BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» BusinessOnLine Events

Bad Office Usability Day!

Benj Arriola — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:48:28 +0000

We work on the 17th floor of a building and we heard the 18th floor was working on some recarpeting I think. A lot of heavy work that we can hear from downstairs, some drilling and other things that either sound like some slamming in a wresting match or someone playing bowling upstairs. And then suddenly this happens at Megan’s desk:

Megan's Desk at BusinessOnLine - Photo by Ann, from her Facebook.

Good thing Megan was out for some errands and no one was hurt. Hopefully the laptop is fine and if not, I hope it gets replace by who ever is responsible.

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Catfish is Back! What’s new in SEO for 2010

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:40:24 +0000

Hello everyone. Really sorry I have been gone from the blog for so long. The last four months have been absolutely crazy around here and to be honest I have been a little overwhelmed keeping up with everything that has been going on. The good news is that the chaos is a direct result of all the increased business that BusinessOnLine has gotten this year and the incredible growth that is happening around the company. We have doubled our SEO team this year and we are getting ready to start hiring SEO analysts again here in San Diego! Look for those job listings to be available soon in the careers section of the site. Additionally, we have been hard at work growing our process based on all the new advancements in search that have happened this year. Whether it’s the advent of the rel=canonical tag, the inclusion of view through data to our analytics offering which completely changes how we look at search attribution, or our new tool FirstLinkChecker.com which revolutionizes the way we look at internal link structure, there have been a ton of new developments. So that coupled with my SES presentation for San Jose in August as well as my upcoming presentation at SES Chicago in December and my Pubcon presentation in November, it has been impossible to find blogging time. The good news is that I finally have a better handle on all changes and I am once again in a position from a time standpoint to be more consistent. So thanks for everyone’s patience and hopefully I can share some things with you today which can give you a head start for your 2010 SEO initiatives.

Avoid duplicate content with the link rel canonical tag.

The REL=canonical tag is definitely something that should be included on every page of your site. This tag solves a lot of potential duplicate content problems and there is no reason it shouldn’t be a standard part of your code. Another recent advancement in duplicate content prevention is Google’s new dynamic parameter tool. Actually we should give the credit to Yahoo Site Explorer for coming up with the dynamic parameter handling idea first. These new tools significantly alter the approach to addressing duplicate content issues although a healthy 301 redirect strategy is also still part of a good duplicate content prevention plan.

If you didn’t see my webinar about View Through Data and how it dramatically changes the way we look at search and social media, you should really check it out. This data allows you to ask the question, of all the people that I am seeing as bookmark traffic, or alternatively, of all the people who typed my company name into Google, how many were exposed to a specific social media site, video, press release, Website mention, web page with a static advertisement, or any other digital asset. And the amazing part is, no link needs to exist between the asset in question and your site. It’s not voodoo and we didn’t make a pact with the devil, but it is amazing. If you want more information about how you and your company can leverage view through data to give you insight into your analytics that was previously impossible, contact me at catfish@businessol.com and I will set you up with someone who can answer questions specific to your application and analytics platform. But seriously, this stuff is incredible, its brand new and it can really help you understand what is causing your brand related searches as well as paint a much clearer picture of your social media ROI.

First Link Check - FirstLinkChecker.com

One of the most exciting things we are doing right now is the official public launch of our new tool “First Link Checker” at www.firstlinkchecker.com. We did some testing and found out that what SEOmoz reported a while back was true. Only the anchor text found in first link between two pages is counted in Google’s scoring. So this tool highlights the first links found in source so that you can see which links are being counted and which ones are not. Benj will be releasing a blog post on the subject this Friday to coincide with our initial public launch of the tool this weekend at DMA (the tool is in Beta right now). We hope this is the first of many tools we hope to develop that will be useful to the SEO community.

WebmasterWorld's Pubcon

And with all this going on, I am really excited to be headed to Pubcon next month to talk about SEO for Mega sites, meaning very, very large sites. This topic is very dear to me as many of my clients have absolutely huge sites. It’s one of the reasons we built our in house SEO tool called SEO Explorer. It’s been going on for a couple years now. Hopefully in 2010 we will be able to extend it to people outside of BusinessOnLine. We will see! But in the meantime, I have a lot of cool things to share about SEO for really large companies. So join me in Vegas next month for Pubcon!

Search Engine Strategies

I will also be speaking at SES Chicago in December. Ill be back on the Beyond the Numbers session where I will look at some ways to augment your analytics data and how that should be driving your ongoing SEO Strategy.

Also look for a new blog post from me next week where I will give everyone a cool excel trick that allows you to measure your long tail keyword performance. Thanks again for everyone’s patience with my blogging schedule! Have a great week in search and hopefully I will see you next month in Las Vegas!

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Hidden Content/Cloaking – Any day can be April Fool’s Day

Benj Arriola — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:25:00 +0000

The Internet goes wild on April Fool’s day. This year, you may have noticed some already from Google’s CADIE, YouTube’s mirror image and the one I liked was Reddit’s pages were redesigned on various parts of their site that look like Digg, Fark, Slashdot and maybe more.

Here at BusinessOnLine, as mentioned in our last years April Fool’s Day blog post, we work hard and we play hard. For some reason, everyone seemed so busy with client projects that no well coordinated prank was executed this day of the pranks in 2009.

But since we do play hard aside from work hard, any day here can be like April Fool’s day. An earlier prank happened on March 4, 2009. This is the office cubicle of our HR manager.

And in this prank we did, blackhat hidden content. We cloaked the HR’s office.

Too bad, all of us never saw Trevor’s reaction that day. He usually comes in at 5:00am. Too early for the rest of the company.

Any day can be April Fool’s Day here at BusinessOnLine.

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Online Marketing Summit (OMS) 2009 Conference Recap

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:36:00 +0000

Well now that I have almost caught up with the work I missed from being at the 2009 Online Marketing Summit, I have to say, what a fun time! If you missed my presentation on Long Tail Keyword Optimization, Kate Fleming did a wonderful job of summarizing the main points of the presentation. Additionally there were a lot of other great presentors and presentations which made this conference the best one ever in my estimation. Thanks again to Aaron Kahlow and his whole staff of tireless workers for making it such a success. And who can forget the free Jamba Juice!

For my personally, the opportunity to perform and sing in my acoustic project for the first time ever in front of the 100+ people at the Thursday evening cocktail hour was amazing. I really enjoyed myself and so did my band. Thanks to everyone for all the kind words and wonderful feedback about the performance. That was our first show together as a band and we are looking forward to playing a lot more of them soon.

If you missed this year’s event, don’t forget that regionals are coming and definately make plans to be here next year. It really is one of the coolest conferences that you can attend. See ya soon!

Catfish

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Work Hard and Play Hard at BusinessOnLine – Celebrating Another Great Year

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:39:00 +0000

I have to admit, I love my job. Not only am I one of the privileged few who get to work in this crazy and fun industry called SEO, but I get to do it with some amazing people who know how to work hard and know how to play hard We celebrated another successful year on Friday with a “Day of Surprises”. And certainly the biggest surprise was not the double decker bus that picked us up in front of the office, but rather the Tequila tasting that shortly followed the bus ride. I have to say, big kudos to Trevor for one of the best ideas for a work function ever. And who knew there was so much to know about Tequila, and that Patron really isn’t that high quality relatively speaking.

Unfortunately, my knee wasn’t up to the scavenger hunt through downtown San Diego or the resulting bar hop, dancing, and karaoke, but my partners in crime (the BOL staff) represented us in fine fashion. So now that we took a little time to celebrate last year’s accomplishments, it’s time to focus on the new year and the challenges of 2009. I can’t wait to see what this year brings!

Here are some pics from Friday:

Tequila Tastes Best When BusinessOnLine is Buying!

Fun on the Bus

It’s a dangerous crowd…lol.

You can feel the competition in the air.

The secret to winning is having a good plan

There’s more than bragging rights at stake in this scavenger hunt!

There is no place like home

Our fearless leader is not scared to wear pink

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Happy Holidays

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:52:00 +0000

On behalf of the entire BusinessOnLine team, I would like to extend a happy holidays (Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Ramadan, happy whatever you celebrate)to all our readers. We hope this season brings you joy, happiness and time with family and friends. We are looking forward to a fantastic 2009 and we are committed to making the SEO blog even better next year. Have a great holiday, be safe, and eat a lot of food!

Catfish

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Going to do an In-house SEO Training Course For a Content Team Today

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:20:00 +0000

I am going to visit one of our local clients today to do an SEO training course for their content team. It’s really a good idea for an business to augment their SEO campaign with some in house training for all Web associates. The thing is, SEO affects every facet of your Web site and often times, your Web strategy. So when you align all stakeholders in a common vision as it relates to SEO, you significantly increase your chances for success.

Content writers without SEO experience, often write with too many assumptions that the audience is familiar with their content, industry jargon, etc. So its a good game plan to expose those people to some of the methods that search engines use to rank content. That way they can incorporate those SEO nuances into their culture of writing.

Two specific examples of this come to mind. The first one is a long standing joke on my SEO team that for some reason software companies never use the word software in their content. We have had a number of software companies that we have helped. And in each of those cases, one of our recommendations was to increase the number of times that they used the word software in content and meta data. Often times we forget that despite advances in latent semantic indexing, Google does not inherently know that words are related. For example, that AutoCAD is software.

The second example of SEO methods that should be incorporated into the culture of writing content is to expand on pronouns. So lets look at the following sentences:

“Our database software is really cool. It lets me track sales in real time.”
(incidentally, this sentence was not taken from one of our clients..lol)

But these sentences could be changed to:

“Our database management software, Brand X, is really cool. The advanced features of this data warehousing program let me track sales in real time.”

So the second sentence is a little longer but gives additional keyword focus to:
“data warehousing”, “data warehousing program” and “database management software” as well as other valuable permutations of those phrases. So in the first sentence, we just added another adjective. In the second sentence we replaced a pronoun with a noun and a prepositional phrase (I swear I haven’t used the term since high school..lol). But the end result is adding a lot more keywords to the content and conveying more specific information to the user. It’s a win win. Just make sure you always focus on enhancing content in such a way as to always benefit the user by giving more detail. That’s a KEY point in this process.

So the point is, getting everyone in your organization on the same page in terms of your approach to SEO is critical for success. And as it relates to content writers, the ideas of writing as if the person had no idea of what your content was about and the idea of expanding on pronouns can be very effective for SEO. Gotta go, have a great day!

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Come Join and Have Fun at an SEO Company!

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:54:00 +0000

Just look at our previous blog post we had on April Fools Day. We indeed are having fun! But just because we do this, that doesn’t mean we don’t work and it’s all play. We work hard because we have a lot of work on our hands and maybe you can help out with the work we do.

If you have the hard core skills in business or management and is thrilled to work in the online media space, you might want to join in the fun! We are currently looking for the following to start ASAP:

Business Analyst
Project Manager

These jobs are based in the cool and sunny San Diego, California. This is a full-time job with a complete line of benefits. Get to work with our team of experts in Internet marketing and web development that has delivered solutions for top brand clients such as Sony PlayStation, Hasbro, Cisco, Caterpillar, RailEurope, and many more.

Visit our job opportunities page for more details.

Photo Credit: Glenborough, LLC – 610 W. Ash, San Diego

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April Fools Day Strikes Again – The Tin Foil Treatment

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:44:00 +0000

Here at BusinessOnLine, we work hard and play hard. And sometimes we prank hard. This is an old school style prank that was really well done today. Candyce is still recycling the tin foil as we speak Happy April Fools Day! TRUST NO ONE

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Merry Chirstmas

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:44:00 +0000

Merry Christmas. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, then I wish you a very happy holiday season. I’ll be blogging about the Top 5 intersections of SEO and Usability after Christmas. But today I am staring at 200 pages of my client’s site that need work. So, I am gonna go do that today instead of blog..lol. Be safe today and tomorrow! Tonight, I recommend staying inside, getting some hot chocolate and watching my San Diego Chargers DESTROY the Broncos on national TV! It’s a perfect family activity, unless you’re from Denver. Have a great holiday.

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BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» BusinessOnLine Events

Bad Office Usability Day!

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