Savannah W-ITS

The second meeting of Refresh Savannah was held tonight at Lady and Sons.  Phil Peterman gave an excellent presentation on SEO basics and some interesting discussions followed.  More info about Refresh Savannah…
A good reference covering SEO related topics is the book by Aaron Walter: Building Findable Web Sites.

In case you did not notice, there are some interesting new features in Google search – the video below (from Google) provides a quick introduction.  Note the new types of relationships as well as time-sensitive options that are now possible.

WolfRam Alpha – a computaional knowledge engine

Launching May 29, 2009, tonight (5/15/09) a live webcast is being presented on this new search tool.  Ready for the new direction that Stephen Wolfram is taking?
Based on Mathematica technologies this new engine may be a tool of choice for anyone familiar with Mathematica.
Wolfram writes, “When we launch Wolfram|Alpha [...]

Only a few hours after reporting SPAM in the Google index I find that I am no longer getting any Google search traffic for one of my sites.  In addition, the SPAM is still in the index.  Based on a few checks ‘around’ the Internet it seems that a number of sites are seeing similar [...]

Are you an cost center/expense or a solution/innovation resource?

What is your IT group contribution to the company’s bottom line?  As long as IT is viewed as a cost center your position/group/efforts are short term and so is your job…

There are a number of small companies where all information technology (IT) service needs are out-sourced (i.e.  managed services for email, web services, accounting, applications, etc.)  This can be great for such

Hmm, everything is free? 

• email
• standard computer apps
• special computer apps (image editing)
• virtual PC (all your stuff from any Internet connection)
• free image/data storage (UGC, images sharing sites)
• free global/social publishing/advertising
• free search ???

 Who’s making money if everything is free?  (Who pays for all this free stuff?)

Google recently opened yet another service offering:  Knol (A Unit of Knowledge – A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.) 

Do we need a new option from the search engines OR maybe a new type of search engine?

• Instead of a ’search box’ we need a ‘my problem is this box’ or ‘the error message is’.
• Instead of ’search results’ we need ‘a prioritized list of possible solutions’.

Any takers?  How difficult could it be, right?  Hmmm, what might we need:

• limit results to top rated (vetted) 10? 20? 30?
• only accept long tail searches

How about search engines, do they matter?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making a web site findable via a target search engine.  The techniques used vary for each search engine.  Since the secret sauce (i.e. what can a web designer do to get a web site to show up in search results) of any search engine is usually proprietary anyone trying to optimize selected pages or entire web sites has a

Successful blogging is about (or seems to be about) long tail information chains – information niches.

Do you have a very specialized topic, product, event, service about which you can provide your visitor (potential customer?) with: subject matter expertise, quality content, relevant content?

Authors Rowse & Garret (see professional blogging post on this site) devote a chapter to this topic where they provide a number