Internet Marketing Strategy

Closing out the week with the first Blog Comic Friday of 2009!

Sometimes tweaking your site and checking your SERP’s can be a little rough.

If you liked this comic, check out Ranked Hard for more!

Au contrair to my previous post dissing on Google’s weird favicon … Google made me feel all warm and tingly with this one!

Google’s new favicon features a white g overlaid on a multicolored background representing the Google colors, which was inspired by the submission of André Resende a CSCI undergrad in Brazil. (Background remind anyone else of the Microsoft flag? Looks cool, but I’m just sayin’ …)

Anyways I’m sure you’ve all noticed it already just had to put in my two bits about it. I’m really happy they changed it, because the old one was starting to be a real drag!

You can check out the official new Google favicon announcement for the runners up in the submissions that inspired the new icon.

It finally here, the booster kit every SEO newbie has been waiting for, handed down to man by the Gods themselves … Okay so maybe I was being a little facetious, who cares?

Due to the repeated questions of many anxious webmasters yearning to climb the ranks of the Google results pages to that #1 spot, that gold mine of traffic, Google released a simple document that overviews what you need to know about search engine optimization, the basics anyway. Google’s Official SEO Starter Guide goes over proper title creation, good practices for title and meta tags, ideal URL structures, website navigation from a search engine spider’s perspective, proper user of anchor and header tags, image optimization, robots.txt, and more!

If you don’t know much about optimizing your site for Google (or any other search engine, for that matter) you should definitely give the PDF a read. Hell, if you feel like brushing up on your SEO fundamentals, you should definitely give the PDF a read.

Check out the post over at Google Webmaster Central or just download the Official Google SEO Starter Guide!

If you’re like me, you have a pretty busy work day, and sometimes you just can’t spend the precious moments you have off (or you can’t afford to pay someone) doing smaller tasks (that of course, must be done) because you’re focusing on the big picture, working on something larger in your project.

Here are a bunch of time and money saving resources that will help you in both online and offline marketing.

Free 125×125 Entrecard Badges & Advertisements
Free 125 Cards provides quality 125×125 for public use, and provides a web interface to customize them on the fly!

Free Web 2.0 Badge Button Generator
Fresh Badge lets you create smooth looking badge graphics for use in your website or emails, or even pip icons for rankings! (Honorable Mention: Web 2.0 Badges)

Free Web 2.0 Logo Generator
Creatr lets you choose from six different styles that mimic popular Web 2.0 logos to make your own.

Free Web 2.0 Icons
UtomBox provides some great Web 2.0 themed icons to use on your website for linking to your RSS feeds, popular social networking websites, and more. If you’re just looking for icons to link to your RSS feeds, check out Feed Icons.

Free Tabbed CSS Menus
Exploding Boy has some really sweet looking CSS based navigation menus that can easily be incorporated into any website you are designing. Explore the rest of the site for more excellent resources.

Free Chart / Graph Generator
Maani.us’s XML/SWF Charts can help you out if you’re in a swift bind to get a presentation ready for the meeting you have in the morning with Mr. Kawasaki, fresh off his red eye flight.

Free Vector Imaging / Conversion
Vector Magic is an online utility that will take images you upload, and convert them into vector format. You can download your vector in EPS, SVG, PDF, or PNG.

Free HTML to RSS Converter (RSS / HTML Content Scraper)
RSSxl is a really useful web application that lets you take content from an HTML page and convert it into an RSS feed you can publicize or handle with a web scripting language, like PHP. Many things can be done with this.

Hope you guys found something you can use!

Big Oak delivers seo comedy gold once again in their latest comic, Your Link Here. If you hate how people sell targeted and/or keyworded links in their posts and content, you’ll get a kick out of this one.

If you’ve got an SEO, or even a general Internet / Technology related comic, and you would like to be featured on Blog Comic Friday, leave a comment or contact me.

Here is the math behind the major social networks, the formulas worked down from analyzing their inner mechanisms and just exactly how a submission gets a “popular” status. Hopefully, these social networking statistics will provide some insight into how they work, and which ones might be easier to manipulate for your particular niche.

Social Network: Digg
Digg takes, on average, 60 – 300 “Diggs” to become popular, and you can expect to receive around 10,000 to 100,000 unique visitors if your story makes the Digg homepage.

Social Network: StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon submissions take about 30 – 50 “Thumbs Ups” and/or reviews to become popular, and you can expect to receive anywhere from 2,000 – 50,000 unique visitors in the first round, and you will probably receive more traffic over time, in residual waves.

Social Network: del.icio.us
del.icio.us submissions take around 100 – 130 bookmarks in a relatively fast time period to achive popular status, and you can expect around 20,000 unique visitors if you make it to the del.icio.us front page. Expect this number to go up, due to the recent redesign of del.icio.us!

Social Network: Reddit
Reddit submissions take anywhere from 30 – 300 votes to become popular, and you can expect just as wide a range of incoming traffic, which could be 3,000 – 30,000 unique visitors.

Social Network: Yahoo! Buzz
If a Yahoo! editor chooses your submission for inclusion in Yahoo! Buzz, you can expect to receive 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 unique visitors initially, and expect to have higher authority in the search engines now that you have an official link from Yahoo!’s website.

Social Network: Propeller
Propeller stories take around 40 votes to become popular, and you can expect to receive anywhere from 1,000 – 20,000 unique visitors. If your story gets chosen for inclusion on news.aol.com, you can receive upwards of 100,000 unique visitors, and a nice authority link from AOL.

Social Network: Mixx
Submissions to Mixx take about 30 – 50 votes to become popular, and you can expect to receive anywhere from 100 to 1,000 unique visitors, as their network is still expanding and growing their userbase.

Cheers, and remember, if you liked this post, feel free to submit it to your favorite social network! Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed as well!

Many of you probably already know, but in case you didn’t … Delicious has undergond a nice, overdue makeover, and it’s residing at it’s own dot com domain! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand its new design is totally gorgeous. Head on over and check it out now! Don’t forget to bookmark DaftSEO as well!

Delicious!

Cheers!

I’ve been noticing alot of start up companies developing more and more interesting concepts when it comes to search technology, and evolving it into a more aesthetically pleasing and less metciulous process getting your desired search results.

Sure, you’ve heard about the advancements in user powered search engines like Cuil and Stumpedia, but the only search engine that REALLY has made me give it a double take is SearchMe.

SearchMe‘s interface is already visually stunning, and after a few modifications to the interface (and of course after they have a comprehensive database of search results) … I think I might actually switch from Google! Be careful, if you go to the video search engine, you might fall in love! SearchMe has truly innovated video search interfaces with their carousel display style that you can see.

Other features available make SearchMe truly unique, such as the ability to group your searches into “Stacks” … which allow you to categorize your searches and keep them organized, making it easy to delve into past searches and find an old result with efficiency, instead of retracing your steps on the search engine itself.

Get ahead of the game and submit your websites to SearchMe today!

Once again, it’s Blog Comic Friday! (What did you expect, it’s Friday!) I’d like to take this opportunity to showcase a new comic by Jeffrey Rowland. If you like this comic, head over to his site, Overcompensating.

Cheers!

I’ve made it a point to never use Dreamweaver, ever. I never used it as a Macromedia product, I never used it as an Adobe product.

Please join me in a round of laughter as we make fun of everyone who uses it!

Boy, I sure am glad I use PHPDesigner.