SEO Blog

I just got back from the amazing SMX West search marketing conference very early this morning so the post will be a bit short on style but hopefully long on substance. Bear with me friends, it has been a long and exhausting week. Conferences tend to take 110% of the attendees’ energies, leaving a gaping deficit that has me feeling half-strength and under the rainy weather today. Instead of trying to write a high standard post this morning I think I’ll just share a few notes from the week that was… (And what a week it was…)

1/ Search Marketing Expo West

Third Door Media achieved the home run they needed at SMX-West. To be more accurate, the SMX-West conference was one of the best shows I’ve ever attended; second only to the inaugural SMX-Advanced (Seattle) conference in June 2007.
Held in the expansive Santa Clara Convention Center, SMX-West featured a massive line-up of speakers, networking events and information sharing. I plan to do a much longer article on the show but, not today. It was far too busy for me to be able to work well after 96-hours in that fast-paced environment. In the meantime, here is a link to 80 photos from the show.

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management was quoted in Sunday’s New York Times over his suggestion that Yahoo is the wrong target for Microsoft. Though much of the SEO/SEM industry wants the deal to go through because it presents the concept of real competition to Google, Prof. Cusumano thinks buying Yahoo is a bad sort of awful choice Microsoft is making.

In his experience, the best way for a company like Microsoft to spend its investment capital is to buy a firm that does the same sort of thing they do, create and market software. If you happen to be reading this blog within two miles of Redmond, do the folks at Microsoft a favor. Run over and tell them about Cusumano’s thoughts. They might thank you for your troubles later.
The full article can be found here - Maybe Microsoft Should Stalk Different Prey (registration required)

Microsoft announced today that it was committed to opening up and sharing far more of its technical secrets with users and the software industry. Calling it a strategic shift in the way the company does business and handles information, Microsoft executives characterized the move as a major step for the Redmond WA based firm.

Microsoft is adopting a more open-source stance, in part, because European anti-trust regulators have told them to in order to ensure interoperability between its operating systems and productivity products and software developed by rival companies.

In October, Microsoft was forced to open its code to rivals as part of its settlement of a nine-year anti-trust case in Europe. European regulators have recently threatened to reopen investigations into Microsoft’s practices in order to get them to comply with the terms of that agreement. Another investigation is looking into Microsoft’s reluctance to share information about Word and Excel to competitors making complimentary products.

Moving forward into an uncertain future, the company has several other reasons to open up to outside developers. Quoted in the New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his firm was taking these steps on their own and signaled the company would shift to adapt to, “… the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-orientated world.”

Content is king. More than a truism, the phrase is a mantra. Content is the stuff people are looking for on a website. A commitment to developing and deploying great page, document and site content is a commitment to good SEO.

Comprised of the most common site elements, content is the most effective tool SEOs have to work with. Loosely defined as All Things On-Page, the term “content” would include titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links. In some SEO practices, the acronym ATOP is used to refer to the hands-on work environment. (ATOP, i.e.: Mark sends the keyword targets to Jade whose staff works ATOP in the overall SEO effort) Content optimization is where creative art gets mixed into the webmaster science of SEO.

In the SEO process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work done to make unique documents place well in search engine rankings. For the purposes of search engine optimization; content either exists, has to be created, or both.

Sometimes optimization of existing site content only requires the SEO to perform minor textual tweaks. Sometimes content does not exist and has to be written by the SEO. Frequently, SEOs come across pre-existing page content that needs to be totally rewritten or redeveloped.