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

I read several usability and search blogs on a regular basis (Jeff Croft, A List Apart, 456 Berea Street, Matt Cutts, etc.), but UXMatters is consistently one of the best I read. And when worlds collide of search and usability, I’m especially interested. This article discusses using location and location based information as part of the information display, filtering, and user interaction processes. A great read, but it got me thinking about the future of mobile web and what it could mean for me walking down the street one day with my cell phone.

Very Near Future Me
As I’m strolling down the street, I walk by a restaurant and open my phone/mobile device to see a message from the restaurant itself (opt-in of course). After doing a quick lookup of my phone number it says “Hey Jeff, come on inside. Lunch special today: Roast Beef Sandwich, $4.99.” As excited as I am about a roast beef sandwich, I click on the name of the restaurant in the message to get their Yelp page, just to make sure it’s a decent restaurant. I like the reviews, why not give it a shot.

After lunch, I walk outside, take a quick picture of the restaurant, add it to Flickr with some tags for “delicious sandwich”, Yelp with a positive review, and my blog. Other folks, ready for lunch, see the posting on my blog and head out for the same lunch special. I hit “locate” on my phone and see where all my friends are instantly. Everybody’s busy so I head over to Borders to see if they have that DVD I was looking for. Once I get there, I take a picture of the UPC code and it instantly pulls back the price of the DVD and the price of 5 other retailers, online and nearby.

Soon enough

image courtesy of Sufjan Stevens

Today is my one year anniversary of blogging on JeffWoelker.com. Oh how the time flies. I began this blog mostly as a knowledge repository for myself. I was sending out links each day to my co-workers and family and wanted a better way to aggregate my thoughts and opinions, and so this blog was born.

As the months past, I realized what a great PR tool this could be for myself and, to all of you thinking of setting up a blog or trying to get an online presence, it can definitely work to your advantage. As a result, I’ve met a lot of great people both online and off who have enjoyed my posts and lent some great commentary on some of the more random topics here. I’ve also learned the power of blog spam and was almost to a point of shutting comments down all together, if not for Akismet.

The most popular post I’ve ever written is still 30 mpg is Laughable ~ US Auto Makers are Joking, right? I had just seen this Chrysler ad and thought 30 mpg doesn’t really seem like a lot. What were we, as consumers, getting 80 or 100 years ago? Well, the result crashed my site for a few hours and made it slow for 2 days straight as it sat on the homepage of Digg. To see more of what that whole experience taught me, check out my Digg analysis.

The power of blogging is immense and can have a very beneficial effect on your professional and personal lives. As part of my job, I’m often asked for my opinion about one technology or another, and this only helps to condense my thoughts into a coherent idea.

And finally, thank you again to all my readers. Actually, I know of only a handful of people that regularly read my blog, but my feedburner stats tell me that I have between 25 and 30 people reading this blog regularly. So all of you anonymous readers, why do you read my blog? Where are you from? What else would you like to see covered here? Let me know in the comments.

image courtesy of Table and Home.com

So the other night I was watching TV and saw a commercial from Ask.com. Now I’ve seen previous commercials from Ask and thought, that seems kind of desperate, or I guess that’s kind of funny, but nothing that really impressed me. However, I saw this commercial last night and thought, “that’s awesome!”. It was in reference to an Ask.com commercial starring KT Tunstall. Well, not really starring her, but her name really.

The video shows the Ask.com interface and somebody types in “KT Tunstall”. The next screen shows the result page with the Ask.com 3D interface. First, I like the 3D interface much better than the Google Universal Search as things have context (results with results, pictures with pictures, etc.), instead of just “this seemed to match your query”. The thing that got me was that right within the interface, you can play an mp3 by Miss Tunstall as well as listing her concert dates. Awesome! That kind of interface between search results and content is the next step in the web information hierarchy.

So Jeff, where’s the video?
Well my friends, I would post it, but it appears that either Ask is test marketing it, or they just don’t get the viral and social media marketing game, because for the life of me, I can’t find it anywhere online. There’s even a thread on the KT Tunstall discussion board about it and within the first 2 posts somebody asks:

“oh no I haven’t seen it! … is it on youtube?”

Excuse me while I pick up the dropped ball, Ask.com. Lesson learned to any viral/social marketers out there.

Update: Lisa let me know that you can get the whole mp3 player in results in Yahoo. And if you want to see how ask further dropped the ball with this campaign, check out Lisa’s post regarding the capitalization issue.

SECOND UPDATE:
It’s FINALLY online.

The other day, I read a great article about Microformats and the hCard. Although Microformats are not regulated by the WC3, it’s still a great middle ground to solve a number of location based problems on the web. Here’s some more info about microformats and their strengths and weaknesses:

• hCard on Wikipedia
• Microformats cheat sheet
• Practical Microformats with hCard

Here’s a quick overview, if you are unfamiliar with hCards. An hCard, similar to a vCard, uses XHTML to allow search engines and other bots to decipher between a random text passage on a website and an address, phone number, website, etc. by simply adding a few extra attributes to a websites XHTML.

I didn’t think much of it at first, but then started to look back at previous pages that I’ve coded and this is really a powerful technology. Since addresses appear all over the web without any unifying structure, this works to tie them all together with one consistent syntax. By using a consistent syntax, tools such as Google Maps’ API can pick up on these things much easier, while still providing useful markup that humans can read and understand easily.

Along with Google Maps, the article points out, Yahoo maps might start using the hCard format soon, but haven’t given any definitive time line.

So why should you start using the hCard format? Like most SEO best practices - for the limited amount of time needed to make the necessary changes and the possibility of future adaptation and acceptance, it can’t hurt.

To make your own hCard today, use the hCard creator. Make sure to note the warnings on the page as well.

With the implementation of Google Universal Search, many SEOers have been, shall we say, flipping out over lost rankings since press releases, YouTube videos, and images can now outrank your website easily. Never fear though. Even the most unrankable can still show up in the top ten if you know how to optimize not only your keywords, but also your time.

Google has recently been improving the speed at which it crawls sites and updates its index. So say for example, I write a post on my blog, I can expect it to show up in Google’s index within 3-4 hours. We can use this to our advantage by scheduling exactly when we release our “Google Flood”.

For example, if I am a marketer who knows that after a certain date, people will be searching for a specific competitive term, perhaps one that I will mention in a television commercial or print campaign or that my competitors mention. I can release press releases, images, videos, and websites all within 24 hours of “the mention” and Google will pick them up as most relevant content.

Now this will only last until other content creators write more timely or relevant pieces on the topic, but if you publicize the fact that you did this, that in itself might gain additional coverage. Now this “Google flood” will only last a few hours or days, unless of course you have definite relevancy, but the timeliness of your approach might be exactly what you need to get a foothold in an otherwise very competitive keyword marketplace.

I’ve been working with a few clients lately who were asking me:

“We can’t find anywhere to post links to our site that will be relevant. We’ve tried numerous blogs, we’ve tried social network spaces, and we’ve tried message boards, but they aren’t exactly what we are looking for and we don’t feel like the links are 100% relevant.”

So what was my suggestion to get out of this SEO funk? Create your own content network of course. I mean, it’s so easy these days with Wordpress, Pligg, Plone, Movable Type, phpBB, Joomla, or Drupal and these are just the open source options. There are content management platforms for Coldfusion and .Net as well to satisfy all your technology platform desires. Granted, it will take some time for your content to be indexed and to rank well, but if you have the time and the resources, it could definitely be worth it. Eventually you can turn your own content network into an ad network using Google Adsense, Adbrite, or by selling the ad/link space yourself, which could pay back any up front initial investment.

So instead of setting up a new MySpace profile or putting your links into Yahoo Answers, why not just create your own content network to link from?