Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

This is a fantastic article written by A List Apart for how to convert ImageReady or Photoshop templates into extensible, usable XHTML and CSS code instead of the muckity muck you get from some other tools that export images as slices. This is for you designers out there with little coding experience, or just the designer looking for a quick mockup to throw over to a client.

And if you’re not the uber-photoshop wizard that some people are, maybe a more elementary (sic) approach will work better for you.

Enjoy!

Normally, I am the first person to bash flash, but there are really only a few applications I can think of offhand that make excellent use of flash. The first is LivePlasma.com, which is a fantastic music/movie/actor search engine.

Today I saw another great use of flash with the family tree website, Geni (pronounced “Jenny” or “Genie”?). It’s a pretty cool website that allows people to quickly and easily create a family tree and then invite your family members to add more people, and so on and so forth. It’s pretty much the ultimate viral website. The only worry I have is that this site might turn into family spam if Geni decides to sell this list to outside marketers, but for now, it’s pretty darn cool.

AOL has made an offer to acquire Tradedoubler, a Swedish based search marketing organization, for $900 million. From what I read here, it appears that AOL is looking to expand their search advertising into Europe via this organization.

AOL’s bread and butter used to be the size of their customer base. With more and more people canceling their accounts and switching to the ever increasing number of broadband providers, AOL is a sinking ship. And with the ever growing number of customer complaints about AOL and their “excellent” customer service along with their spamware, this will only continue. How they can make a cash offer for $900 million, especially when they are trying to make up a $1 billion in cuts, is beyond me.

Good luck to AOL investors and congrats to TradeDoubler. If I were at TradeDoubler, I’d cash in my stock options and bonuses ASAP and hop on off to somewhere else, before AOL hits rock bottom.

In no particular order:

Make your own birdfeeder with webcam

Very cool ceramic designs (my favorites: here and here)

The job posting for my current job

Get rid of **** expletives!

My next culinary feat: Chocolate Souffle

With the announcement of Apple’s iPhone yesterday, I couldn’t help but think about, so what happens to the old phones once everyone runs out and buys this thing? Right into the trash.

More and more of this type of stuff is going into landfills: from computers, laptops, iPods, iPhones, blackberrys, cell phones, keyboards, mice, video game systems, software, printers, and other iTrash. And if it doesn’t end up in US landfills, it ends up in Chinese landfills. More programs need to be started to help with the insatiable need of Americans for the latest in tech gadgetry and other tech doodads.

Instead of throwing out your next cell phone, monitor, motherboard, etc. please take a second and think about where it will end up and what chemicals it will add to our already dying ecosystem.

Just because I got a new job today. Hooray me and hooray SB!

A list apart (which I highly recommend you read, both for the good and bad articles) just published another article about branding in relation to whitespace. In case you haven’t noticed, whitespace has come into its own with many new web applications and sites: Flickr, 43folders, Backpackit, etc. And even major news portals have started to implement the “less is more” approach to design.

To boil the article down quickly, the net effects of a whitespace overhaul are:

1. Improved legibility and readability.
2. Creates a sense of lightness or airiness within the page itself, making your brand seem less intrusive and more passive (this may or may not work for all audiences and brands).
3. Creates a sense of playfulness if used creatively.

Some of the things to watch out for though are:

1. Creating additional length to each page, which increases scrolling, but as we have seen in the past, vertical scrolling is not really a problem anymore.
2. If overused, your content can look disjointed.

So tread softly with whitespace and always remember to try it out in different browsers and platforms. PLEASE!

Well, it looks like outsourcing might not be that bad after all, for those us of who have remained in the tech industry. According to a recent study conducted by Yoh Outsourcing:

“The technology market continues to grow, which keeps pushing wages up…”

That is something I can definitely attest to and appreciate. All of my friends in the tech industry have seen favorable opportunities for job growth within their own companies as well as being able to increase any freelance work they are doing on the side. And if you have recently looked over Careerbuilder or Craigslist job postings, it definitely feels like there is increased demand all over the place for all facets of technology and tech related jobs.

Good luck to all you techies out there! It’s not the late 90’s, but it’s not too shabby either.

So you’re asking yourself, what’s the difference between horizontal search and vertical search? Doesn’t everything just search?

Well, there are some very big differences when it comes to these two.

Vertical Search, also known as “specialty search”, is a search engine that only searches within niche categories or sites. If you are looking for a recipe, you might go to FoodieView. If you are looking for sports information, you might visit Aardvarksport. Or you could even make up your own search engine using Rollyo. With Rollyo, you pick out the sites you want searched and aggregate them into your own personal search engine. It will then only search the sites you specify, instead of the entire web.

Vertical search has many advantages over traditional horizontal search, in that it only searches specified sites for specified content. It’s not looking at the entire web at once and will only return results for that specific content area. The problem with vertical search, in many cases, is that they are manually updated. If a new site concerning sports or recipes comes out, the owners of the vertical search engine have to manually add that site to their indexing in order for the content to be added. They can avoid this by using the DMOZ.org or some other hierarchy of sites, but those often take weeks or months to update, in which time other sites have been created, etc. etc.

Horizontal search refers to the more traditional Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These search engines benefit from their lack of hierarchy, in that they don’t have to classify each site as Category A or Category B (even though some have started doing this with “Neighborhoods“). They have the disadvantage though, as mentioned above, in that they search everything. It doesn’t matter whether “chicken” was mentioned on a cooking site, sports site, clothing site, or amazon, it might come up in your search results.

So if you are looking for the best results possible, I would try both methods and find out for yourself where you think you can find the best information for you and your content area.

A few years ago when I began doing search marketing, I thought you could create a website with a well thought out architecture and then just link between any pages in any method at all. However, in search marketing, the links are much more important than you think, so they should not be chosen arbitrarily at all.

Example Scenario:
I create a website with products all over it, let’s use kids toys for example. You have rocking horses, toy trains and model cars. If I create a link on a page for “Rocking Horse” which links to the rocking horse product page, this will tell search engines to pull up the product page when a user searches specifically for “Rocking Horse”, which is the product name. This will increase sales for this product, which will make my suppliers happy, which will make my investors happy, and so on and so forth. However, if I put the full product name “Johnny Appleseed Rocking Horse” instead of just the basic product name, I am also going to pull in people who are looking for a generic rocking horse as well as that specific brand.

So Jeff, where’s the problem? The problem arises with the company who hired you to do search marketing for them, e.g. whatever company that makes “Johnny Appleseed Rocking Horse”. If they specifically hired you to market to customers looking for the generic “rocking horse” and not off of their own brand name, it becomes a problem for you and as a result this new website could turn into a competitor to your existing client. So before you run out and develop a website for lead generation, make sure you create a list of keywords and terms to use when building your site and not just randomly picking link names or descriptions.

I have also included a few links for more information about the power of text links or to continue the debate over whether content is king or not.

What have I missed, let me know in the comments.