Neil Patel and Todd Malicoat are active in the Digg community (SEO consultants) and have some perspective on the market.  How will businesses take advantage of Digg? For those already in the game, the question is what’s being done correctly or incorrectly?

Like search engines Digg supposedly uses custom algorithms. But there have been some manipulations of this system.  It’s old news now that there are groups of croneys “digging” each others articles for placement on the list of most popular articles.  These articles of course get a lot more readership - along with black hat practices and spam.

Neil Patel has been quoted - “I think, right now, what a lot of people are doing wrong is that they’re joining Digg crews, or groups.”  Anybody that takes a hard look at Digg saw these same old authors TOP the charts.  This kills the idea of “social” and any possible spontaneity.

“It’s really fascinating to see how quickly the Digg algorithm is evolving compared to search engines in the past. They’ve really caught on to a lot of the things that took Google, Yahoo and MSN a long time to catch on to…”  I don’t think it’s hard to catch on to somebody else’s ideas after they have done all the work.  But, I don’t have a lot of respect for Google’s algorithms anyway.

Aside from that, I think that people selling altruistic and natural systems have automatically got problems.  “Natural” and “Altruistic” are seldom cooperative and never synonomous.  Without checks and balances, an opposition party, or some objective judges, nature goes the way of natural selection - the strong survive.  This ends many other good or not so good things, including: diversity, equal opportunity, new technologies, progress, etc.

Founded on the ideals of democracy? Digg may suffer the same problems as a democracy.  It can only survive when there is a general desire for law and order, which can only happen when people are free from want and fear.  The predators are still there, they just don’t get unlimited power.

Digg however, risks itself to inbreeding by excluding or allowing the exclusion of divergence.

You talkin’ to me?
Arthur Browning

1) Put your keywords in your title, slogan and text with keywords above your menu. This is the first thing that search engines will read.

2) Headlines are highly rated by search engines. Keep keywords in your headlines.

3) Write your keywords into the “title” and “description” tags - specific to that page’S content. Try not to go over 8-10 words on the title and 14-20 words in the description - this keeps it readable again.

4) Be very careful with Flash - it can’t be read by search engines and causes slowness on loading the page.

5) Keep graphics relevant to your content and be sure to use Alt tags containing the relevant keyword(s).

6) Use image links in to important content on your own web site. Spiders will follow image links even if they prefer text links.

7) Some search engine spiders cannot search frames - use frames at a risk.

8) Simple tables are more easily read by spiders - so keep them simple.

9) Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files reduce page size and download time - spiders can index your web page faster which helps your ranking.

10) Use standard HTML as often as possible. FrontPage, Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG software editors add unnecessary scripting codes that make the page larger and harder to crawl.

The Wee MacBlogster,
Arthur Browning

Organizations large and small need communication. Hopefully not only by executive decree. Everybody needs a voice and an organization should have more than dry, formal memos.

WordPress Themes allow any company to get out the news - from the human side of the organization. It’s not just about birthdays or company picnics - there’s people, families, holidays and buzz on the team.

WordPress Theme #10840

WordPress has a free platform. Wordpress Themes are inexpensive. Budding authors are everywhere. So let your organization breathe, let it have another way to communicate - on a WordPress blog.

It’s Basic Blogistics,
Arthur Browning

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds have made copyright law a lot trickier. RSS was labelled “really simple stealing” at AOL for awhile. There is still no clear-cut legal guide to using RSS on your WordPress Theme as far as reprinting. The legal system provides some protection for search engines but could be seen as giving an okay to content aggregators with Intent to Spam.

There’s a dilemma here: A content distributor sends out content through the use of an RSS feed. The feed is open to whoever wants subscription. One question here - Is there an implied consent to republishing with proper credit on a blog or Website? Plenty of blogs do it. Syndicating content could be considered implied consent.

Another question is - How are spammers set up as aggregators of content to attract keyword-driven traffic and publish only the headline and first line of text and that link to the original source and that make money from AdSense any different from Google and other search engines? Google is doing the same thing, essentially.

I like many people have used a WordPress theme and had a lot of fun blogging. If I make reference to someone else’s blog or article is my WordPress Theme blog violating any laws? Personally, I don’t see how. But legal minds are at work to protect copyrighting so keep your eyes open in the future.

Copyright law has not caught up with the many parts of the internet, including RSS syndication. I believe it would be better for legislators to decide this than a series of judges, but when have legislators been carefully proactive? Maybe not since the Constitutuion.

Copyright holders have taken real issue Google, whose News and Book Search offerings have gotten the company sued in several countries, including the U.S., France, and Belgium. U.S. courts so far have held up Google’s right to index copyrighted content.

Google says its right to offer headlines, titles, and snippets of content is supported by a standing policy to allow content owners to opt out of indexing.

The Google Blog made a statement awhile back - “Even if use of their work would be perfectly legal, we respect the wishes of content owners. For example, if a content owner asks us to remove his or her content from our web search results, we do. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we take the paper’s stories out. And if publishers would prefer not to have their books included in Google Book Search, we honor their request. It’s simple: we always allow content owners to opt out - quickly and easily.”

Aggregators do not offer an opt-out provision, effectively ignoring any objections from the content owner. Even this may be legal, if there is implied consent.

So it seems RSS on your WordPress Theme is okay for now, and I’m sure there will be a buzz as soon as one judge or congressman says anything.

Terrorism - Faith Based and Petroleum Fuelled?
Arthur Browning

For the internet - web design, internet marketing and SEO go hand in hand. I found a designer who has a great approach to website design, Ash Harris of Kinetic Web Media, LLC - aka ShakeYourBusiness.com.

How did you get into web design? “I’ve always been an artistic person with an eye for layout and design. I had a friend in college who started the font website www.FontFace.com. This was my introduction to web design and development. After college, I went to work for a creative firm and learned how creative business worked. They also trained me on the basics of web design as of 2000. I then moved to a technology company and learned how a tech company was run and then the next natural step was to branch out and try my own business. It was a perfect marriage of creative and technical services. So, long story short, design has always appealed to me. I just had to get the technical under my belt and I was on my way to mastering web design.”

Do you remember the very first site you designed? “Aside from the practice sites for classes, the first actual website I worked on was a small website for the tech company that I worked for. It was cool for the year that it was created (2001). As you know, time goes so fast in cyberspace that it was only a matter of a year before it sorely needed replacing.”

You are doing a lot of email marketing. Is this a specialization for you? “It is one of our specializations. We really focus on working with a company to understand the nature of the business and then to help identify and address the needs of the company. We work with them in web design and development and then we also work with their marketing approach. We are really a one-stop shop for commercial marketing needs. Our primary purpose is to help businesses become visible - in the virtual marketplace and in the actual marketplace.”

Where do you get your art for these webpages? “There are a number of sources that we have available. We work with professional photographers in some cases. Primarily we use stock photography from photo libraries on the web. Our favorites are Getty Images and iStockphoto.”

What will be the next big development in webpage design? “I am going to say accessibility. It is not going to be long before higher authorities get involved with website development and begin to lay down legal requirements for website structure and presentation of content. Basically, the Internet has to be made ‘accessible’ to individuals with disabilities in much the same way a shopping mall or an office building needs to accomodate them. With a commercial building, we have ramps to allow people in wheelchairs access to the building. On websites, we use high-contrast text and backgrounds providing for people with low vision to be able to read the content. We use other methods to allow screen reading software to read a website to an individual who has no use of his eyes. There are many other strategies and standards that need to be followed as well.”

Have you ever worked with website templates? “I have. In fact, I am currently working with some templates for Joomla!.”

What website template providers have you tried? “I have really been enjoying working with the templates I get from Rocket Themes. Very user friendly, very easy to customize. All around a great product.”

What was your experience with them? “They have great support and great prices. The forums there are very well maintained and the user-base is ready and willing to provide input and assistance.”

What do you think about Flash technology? “It’s beautiful. However, I rarely use it. I think that 99% of websites can get along just fine without it and it is really only useful to Multi-Media and Creative firms to ‘WOW’ their visitors. It’s GREAT for visual effects, but it’s terrible for content delivery. And, I would say many sites abuse it by delivering ALL of their content with it.”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? “Accessibility comes up with this question as well. Flash is at least VERY difficult and at most, impossible, to make accessible to an individual using a screen reader. Again, Flash is beautiful if used in the correct ways, but, if your entire site is flash, you are going to be losing a segment of your website visitors, and you are going to be limiting how much search-engines can ’spider’ on your site - unless you take care to provide content specifically for the spiders.’

What are your sources of inspiration? “Here are several GREAT sources for inspiration: Website Design Ideas:
- www.monstertemplates.com
- www.bamag.com (Before & After Magazine)
- www.coolhomepages.com

Colors
- www.colorschemer.com

Books:
- Layout Index

- Color Index

Just to name a few.

VERY IMPORTANT - I suggest to any designer that when they surf, they should definitely be keeping an organized set of bookmarks so they can come back to a site that has great content or a site that just knocks their socks off.”

What are your favorite website designs that you did NOT design yourself? “I used to like www.apple.com - but it is really in need of an update. Adobe has come a long way - www.adobe.com - cool new design merged with Macromedia solutions. www.bamag.com is a nice clean design.

I also really like these sister sites:
- http://trendwatching.com/
- http://springwise.com/”

What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “I was once blamed for mis-handling a customer’s meta tags. The client was selling a holiday product and we deployed their site in mid October. They were baffled when they weren’t at the top of search engines in time to do a HUGE amount of sales for Christmas. I was blamed - basically for not getting them to the Top 10 on Google and Yahoo! within a couple of weeks. And here’s the kicker - they never asked me to do it. They assumed it was part of the project price. When I tried to explain, the situation got stickier. In the end, I lost the customer and I learned a valuable lesson about educating clients.”

What are your interests and dislikes in webpage design? “I LOVE the design process - the process of finding inspiration and injecting life into designs and the message of the site. I love the artistic side of it. I love meeting new people and helping them solve problems and bringing them solutions for their website and their image. The business side is difficult just because of the details and the paperwork. It’s just a lot to keep track of.”

Thankyou Ash for the expertise and experiences.

Template Impresario,
Arthur Browning

When Google is buying into radio and television advertising that should tell you something about SEO generally, and in particular for organizations who are not web-only entities.

Mass marketing advertisers would have used various strategies for spending on ads - including telephone directory, radio or television, newspaper, magazine, billboards, etc. Each of these media provides some form of statistics showing their effectiveness.

In a multi-format approach to advertising and marketing each company will have to analyze the effectiveness of dollars spent in each medium, OR combinations of those media. The idea that groups of these media will band together to offer competitve prices versus Google is a given. Whether any of these multimedia ad groups, some combining with Google or other search engines, can offer more bang for the buck than a first year marketing student can put together is a major question.

Major Ad and Marketing firms know how to squeeze a buck, if necessary, but their advice is not usually free. Google was able to grab resources allocated for print this past year when they dabbled in print ads campaigns. Effective, or just making their presence known?

News organizations have been losing ads on and off for years as each new medium was invented, then perfected, then improved. National and International organizations can expect more multimedia prepackaging offers. Congressional investigations of PPC schemes and various lawsuits make it mandatory for ads buyers to keep it cheap and keep it flexible when they plan spending. They will have to read their own stats sheets, not Google’s, newspapers, or anybody else’s.

Google will be the most prominent example for 2007 of a techie overselling their services, and their stock prices. The message should be clear by now - only the truly legit tech corps survive. In my opinion, any corp that isn’t user-friendly is dead meat before the wave is over, no matter how many investors they have hypnotized.

As Google focuses on quick profits and maintaining dominance - they make themselves a big and stupid target for corps like Yahoo and the newer breed of search engines that focus on getting it RIGHT.

While Google is trying to push you into all of it’s favorite traps they lose friends, create enemies, and then have to lean heavier on their imagined mystique with their investors.

Video, voip, internet voicemail will all become a standard component of online communication. Video particularly will revolutionize news and movies online.

Yahoo Publisher Network, YouTube, Flickr and distributed podcasts will only partially replace professionally developed network broadcasts, except in the niche and nonprofessional areas.

SEO will be forced to adopt billing that is based on the success of a campaign as opposed to flat fees charged up front or on a monthly basis.

Microsoft Vista users will hopefully get a Patch in 2007 but they may need a new computer before then, and maybe a bigger one to hold the big Patch (or patches).

2007 is the year of the Pig, friend to the Dragon. Let’s hope the pigs don’t do themselves in.

Giving 110%,
Arthur Browning

FLASH Template for Models, Girls, Women - or - Personal Website? Exactly, yes, you guessed it. Arthur’s IN THE ZONE! I think you’ll understand when you see this animated Flash template for a model - OR - any woman who wants to project a “Premium” Image. . .

Flash Template for “HER” - #13425

Yes, you just change out the photos and text. You get the sexy layout, killer soundtrack with music and camera clicks on navigation. Maybe you should use a little judgment about which photos you set into this layout - might get the wrong kind of traffic, you know. . .

Got trouble? Checked your email? Then read this article while you’re looking at the template. Click on the link - yeah. Run through the navigation. After you’re all done tell me about your plans - what kind of moves you can talk about. You need an excuse? Tell them Arthur made you do it. . .

Projecting Your Life,
Arthur Browning