating for the past two weeks, mostly satying in and working on keyword research. The holidays are now over and winter is settling in for real.

Two weeks ago I posted about the importance of content, and how it was at the basis of any good SEO practice or any web project for that matter. I’m gonna keep going in that direction today and talk about editorial calendars. Having great, desirable content is one thing, but planning your content is another. To make the most out of high search volumes, it is important to plan content in order to make it coincide with events, holidays and such things. For instance, there will be high searches on Thanksgiving-related keywords as we get get closer to Thanksgiving. In order to benefit from this search volume, you need to plan your content accordingly. That’s what the editorial calendar is about.

There are some great tools available to determine high volume searches. A lot of you must be familiar with Google Trends and Google Insights. Google Trends lists the top searches on the web everyday, which is great for weekly planning. It also allows specific keyword searches. Here’s are the results for a search on Valentine’s day:

Search trends on Valentines day keyword

Google Insight does a similar job to Google Trends, though there are more ways to break down searches. It also provides a list of rising searches that includes the main keyword. Here’s what you get on a search for Valentine’s day:

Top related searches on Valentines Day

Top rising searches on Valentines day keyword

Another nice trend tool is Twitter. It would be hard to plan ahead of time your content using Twitter Trends, but for day to day or even weekly planning, it does an amazing job. Twitter is very much a real-time application. On Twist, you can monitor what people are looking for in real-time, see what’s hot at the moment. These trends can crash as quickly as they pick-up, but some pattern are discernible. Knowing what’s going on on Twitter can give you a heads-up on competition.

What tools are you guys and gals using to plan your editorial calendar? Come and share your comments!

Photo by Sebastian Prooth, Flickr Creative Commons

The internet is shit. Those are not my words, they were taken from this website (as pointed out in a tweet by Julien Smith). The catch phrase might be a bit strong, but the guy (or girl) has a point – what the hell happened to content on the web? Is the internet now all about bullet lists and Top something guides? User-generated content? What happens when everyone is referencing everyone? Are we all stuck in a infinite loop of crap?

I would not say that all is bad on the web; there are truly some amazing gems scattered here and there, you just have to look for them. Having been raised with the internet, it is very much a part of my social identity and personal mythology. Nowadays, I would also have a hard time defining our civilization without including the web (and its content). So if the content on the web is mostly crap, what does it say about our societies? Is the web getting worse or is it just an illusion? Who’s responsible for content? Users? Web developers? Bloggers? Social platforms? Everyone? Was the web 2.0 just a gimmick or an internet revolution?

There was this article on A List Apart a few days ago, also on content. It might help shines some light on this subject matter. Kristina Halvorson, the author, raises this question:

Do you think it’s a coincidence, then, that web content is, for the most part, crap?

Dealing with content is messy. It’s complicated, it’s painful, and it’s expensive.

And yet, the web is content. Content is the web. It deserves our time and attention.

So how come so little attention is given to content by web developers? I haven’t got a lot of professional experience working with web design companies as of yet, but what I’ve seen so far is disarming. A lot of resources are being put into building a site structure, defining the design elements and getting funding, but somehow there are no resources nor money to build content. Nada. I don’t even think this is something that was considered, as if a site’s design was enough to attract people, and that those same people were going to generate the content they were looking for in the first place.

This is wrong.

I was talking last week about the pyramid of SEO, and how accessible and quality content was at the basis of a search engine optimization strategy. So what happens when you’ve got your foundations all wrong? But most of all, why oh why are we so afraid to get our hands dirty with the production of content?

Because it is messy. And difficult.

Creating great content is hard and time-consuming. I myself am struggling to find time to write interesting posts on this blog. There’s a lot of research involved, you need to take time to think about what to write, and how you’ll write it. In that respect, it is very much like being back at university and having to write all those essays (again). If the web had to be reviewed by one of my teachers, I wonder if it would get a pass mark or not…

People in crowds are supposed to get stupider. Is the same happening on the web? Are folks pleased with the state of the internet? Please comment!

A List Apart’s article concludes this way:

Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.

This is exactly what I’m intending to do.

Photo taken by Cobalt123, Flickr Creative Commons

For those of you who read SEOmoz’s blog on a regular basis, you might have seen last week Rand’s SEO Pyramid. Basically, just like the pyramid of human needs we all studied at elementary school, it breaks down into four sections what SEO is really all about.

These sorts of posts are great because they take you back to the essence of the work. Everyday I spend some time on various blogs, reading about what’s new and what not, and get bombarded with tiny URLs on Twitter (yes I’m twitteriing now!) of numerous articles. All those posts make for a fun and informative read, and obviously they’re great to get your SEO practice to evolve. At the same time, they tend to take away my focus from the essentials of SEO. That might be because I’m still fairly new to this field, you tell me (I mean that).

So a pyramid, eh? Here’s what it looks like:

From SEOmoz, click picture to go to post

When your content is established, you can move on to keyword selection. Finding the essence of your page’s content and optimizing the semantics to get your rankings flying is an important and fastidious part of the job, but very rewarding at the same time. Alan Bleiweiss has a neat article on keyword selection on his blog, I suggest you go have a look at it. Justin also taught me to be creative with keywords. Indeed, I’m constantly reminding myself that SEO is about people, not just search engines. When I google words, I use keywords, but also questions, expressions, phrases, locations. You have to bear in mind how people are performing searches, and how they will be able to find your site.

Then comes link building. I’m not going to spend too much time on this as I’m still reading a lot on the subject matter and figuring it out, but as I said in yesterday’s post, link building is the fuel that gets your rocket flying. The more (quality) fuel you’ve got, the further you’ll go. It’s as simple as that. Getting the links is another story altogether.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid there is social media. To me, this is where your site is given back to the community and is experienced by humans. Growing and converting a readership is important and will ensure the vitality of your site and its community – this is where you’ll ensure a form of perenniality to your projects.

Agree? Disagree? Dazed and confused? Share!

Photo taken by Squid_Ink, Flickr Creative Commons

Isn’t brunch the best meal of all? I would have brunch 3 times a day if I could. And pâté chinois, but that’s another story. I’m just back (that’s not right anymore, I wanted to post this Saturday but got busy, it is now Monday 6 AM!) from Cartet, a nice restaurant/boutique in Old Montreal, where I had informal brunch with Justin, Colin and Julien Smith. Colin showed up wearing the most bad-ass fur boots I have ever seen – Agaguk would have drooled with envy at the sight of them!

Justin had set up this brunch so that I could meet with Julien. This guy has been in the SEO business for quite some time now and done great stuff for Stress Limit Design. By the way, you can have a look at his blog by clicking here. Of all the things that were said during lunch, what I understood as being the basis of SEO and social media is link building. Basically your website traffic is proportional to the amount of quality, editorial inbound links to your site. Justin had mentioned it before and I knew he was right, but somehow I haven’t spent much time yet on building those links on the projects I’m working on. I’ve been quite busy so far with structure optimization, but come to think of it, this is as important and should be taken care of. So today, I’ll be working at building links.

I’ve been listening to Royal Trux the whole weekend, especially their album Accelerator. They have a song on there called Juicy Juicy Juice, which I have attached here for you to listen to. Granted, it’s got more to do with smack than link juice, but eh! it’s good nonetheless!

Photo taken by assbach, Flickr Creative Commons

It’s 7h50 AM and I am sitting down in the hallway leading to the office. Not having any key to get in, I decided to use this hallway moment to bring up another article from SEO Theory called The Theory of Search Engine Optimization.

For Michael Martinez, SEO has three actors with their own personal agendas – the search engine, its users, and content providers. Search engines aim to provide a satisfying listing, the user wants the most relevant listings, and the content providers want the most advantageous listing. Optimization therefore is not the business of a few individuals, but is instead anchored into a complex process of interrelated actions.

If the searcher changes his queries, the content provider changes his content or if the search engines modifies its algorithm, results will be affected and optimized to reflect these changes. The author states that there are 4 reasons that explains why search results tend to change:

1. You do something with your site
2. Someone else does something with their site
3. The search engines do something with their data
4. People change how they search

Point 4 occurs when a user can’t find the information he’s looking for. He will then change his query, change search engine else they try at some other time. So what does this all mean for those working in the field of SEO? Of course we can’t control the web, all we can do is have an influence on the rankings. But how much of an influence can someone have next to those agendas?

This is where we’re going back to yesterday’s post, when I proposed Michael Martinez’s theory that search engine optimization can only be performed algorithmically. Indeed, since we have no control and limited influence on search engines’ indexing and ranking methods, on searchers’ queries and on content, what we have an influence on is the site structure and how it performs next to the search engines’ algorithm.

The author sums this up nicely:

Search engine optimization is therefore the use or application of algorithms to influence the predictable content and quality of search engine results according to the chosen criteria of the optimizer.

Again, I think this brings an interesting point of view to the table. As of yet, I haven’t got enough field experience to say if this can be proven or not, but it sure does give me something to think about.

That was quite the Dr. Doogie conclusion wasn’t it!

Photo taken by Lush.I.ous, Flickr Creative Commons

Today, I read for the first time from a blog called SEO Theory. Kudos for the name, as this is exactly what it says it is. My initial impression was that it was refreshing to read an SEO blog that isn’t all about the practicality of SEO. Don’t get me wrong, most of the resources I’ve been been reading about on them have been hugely helpful. I just think this blog (though you could say it’s closer to an aggregation of articles) brings an intellectualized approach to the discussion. I’ve always been opened to diversity!

Alright.

There was an interesting piece on SEO Theory called The Theorem of Search Engine Optimization. About mid-way into the read, the author asks what search engine optimization really is and how it relates to the content of a site. Let me quote the bit in question and then we’ll discuss it:

The context of a Web page is defined by what a normal visitor perceives, what you show to real people who load your page. Hidden text is outside the context of your page. Cloaked text (served only to search engines) is outside the context of your page. Inbound link anchor text is outside the context of your page.

We can therefore say that an optimization strategy is independent of the context of a Web page because optimization strategies can be applied either only through the context of the page, outside the context of the page, or both through the context and outside of it.

It has to be said that Michael Martinez defines SEO as algorithm-based. To produce optimized search results in search engines, you need to have a knowledge as well as an awareness of the algorithm that powers the engine.

SEO had never been defined this way to me before. My definition is more inclusive and global than his, but reading his article made me question it. Basically, the author draws a clear line between semantics and algorithm. Semantics constitute the content of the web page (what people see) while SEO is the optimization of what surrounds the content . For the author, this optimization can only be performed correctly if you have some knowledge of the algorithm since you are trying to achieve increased search results without semantics being involved.

Semantics are optimized naturally. By changing the keywords, links and headers in your content and making them as relevant as possible, you are trying to achieve search gains on engines. It helps people find you more easily when looking for those terms, but it doesn’t rely on nor affect the way the algorithm performs.

Search engine optimization is the opposite. When people are doing searches on an engine, they’re not looking for code or concerned by HTML tags. They’re typing in words. With SEO, it’s the structure that is optimized, and this optimization has to influence instead the algorithm to produce results. This process is considered unnatural.

I have always associated both semantics and structure as one element. I believe the author has a point, though I’m not ready yet to take a stance. I need to gain more experience before I do so. I would be very interested though to hear what you guys think of this. Let’s get the discussion going!

By the way, I’ll go over another of Michael Martinez’s article tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Image taken by Yashh, Flickr Creative Commons

About a year ago, I got my hands on the CSS for Designers video serie from Lynda.com. At the time, I was trying to gather some CSS knowledge in order to put my portfolio online. I shamelessly failed at putting together a website I was happy about, but I did learn a great deal about HTML coding.

The serie is presented by designer Andy Clark and technologist (that’s how she presents herself) Molly E. Holzschlag. What’s great about it (other than witnessing Andy and Molly’s uncomfortable and awkward flirting) is the time and importance they spend at explaining proper HTML structure and hierarchy. HTML markups were first introduced to structure text into headers, sub-headers, paragraphs, quotes and lists, with styles applied inline to some elements (for instance to bold a word, or underline it). Somehow with time, a lot of designers and programmers lost track of the origins of HTML. The websites I have worked on so far had nice layouts and visual elements, but poor HTML structure. No H1 tags (sometimes no H tags whatsoever) or too many, bad headlines hierarchy, menus not treated as lists, and so on. Basically they were coded only for its end result, i.e. the way people would see the site, and not in a crawler-friendly way.

There’s a neat little tool I’m using to look at websites the way crawlers would see them. It’s called seo-browser and is free of use. All you have to do is enter an URL and voilà! You get a text-only version of it. A well-coded website will make sense to read into that browser. Headlines will pop, menus and lists are recognizable, and chunks of content are organized.

A not so clean URL might reveal poor hierarchy of information and look very messy. In seo-browser, you should be able to scroll fairly fast through content while still having a clue of what the page is about. If you can’t, it means you’ll have some HTML scrubbing to do.

In a previous post, I listed Rand’s 4 elements that sums up SEO. The first of these elements is “Make pages accessible”. To me this means 5 things:

1. Your site’s architecture should be as flat as possible.
2. Make sure all your pages are accessible through links, as close to the Home page as possible. Think Craigslist. This site might have very little styling, but everything can be found within 1 or 2 clicks. Nothing’s buried.
3. Have perfect HTML structure so your site is crawler-friendly.
4. Remember that content that can’t be indexed such as Flash, videos or forms should have alternate versions or transcriptions.
5. You would be amazed at the amount of people that uses their computers with a 800 by 600 pixels resolution. Think about them.

I’m sure that is not all but that’s all I can come up with at this point. If you have anything to add, please say so!

Photo by Mfilej, Flickr Creative Commons

Justin brought to my attention this article from the Huffington Post about the eminent death of Digg by Twitter. To be honest, I have never really liked Digg to begin with.

To me, a lot of the stories that make up its front page are boring and uninteresting. At the same time, I’m just getting acquainted with Twitter. It’s funny how inoffensive it looks from afar (or maybe I need to reset my screen resolution), but once you get to interact with it, it morphs into… something much, much bigger. My initial thought when I first looked into Twitter was one of confusion. How the hell do people manage to digest so much information so fast? Being on Twitter makes you feel connected to a whole new level, as if you were handling 4 mobile phones at once, or all your friends were chatting you up at the same time on Gmail. Fortunately, the more time you spend on the service, the quicker you get at filtering out information. It brings you headlines in real-time and uses your friend’s authority to propagate them. Will Twitter bring us closer to the so-called democratization of information we’ve heard so much about?

One element that was not very much talked about in the article is the portability of Twitter. This is a huge advantage over Digg. The 140 word format of Twitter along with its small file size makes it ideal for mobile phones and such devices. I can easily picture myself tweet on the go, more so than on a computer. As iPhones and other smart phones will grow in popularity, so will Twitter. Geosocialisation tools such as Brightkite have a sunny futur ahead of them.

On a SEO and Social Media point of view, I believe Twitter is a powerful tool to gather up communities and build quality links, even though I still haven’t had much experience with it as of yet. I have set myself a goal to have Twitter on my (still lightweight) tool belt within the next few weeks. We’ll see how things turn up to be!