Michael Zhang from Folksonomy just published an interview of Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. The interview is short but concise. If you don’t know the story behind Digg, you might wanna read the interview.
Surprisingly, when Digg was created, people behind it didn’t really mean to create a business, they just built a service that immediately took off thanks to its uniqueness. It’s also hard to believe that Digg is only managed by 16 people…
“The Bush” says he uses “the Google”. On a recent interview, he said that he uses “the Google Maps” sometimes:
HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?
BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.
Damn, and now I’m thinking about people who sometimes say that French use “the” everywhere when they talk in english 🙂
No doubt about it, Aaron came up with the most comprehensive Search Engine Marketing Glossary ever created. The glossary includes the most recent terms, techniques, and other jargon used in the SEM/SEO Industry.
This list can be of interest if you need to find the right words to explain something to your client, or if you simply don’t understand a term.
Live Search has released a pretty handy operator that allows you to see what are the pages a website links to. The operator is LinkFromDomain. To use it, you need to type LinkFromDomain:domain.com. Here are the pages SEOPrinciple links at.
This operator can come in handy for a link building strategy. For example, you could see where your competitor links at in order to find sites related to yours.
Stephen Colbert announced that he wants his cut from Google’s acquisition of YouTube.
Today, I came across Adhemas Batista’s website, a graphic designer based in Brazil whose work is just stunning. The guy is a 25 years old freelancer full of talent. He’s done commercial work for brands such as Mizuno, Symantec, Palm Treo or Johnnie Walker. His work also consists of book covers, typefaces and logos.
If you need inspiration or if you’re looking for an excellent graphic designer, check his website out!
Do you remember when Google was ordered to remove all content from belgian french-speaking newspapers? Well, it now appears that Copiepresse has made the same kind of demands to MSN. (source: Seo by the Sea)
One of the newspapers that asked to be removed from Google index was Le Soir. I believe they forgot to ask Google not to bid on their domain name. As you can see on the screenshot below, a search for lesoir or lesoir.be on Google.be brings an ad from…well, Google News Belgium.
Via Bill Slawski’s post, I came across a new blog called Startup Review that provides case studies about successful Internet Start-Ups. So far, the blog has profiled Home Gain, Rotten Tomatoes, Zappos, MySpace, Craigslist and many more successful online businesses.
The reviews are all very pedagogical and should make some good reading for people running an online business or those willing to start one.
Each case study seems to be divided in 7 parts:
– Why the start up has been profiled on Startup Review: the blog owner, Nisan Gabay, explains what were the factors that made him choose to review each startup;
– The Key Success Factors of the startup: in this part, the author outlines the key success factors that made the start-up business model unique;
– Its Launch Strategy: how the start-up was launched;
– An Exit Analysis: gives information on how the company was acquired;
– Food For Thought
– Reference Articles: links to useful articles about the start up;
– Questions for Startup Review Readers: StartUp Review incites people to leave comments and to contribute to the review.
One of the case studies talks about RottenTomatoes and is titled: Rotten Tomatoes Case Study: SEO drives traffic growth . The author explains that the owners of RottenTomatoes focused mainly on SEO to drive traffic to the site. They basically rely their SEO strategy on creativity and website architecture in order to obtain a search engine friendly website and gain lots of good links.
Thankfully, RottenTomatoes inhouse SEO team stopped by Startup Review and left several comments. Here’s a summary of the comments that I stole from Bill’s post 🙂 :
1. Movie and review sites were happy to link to them because their focus was upon linking out to other sites. A partnership, and hosting of, the Online Film Critics Society (and other offline critics groups) brought them visibility and positive relationships with related sites.
2. They’ve been active from the start in sending out links to directories like DMOZ and others, especially for new or upcoming movies and actors.
3. Page titles, alt tags, and good URL structures were thought about carefully, and set up so that that would get indexed well in search engines.
4. They shared information freely and built relationships with other sites like Netflix, and provided information about their ratings to others to publish via RSS feeds. Fans of their site, like Google engineers, integrated their site into prominent places, like Google’s Desktop Search v1, Gmail RSS Feeds v1.
According to one commenter, SEO traffic comprised up to 70% of RottenTomatoe’s traffic. Wow, that’s what I called a successful SEO strategy. Hard work , dedication, and creativity are the main factors that helped them build a strong SEO strategy. Nice job guys.
