‘Follow’ the green bird… (get it?!)

Published by Christian | Filed under Amplify-Interactive

Almost all of our employees are twittering… so we thought, “Hey, during the frequent Twitter down times let’s set up an Amplify Interactive Twitter account.”

So we did.

Feel free to follow us.  What this Twitter account will be is essentially an RSS alternative for those who like to use Twitter.  You’ll be getting blog post alerts whenever we post our usual amplified SEO information.  We will also be looking into the possibility of providing some exclusive Twitter-only content, so hey, if that’s not an incentive to follow us along with the thousands of other people you’re following, I don’t know what is.

Now is the time to make your site iPhone-friendly

Published by Christian | Filed under SEO

By iPhone-friendly, I’m not talking about creating a wholesale ‘mobile’ version of your site. I’m talking about auditing your current site to see if you can cut down on some of the trim that might make it load a little quicker on a 3G (or EDGE) connection. The following are a couple of things you can do to make your website be a little more mobile / iPhone-friendly:

1. Take a look at the images on your site. If you’re finding the file size to be a little hefty, look into perhaps squeezing down the quality a little and shorting up the download time for the image.
2. Your site is, essentially, built around providing one big sales path. Help users continue upon this path in a way you want them to by providing call-outs to the ‘next-step’ along this funnel at the end of the content or on the sidebar of the current page they’re on. Make these links / graphics ‘tap-friendly’ for iPhone users.
3. Provide your contact phone number somewhere easily seen on your site. Often, iPhones will make a phone number ‘tappable’ on the page. Give iPhone & mobile web users an easy way to contact you directly this way.

Even if your product or service website isn’t something you think an iPhone or general mobile web user would possibly want to access on their device, the percentage of users who use the mobile web to access content is rising. The new version of the iPhone - coming July 11 equipped with G3 speed - will only increase our mobile web surfing habits.  Better strike while the iron is getting warmed up…

SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Published by Ben | Filed under Search Industry, Events

Julian & I took the short trip up to Seattle this week to attend yet another search marketing conference - SMX Advanced. SMX Advanced is a two-day conference for “advanced” search marketers where the sessions focus on topics beyond optimizing title tags and using keywords in your copy and other more “basic” topics. So, it’s a little smaller than Search Engine Strategies, and a little bigger than the SEMpdx SearchFest.

Between the two of us, we were able to attend a number of sessions, and have captured our notes on the blog. Perhaps the biggest draw for SMX Advanced though is the “Give it Up” session, which promises to all in attendance some top secret SEO tips… however, you aren’t allowed to blog about them for 30 days, so you’ll have to wait for my notes on that session.

Day 1

• Money for What? Search Marketing Payment Models (Ben)
• Creating Value In Your SEM Business (Ben)
• Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques (Julian)
• Bot Herding (Julian)
• Buying Sites for SEO (Julian)

Day 2

• Search Friendly Development (Ben)
• What You Should Be Measuring — But Aren’t (Ben)
• Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know (Ben)
• Search Marketing & Surviving a Recession (Julian)
• International SEO (Julian)
• Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues (Julian)
• Give It Up! (Ben… this post won’t go live until 9:01 AM on July 5 2008)

Diagnosing web site architecture issues

Published by Julian | Filed under SEO, Events

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Developer Track
Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land:

Vans.com has problems with javascript code. They don’t come up high in search due to this. She uses this as an example of identifying problems with websites to determine your strategy.

Chris Silver Smith, Netconcepts:
blog: naturalsearchblog.com

For the newbies:

• Do a sitecommand and see how many results your site has.
• Yahoo shows many more than Google. This is somewhat due to Yahoo! showing duplicate content.
• Do a “inurl:sessionid” search to see if you might have duplicte content.

Register with Webmaster tools and look for errors

New area in Webmaster tools on title tags, meta, content, etc.

• New area in Webmaster tools on title tags, meta, content, etc.
• Check your robots.txt file

Coca-Cola has a homepage redirect (bad redirect).
He uses web-sniffer.net to see what is returned by the server.
Coca-Cola shows a 200 redirect code which is bad. It should be a 301.
Google handles these issues “pretty fluidly” now, but not the other search engines.

Use Lynx Browser to look at links on a page.
Use the Firefox Developer extension and the Link Counter extension.

Another utility: Acxiom’s MarketLeap – Benchmarking Link Popularity

SEOMoz’s SEO Toolbox. They have many good utilities all in one in place.

• example: who else is hosted on my IP
• your ISP could host several domain names on the same IP address which could hurt your site.

Look at “Google Sets” to ID your top competitors, and then see why they are ranking well.
Special Whitepapers available at chris@netconcepts.com

Jonathan Hochman, Hochmanconsultants.com

Diagnosing and Fixing Websites:

Favorite tools:

• NoScript (firefox add-on), blocks all client side scripts
• More sophisticated users might have javascript disabled. There are not many of these users, but could be influential.

Flash issues: make html content as well
Check Google’s cache to see what they actually got out of your page
Live HTTP headers (exposes redirects)
Gillete.com (after redirects which were 302ed) has an OK cache

SWFobject() 2.0 to help with flash sites
For java/ajax, modify DOM to replace HTML content, or use <noscript> tags
For Silverlight, create your own SEO-friendly insertion code.

SWFobject is not cloaking. It is open-souce Google development now.
it is not considered cloaking.
There is an article in Searchengine Land about it
Text must be identical to text in flash, but you can not describe the flash.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth: Contains some anti-Scientionlogy information due to 90s controversy.
It is a handy spider to look at sites

Firefox Web Developer:
You can view code problems

Watch out for search problems with frames, iframes, Flash and Silverlight.
Each object is treated as a separate item, not as part of the host page.
Watch out for AJAx due to iframe issues

David Golightly, Zillow:

Optimizing Zillow’s Search Interface for Engines: A Case Study.

David is not an SEO, and discusses the issues Zillow had including issues using Ajax and Javascipt.

International SEO

Published by Julian | Filed under SEO, Events

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Organic track

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, ExactTarget
Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Search Strategies

Ian McAnerin, McAnerin International:

You can geolocate web pages (not just sites).
Search Engines look at the domain country code (ccTLD), ip address, and link analysis.

• This is a script, and if the country domain is country specific, then the engine stops and assumes that country. If not, then IP address. Then, link analysis.

When looking for international links, you can have many issues:

• local terms
• spelling issues (UK vs US)
• Pop Culture
• Other Cultural Issues

SEED Tactic: Symantic Expression Equivalency Document

“Good marketing material appeals to your emotions” and then look at info. Emotions are very culturally relevent. Better writers/writing translates poorly.

Put information into bullet points and take out emotion. Then translate to other language. Then take that and give it to a real copywriter in the country to put the emotion back in. You might want to translate back as a check.

Andy Atkins-Kruger, WebCertain:

• Adopt a global PR strategy.
• Manage 301s
• Keyword URLs (can be very difficult)
• Source local links
• Need expert keyword research in target language
• Local hosting and cctlds needed

Language and content presentation

• Don’t mix up languages on the same page
• Need more than limited content to help google detect location.

This becomes a the recurring theme from all the other panelists. You need to understand culture, spelling, etc. you need to host locally and get local links.