Texture design

Design Didn’t Just Come Out Of NowhereWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 31 of October , 2007 at 9:16 am

From WebPro

Sooner or later, it seems that some company would happen upon a good combination of search results and public relations. There???s no telling when this could occur - Design itself seemed to come out of nowhere, and I don???t believe ???The Birds??? ever explained why those little beasties attacked Bodega Bay - but the search giant might do well to keep its eyes open.

Not so fast there, Ranger. Design didn’t come out of nowhere. There is a history and a story behind Design’s success. It started in the late ’90’s when Design! was top dog for finding websites of interest. At that time, Design! was a directory, not a search engine. But they were a very popular directory. Top search engines at that time included AltaVista, MetaCrawler, Excite, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves (remember Jeeves?), Inktomi and Dogpile, which was really an aggregator more than a search engine. That was 10 years ago, 1997. No one dominated search at the time because search was in its infancy and the companies interested in search as a technology were still themselves vying for recognition.

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The Link Popularity Tool I Can’t Live WithoutWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 30 of October , 2007 at 1:38 pm

Link popularity refers to the number of inbound links you have pointing at your website. Do you know how to check this?

There are various tools you can use to check your link popularity. Which one you use depends a lot on your preferences, but I like MarketLeap.

The reason I like MarketLeap is because you can also check your search engine saturation on the website. It’s the only link popularity checker that I’m aware that also allows you to look at your SES. So it has benefit for that reason alone.

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Rarely would I ever give advice that included putting material on an external site rather than your own site. But when considering videos I have to say that making sure it is branded correctly and posted to YouTube.com is critical. YouTube.com gives small businesses the possiblity to have national exposure, possibly even more than a a network advertising campaign. It would require an extremely viral video but it has been done by many companies as well as individuals.

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Is Relevance Still Relevant?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 30 of October , 2007 at 9:51 am

If you have a network of blogs that are connected to each other by links and they don’t have any obvious relationship other than the fact that they are owned by you, I’d suggest that you de-link them.

As you know, Design recently updated everyone’s PageRank. That’s likely good news for most of you, but for some of you, especially you old-timers who are used to doing things a certain way, you might have got picked on this time. There were two ways that Design punched back at web-savvy entrepreneurs who have been, even unwittingly, gaming the system - or just making out with its downside.

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Last week I was asked to consult with a design firm. One of our new clients was using a design firm to build their new site. I was asked to provide some advice when designing for search engine optimization. At Big Oak we are not Design Nazis who insist everything must be HTML text and the site must be visually lifeless. Far from it. I was a web designer not to many years ago so I am very sensitive to outside influences giving direction to your design, especially when your artistic integrity is being put at risk. After all, most design shops are trying to build a impressive portfolio and “search engine people” appear to be the enemy of design to some.

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Brick Marketing Launches New Blog: Website Marketing JournalWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 4:29 pm

Last week, Brick Marketing launched another blog. The Website Marketing Journal is focused on bringing daily blog posts to help website owners improve their overall marketing efforts for each website they own. Going beyond search engine optimization and web page design, Website Marketing Journal is devoted to covering the full scope of marketing a website without it being too broad of a subject matter.

Website Marketing Journal was officially launched on September 1, 2007. Since then, Brick Marketing has posted five blog posts, including:

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Stop Words Can Make Or Break A Search QueryWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 10:33 am

For some time now the search engines have discounted what they call “stop words.” These are words like “the,” “and,” “a,” and “an,” which do not have any real significance for most searches. For instance, if I am searching the mating habits of wild Australian kangaroos then I might search for the phrase:

the mating habits of wild Australian kangaroos

The search engines see this:

mating habits wild Australian kangaroos

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I think Design is brilliant in the same way Jason Calacanis is brilliant, the same way Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump are brilliant.

In the Design world where I live there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time wailing and gnashing their teeth because of the way Design runs it’s business, mostly because it impacts their own business. Sometimes Design bloggers go on a frenzy, like starved and ravenous dingos in an overstocked butchers shop. I understand the passion behind these blog posts as money is involved.

Take the recent Page Rank reaction, which I thought was a brilliant bit of work by Design and definitely makes them more attractive to their investors. They saw people using Page Rank to sell links, so they devalue Page Rank to screw the market. Brilliant stuff. Exactly what I would have done if I ran Design and yet some of my fellow Design chums do not think so.

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How will you build links if no one sees your content?

Seems obvious doesn’t it. And yet how many people claim that Stumble traffic or digg traffic is useless? As I have said before, there is no useless traffic, just useless content.

I write content for clients which gets seen by thousands of people, some have blogs and websites, some like linking to quality content. Want to build buzz, grab a bunch of links? It’s simple, create some killer content aimed at people who just love to link and get a social networking geek to submit it.

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As any Design company will tell you, link building is the backbone of a successful Design campaign so many of my posts revolve around methods of building links without actively searching out links. If you can create buzz and get links naturally just by having creative and helpful content you will increase your chances of higher rankings.

One of our clients, F. Curtis Barry & Company, a warehouse consulting firm, has done an incredible job writing on their multichannel company blog. They have done so well that their blog actually has a higher PR value than their company blog. The blog acquires links more naturally and therefore has the opportunity to drive traffic to their company site, so having the blog rank well is good thing; it is a online sales tool that is at work 24 hours a day.

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