Web design blog

See hydropackuli-city.com for Gary Lutgen’s entry in the Hydropackulicity SEO ratings contest.

Gary writes:

This is a Hydropack. Recently discovered, it is a member of the camel family. It differs from the common camel because it’s hump is located towards it’s rear end and it’s a little more ornery. It is known as the “recliner of the desert” to it’s riders. It only allows riders from the “hidden” Bedoins after checking their signature phermone. The “hidden” Bedoins were only recently discovered after Google Earth found their “hidden” oasis. They are not happy with Google. They were a myth to the other local tribes, until now.

SEO exercise sidebar now displays students in random order

Screenshot of PHP that does the shuffling:

[getImg id=”seo-shuffle”]

Slashdot reports:

“For some time there’s been rumbling that Google’s search results have been gummed up by low-quality pages from ‘content farms,’ written at low or no cost specifically to score high on common Google queries. Now it looks like the latest update to Google’s search algorithm is having an effect, cutting into traffic to eHow (and cutting down the stock price of eHow’s owner, Demand Media, in the process).”

— Slashdot

SEO tactics you should not use:

• Link buying
• Publishing online press releases
• Article submissions
• Blog commenting (only for the sake of a link)
• Link exchanging
• Directory submissions
• Keyword stuff

— Alhan Keser @ bnet.com

See the article for explanations and alternatives.

“SEO has become a valuable online marketing tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes, but for an SEO campaign to be successful, solid foundations need to be in place. Doing things right from the offset can really reap the benefits, save time and money.”

• Keyword Research
• Search Engine Friendly Navigation
• Website Load Times
• Website Images
• Keyword Placement
• Add Social Elements
• Friendly URL’s and image filenames
• Sitemaps
• Google Web Fonts
• 301 Redirects
• Prediction: W3C Validation

— David Cain @ Web Design Ledger

News from the Search Engine Wars:

Bing has overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January and increased its lead in February according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google’s 89.94% of the global search engine market.

— Slashdot

The essay below describes a “curation ecosystem” — that is, web content which is cataloged, cross-referenced, rated, filtered, and otherwise managed by human beings.

[T]he entire curation ecosystem is growing and along with it there has been an will continue to be a proliferation of interesting tools that people can use to help filter, organize, archive discover and share content on virtually any topic.

How useful any one tool might be depends heavily upon the intended use. Some are designed to help curate (or in my own opinion) more artfully filter real time streams -– most especially twitter however I think this form of curation is actually closer to aggregation unless those lists of tweets and other content and subsequently perused by a person and further refined. In fact I would go so far as to argue that a purely algorithmic effort at filtering content should really be described as aggregation and not truly curation.

The way I see it you wouldn’t have an algorithm choose the most important 10 pieces of French Impressionist art out of a 10,000 item collection. Could an algorithm really determine not only why they were the most important pieces but also make decisions about how to display them in a way that places them in context with one another as well as within the larger context of the entire period?

Perhaps the day when that will happen isn’t far away but as someone that has followed our progression towards Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” it is pretty clear that we’re not there yet.

On the other hand humans are already very skilled curators. In fact, virtually every one of us curates something. Granted, most of the stuff we curate may not be to your liking -– you may not be as fond of ceramic dogs as my mom is, for example, but that doesn’t mean her collection is any less well curated for that fact -– but when you do seek content on a particular topic it’s highly likely that if you look for material curated by an expert in that area it will deliver far greater value for the time spent to locate it than you are likely to realize using search engines to find material on the same topic.

— osstar @ blogs.reuters.com

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

… Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

– Derek Powazek (via BoingBoing)

On The Value Of SEO

To succeed in attracting that audience, she should have a great site and great content — agreed. But does she have individual listings? Then she probably needs to kick them out into Google Base, in order to fully be listed in Google. Does your mythical web developer deal with Google Base much? And where’s her web site now? Is she running it off Blogger? Using her own domain? These have impacts on how both the search engines may see her as well as how she’s perceived.

Does she have a blog in addition to a main site? That has an impact. Has she considered some unusual, creative ways to create content around real estate in her area, perhaps some catchy link bait, which may pull in the links she needs to rank better (which, by the way, is a recommended Google practice).

Does she have a local office? If so, has she claimed her listing in Google Local? If so, has she updated her title to reflect that perhaps she has “newport beach homes for sale?”

– Danny Sullivan @ SearchEngineLand (via BoingBoing)

Entire .SE TLD Drops Off the Internet

The SE tld dropped off the internet yesterday due to a bug in the script that generates the SE zone file. The SE tld has close to one million domains that all went down due to missing the trailing dot in the SE zone file. Some caching nameservers may still be returning invalid DNS responses for 24 hours.

– Slashdot

Yoko Ono Embraces Creative Commons

We’re very pleased to announce that thanks to the helpful advice of Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing and Eric Steuer at Creative Commons, the audio elements for Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band – The Sun Is Down (remix) are now being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. We firmly believe that releasing the elements under a CC license embodies the true spirit of the competition.

– Imagine Peace (note: site uses jQuery) (via BoingBoing)