Author Archive for Tamar Weinberg
 |
Top 50 Search and Social Media Happenings for 2007Dec 31 2007 | Roundup |
It’s the end of the year and we here at 10e20 have a tradition of sharing our top stories in search and social media. This year is no exception. Without further ado, here are the top 50 stories in search.
50. Twitter microblogging tool goes mainstream (November/December)
49. Alibaba goes IPO (10/29)
48. Server downtime plagues Yahoo Stores on Cyber Monday (11/26)
47. Bodog online casino domain name frozen (8/28)
46. Porn.com sells for $9 million (5/15)
45. Jason Calacanis launches Mahalo human powered search engine (5/30)
44. Google starts to publish AP news in new partnership (8/31)
43. Digg partners with Microsoft for ads (7/25)
42. MySpace and Facebook study discovers different social class divisions (6/25)
41. Microsoft comes out with Silverlight to compete with Flash (4/15) and then launches Silverlight-powered search engine, Tafiti (8/20)
12 Comments » - Posted in Roundup by Tamar Weinberg
|
robots.txt: People Don’t Always Want Search Engines to Crawl Their ContentMay 18 2007 | SEO, Search Engines |
What goes through your mind when you read about the silly lawsuits against Google accessing portions of your website? What do you think when you visit the Internet Wayback Machine and find hundreds of pages of your site in its full form (almost)? Most of you wonder what is going on in the minds of these clueless people. Don’t they understand how the web works?
That’s right, folks. In case you’re not in the know, the web works in a certain way. A brand new site generally does not get indexed in search engines for a period of months. Over time, the search spiders find your site and your interlinked pages begin getting crawled. Eventually, someone will search for something and your website will hopefully come up.
6 Comments » - Posted in SEO, Search Engines by Tamar Weinberg
|
The Mantra of Social MediaMay 11 2007 | SEO, Social Networks |
Good advice does not necessarily have a single application. Solid advice can be “recycled” and used for a variety of situations. In January, I wrote how advice for startups can be applied to marketing a website. A recent post I read applied advice in human resources to SEO. I want to take that post and go the next step: into the world of social media.
This post highlights four main points, all of which have applications just about anywhere when you are looking to become active in the social media world and to have the sites that people care to share.
Lesson 1: Attract Attention
The key to being discovered is having something that attracts attention. Whether you write a list post, a how-to, or you gather a collection of viral photos, the key is about writing something that captivates your audience, whoever they may be. The title needs to grab the eye. Graphics can even further help the cause. Do something different. An old post by Robert Scoble about blogger Kathy Sierra resounds in my mind almost every time I write a blog post.
2 Comments » - Posted in SEO, Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
|
Tips and Tricks: An Introduction to Google’s Webmaster CentralMay 04 2007 | Google |
Any webmaster should be aware of the tools available to them. This is especially true for Google’s Webmaster Central, a collection of tools that allow you to better understand your website and give you more information about it.
One of the first things you will notice when you go to Google Webmaster Central is that you can check if your site is being indexed by Google. The site status wizard allows you to see when your site was last crawled and if it’s in Google’s index.
You might be told that you have potential problems and that you should submit a sitemap. It is recommended that you do so, even though you can now declare the path of your sitemap through your robots.txt file.
If this is your first time at Google Webmaster Central, you need to verify that you are in fact the owner of the site. You can do so with a meta tag or you can upload an HTML file.
2 Comments » - Posted in Google by Tamar Weinberg
|
The Cluetrain Manifesto and What it Means for Your BusinessApr 26 2007 | Blogging, Social Networks |
On the Internet, information gets outdated pretty darn quickly. Months pass and old blog owners consider pruning old posts that seem outdated. However, there’s one piece of information that has remained true and current for over a span of nearly a decade. The message comes from the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was written in 1999. The Cluetrain Manifesto was written well before its time; it is a precursor to social media of today. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s message is simple yet extremely powerful: markets converse with each other and the Internet facilitates that communication.
Here’s the opening paragraph to their key 95 theses:
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
No Comments » - Posted in Blogging, Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
|
The Prevalence of Social MediaApr 19 2007 | Social Networks |
At SES NY, there was a surprising amount of people who I spoke to who were not embracing social media as much as they could, which I feel is a huge mistake. Rand Fishkin presented some very compelling reasons to pursue social media. From his examples, articles that had good content and subsequently were made popular on a variety of social sites got a burst of traffic, and as articles hit the front page on a regular basis, he saw an increase in rankings for particular search terms. Some numbers that were thrown out: Digg is a site with 2,000,000 million daily visitors. A Digg, once it hits the main page, can bring anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000+ visitors and over 1,000 links after three weeks.
No Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
|
APIs: An Easy Way to Make Novel Websites Familiar and FunApr 12 2007 | Web Development |
Okay, you might not have had that two billion dollar idea, but that doesn’t mean you can’t partake in its features. APIs (Application Program Interfaces) allow programmers to access publicly available services from widely known services, which can make your “web 1.0″ (sorry about the moniker, folks) site more welcoming to users looking for something new.
The concept and utilization of APIs is simple. Many well-known sites share some portions of their site code so that you can experience similar functionality on your website without having to navigate to the original site. One of the most well-known APIs available is the Google Maps API, which allows you to embed Google Maps on your web page with just a little bit of code. Ever track a package on a website and see a Google Maps page showing your package’s progress as it travels from shipping facility to shipping facility? Didn’t it look cool to see Google Maps on that third-party website? That’s what you can do by unleashing the power of APIs.
2 Comments » - Posted in Web Development by Tamar Weinberg
|
Content is King, and Why This is True for SearchApr 01 2007 | SEO |
Fresh content is a very important asset for the growth and popularity of your site. There are many reasons why this is important.
First and foremost, having fresh content benefits your link juice. The more you write, the more opportunity you have to be linked to. I wouldn’t say to take the Twitter approach, however. When writing an article, write something of substance. Write something longer than that — but not too long so as not to neglect your readers. If your content actually requires great length, break it up into small pieces and link to each other in subsequent articles, making sure you link appropriately to refer them to a previous related article. Create a series of related posts. This works in blogging as well. Michael Gray recently did a series on local search. If you have not seen his vast interview coverage, I urge you to check it out to get an idea of how he did it.
1 Comment » - Posted in SEO by Tamar Weinberg
|
Can Twitter Serve as Highly Targeted Marketing Tool?Mar 27 2007 | Social Networks |
Many of you may know of the recent surge in popularity of the Twitter service. Quite simply, the goal of Twitter is to answer a question: “What are you doing?” Last month (as I began to use the service more aggressively since I signed up in December) I realized that not everyone is answering that question anymore. Twitter is becoming more of a microblogging tool, a news announcement tool, a networking tool, and as of late, a marketing tool.
That’s right. Twitter can be used for marketing.
Currently, the hot “bot” (literally) update comes from Woot.com, an online store that provides daily deals. As you can see on Woot’s Twitter page, the site does not feature anything but hot deals on the products it is selling for the day.
6 Comments » - Posted in Social Networks by Tamar Weinberg
|
Why the Age of Your Domain Name is Important for SEOMar 21 2007 | SEO |
If there’s one request that I always cringe at, it’s to disable a site because a customer decides that it is in his best financial interest to “close shop.” Later, if we own the domain name and get notifications about its upcoming expiration date, the customer may already be long gone and is not reachable with any contact information we may have for them.
I can’t say this has happened a lot, but it isn’t unrealistic either. If there’s one thing you should keep when you decide to shut down your business, it’s your domain name (and let’s hope you grabbed your website files too). But why? Believe it or not, it’s an important element for ranking in search engine optimization.
