The 2000's (or the noughties) have seen the start of the end of a number of technologies people have taken for granted – some for over 2000 years.
Business Insider just did a post on 21 things that went bye bye (or at least seriously started to contemplate the end… they fudged the meaning of obsolete just a bit).
What else is near the end or at least in for radical change? Here's a few of my picks:
• Downloads – streaming will wipe this out very quickly.
• Hybrid cars – 2 drivetrains equals a poor ROI.
• Broadcast media – TV, Radio supported by advertising in the current format – gonzo.
There's not much to argue against the steady and significant rise in use and significance of review sites like Yelp, Praized, etc. People like getting non-biased opinion from other "regular" people when they are looking to spend their money.
As an aside: What does this say about the much ballyhooed impartiality of the press of the world? When the common man no longer unthinkingly eats the pablum served up by the press, especially when the common man is looking to spend his money, what does that say about the public's perception of the so called "church and state" separation between the advertising and news departments?
The review section on the Google Local Business Center has a serious affect on your sites ranking there. Google is recognizing, responding to and supporting this major change by rewarding businesses that have reviews with better search engine positioning. But what is the result of this change and how will it affect SEO?
A more recent phenomenon is the way people are using and relying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get informed opinion on everything they might be looking for information on. I think we have to face the fact that crowd-sourcing is growing like crazy.
Social Search
John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing has just written an article, Will Customer Opinion Overtake Search? discussing the effect of the newly launched Social Search services that all the search engines have just started up.
He brings up some thought provoking ramifications of what happens if social search and reviews keep growing in the manner that they have been.
What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?YouTube is the top dawg of Video distribution sites. YouTube serves around 80+% of all the video viewings on the internet. That popularity means it offers both a large opportunity and a serious challenge.
The opportunity lies in the amount of people who are watching video on YouTube. On YouTube your video has the ability to reach more people, quicker than any other video distribution site.
The challenge is in standing out from the sheer volume of hundreds of videos posted to YouTube every hour, of every day.
If you're fortunate enough to have a video go viral, the amount of traffic and business you can get could power your company for many months. The majority of videos do not reach this holy grail of marketing, so the effective strategy is to promote your video on YouTube to gain both the most viewers, and traffic to your website.
James Harrison at JameSEO just wrote an article outlining 20+ video promotion tips for YouTube. It's a solid checklist to follow and will give your videos on YouTube a strong SEO promotion boost and it is a great advanced addition to our earlier article on YouTube SEO.
Hopefully these tips have been helpful. What do you think?YouTube has been running ads at the bottom of videos for awhile now. I find that they are unobtrusive and I have no problem clicking the quit "X" button which removes them from the video. Greg Sterling over at Screenwerk has a short article about a YouTube advertising test.
For context: I'm firmly in the less advertising is better camp. I think that we're bombarded past all reason at this point with advertising and honestly I think the overuse is making all consumers more and more resistant to advertising. Yes it still works or business wouldn't do it, but how many consumers are with me on the idea of seeing less advertising?
Putting on the business hat though: Show me that it's killer effective to run forced ads and I have to be there, using it for my business and for my customers. We gotta eat, right?
YouTube has been doing some limited testing of pre-roll advertising; pre-roll ads run before the content that you want to watch. People don't like them much and I have to wonder what the long term effect would be if they rolled them out, en masse tomorrow?
I've given up on "regular TV." We unhooked the cable and only use our AppleTV and DVD's for entertainment. What that's done is educated me that commercial free entertainment is much more enjoyable. After a year, I cannot watch regular TV and enjoy it. I want to be entertained, not have to watch commercials for stuff I'm mainly not interested in…
Makes for a conundrum – I have to market to grow my and my customer's business; advertising is a big part of that. How do we make advertising less intrusive and more targeted to when people are looking for a product or service?
This is one of the big reasons I love SEO, Video and PPC advertising. They reach people when they are wanting more information -now- about that product or service – no intrusion!
I have the "pleasure" of having a cellular provider in Canada who benefit greatly from the government sponsored quadopoly in cellphone provision.
Here's a customer appreciation promotion that I received by email today – they were also texting me about it at the same time.
Epic Marketing Fail
Here's the text of the email I sent them to the return address on the email.
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Re: Rogers Customer Appreciation Event
Why do you have a splash page? The instant I get to those – I'm out. Thanks for not respecting my time!
Why all in Flash? Did anyone in the management team realize that smart phones don't use flash? Fail!
Stunning Fail. Marketing at it's most disconnected. I'll blog about it though, so thanks for the fodder.
For whoever is in the trenches and gets this, pass it on to your bonehead upper management. That's who it's meant for, not the hard working people who just did their best implementing a flawed plan.
Isn't it time for real telephone competition in this country?
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Rogers enjoyed being the only cellphone company in Canada to have the iPhone until very recently. Sending a promotion to smart phone users that they cannot see on their cellphone is not well thought out, is it? It says, "We appreciate you so much that we're willing to give you stuff in exchange for marketing to you more, but we won't let you see it on your kick ass cellphone – we forgot that Flash doesn't work on the iPhone… hehe!"
What a bunch of maroons. (Bugs Bunny reference there…)
My email's response? I got a bounce back saying that email address is not monitored. Go here or there so "we can ignore you even more!" Meh.
The CRTC needs to be abolished. They prop up this sort of incompetence with price fixing, so the big companies in the cellphone business can make large profits, no matter how bad they are or how much their service blows! Competition is the only thing that will make them do a better job.
Do YOU have any ideas on this? Please comment.Filed under Blog, SEO News, Website Conversion by . 
SEO as a business is plagued with scammers (they almost always cold call by phone or email) and people who think they can do SEO cheap and cheerful. They invariably are using software that essentially spams the internet or have a virtual team in another country that produces non native English speaker type content.
It's crap.
It's uncomfortable to have this ilk creating one image/experience of what I consider a valuable, high ROI business. Sometimes I've encountered business owners that are now convinced that SEO is just a big scam. That's unfortunate. We work hard at SEO and we pride ourselves in the results we get for our clients.
That can make it tough to hear someone dismiss our work out of hand without giving you a chance. I'm getting thick skinned and all zen about it.
The damage it does to small business owners is more what bothers me. Local SEO can provide the highest return on investment of any marketing. Further, this ROI is going to grow drastically over the next few years as the internet becomes even more useful, more used and more sophisticated.
Every business niche has fierce competition. That's the "game" of a free market economy. I'll bet your business has some low ball, poor quality, "promise much and under deliver" competition that you lose business to. Invariably that customer ends up coming back to you. Then you have to clean up the mess or explain to the customer who went with the low price, why that low price meant the product or service they got – sucked. And why yours won't. You almost always, get what you paid for!
Matt McGee has written a short post about a fallacious SEO offer he got over at Small Business SEM. Worth a giggle.
Our recent article on how Google uses your IP address to customize your search results, prompted a couple questions from friends on exactly how that works. I was going to delve into to it a bit more and then I found a good article that describes how it works; and much more! (mmmmmmm, Geekiness!)
James Harrison at JamesSEO just did a 3 part article on how to use browser IP addresses for useful redirection. Great explanation, check it out.
Geo-location is starting to be used in many ways. You are seeing it being used a lot on smart phones for way finding, for notifying friends where you are (and how long until you get to them…), for finding shopping and restaurants, for finding specials and sales… and there are more uses. GPS location, IP location, and Cell Tower triangulation are facts of life now. It's getting easier to find out where someone is.
• What does this do to privacy?
• What does this mean for how much and what information corporations have about us and our habits?
• Is there any public discourse as to how, why and when this tracking should be limited? Or are the corporations just running amuck with this, and governments are complicit because big brother wants to know exactly what you're doing as well?
Anyone else have feelings about this?In a back to the future moment, last week Google (through the personage of Matt Cutts at PubCon 2009) announced that site speed might become a ranking factor in 2010. And "Here's the pages we've built for you to learn about speeding up your website". There's a fine article exploring this over at Vertical-Leap's SEO blog.
One web browsing factor that people in the SEO business have speculated about for years is page load speed. My first encounter with this was when I first started in SEO ten years ago.
I got a job as a "web associate" and inherited a very large and expensive website. Really expensive! It was one of the first iterations of a website done completely in Flash (1.0). It looked cool and had some interesting graphics and unique navigation… OK it totally sucked.
Worse than that, most people were on 33.6 analog modems (…'member those? those strange sounds back and forth as they would hook up over the phone lines?) The site was slow. I mean dead dog slow. 20-40 minutes to load the front page slow! Really abysmally, totally stupidly slooooowwwwwwww.
I'd get into work and face a barrage of hate email from customers who wanted to use the site and were less than thrilled with it's cool factor. People had little to no filter on their language in those emails… I quickly learned to not read my email in the morning!
Once the political will inside the corporation found the fortitude to admit the site was a certified POS, we redesigned and rebuilt it. I SEO'd it and re-launched to get 10,000 times more traffic inside 3 months. The usability of the new HTML website was the major contributing factor, but I also saw from the server logs that the search engine spiders came indexing far more often after we relaunched. They liked it better too!
Highly recommended reading! Check out Emily Mace on Site Speed Becoming a Ranking Factor
Filed Under: You Know These Guys Are Serious When…
I had me some ideas to improve this program… and I'm calling shotgun on the Google StreetView BigWheel!
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- StreetView HoverBike Today!
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- StreetView HoverBike Future
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- StreetView Water Skipper
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- StreetView Segway
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- StreetView BigWheel
Mad Props to Big Wheel Drifting
More mad Props to Off Road Segway
Bizarre Water Skipper!
Cool animation of the Future StreetView HoverBike.
Will from New Zealand with his fresh HoverBike!
What ya think? I think Google's calling me any day now fer all my biggest ideas!!! (NOT)
What's your next move, after having read this post?