SEO Blog

“Players are expected to remember that hockey can be an intense and physical sport but everyone is participating to have fun.” - from the Rules & Regulations governing the 2008 Victoria Tech Community Floor Hockey Challenge.

It’s on… Team Metamend is taking on several challengers for the second annual Victoria Tech Community Floor Hockey Challenge, a fun filled tournament that lasts four weeks and tests the physical endurance of everyone involved. (We take our hockey seriously ’round these parts)

Our outward goal (aside from winning) is to raise money for various local charities while creating an environment in which local tech companies and workers can get together to meet and have a lot of fun. This year, we are playing to raise funds for The Mustard Seed Food Bank and the Boys & Girls Club Services of Greater Victoria.
Here’s a brief rundown of the schedule: (All games start at 6:30pm)
May 14: Reliable Controls vs. Metamend

May 21: Scheider Electric vs. Telus
May 22: Reliable Controls vs. Pareto Logic

May 28: Reliable Controls vs. Telus
May 29: Metamend vs. Patero Logic

June 4: Pareto Logic vs. Telus
June 5: Metamend vs. Schneider Electric

One of the most important skills of a search engine optimization specialist is the ability to very quickly see the search engine readiness, or “friendliness”, of websites and the web documents housed within them. It doesn’t matter how well a SEO writes or how deep their keyword determination skills go, if a website is unwelcoming to search spiders, documents from the site will likely not rank and will certainly not rank as well as they should.

Making a website search engine friendly is far less difficult today than it once was, partially because of standardization in the way websites are built and spidered, and partially because the search engines themselves are far better at accessing web documents than in previous years. Nevertheless, there are a number of small steps webmasters and search engine optimizers can take to make a website and the documents housed within it as search engine friendly as possible. The first place to start is site structure.

“I don’t want the whole world, I just want your half.” - Ana Ng, They Might be Giants, 1989

Yahoo! might have wriggled free of Microsoft for the time being but it is now getting closer to Google than many PPC experts are comfortable with. Yahoo!’s overt flirtations with Google proved to be the ultimate poison pill that turned away Microsoft’s uninvited attentions.

Most in the search marketing community were rooting for a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo!, not because we love Microsoft or dislike Yahoo!, but because we felt that the combined forces of the two mega-firms would provide a truly capable competitor to Google. That didn’t happen. As it stands today, we’ve transited from a potential to create greater competition to the very real potential of seeing far less competition in the lucrative PPC marketplace.

On yesterday’s Webcology show on WebmasterRadio.fm, we explored the Post MicroHoo environment with Search Engine Watch Executive Editor Kevin Heisler and WorldBenefactor.com co-founder Greg Meyers. (Greg also publishes the blog SEMGeek.com).

It was an interesting conversation. Kevin covered the business ends of the equation and Greg passed out several tips on PPC bidding strategies his non-profit WorldBenefactors.com site is adopting in the post MicroHoo world.

This is just a quick speculative post. I’ve been watching Yahoo!’s stock performance since yesterday’s opening and have been pleasantly surprised at the direction shares prices are going in. Believe it or not, they are generally going upwards.

Yesterday, YHOO opened at $23.28 per share and rose gently through the day to close at $24.37 per share. This morning, it opened far higher at $25.55 per share, instantly fell to $24.20 per share and then quickly rose to peak at $26.03, the point they trade at right now (12:10 pm-pacific).

This was NOT an expected outcome. When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer openly closed the door on a deal, observers anticipated immediate and extraordinary losses for Yahoo!’s shareholders. Though down from their Valentine’s Day peak of $29.98, YHOO is still trading well above their low of $19.18, the day Ballmer announced Microsoft’s acquisition attempt.

Donning my counter-intuitive thinking cap, (and opening this round of speculative writing), I’ve been trying to make sense of Yahoo!’s NASDAQ yo-yo act.