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In the past all the videos I had to create were intended for online distribution. This time though I had to make a DVD. I use Adobe Premiere to edit my videos. On the few occasions I wanted to make a DVD out of its output I just used Windows DVD Maker and it worked fine. This time however no matter what format I outputted from Premiere, after I created the DVD, the audio was out of sync from the video. I knew it was time to upgrade my tool. So I got Adobe Encore, which is designed to work together with Premier. It did, but I didn’t. When I opened it I had some ideas what to do, but not enough to produce a simple DVD. Therefore I turned to the web, where I found two videos that put me on the track in 11 minutes, combined. They were both made by Ryan Atkins.
After watching the first one I managed to make a simple DVD with no menus. Finally it was not out sync. After watching the second one I could even make a set of menus. Although the missing step from that was that I had to create my buttons foist in Photoshop. Otherwise both were assumed the level of knowledge and the speed of learning that I was comfortable with me. Thank you, interwebs and Ryan Atkins for getting me going in 11 minutes.
Yesterday, February 7, 2012, I attended a webcast titled “Google in the Real World: How Links Boost Your Rankings“. It was presented by Stephan Spencer for O’Reilly, who published his book “The Art of SEO” three years ago. The books 2nd edition is coming out in March. This webcast was much better than the one I listened to 2 months ago. The slides were available at the beginning of the presentation so I could follow it from there. I learned a lot from the presentation, particularly about the tools of the trade. The pace was much closer to my level: fast paced. I believe I am not allowed to share the slides, so I won’t. (The thumbnail on the side is of the cover slide though.) But we were encouraged to tweet through it, and I did. Below is a somewhat cleaned up version of my tweets, with added hyperlinks, in reserve chronological order, latest being on top.
Monday I’ve learned what I suspected for a while. YouTube is going forward and enforcing its Cosmic Panda update. I found a note/link on my logged in YouTube page saying “All channels will be updated to the new design on March 7th 2012.” Clicking on it I got to the page describing the new YouTube channel options. From a developer/designer’s perspective the options are much more limited than previously. I can still upload a background image, but none of the major sections of the regular YouTube channel page can be set transparent. Furthermore in the old version of YouTube there were 8 modules that I could turn on and off and position on the page ( Ask Your Audience, Comments, Event Dates, Moderator, Other Channels, Recent Activity, Subscribers, Subscriptions) . These modulels are gone in the version and instead we can select 1 of four preset options/combination (Creator, Blogger, Network, Everything) and enable or not a “Featured” tab. The combined effect of these changes is that most YouTube channel will look very similar to each others.
Old YouTube Design
New YouTube Design
On the same day I read some rumors about upcoming Twitter changes which points to the other directions, with the introduction of “enhanced” pages. Econsultancy wrote: “the enhanced pages will allow brands to add additional interactivity to their Twitter accounts. The enhanced pages may even include iFrame support, which would allow users to play games or shop on a brand’s site without actually leaving the Twitter environment.” They link to The Wall, which in turn linked to AdAge:
According to an email from a Twitter account executive obtained by Ad Age, the roll-out of enhanced brand pages will only be available to those firms committing to spend in excess of $25,000 a year in advertising.
The initial group of 21 brands which got the original versions of brand pages in December were all higher-spending media partners and were said to be spending around $2m a piece.
This means that while YouTube is homogenizing the user experience, Twitter is allowing (at least for big spenders) making Twitter pages be very different from each other. We’ll see who wins on the long term. I bet on both. They are both learning from MySpace’s example which originally went too far in allowing users to modify their pages/profiles.
I encountered a client who often searches for his name to see how well his site is ranking. He even clicks on the results and visits his own site. He may not know that this behavior is detrimental to his ranking on two accounts. His bounce rate is high, because after he visits his site’s page he goes back right away, which is the definition of bouncing in the area of analytics. The higher a site’s bounce rate is the more likely that Google will think that it is a low quality website.
If he wouldn’t click on the link at Google leading to his site that would still be bad on the long term for his ranking. What does it tell to Google if his site has a lot of impressions i.e. the it often shows up in Google searches, AND the most of the time people don’t click on his links? It tells, the same thing: this site is not something people would want to visit, hence Google may rank it lower and lower.
Searching for one’s own name is referred to as “egosurfing“. I wonder what proportions of people do it on a regular basis? I think, in this case, it became a kind of an obsession. For any kind of addiction there seems to be an “… Anonymous” group, but I didn’t find one for this newfangled one anywhere. Thus I recommend the formation of an “Egosurfers Anonymous” organization for people who keep searching for their names. I wonder though how its meetings would go, how the members would be able to handle to remain anonymous. That is part of their problem. Or should I say “ours”? I admit to egosurfing about once a month.
Today I was working on a WordPress site with 100+ pages (and no posts). Part of my job was to make sure there are no broken links in the site. So I loaded up my good old trusted Broken Link Checker plugin. When it started to pop up the “broken links” I noticed that almost all of them came back with “Connection Failed” error, while the links were not even broken. I know that we have some server issues, which may prevent some automated processes finding the very same server the site is running on. I suspect this was the case here too. So I turned to an internal tool we developed and was running on a different server. That timed out, because WordPress sites have so much more links (to check), than custom, non-cms-based sites.
Finally I decided to use a dedicated tool. I have been working on PCs for the last 12 years, so I was quite familiar with the excellent Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Unfortunately it is a Windows only tool, or as the author put it, “No, I won’t make a Java, MacOS, Linux, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Beos, Palm, C64, SAP, AmigaOS, Blackberry, Symbian, iPhone or Android version. Don’t even ask!“ However I quickly found a very similar tool for the Mac I was working in: Integrity. It did everything I wanted and seemed to be even faster then Xenu. Although the speed depends on the machines CPU and on the size of the project too. I am very happy with this finding.
Soon I found another issue with this site. When we moved it from the development server to the production server the switch of internal URLs wasn’t perfect. about 10-15% of them were changed from http://proof.domain.com to http://domain.com, instead of my preferred http://www.domain.com. I could have played with the .htaccess file to fix this, but for other reasons this was not an option. I also could have written a little SQL command, but instead we utilized a plugin called Search & Replace, which was designed for this kind of tasks.
Ever since I started to check at Google’s Webmaster Tools (and more recently in Google Analytics) how my sites are performing at Google itself (meaning where they show up for what keywords for how many searches) I was fascinated with the numbers. But it seemed illogical that in the cumulative data they showed the average of averages. E.g. if for a certain keyword my site showed up in three positions, the system averaged them and then took these individual averages and averaged them into a single number. From now on, based on Google’s announcement though they will take the best/first position of each query and average that. As a result of the above I expect a slight jump in the “Average Position” metrics of the Top Queries sheet. I think the proper, logical label for this should then should be “average of highest positions”, but I realize that would be too long to put on top of a column in a table.
Three Infographics related posts grabbed my attention from today’s interweb flow. Based on the title of Erin Everhart article “Infographics: Why They Fail For Link Building” I thought she would cast some doubt why they may not be the best for linkbuilding purposes specifically. Instead she spent most of the article explaining what’s wrong with Infographics in general. Then she added the adage “that social media is a tool and not a strategy”. Even if I agree with most of her points, I still think the article’s title was poorly worded.
Later in the day I stumbled upon two fresh and useful infographics. One of them, titled “Infographic: How Much Does SEO Cost?“ was done by SEOMoz, and posted on January 3, but I only learned about it from Search Engine Land’s post today. As I am slowly creating my own SEO business it, being the summary of a survey with 500 SEO professionals, was a useful piece in figuring out where I would fit in the market.
The other, “The Small Business Social Media Cheat Sheet, didn’t give me any new information, but it was still well-collected sheet of basic information on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Digg and to my surprise Tumblr. I was surprised to see Tumblr on that sheet, because in my mind it was a channel for more of a personal communication, than for businesses. I have never seen a business tumblr site, but I guess there is no reason why it couldn’t be one. The main obstacle for widespread effect is that each Tumblr site is a separate mini site, unlike Twitter/Facebook/Google+/YouTube and Digg, where there is a coherent, single interface for millions of users and businesses. The Tumblr dashboard has that to a limited extent, but the whole of the millions of public mini-sites don’t.
Today I had to research how to use WordPress’ Menu system as the basis for a sitemap page. In the past I used the ”HTML Page Sitemap” plugin to turn the site’s pages and their hierarchies into a sitemap page. Today however I had to find a solution for a site that uses the hierarchies of the menus, but not the parent/child and ordering system of the pages themselves.
Let me cut to the end and share the best solution I found. The WP Realtime Sitemap plugin does exactly what I wanted and much more. The key to make it work for the above scenario is to do the following on the plugin’s setting page (after installation and activation):
I need to mention two more links as they were part of my research.
It took me a long time to find an ideal solution for a simple feature: I wanted the results on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) numbered. That would give me an easy answer on how a client’s site at for a certain keyword ranks. (I will make another post later on how to depersonalize a search, to make the number more universal.) I spent over an hour finding the right thing. I hope that reading this post will save you time if you are looking fror th same thing.
SEOBook’s RankChecker is supposedly doing it. However at my company we have to use an old version of FireFox, because one of our vendor’s site only works with that. RankChecker, however, doesn’t work with such an old Firefox. And I can’t run two different version of Firefox on a Mac. So that’s out.
I think SEMToolBar has the feature I am looking for. At least that’s how I read this convoluted explanation: “This is the Keyword (or phrase) being followed. The user wants to know what position or index tracked pages have in the search results when this Keyword is used as a search query. The user also wants to follow the tracked pages’ position in the search results over time.” However this feature is only for paying members and I was looking for a free option. Membership prices http://www.seotoolset.com/ range between $30 and $1500.
The other two better known SEO toolbars are SEOQuake and SEOMoz. The former doesn’t have this feature at all. The latter, might have it but only for members and membership starts at $99/month .
As I am on a Mac I even looked into Safari’s extension. There I didn’t even find anything close to what I wanted, plus I couldn’t search the pool of extensions.
Next I checked out Chrome extensions and found Google Enumerator by Blue Fountain. I watched their video, installed it and waited for the red numbers. They never showed up.
The most promising FireFox Extension was ResultRank. It only has 1 review and 390 users so I don’t have high hopes that its creator will update the tool to the latest version of Google. I suspect it worked at one point, but Google keeps changing how its SERP is structured and the add-on broke somewhere along the way.
I won’t bore you with all the other extensions I tested for Chrome and Firefox. I even looked into >GoogleParser. It fetches the results from a Google search and returns a clean list of URLs. The list is not numbered, but at least it is easier to enumerate them manually. The method they are using (scraping Google) is on the edge of being against Google’s TOS. Google doesn’t allow automatic scraping. They are using a captchaa to prevent overuse by bots. But that solution doesn’t address the issue, that they store (even if only for a short time) Google SERPs on their server. So this is not a sustainable, long term solution, although the tool is cool.
Eventually I stumbled upon OptimizeGoogle. I finally found what I was looking for. This Firefox only add-on works, has loads of other features. It also has 122 reviews and over 50,000 users. Its version is still only 0.79.1, but the developer is active in fixing bug, adding features and answering user comments. Well done and will bewail used.
Below is a screenshot of a SERP with the numbers. (and at #4 is this site for some weird reason.)
I joined last week a webcast by Stephan Spencer titled “Getting Google to Love Your Website” organized by O’Reilly. Spencer is the author of the only SEO book I ever read on SEO: “The Art of SEO“, published by, surprise, O’Reilly. The webinar promised to teach “both SEO fundamentals as well as advanced tricks and tactics that only the elite SEO experts know.” Unfortunately the first 45 minutes was spent on the basics, on topics I already knew. Then the last bit, where I would have preferred to spend the majority of the time, was either rushed through or mentioned only in passing, saying that there is no time for it or it will be the subject of a future webcast.
Now, that I got that out of the system I can tell you that it was an excellent presentation. I appreciated that the slides were offered for download for participants. I sent an email requesting them from Mr. Spencer’s assistant and got it the same day. I was asked not to circulate it, so I won’t share it here. In the same email I also received a link to a word file full of SEO best practices. The doc not only included 14 best practices, but also 29 worst practices and detailed explanation for all. I am happy to report that I was already doing most things right.
We were encouraged to tweet through the session from within the interface (that automatically added the #GoogleSEO hashtag), but that didn’t work with Chrome on Mac. So I did it on my own Twitter account instead. To provide a summary of the event I collected here all the tweets I sent out during the presentation, and I boldfaced the ones that either contained new information for me or want to revisit later. (They are in reverse orde, first post being the last.)
The event was captured and anybody can re-watch it till next March.
Looking forward to the next presentation I signed up at O’Reilly on HTML5.
