Tom normally selects a (very) funny cartoon for us. Unfortunately he’s struck by either some kind of ninja flu’ (Tom’s version) or a tiny cold (Tom’s wife’s version).

Either way, here’s me doing the honors for him!

These two Geek and Poke cartoons in the Simply Explained series remind me a lot of Common Craft’s Explanations in Plain English

In his January video marketing piece, Tom Tsinas reminded us of the importance of incorporating images, audio, and video into our content. He wrote: “As search engine marketers, we all know that content is king and that content is more than just text. Images, video and audio each represent a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to our client’s sites.” In this post, I’d like to share two examples that demonstrate how important that statement is.

Most SEO’s will agree that Blogs are an important part of their Toolkit. Blogs offer both on page and off page benefits for our client’s sites.

Implementing a Blog is relatively simple to do…the tough part is getting the client to agree to one.

This is the first in a 5 part series looking at Blog Strategy with a focus on Clients. In this post, I’m going to look at some of the typical objections clients have to implementing a Blog Strategy, and how to answer them.

The Client: Why would I think about implementing a Blog Strategy?

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Last week: Recognize this index?

Memory is much faster than looking things up.

In order for a search engine in high demand to serve its users efficiently it should keep things in memory instead of looking it up on a disk.

Traditionally large scale search engines will keep their complete dictionary in memory and the posting list on disk.

Inefficient Storage

Obviously the more you can keep in memory and the more information can be read back with one disk action, the better.

So it would seem that Yahoo is starting to flail around a little bit while under the waiting and patient gaze of Microsoft, who may actually be able to make their purchase for a  better price than what they originally offered!

Smart!

There’s a bunch of shareholder groups all filing suits against Yahoo for not accepting Microsoft’s original offer, and Yahoo is having difficulty finding anyone else to come riding to the charge.

It was my intention to blog on something else today until I chanced upon this article from SearchEngineWatch.com: 48 Practical Questions to Qualify Prospective Search Marketing Vendors by Marty Weintraub.

The 48 questions in question are both enlightening and informative.

And frankly, they should be information volunteered, not solicited. Run the questions around your agency/office and everyone from the receptionist to the CEO should be able to answer any one of them.

Did you know that Google played favourites (Canadian spelling eh?) for a long time?

Its true! For the longest time, American companies were not really given a fair shake in the search results. It wasn’t intentional, rather was just the byproduct of legacy infrastructure, and competing priorities. And don’t get me wrong, this is in no way Google bashing. I certainly understand the problems associated with their dilemma, and why it took so long to rectify.

Let me explain. Being Canadian, we’re obviously very aware of our neighbours (yes I spelled that with a ‘u’, eh) to the south. Until very recently, we understood that there were 3 different sets of Google search results applicable to us:

Short and sweet.

Start talking about file sizes, page load time, ease of navigation and in the shortest time possible you’ve just qualified yourself as a goodie-two-shoes geek with admirable yet naive views on making money on the web.

And that, my friend, is your fault.

Instead of using Urkel speak  and freaking geeking everybody out, use words that make sense in business.

"Is the site consumer friendly? Is the site ready to do transactions at any time, on any platform? How easy is it for a prospect to become a customer? How fast can a customer pay?"

Ever wonder why some of your competitors frequently seem to get mentions on radio, in newspaper articles, magazine articles, and even occasionally on television (news or local programming)?

Here’s a little strategy I’ve been working on for about 6 months now that has resulted in some great offline mentions, and takes minimal effort.

Here it is in a nutshell:

What You Need:
If you don’t already have an account on Digg, get one. Dedicate some time to it though … build a semi-power account if you can. If not, try it anyway

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Last week: "The" Index (2).

Oversimplified: we have at least a few pages in our index, have extracted every single word from those pages and have written down in an index where in which pages those words occur.

Want to talk numbers? We have some very precise ones for the English language.

Google says;

"We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,588,391 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times."