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Video: Google Speaks About Search Quality Raters
May 1st
Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has published a video talking about a topic that Google has never really talked about publicly before – Google Quality Raters. The video goes through the process used by Google with these Quality Raters. Matt Cutts specifically says these quality…
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Contingency Plans: The One Thing Mike Tyson Wants You To Know About Enterprise SEO
Apr 24th
Before we get to the everyone’s favorite collector of white tigers and facial tattoos, it is important to set the stage with another heavyweight. “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” – Eric Schmidt, Former Google CEO and current…
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5 Questions About Image SEO Answered – Business 2 Community
Apr 22nd
 Business 2 Community |
5 Questions About Image SEO Answered
Business 2 Community Take advantage of this underutilized SEO secret! The alt tag is the most important SEO opportunity for your images. Every content management system gives you the opportunity to describe your image. Take advantage of this is in the same way you did with … Building a Good Link Profile: Measure Twice, Cut Once |
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Lawyer Marketing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly About Outsourcing SEO Content. – WiredPRNews.com (press release)
Apr 21st
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Lawyer Marketing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly About Outsourcing SEO Content.
WiredPRNews.com (press release) Such small mistakes may not seem like they would have much effect in relation to optimization, but SEO is such a language-based game and thanks to the Google Panda update grammar really counts. Never mind the branding and image issues bad grammar can … |
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Sharing Office Space – 6 Things to Worry About
Apr 20th
When you’re launching a business, you’re always on the lookout for every possible way to cut costs. One of the smartest – or maybe the dumbest – ways to save money is to share office space with a bigger company. It all depends on how well you understand the dos, the don’ts and the special risk factors.
I know, because my company, GrowBiz Media, tried this not once, but twice, during our early years. Let me share what I learned (the hard way) about the pros and cons of sharing space.
Consider these factors before you move in:
1. Clarify expectations. Be crystal clear about what both you and your landlord expect from the situation. Will you pay for space, or will you work rent-free in return for bartering your services?
Having tried it both ways, I highly recommend paying if you can swing it. Barter arrangements tend to suffering from “mission creep,” and when the person who owns the room you’re sitting in asks you to do one more extra thing… and one more… and one more… it’s hard to say no. Paying, on the other hand, keeps the relationship professional.
2. Consider the culture. Assess how your way of working will mesh with the company you’re considering sharing space with. If your team likes to blow off steam with impromptu Nerf football games or yell ideas to each other across the room, will that clash with a more formal landlord’s need for a quiet atmosphere or serious client meetings?
3. Could you be competitive? Think carefully about whether you and your potential landlord are at all competitive. It’s great if you’ve got synergy and can work on projects together, but that can also backfire. If you and your landlord are competing for the same clients, you could end up in that awkward place of not being able to discuss your plans out loud in your own office.
4. Check the details. In your excitement, don’t forget to ask the standard questions you’d ask any landlord. What will be included in your rent? Is there enough parking for your team and visiting clients? Can you use the conference room when you need to? Will your landlord provide office furniture? What kind of Internet connection and phone service is available? Will you have access to the building at night and on weekends? If you do, will the heating or A/C be turned on? (Take it from me, there’s nothing like working a January weekend in a building without heat to get you looking for your own office space.)
5. Draw up a lease. No matter how close you are with your landlord, you need a written lease to protect both of you if the relationship should go south. And believe me, it can. There’s also a more mundane reason you need a lease: When you look for business insurance, the insurance company will want a copy of your lease before issuing a policy.
6. Be respectful. When you share an office, you’re in someone else’s space, and people often have weird territorial issues that won’t raise their ugly heads until you’ve settled in. You could find out that the landlord wants all the window shades drawn to exactly 10 inches above the windowsill level, or monitors toilet paper consumption and threatens you when your staff is using too much, or is a thermostat Nazi (all true stories).
Unless these issues are truly disrupting your business, try to go with the flow. Draw the shades, BYO TP, put on a sweater – and let your landlord’s quirks motivate you to be so successful that you can afford your very own offices.
After our experiences, we realized, given the nature of our business, we didn’t need to be in an office at all. We went virtual, and now we meet once a week at a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi and soda refills, and no longer worry about how much toilet paper we’re using.
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What Web Users Need to Know About SPDY
Apr 19th
Slowly but surely, SPDY (“speedy”) is becoming more widely used. The Google-backed protocol, a modification to HTTP, is designed to help reduce latency and bolster security. Even if you don’t manage a Web server yourself, you should know about SPDY and what it offers to you – and the Web at large.
SPDY has been in development for a couple of years, but a few things will start to accelerate its deployment.
First, Google has put out a SPDY module for Apache, which will make it much easier for organizations to deploy SPDY. Nginx is expected to have an implementation by end of May. That covers a huge chunk of the server market already.
Second, SPDY should be on by default in Firefox 13, and Chrome (and Chromium) already supports SPDY. Which means that organizations have more incentive than ever to start turning on SPDY.
What SPDY Is, and What It Offers
SPDY is a two-layer HTTP-compatible protocol. To break that down into more manageable terms, SPDY is like HTTP, but with additional features designed for today’s Web. The “upper” layer provides HTTP’s request and response semantics, while the “lower” layer manages encoding and sending the data.
The lower layer of SPDY provides a number of benefits over standard HTTP. Namely, it sends fewer packets, uses fewer TCP connections and uses the TCP connections it makes more effectively.
A single SPDY session allows concurrent HTTP requests to run over a single TCP/IP session. As Patrick McManus writes in SPDY: What I Like About You, it’s great for high-latency environments “because a resource never needs to be queued on either the client or the server for any reason other than network congestion limits.”
SPDY cuts down on the number of TCP handshakes required, and it cuts down on packet loss and bufferbloat. Says McManus, “SPDY’s parallelism, by virtue of being on a single TCP stream, leverages one busy shared congestion control block instead of dealing with 36 independent tiny ones. Because the stream is much busier it rarely has to guess at how much to send (you only need to guess when you’re idle, SPDY is more likely to be getting active feedback), if it should drop a packet it reacts to that loss much better via the various fast recovery mechanisms of TCP, and when it is competing for bandwidth at a choke point it is much more responsive to the signals of other streams – reducing the over buffering problem.”
There’s currently a lot of redundancy and bandwidth wasted in HTTP headers. SPDY compresses HTTP headers, which means that fewer bytes have to be transmitted between client and server.
All that adds up to serious performance improvements. According to Google’s initial whitepaper on SPDY, you could see “a speedup over HTTP of 27% – 60% in page load time over plain TCP (without SSL), and 39% – 55% over SSL.”
Security
In addition to better performance, SPDY is also more secure. Despite the best efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and others, we’re a long ways away from HTTPS Everywhere – which means that most Web traffic is still sent unencrypted.
That will be a thing of the past with SPDY. Current implementations of SPDY mandate SSL, which isn’t universally liked but seems the best way to nudge the Web forward to encrypting traffic most of the time.
Push and Hint
Finally, SPDY adds two new mechanisms that will also help speed up the Web. Server Push and Server Hints.
Just what it sounds like, Server Push will send resources to clients without being asked. If you request a Web page URL, for example, SPDY might also decide to send down images associated with the page even if they’ve not been requested yet. Note that there’s a potential downside here, since servers could wind up sending redundant or unneeded content.
Server Hints doesn’t send the content, but it does send the URL so that the client can decide if it needs it. If the content isn’t cached, a browser or other SPDY client can then make the request a bit faster than it might have otherwise.
Getting SPDY
The only, or at least the major, problem with SPDY? You need SPDY support on two ends to make it work. You need a browser that supports SPDY, and Web servers that are delivering content using SPDY. If you’re one of millions using Chrome, you already have SPDY support. If you’re using Firefox, SPDY support will be the default with Firefox 13. Note that Firefox 11 already supports SPDY; you just have to turn it on manually. It’s unclear when other browsers will support SPDY, but it may be awhile before you see SPDY in Internet Explorer or Safari.
Very few websites support SPDY at the moment. Google, of course, has been rolling out SPDY. Twitter is also offering SPDY. But it’s going to be some time before most users see the effects of SPDY across all or even most of the sites they visit. But the odds are good that you’ll start seeing a significant benefit from SPDY before you’re using IPv6 at home.
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This Old Website: What Bob Vila Can Teach You About SEO
Apr 19th
I admit that I am more than just a tech geek. I actually enjoy watching the TV show “This Old House.” I started watching it way back when Bob Vila was the host (does anyone else remember Bob Vila?). I have been a fan of the show over the years, and for most of the [...]
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Four Things You Need To Know About Search Retargeting
Apr 18th
In two very short years, search retargeting has been created, tweaked and matured to the point where most serious marketers already have it on their media plans or are considering it for a 2012 test. In short, search retargeting finds those individuals who have searched for a term that matters to…
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Talk About SEO Like a Regular Marketer – ClickZ
Apr 17th
 Industry Today |
Talk About SEO Like a Regular Marketer
ClickZ Years ago, when I first started with SEO, there was a lot of uncertainty about how to classify the function SEO served. Was it marketing? What is it technology? Was it something else entirely? Contributing to this uncertainty was the mystery that … Top 10 “Hidden Gem” Internet Marketing Blogs You May Not Be Reading MJ's Blog Offers Guidance On Internet Marketing and Online Business Aspects |
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What You Need to Know About CISPA
Apr 16th
Battle lines are being drawn over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA). It’s a bill that would make it easier for private companies and the U.S. government to share user information concerning possible cyber threats. Microsoft, Facebook and a host of other technology companies are supporting the bill, but many digital rights groups fear that CISPA is another version of the Stop Online Privacy Act… but worse.
What Is CISPA?
CISPA is different from SOPA and PIPA in that it’s not primarily about piracy or privacy issues. Instead, it’s intended to help fight cyber attacks.
But the bills share similarities that raise red flags with digital rights advocates. Foremost, the language of CISPA is vague, broad and leaves much open for interpretation.
CISPA would amend a current law that defines how cyber threat intelligence information is used between the U.S. intelligence community and the private sector. Currently, that’s often difficult or prohibited. CISPA would remove that firewall.
It would be a two-way street, where the intelligence community could give private entities information (with proper security clearance) and would allow companies to voluntarily share information with the government. The bill does not say that companies must share information with the government.
The procedural elements are not what makes the bill concerning. The issue is how things in the bill are defined. This is where the vagueness comes in.
- Cybersecurity Provider: “A non-governmental entity that provides goods or services intended to be used for cybersecurity purposes.”
- Cybersecurity Purpose, Cybersecurity System, Cyber Threat Information: “[An entity] designed or employed to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of, or safeguard, a system or network, including protecting a system or network from:
Efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.
What are “goods and services intended to be used for cybersecurity purposes?” A Facebook status update was never “intended” to be used for cybersecurity purposes. Yet, under this law, a Facebook status update could be seen in a variety of ways. The wording of the definitions leaves it open for the government to request information from Facebook (or any other digital information service) over the smallest of updates.
Who Supports CISPA?
The bill is sponsored by two representatives:
- Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His office wrote the bill.
- Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, ranking member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as a member on the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.
- The bill is cosponsored by 106 representatives. See the full list here.
- In addition, CISPA has a letter of approval from 28 large technology corporations and organizations. That includes Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Symantec, Verizon, AT&T and CTIA.
Who Opposes CISPA?
- There is a competing bill in the House of Representatives sponsored by Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) titled, “Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act” (the PRECISE Act). The Center for Democracy and Technology opposes CISPA but supports Lungren’s bill.
- Civic organization Avaaz.org has collected more than 600,000 online petitions opposing CISPA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a paragraph on its site titled, “Don’t Let Congress Use ‘Cybersecurity’ Fears to Erode Digital Rights.” The Constitution Project’s Virginia Sloan sent an open letter to “editorial page editors and writers” urging them to scrutinize CISPA.
- Hacker group Anonymous also opposes CISPA and has launched attacks against corporations that have stated support of the bill.
Does It Stand a Chance?
From a legislative perspective, CISPA is in a stronger place than SOPA ever was. It enjoys bipartisan sponsorship from Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and has 106 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, including the likes of Darrell Issa and Michelle Bachmann. Issa, as many will recall, was a staunch opponent to SOPA and holds influence as the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
What’s Next?
CISPA made it through a Congressional committee in December with a 17-1 vote. It is currently being amended before going to a vote before the full House of Representatives on April 23.
The CDT, EFF, Demand Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union will launch a week-long campaign next week ahead of the voting on CISPA to protest the bill and educate citizens, and persuade them to contact their members of Congress to voice their concerns.
We will see if the anti-CISPA fervor reaches the level of the protests against SOPA and PIPA, but with some of the biggest technology companies supporting the bill, widespread blackouts are not likely.
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