Cameron Olthuis

Alexa Search is now powered by Microsoft’s Windows Live (source: Threadwatch). A9 is still powered by Google.

Windows Live is also the 13th most popular site today.

So what exactly does this mean? Not quite sure yet but this is going to be very interesting to watch. Microsoft is now promoting Live instead of MSN and this could be the future of their search. Keep an eye on this one.

Update: A9 is now using Live.com as the default search and ‘Web by Google’ is optional.

Live, Windows, Microsoft, Alexa, Search Engine

… using Marketing 2.0 as a powerful tool in your SEO bag of tricks.

Wendy’s recently created a profile on MySpace for that square hamburger character from their television commercials. This character ended up with 90,000 friends shortly after joining the MySpace community and got the eyes of thousands, if not millions of people. Wendy’s was able to get this many eyes for absolutely no charge and also got coverage from bloggers and journalists for this.

Can you imagine what this did for their search engine optimization? I bet they’ll get at least 25,000 - 50,000 backlinks from doing this. Good links too. Links from authorative blogs, news sites, and other places that they’ll show up in natural content.

Just the amount of eyeballs you get to your site from buzz marketing is awesome. Millions of eyes without even taking into the account the search engine rankings that will follow. I bet this is more than what most average SEO companies can do period.

Combined with SEO there’s no doubt these marketing techniques are a very powerful force, easily the most effective marketing you can do online today. Can you imagine the SEO damage you can do when you leverage social media, web 2.0, and other viral marketing techniques together. If you’re not doing this as part of your whole search engine optimization then you’re missing the bus.

This is why Internet marketing for web 2.0 type sites is so fun and effective right now.

SEO, Linkbait, Link Building, Viral Marketing

There’s been some noise lately suggesting that bad design is good or it’s the anti-marketing design (ugly site) that’s what makes a website successful.

I disagree, but for arguments sake let’s take a look at some of the more successful websites.

Let’s take Craigslist, Google, eBay, and Amazon to name a few. What do all these sites have in common? They’re not beautiful that’s for sure. I wouldn’t say that Craigslist and Google are ugly, but their sure not pretty either. Amazon and eBay on the other hand are pretty damn ugly.

So what makes these sites so successful? Is it because they’re ugly? I think not. Google and Craigslist and are successful because the user interface is straight forward and simple. That and their customers are great evangelists. So what then makes Amazon and eBay so popular? Both of these sites have horrible user interfaces so we know it’s not that. I’d say it’s because they were both first to market in their niches and have since dominated.

Yes, having a website that is simple to use and fast is one key to being successful, but I wouldn’t design your website to look like ass on purpose. For every popular website that’s ugly there’s 5 great looking popular sites.

What’s your take on this?

I may be the only SEO that doesn’t buy into the myth that your PageRank (PR) gets passed out by linking to other websites. It’s a stupid myth that I’ve never believed. Seriously, do you really think your PageRank gets distributed when you link to another website? Sillyness!

If you link to other people your PageRank does not get passed out, in other words the PR on your site is not lowered if you link to other people. There’s a difference to passing authority and passing PR. Passing authority simply means that your site, which we hope has some authority is passing on some love to the site you’re linking to. You’re giving the site a vote of confidence, which turns into PR for them, but it’s not at the expense of your own PageRank.

I think this where the common misconception lies (from the original Google research pape)…

The PageRank given to Page A by a Page B pointing to it is decreased
with each link to anywhere that exists on Page B. That means a page’s
PageRank is essentially a measure of its vote; it can split that vote
between one link or two links or many more, but its overall voting
power will always be the same.

It doesn’t say that the PR of site B is lowered which each link it gives out. It basically says the more sites that site B links to the less PageRank each of those sites gets.

So stop being a link nazi and spread the link love. If anything this will only help you, not hurt you. Some people are going so far as to putting no follow tags on their own inbound links, this is ridiculous.

Feel free to agree or disagree.

SEO, Links, PageRank

The other night I attended a local web design meetup and the discussion topic for the night was ‘the benefits of CSS’. Unfortunately we didn’t end up in the private room in the restuarant that we usually get so it wasn’t quite as easy to carry on a roundtable discussion. I noticed that most of the designers that showed up where fairly new to CSS and didn’t fully understand all the positives. In fact most of them seemed to think there wasn’t any benefits, and I even overhead a few say that tables are better.

Well the fact is there is a lot of benefits of using CSS. I’d even go as far as saying I can’t really see any negatives to layouts based on Cascading Style Sheets. The only thing that could possibly be a negative in my opinion is so called browser issues, but once your skills improve it shouldn’t really be a problem. Anyways, here’s some of the benefits that I could come up with, if you have anything I miss please contribute.

Maintenance - Maintaining websites with CSS based layouts is a hundred time easier than maintaining ones that are table based. Seriously! If you’re not making any content changes to the site all you really need to do is update one file, of course that all depends on the size of the site. But even if it is a large site it would still only be a fraction of the total pages.

Accessibility - The W3C says…

CSS benefits accessibility primarily by separating document structure from presentation. Style sheets were designed to allow precise control - outside of markup - of character spacing, text alignment, object position on the page, audio and speech output, font characteristics, etc. By separating style from markup, authors can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible at the same time.

I’ll also add that it’s far easier to make your site accessible using CSS. Think about all the people using cell phones and other wireless devices to connect to the interent now. Don’t you want to make your site accessible to them?

Cleaner/Less code - CSS generally requires less code than tables, a lot less. This make your code both lighter and a lot cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Faster - Your pages will load quite a bit faster with CSS, and for a number of reasons. This also cuts down on your bandwidth, if you have a site that gets a lot of traffic this can make a huge difference in your bottom line.

Easier - When I was first learning to design based on CSS I struggled a lot. But I caught on very quickly. In the beginning you would’ve never catch me saying that CSS is easier. But now, I truely believe that it is. Because you’re only using a fraction of the code it’s so much easier to design with CSS. If you’re still having a hard time don’t worry, once you catch on it will be so much easier. I would even recommend that anyone that’s just starting to learn web design to learn CSS before tables, I believe the learning curve is much quicker.

Creativity/Limitless - We’ve all seen CSS Zen Garden, and if you haven’t go check it out now. The idea behind CSS Zen Garden is…

The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document.

So many more possibilities with CSS. There literally no creativity bounds design wise.

Professional - It’s my belief that if you’re a professional web designer (in other words, you exchange money for your services) then you should be building sites strictly with CSS. If not for the reasons above (which are all more than enough reasons as a professional) then do it to keep up with the current standards and trends in the industry. If you don’t start now it won’t be long before you’re left in the dust.

As you can see there’s a quite a few benefits to CSS. If you’re still not convinced to use CSS then you probably never will be, so let’s just leave it at that. Again, if you have anything to contribute please do.

CSS, Web Design

Of course they can. But I want to point you to a very good debate between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.

Jason is arguing that bloggers can make a decent living and Alan doesn’t think they can. The one thing they do seem to agree on is that it takes a decent amount of traffic before that’s possible.

My Take is that you can make money from blogging. But I don’t think that’s the reason 95% of people blog in the first place. There’s a hundred other reasons someone start blogging besides making money, a hobby being one of them. I will agree though, if you do want to make money it will take a lot of traffic before you can replace your daytime job.

There’s a lot of things that you can get from blogging besides getting rich. The networking and contacts I’ve made through my blog alone have been priceless, and I’ve only just scratched the surface.

So who wins they debate? I vote it’s a tie. It’s true that if you want to make money blogging you can, but for the majority that will never happen. I agree with Jason that the industry is still young and ad dollars that go towards blogs is only going to increase. With that the number of people making a living off blogging will go up as well. If you do want to make money from blogging it’s possible, but like anything be prepared for lots of hard work. Let’s not forget the money a person can make indirectly from blogging as well. I’m sure Alan wouldn’t write a blog if it wasn’t tied to making money somehow, I guarantee he doesn’t do it for fun.

Blog, Blogging

Yes and no. There’s been some discussion today about whether or not SEO is easy. In my opinion SEO is easy, or at least understanding the basic concepts are easy. It’s common sense. Implementing the concepts and techniques is a whole other story and that’s where it becomes difficult. It’s the reason why there’s professional SEO’s and why it’s often a very costly service. Just like anything SEO takes years of experience to become good at. Sure the basic principles are easy to grasp but there’s more to it than that.

So why do I think it’s easy? Maybe SEO is just one of those things that comes easily for me. But I personally just think it’s just something that’s really simple to grasp. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that anyone can just go out there today, create a website, and appear at the top of the SERPs. But I do think it’s something that anyone can learn if they put in the time and effort. The concepts are easy but the devil is in the details.

There’s 4 basic principles for SEO; research, content, links, and spiderability. If you effectively implement all of these into your SEO strategy you will have a great shot at giving your website high visibility in the search engines. We’ll go into detail on these 4 principles in another post.