Archive for April 2011

YouTube SEO is Heavy, Man!

Optimizing for more YouTube views, and building a subscriber base, is something I must admit I have little experience with, but a friend of mine recently asked me for some advice on this, so I’ve done a pretty exhaustive survey of various material and postings. The following ideas look like sensible basic optimization tips.  There were so many ideas I had to break it into three postings – this one, an upcoming “Advanced Tips” posting, and an upcoming Read on »

Internet World Stats

Truly Penetrating Analysis

You’ve probably had to research internet usage at some point – whether to figure out browser usage percentages so you can decide which browsers to bother supporting, looking at internet usage by country for a business looking to expand geographically, or any other myriad of reasons.  Like me, you probably did this by doing a ton of Google searches.  Well, I ran across a site that aggregates much of that information, and also the sources for the rest of it, all in one convenient spot Read on »

Mining for PageRank

Google’s Toolbar PageRank, the value that you can obtain by surfing websites while the Google Toolbar is installed, has been available via a number of websites for years, ever since someone figured out how to reverse engineer the protocol that the Toolbar uses to talk to Google’s datacenters to obtain the value. Google appears to have been fairly tolerant of tools that obtain this data over the years (otherwise many of them would have been banned, or they would have changed the protocol frequently, etc.). This tolerance sometimes makes me suspect that Toolbar PageRank is a bit of a purposeful red herring, and ranking is perhaps all about anchor text instead, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The most popular tool for checking individual PageRank values is probably Read on »

McDonalds: Behind the ArchesLet’s say you were stranded on a desert island, per our previous scenario, have your positioning book in hand so you can properly straighten out the product you’re trying to sell with your burgeoning lead-gen business, you’ve SEO’d (is that a verb?) your lead-gen site with the help of your SEO reference book, and you’re having trouble getting to sleep at night due to wild monkeys screeching as they bang coconuts together.  What business biography would be really beneficial?

Well, if you want to get some sleep, don’t get Read on »