SEO 2.0

Can’t Fail Cafe - image by pbo31.

Recently I wrote a guest post that took me a long time to write and was well crafted timely pillar content which nonetheless failed miserably on social media, even the site I targeted directly. OK, I may be biased, maybe it was just “great content”, or rather a great article as I do not like the fuzzy term “content”. It was a how to that grew to be a small tutorial in fact. As this was a guest post and it targeted my favorite community Mixx I was really disappointed. After I overcame the ensuing suicidal tendencies I started analyzing what happened and comparing it to other posts both successful and not.

Now I present you the outcome, the top 10 reasons why great content fails on social media:


The Headline
The headline is crucial, without a proper, intriguing, kick-ass headline the best content will fail. Take a look at this post at SEO ROI which also failed miserably: “The Biggest, Baddest, Resource Bonanza Bar None!“
What the heck is it about? Nobody knew and thus it failed even on Sphinn where otherwise it would have ruled the homepage. I was silly enough to submit it without changing the headline. I should have called it something like “111+ Most Important Online Marketing Resources of All Time” instead.
Basically the original title just does not give you a clue what the post is about and why anybody should care for it.


The Submitter
Now this is something most social media mavens already know and most bloggers hate, being submitted by a nobody. It’s often as bad when someone submits who will describe your post as “good post about blogging” where all other posts are outstanding, amazing or must-read, a post that is just “good” will fail. So if you’re a blogger and you just provided the best list post of you blogging career make sure someones submits it who can get it the attention it deserves.


The Target Audience
You should know beforehand who you target with a post. Bloggers? Webmasters? The social media crowd? Which social media site? Just today I noticed someone who submitted a post to Digg that used a title targeting web developers. Now the submission to Digg included the word “SEO” instead which equals to self-annihilation on Digg. No story that contains “SEO” in its title makes the Digg front page. So study your audience at least a little. You won’t enter the Indian market selling beef either! Each site has specific topical preferences you must take into account.


The Time Submitted
This one is really important. If you write in English, and you should if you want to succeed on social media, you basically write for the US. I have more than 50% US traffic, 10% Canada etc. although my English is far from perfect. So you have to take time zones into consideration and not submit at night but in the morning or during day time.

Also a post submitted on the weekend might get overlooked by many, especially if it’s dealing with business stuff. Most other business people also have business hours Just recently a great post of mine failed miserably after it was submitted on Friday evening to Sphinn. It had 21 votes on Monday when the 3 day “upcoming” phase ended.


The Appearance
Most people decide whether they leave your site in seconds or rather milliseconds. So you have to grip them by their throat. You really need an eye-catcher. Lidija of Blog Well understood it very well when she posted her legendary b00bs/resources post. My guest post which failed had it’s images downsized so drastically that they were unintelligible. You couldn’t discern anything. They were meant as illustration of the tutorial. A tutorial with useless images is no tutorial.

Of course if the only thing above the fold/scroll are Google or banner ads I will leave immediately. Last but not least: If the page copy is one huge piece of text I won’t torture my strained eyes either.


The Source
Now this might not be obvious, but some sites will never succeed on some social media. SEO 2.0 will never ever get to the front page of Digg as the Digg bury brigade does not read SEO posts (posts about SEO) at all, they hit “bury” right away when spotting the term “SEO”. The same post might succeed being published elsewhere but not here.

Also some people are persona non grata on some sites, like Jason “SEO is bullshit” Calacanis e.g. on Sphinn. An a-list blogger might succeed even with rather poor content. An unknown blogger must be twice as good to be successful.


The Me Too Factor
Some topics are hot as long as they haven’t been covered by dozens of others days, weeks or months earlier. When people are tired of some kind of content it can be the best but it will fail anyways. So not write another me too post when the topic has been already covered to excess.


The Genre
In literature we have poetry and prose and everything inbetween. We also have drama, comedy and horror movies. At the box office or on social media weird experimental mixes won’t succeed as people will be confused. So decide if you write a list or a tutorial. If you write an analysis do not make it opinionated etc.


The Categorization
I see this mistake every day on StumbleUpon. SU is very dependent on it’s categories/tags. Without adding the right categories nobody potentially interested will even see your post. Just recently my “Flagship Blogging” post has been submitted in the “Internet” category to SU. This is a very broad category which deals with many topics, but just because blogs are part of the Internet does not make this category the right one. StumbleUpon has the weblogs/blogs category for this, also writing is fitting in this case. This is just one of dozens examples of miscategorization at StumbleUpon.


The Initial Push
The initial push means making your friends and peers online aware of your post. Did someone submit your post? Now you have to contact people of your social network on the Web to ask them to vote for you. Without the initial push of a 12 votes by your peers you won’t even get noticed at most social sites. You will end up as a bleep among thousands. So rally for your post if you truly believe it’s worth it.


So by now you may already sense that it’s not just about content is king on social media. It depends. A king is nothing without a kingdom or an army. The good news is: You can overcome most of these 10 reasons why great content fails on social media. So try not to make these mistakes next time.

Ironically I published this post on a Friday night so any submission will fail

Nonetheless, do not wait, submit it, it’s my bad this time. Also I need some proof for my theories.

Classics in Lego by Balakov.

Starting and maintaining a flagship blog is not really easy. You need perseverance and the will to keep on blogging no matter what happens. You need passion.

You need to fall in love with blogging!

I have it, so I don’t need extra motivation or something. What I need though, like other bloggers, is a strategy or simply put adjustment to the 3 phases of blog growth.

You just can’t blog the same way for a completely new blog as for a blog which already has a significant audience or an established blog.

What is a flagship blog? A flagship blog is a blog created upon the premise of unique content of high value able to boost your online reputation. A flagship blog is a resource people will link to, subscribe and recommend to others on social media.

I want to outline the 3 main phases of flagship blog growth and how to deal with them in terms of

• content creation
• posting frequency
• topical relevancy
• social media engagement
• guest blogging

What are the 3 main phases of blog growth? These 3 are embedded in a holistic SEO 2.0 strategy including true blue social media participation.

1. Initial Frenzy
The initial frenzy is a hilarious phase of blogging. It’s like a new love affair. You’re agitated all of the time and can’t sleep well.

• You blog daily or at least as often as you can.
• You write guest posts for more popular blogs
  
• You try everything, several social media, widgets, Plugins and maybe even WordPress Themes.
• You create highly relevant topical content geared towards the social media of your choice audience
  
• You link out generously and you praise other established as well as new bloggers like you who you admire.
• You watch your first social media submissions eagerly
• and you are are glad about the first 100 visitors daily, then the first 100 subscribers
  

2. Establishing Mode
The establishing mode phase is a cool down phase. Like in a love affair you now discover whether you truly love blogging. You take a step back and analyze. You take a look at your audience and the workload of blogging. Now you need a focus and some lasting benefit of blogging.

After the initial frenzy ends there comes the establishing mode. It may be after 3 months or after 6 but it will come. You will notice it by the fact that you are posting less without really knowing why. You will more often take a look at your watch to find out how much time you spend with blogging.

• You blog less often but write longer posts
• You elaborate on topics you already covered
• You concentrate on your existing audience, you may have 300-1000 feed subscribers
• Your social media traffic either tends to become lower or you stop caring that much
• You think twice before you guest blog, some people might offer you money already for guest blogging
• You already have a significant network of like minded peers across several social media and people know your name or recognize your avatar
• You think more often about making money with your blog to justify the time spent on it
• People you never heard link to you in best of lists or as a source (”via”)

3. Final Boost
The final boost is in a love affair the equivalent of marriage. Now you decide whether you abandon your beloved one or if you’re really in it whatever it takes. You can do it you just need to want it. If your heart jumps each time you start typing a blog post you can really become one of those exceptionallysuccessful bloggers.

• You want to reach new heights each time you start a blog post, you want to write a short one but it does not work, you have so much to share
• You are the first or one of the first to cover or uncover topics others haven’t t thought of yet
• Your traffic is higher than in the initial phase even without being submitted to social media
• The no referer crowd becomes the biggest traffic factor in your stats on days you are not on social media
  
• Your blog posts get submitted to different social media just minutes or hours after you published them
• People you never heard of admire you or ask you questions
• Once you submit something to social media you get an initial boost of 10 - 20 people recognizing it’s you and checking out your submission because they trust your choices
• You get job offers via or because of your blog regularly
  

Now to reach the final boost phase or whil in it you can go pro for instance, and/or you create immensely valuable posts that will go bananas on del.icio.us, you can create an ebook or you just venture into other media like audio or video or even start a second flagship blog. You can start speaking at conferences. You will consider a professional custom blog redesign.

You want to keep inspiring people forever. You want to empower the people, you want o evangelize them and you even believe it because you made it so far. It’s wonderful!

Now I’m not yet at #3 or final boost, at least not entirely. I assume being in the final boost phase means having around 1000+ subscribers but I already experience the ramifications of it to some extent. I recognize the things others wrote about, like content creator Skellie, web designer Steven Snell or internet marketer Dosh Dosh.

Now will I get the final boost that will propel me to the next level? How will I do it? I’m not sure yet, I already see phase 3 unfolding. Maybe it’s not about doing anymore but watching it happen by now. Anyways, blogging is my true love!

CNN adds Mixx buttons, 5 of them! Couldn’t resist it Screenshot taken with Firefox 1.5

Join us at our SEO 2.0 group at Mixx before it’s too late.

Findability is a seemingly new term that has become a buzzword recently due to a book called Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter (not to mix up with Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book). Now as a true SEO 2.0 I’m always on the lookout for new concepts and innovation. So I took a little time to find out more about findability, it’s meaning, roots, who coined the term and when.

The first thing I found out was that neither Aaron Walter nor renown usability expert Jakob Nielsen used the term findability first. It appears that the term findability and most notably ambient findability was coined in 2002 by Peter Morville who even published a book of the same title. First things first though, so let me explain what findability is about.

Website findability is the new and better SEO so to say or, on-site SEO without the bad rep of the SEO industry if you adopt the definition from Building Findable Websites.

Basically Aarron Walter says that building websites for findability encompasses not only SEO but a holistic approach with usability and web standards etc. in mind, a position I can fully support. One thing that Mr. Walter attempts to tell us though is:

SEO is bad, findability is good.

This is a good move from a marketing perspective as nobody likes SEO of course, the term is a stain in itself or at least is perceived by the majority as such.

When we go back to what Peter Morville wrote in 2002 we discover that findability and SEO are not contradictory but basically twin brothers. He acknowledges how

SEO contributes to a websites findability along with usability and other important aspects of information architecture.

Now that might be the problem of it not generating enough hype so that Aarron Walter took a more aggressive approach.

Also Walter reduced findability to websites build with web standards while Morville’s definition extends to the real world. Morville uses examples like looking for long term parking or restrooms on an airport which strike home very convincingly. Jakob Nielsen used the term in 2006 for the first time as far as I can see. Nielsen also limited it to website findability without denouncing SEO though.

Now am I angry at Aarron Walter for being explicit about SEO? No, I’m glad, glad someone makes a strong point on renaming the “whole problem”. In this sense I took the wrong approach with attempting to redefine SEO and having to deal with it’s reputation problem. Using another, better term is the by far more effective way of redefining something. Sadly it’s mostly used by political think tanks to manipulate the public usually. In this case the outcome of the manipulation is a positive one. People will acknowledge best practices and put them in use.

I don’t care how do you call it, SEO, findability or like myself probably SEO 2.0 as long as we have the same goals. Our goals match while the methods do just partly as findability refers in web development only to the on-site or on-page factors of SEO which is not enough to be found, especially in the Web 2.0 environment, but they match.

The single most positive aspect of website findability the teaching aspect:

Findability teaches designers, web developers and information architects what they condescendingly ignored for years, making websites findable.

Now as I am the garbage man of all these lazy designers, web developers and information architects and had to fix crap websites for years, I’m sick and tired of it. I want to do the real thing, the content, the SEO 2.0 the fun stuff.

So clean up your websites yourself guys and don’t rely on the poor Mexican migrant worker wit a sombrero to do it.

That said, I still prefer the approach of Peter Norville. So do not only read Aaron Walter book but also, or at first Norvilles “Ambient Findability”.

Btw.: Building Findable Websites only covers the on-site SEO basics, adding some microfomats and the likes, if you really want to do web design for findability you need to read the Web Design for ROI, a book that will change your professional life forever.


Findablity resources:

• The Age of Findability - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
• Ambient Findability
• Digital Web Magazine - Ambient Findability
• O’Reilly Media | Ambient Findability
• findability.org - by Peter Morville
• DonnaM » Blog Archive » Usability testing for findability
• A List Apart: Articles: Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks
• Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond
• Findability Bliss Through Web Standards | An Event Apart New Orleans April 2008
• SEO and Findability blog: LJ Banks — findability expert

From now on please refer to me as findability expert, maybe this way I can outsmart the SEO haters

The birds by rickydavid.

In recent weeks I faced a huge onslaught of posts about Twitter from at least 5 sources per day I read. Many people will probably assume I’m an early adopter, but I was not on Twitter, well, until now. So follow me or I will never again stumble, sphinn, mixx or link you! Now said that, I’m not sure yet if I will use it for more than testing as with the hundreds of Web services I try. Indeed I’m only an early adopter where it does make sense from the start. Now Twitter was useless as is but with growing community and market share it seems the point where it matters has arrived.

Now I’m still undecided and was was analysing pros, cons among all things twitter like tools for a while now to assess if and how I will use it if I will. As I’m a social media monster when I enter a new service to really contribute I either take it by storm or I won’t at all. This way I conquered the above mentioned social media StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Mixx.

Indeed Twitter is a lot like Mixx although it’s a different concept. Both sites do not result in significant direct traffic or other benefits you can measure easily. I wanted to share my thoughts on Twitter and help you decide whether it makes sense or not so I collected 50+ Twitter related links to answer the question: To tweet or not to tweet? Also once you decided you want to use it, you will find plenty of ideas how to use it below:

Pretty bird by Picture Taker 2.

Balanced Twitter pros and cons articles

• What is Microblogging or Tumblelogging? Pros and Cons « Lorelle on WordPress
• Influential Marketing Blog: 6 Reasons Twitter Rocks and Sucks Simultaneously At SXSW
• mathewingram.com/work | Twitter: Waste of time or social tool?
• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Twitter for Nonprofits: Waste of Time or Potentially Useful?
• Twitter Review: Waste of Time or Extremely Valuable? | TechConsumer
• Twitter: I Twink I Twove You | Brent Csutoras

Polka - the humming bird by Cris Pierry

Reasons to use Twitter

• Twitter is My New Search Engine | The Marketing Technology Blog
• How To Make A Small Fortune With Twitter | Scoreboard Media Group
• How We Use Twitter for Journalism - ReadWriteWeb
• Hate Twitter ? Become A Media Mogul With It | BloodhoundBlog
• Think Twitter Sucks? You’re Wrong, Here’s Why.
• Held by Egyptian Authorities? Time to ‘Tweet’ - washingtonpost.com
• The Business Value of Twitter | Advice and Opinion
• Using Twitter in IT Support
• How I Use Twitter for Headline Examples | Cornwallseo.com

I look up to the little bird by monkeyc.net

Reasons not to use Twitter

• Twitter ’spam’ threat leads to paranoia « What Matters Online
• Twitter Sucks. Lightning does not. | CenterNetworks
• Twitter Is Unethical For Business Use | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing
• Why Twitter Sucks…
• Alt Text: Twitter Away Your Life With Social Networking
• Ioannus de Verani: What is Twitter? A bloody waste of time!, or one man’s dramatic divorce of the narcissystem
• Why I Stopped Using Twitter - Publishing 2.0
• Twittering Your Way to Social Media Unproductivity | Cape Cod SEO
• WinExtra » The danger of Social Media falling in on itself
• Seven psychological complaints of bloggers and social media addicts « Online Journalism Blog

Red wing black bird 3723 by Casch52

Twitter tools
clients

• twhirl | a twitter client
• Snitter: a desktop Twitter client
• Tweetr 3.1, best Twitter Client for Mac / PC, send files, take pictures, runs on Adobe AIR 1.0
• Spaz: An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
• Coding4Fun : Twitterlight: A Silverlight Twitter client
• The Ultimate Twitter Client
• Twitteroo: Twitter Client for Windows » Freakitude
• Twobile: A Twitter client for Windows Mobile - Download Squad
• IPhone: Twinkle, the iPhone Twitter Client, Adds Location Features
• Twitter Client for Android (How to make XML over HTTP calls) « Show me the code!
• CrowdStatus Becomes a Twitter Client and Other Updates | CenterNetworks

scanners (Twitter search etc.)

• Real-time Twitter Search - Tweet Scan
• Intwition : What’s Being Linked To On Twitter
• Summize Conversational Search
• Alert Thingy: A desktop app for FriendFeed.com

Bejia flor / Humming bird by Marcio Cabral de Moura

Twitter marketing how tos, tutorials and resources

• Twitter Wrote This Column For Me
• 7 Ways Marketers Can Use Twitter | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
• Twitter Secrets Revealed | Portent Interactive, Seattle, WA
• A Twitter Marketing Experiment
• how to use twitter for marketing
• How-To: Using Twitter to Build Brand Integrity - MarketingVOX
• Twitter Marketing Guide - Tips on using Twitter from the Twitterati | Online Marketing Blog
• 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter
• SEM Twittering? - SEM 2.0 | Google Groups
• The Golden Rule of Twitter Marketing
• Twitter Marketing Do’s and Don’ts: Interview With Ma.gnolia - Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog
• 26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter | Social Desire
• Twitter Tweet Sheet — JasonTheodor.com

Now of course the main reason why I’ll be using Twitter is to inform you of my eating habits! No, probably to indoctrinate you with my SEO 2.0 propaganda. It does only make sense when I have enough people to preach to. So follow me now if you are really serious about the SEO 2.0 cult!

On a side note: I have been on Pownce for a while, but like with Digg, SEO hater Kevin Rose has failed to create a real community here. Basically most people who are my friends on Twitter either never show up at all or just reuse their Twitter stream there like Dosh Dosh for instance. I already was angry at him for not replying when I noticed this…

1. How do you use Twitter?
2. Do you use a client?
3. If yes, which one?
4. What are you using Twitter for?
5. What do you tweet about actually?
6. What are you doing?
7. What is your user name?
   

If it makes sense I’ll follow, stumble, sphinn, mixx and link you! Did I miss some valuable links? Add them in the comments, this list will be continually updated.

This post has been sponsored by Nstein*

An unexpected gold mine, image by Maproom Systems

You think on-page SEO is dead? It hasn’t even begun! To be clear, your website is a goldmine and you haven’t even started to dig for the gold.

In my SEO 2.0 blog I have covered blogging, social media and the likes to the point of excess. At the same time I have dismissed most of on-page SEO as obsolete or as built in basics of even the simplest CMS software.

Do you think on-page SEO is just about h1 tags, meta descriptions or enhancing website copy with keywords? Now think again.

Consider using the term on-site SEO referring to the whole site not just each page for itself. Now add the adjective “semantic“.

The semantic web (often called Web 3.0) and its search are about meaning.

Google matches phrases without knowing what they mean. Semantic search is based on understanding what the search query is about. What if you could use software to determine the meaning of your own content and categorize it in topical clusters?

You could:

• Make users stick with your website as a reader would always find related articles to the current one he just read
• Serve contextual advertising like Google does
• Automatically improve indexation with “internal links” cross-linking related content
  

Doesn’t sound revolutionary? Well, what does it mean then? Nowadays you will typically structure news by location and topics. For instance Europe or business are used as categories. So a story about fuel shortage in Great Britain could be found in Europe and business categories. Now what about other relations? What if the story is related to another one from outside Europe or one that is not about business directly? A reader keen on reading the latest energy and fuel news would not find anything of interest anymore amidst bizarre stories from Europe about a father hiding his daughter in a cellar for over 20 years or singer Amy Whinehouse and her legal problems.
Yes, these stories have been been put together in Europe on CNN (April 28th, 2008). The reader will leave.

With semantic SEO implemented on your website you can make the reader find several stories related to this one, automatically.

Using this example: There are a few related stories out there right now: In Brazil president Lula speaks out about bio fuel , in Singapore the oil price reaches a new height, Venezuela and Iran plan to work more closely together (thus limiting western access to oil). Also there is another story about pirates freeing hostages near Somalia. Now the first three are obvious. The fourth one is related too but how? Pirates and other militants are also increasingly a problem in Nigeria where they attack oil tankers.

How did I find out? I used a news aggregator that uses semantic web and search methodology to determine which articles and news are related.

• So instead of reading just one article or page I read 5 increasing page views per visit or stickiness
• The website could show contextual ads about alternative energy or energy saving
• Older news about the same topic could have been directly linked to the latest news automatically. Google could spider them and rank them up as relevant again.
  

Now this means

• an increase of 500% in page views per visit for this example
  
• serving highly relevant ads with most probably high click-thrus
• new crawling and better ranking for several articles resulting in more targeted search traffic
  

All this just with semantic SEO implemented on-site. Nowadays most of your content gets wasted. You can let machines dig for the hidden gold in your archives instead. So how do I do that or rather which solution can do it for me?

I do not know myself yet. I was aproached by Nstein, a company that is “powering online publishing” for large publishers across the globe to help them spread the word about their latest webinar. This free webinar is about “Semantic Tagging & Automated Discovery Strategies: For SEO, Editorial, Contextual Advertising and more“.

Now as even I needed some explanation what this really means I decided to write a sponsored post* for them. It does not make sense to advertise for something that nobody understands.

I was approached by potential advertisers in the past but never conceded to run the ads due to the lack of credibility of their products or companies as well as lack of focus at my audience or value for my readers.

Now the Nstein representative could convince me on the phone that this latest webinar can really be of use for my readers. Especially he cited the above mentioned news aggregator as one example where Nstein has already successfully implemented semantic methods for on-site SEO I just call semantic SEO.

Anyways, you can be sure that any method that looks like SEO 2.0 to me and that allows to potentially double, triple or even increase the number of page views by 500% in my case will make me want to cover it.

Now as I feel a little uneasy about this first sponsored post* and wonder if it’s too sneaky to write for an advertiser about something I want some feedback from you if this post was useful or not and if it’s acceptable to write posts I was asked for on my own blog and getting paid for them. Until now I only got paid for guest blogging on other blogs.



*This is a sponsored post. It’s not an ad. Also it’s not a sponsored review. It just introdocuces a topic I was asked to write about by the sponsor. The text is written by myself and only reflects my opinion so it’s not even an advertorial. It’s not automatically an endorsement of the above mentioned offer.

Google baby by skoop.

As most of us know it is often really difficult to build websites for both the user and Google.

Google still needs to be assisted in finding and assessing a website’s worth to such an extent that it can break the user experience altogether.

Of course there are plenty of CSS solutions for Google’s weaknesses. Although I do not like the term tricks I have to refer to them as CSS tricks as in fact these are workarounds to suit Google. Google spiders are still unable to recognize most advanced web technologies like Flash or AJAX.

Google spiders are like little children, you really have to assist them to find stuff and understand it.

There are other search engines of course but they struggle even more so to keep it simple I will concentrate on Google, which is the by far dominant search engine in most of the western markets.

On a side note: “Trick” sounds like “black hat SEO” or cheating search engines. Well, take a look at them yourself and tell me whether I’m cheating or whether Google is making web development a pain in the back.

OK, then. Let me present to the top 7 CSS tricks for better SEO in no particular order:


CSS Pagination
Google has a serious problem with ranking long articles which are divided into several parts. Also long one page articles will outrank short ones usually. Apart from that the usability is key in making your visitors read the whole article so you don’t want users neither to scroll for ages nor to click a link and send a request each time they want to get to the next page of your article.
The solution is CSS pagination. Isn’t it hidden text though? Hidden text is one of the oldest “tricks” to cheat search engines, webmasters still employ it and my potential clients sometimes wonder why they don’t rank while using hidden text. So hands off hidden text! Well, if Digg, your number one anti-SEO site, uses it can it be “black hat SEO”?
Anyways this way you can divide the content into easily digestible parts while still having it on one page. Take heed to another limitation of Google: The crawler might not crawl a very large page in its entirety.

Absolute Positioning
The higher your content is on a given page the more it counts for Google. Google does not see a page like a human being, it crawls the code. Thus the higher your content is in the code the better. So if you have a complex site with lots of menus, scripts and other gimmicks you should consider absolute positioning otherwise Google might even stop crawling your page before it reaches the main content. You can place the actual content high up in the code, at the top, while the users will see it in the middle of the page below the menus.

Styling h1, h2, h* Headlines
In HTML the h1 headline appears huge by default, the h2 is still much larger than the rest of the page copy etc. Many web designers thus used divs and spans for headlines for years to style them the way needed. Now Google won’t know what the headline is unless you tell Google by using h* tags. It’s like in 1999: You really need to use h1, h2 etc.
Of course you don’t have to make huge h1 headlines like in pre CSS times. Just style the h1 the size you want, also you can get rid off the line-height etc. which h1 headline force upon you by using the display: inline; attribute.

Sponsored Message
	Free Webinar on How to Use Semantic Tagging & Automated Discovery Strategies for SEO Sign up now!

sIfr/Image Replacement for Headlines
Many people will argue that styling headlines with CSS is not enough for web designers. They are in fact right. I think it’s by now grotesque that we’re in 2008 and we still are limited to less than a dozen basic standard “web safe” fonts for web design. We were meant to have flying cars by 2000 and now we do not even have real typography on the web. Many people have tackled this problem with image replacement techniques for headlines, which in short will hide the original headline and insert an image in it’s place. Some of them are fairlydavnaced , others are very simple. No isn’t it hidden text again? Yes, it is! Also some of these methods will hamper your SEO efforts moredfirectly as the crawlers won’t recognize the headline anymore.
There is one popular image replace technique called sIfr which is by now officially approved by Google. It uses Flash to display the headline in any font you wish but in code the h* tags are still recognizable.

Using Lists (ul/ol)
Most SEO experts agree by now that so called keyword density is not a major positive ranking factor. It means that mentioning your keywords 20 times instead of 5 will not make you rank better in Google. You may get penalized for so called keyword stuffing though. Now what to do in case where you really need to use the same words over and over? Use an unordered or ordered list. Google allows repetition in lists without penalizing you.
With CSS you can style lists in any way you desire so that if you do not want a list to be clearly visible list style it accordingly. Some people do even a whole site design without tables and layers (divs) or even spans.

Nofollow Attribute
Contrary to what some people believe the nofollow attribute like in a href=”page.html” rel=”nofollow” does not prevent a page from being crawled by Google. As nofollow does not help against Spam whatsoever, as it was its original purpose at which it failed completely, what then is nofollow good for from the webmaster perspective?

Matt Cutts of Google recommends the so called pagerank sculpting. It means assigning PageRank to the important pages while not wasting it on a contact page for instance.

Yes, Google assumes that the page with the most internal links is the most important one so if you link from all your pages to the contact page it will be the most important page for Google. So you really have to tell Google: Do not mistake this page for the most important one by using the nofollow attribute (not tag!) on the links leading to the contact page.

Pure CSS Menus
While pure CSS menues are not really a trick most people still assume that you need JavaScript or other enhancements to make dynamic menus. Well it’s not true, many advanced CSS only menus offer slick interactivity while being the best choice for Google and other search engine spiders.


Now can you use this methods for cheating Google? Well, I guess you can, but these techniques are so low level that Google won’t count it anyway. For all those who mistake SEO with spam: Spam works on a whole different level nowadays so using stuff like hidden text is ridiculous by now. These CSS tricks can help you with legitimate SEO efforts. I do not like the term white hat SEO as it acknowledges that there is another kind of SEO (I don’t agree with that premise, I rather divide: Either it’s SEO or it’s spam). Nonetheless: It’s all white hat SEO if you ask me.

Now you might argue this is not SEO 2.0, these are SEO basics known for years but it’s not really the case, the web developer community is rather keen on web standards to the point of dogma where for instance absolute positioning is frowned upon. So most people won’t use it. Also if you want to learn more about advanced SEO 2.0 methods you might want to read more in this blog. It’s full of SEO 2.0.

Many people just don’t get the differences between websites and blogs or more specifically between news and blogs.

You can have a Wordpress based site posting daily the latest news and still won’t be a blog.

How to blog then to really make your blog a blog? That’s easy once you acknowledge and put into practice the 7 writing for blogs guidelines that define blogging:

Character:
What character does the SEO 2.0 blog have? It’s daring, humorous, interdisciplinary, visionary, radical. I’m not sure whether everybody does feel the same about the it but at least these were the first 5 things that came to my mind. Do you have some adjectives to describe your blog? If you don’t or they sound more like “average, just another WordPress blog, bleak” you should change something. A blog needs a distinctive character. It’s not necessarily the character of the blogger. SEO 2.0 is just part of me.

Subjectivity:
The writer of a blog should always write what s/he thinks. Not what a company thinks (it does not in the first place) but what you, the blogger, like or dislike. Only God is objective. So embrace your subjectivity and write from your own point of view.

Imperfection:
A blogger is a human being, thus imperfect and that’s fine. You blog quickly and thus you often make mistakes. That’s fine too as long as you react to people who point out issues and you correct the mistakes you made. If your blog sounds as if a whole PR department has worked a night to devise a posting you should rather write press releases. So a blog thrives with imperfection.

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Non-commercial:
While blogs, especially corporate and business blogs often are dealing with business and there is nothing wrong with “making money blogging” the nature of the blog or there the blog posts is non-commercial. So the blog post itself can’t be a sales pitch. If you want to sell something, even in a blog post, the article must contain something useful for the reader.

Personal voice:
People read most blogs because they like the person behind them or the team if it’s a group blog. There are plenty of “blogs” where a bunch of no-name badly underpaid editors fill WordPress sites with content. This is not blogging. If you can’t recognize or imagine a person behind a blog it’s not a blog it’s a news source at best. A blog needs a personal voice.

Critical approach:
If you applaud just about everything nobody will trust you. This applies also if you will leave out everything that’s negative. So even self improvement blogs will deal with negative aspects of life. You do not have to negative yourself but yo can’t sweep everything under the rug. You need a critical approach to things. Tell people when something’s wrong.

Informal:
Humor, colloquial expressions or off-topic posting are part of blogging. Without them your blog becomes an official website. A blog must be informal to some point. Or it should be 10% informal so that it does not get too sloppy. Nonetheless blogs are informal and not 100% earnest.

Now said that I bet I forgot some other important factors but I prefer the number 7 to, 8, 9 or sometimes even 10 (less work so if you you think I forgot the most important blog writing guidelines prove me wrong in the comments.

Free rice.

In recent days I read news about the exploding global food crisis all over. It seems the whole world is starving besides us rich westerners.

Even worse: Much of it is our fault, not only IMF, WTO or World Bank policies that favor the industrialized nations but even more directly: Our green cars and alternative fuels are one of the most acute reasons why the food prices skyrocketed recently so that people in the “majority of the world”, the Americas, Africa, Asia who usually get by with almost nothing, now really starve.

Much of this mess is also due to us rich people messing up the climate via consuming way too many resources and producing far more co2 than hundreds of poor in the developing world. The ensuing climate change leads directly to poor crops due to draughts or floods depending where you are.

So now that we created this mess, what we’re gonna do about it?

• Whine about the slow economy at home?
• Go on buying cool stuff?
• Ignore it altogether?

I can’t: Writing for a global audience made me even more aware of global problems and my advantageus position in one of the countries where people do not starve.


Also I’m not powerless, far from it, as a blogger with readers all over the world, a social media power user on several platforms and SEO expert I can make a huge impact on the way the people think, what they know and how they react to it. I’m an influencer. It’s time to use this influence for more than petty financial benefits.

Let’s fix the world. One link at a time.

So I want to join me and tell how we, the bloggers, social media users, SEO experts can help the world during the current crisis. Add your ideas in the comments below:

• Drop in links to charities that fight the hunger outbreak
• If you’re from India or China add information how we can help local people without the interference of governments or organizations based in the west
• Ways of limiting our wasteful lifestyle

To start out helping to spread the world I added this NYT article to breaking news at Mixx so that people finally realize that these news of hunger, riots and desperation are really breaking people’s lives.

Also the first thing that comes to mind is the Free Rice project a wonderfully playful way of to support the United Nations World Food Program.

As a philosopher once said: You can’t be happy if everybody around you is miserable.

If you represent a charity tackling the current global food crisis contact me via email, mail to onreact at onreact.com - I will consider supporting your campaign for free (free of charge). Also take note that there are several SEO companies offering discounts for non-profit SEO projects.

If you’re from the countries that are affected tell us how bad the situation is. If you’re like me a well-fed westerner whose problem is rather obesity than hunger, act now, support us.

Give. Image by Mr. Kris

Personally I hate the term “marketing” as well as combinations like search engine marketing. Even more than that I despise the term social media marketing which is an oxymoron in itself. I wonder why I forgot to add to this list of despicable terms.

In fact I do search engine and social media optimization instead of marketing.

In SEO 2.0 you do not sell to people, you inform, but they want to pay you anyways to get more.

The difference between social media marketing and optimization is like that of shareware and freeware. Marketing means selling the people stuff, optimization giving it away for free. In SEO 2.0 you get one step further: You give it away for free to get something else in return without tying both. So you do not just give away a freeware version to sell your professional software package.

SEO 2.0 is more like creative commons or open source: You give away everything to get something else: Reputation, attention, authority etc.

With th