Search Marketing and SEO

A big thanks to everyone who came to watch me speak at Internet World at Earl’s Court yesterday. I was told it was the biggest crowd at IW keynote theatre this year!

I found the whole thing really enjoyable and rewarding and received some great feedback from attendees and organizers.

I’ll post the video up here when it is ready, in the meantime you can view my presentation: How to attract engaged users who have never heard of you or use the SlideShare widget below to run through it.

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Please feel free to ask any questions or send feedback here, or to dan@dancohen.info

Well, more accurately it is 15 years ago today that CERN opened up the web to the general public. This is different of course to the Internet which is the structure and set of agree protocols which provide the platform for the application of the Web to operate over but these days the terms seem to be interchangable.

You can read more in this great article by Jane Douglas, the MSN Tech and Gadgets editor, which looks at the ways the web has changed our lives and what most people use it for.

I’ve been lucky enough to be approved on to the technology preview of Live Mesh which is a new technology from Microsoft which allows users to share and connect all their various devices via a “mesh” to sync and share data and control with each other over the web.

You can watch this video interview on channel9 of Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and one of Bill Gates’ successors.

Here’s a great blog entry about Mesh by Amit Mital, who is heading up the Mesh project. He describes the need for a “cloud” based link between all his various devices and the need to connect and bring those devices together. I know how he feels. I have a work laptop, a home laptop, a media centre and a Windows Mobile device all of which are connected to the Internet most of the time and sharing data and media between them has been challenging at times.

This all changed for me this week. Signing into Live Mesh with my Live ID I get access to a shared desktop interface which  I can use in a folder-sharing way, which allows me to have a “desktop in the cloud” that I can use to share files to any PC in the world I am in front of.

This is cool enough, but then I’ve added my Media Centre as a device in the Mesh, and the first application Mesh offers for devices is a remote desktop experience which isn’t in itself a new experience but it’s one I’ve never used so seemlessly.

The remote desktop and the Live Desktop are the first two applications which use the Mesh platform which is fully programmable. For more, watch this video about developing for mesh from channel9 and also this hands on with Mesh on channel10. The Mesh is part of Microsoft’s software-as-a-service vision, and you can read more about the platform of Mesh as it relates to this vision.

Nathan Buggia, the PM for Webmaster Center here at MSN, has written a blog post about some changes to the MSNBot crawler which is the spider that populates the Windows Live Search index.

As described a few months ago, the changes include HTTP Compression (see RFC 2661 sections 14.11 and 14.39) which is a method to reduce server traffic and increase crawl-time of your site and Conditional Get (see RFC 2616 Section 14.25) which is a GET method which will only download a page if it is required due to a change since the last crawl.

You can check your server to see if it supports this new functionality by checking to see if your server supports Conditional Get or checking to see if your server supports HTTP Compression.

Also very cool is the ability to direct the crawl rate in your robots.txt file. By using the property “Crawl-delay: 5″ you can set an n second delay in how long the crawler waits between crawling your pages.

Remember to refer to the Crawling Help Documentation for any information or send your crawler feedback direct to the team at the MSNBot Feedback Forum.

I’ve been in Copenhagen, Denmark all this week running an SEO Workshop for our Nordic markets. We had a great turnout with MSN Sweden, Norway and Denmark represented. Over the two days we introduced the editors, channel managers and producers to the concepts of SEO, our platform and suite of technologies we’ve built for them and also shared our initial findings from crawling their sites.

I’m a big fan of Copenhagen; I went there on holiday for a week with my brother last year. It’s a great city and the Microsoft Offices are beautiful - all glass and steel.

This is a very cool piece of web goodness.

Using Windows Live Maps and the Windows Live Spaces recently updated RSS feed, we’re really proud to launch http://www.livespacevision.com/

Live Spaces Vision is a stream of global updates to the Windows Live Space network of local market sites in near real-time. Live Spaces Vision joins FlickrVision, TwitterVision, and WikipediaVision in the vision map genre. This was achieved by using the publicly available Changes Feed and Virtual Earth SDK.

Evangelized and product managed by Rick Stock and Jason Christie in London, UK. and built by Cyokin Zhang and Jamie He in Shanghai, CN.

I’ve been testing the reactions of Googlebot and other crawlers to the NOFOLLOW rule on links contained in image maps. I noticed some strange results appearing in the Google index which I traced back to an image map which allows users to rate content.

I added a test page to my SEO Sandbox site which has two image maps, one with the NOFOLLOW instruction in the image <map> tag and the other in the <area> tag to test the results. Google and MSN bots both ignored the directive and indexed the pages behind the images.

I guess that’s conclusive! I posted a question on the Google Webmaster forum but have yet to hear back. If you link to this article or test then please don’t link to the destination pages as this will disprove the test

I’m lucky enough to have been offered a seat in a private box at the Royal Albert Hall tonight to attend Classic FM Live. The production for tonight is Classic Movie Themes and here’s the lineup!

First Half
Bernstein: The Great Escape - Main Theme
Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No.2 – Lang Lang
Gone With The Wind and The Godfather – Jonathan Ansell
Gladiator and The Ashokan Farewell - Blake

Second Half
Raiders of the Lost Ark - Raiders March
E.T.
Schindler’s List (Soloist – Ruth Palmer)
Mussorgsky – Night on Bare Mountain - Fantasia
Jurassic Park
Superman
Star Wars

I am a big movie fan and have always thought that a lot of the emotional weight of a film is carried by the music so this is right up my street. Thanks to Louise for the tickets!

UPDATE - Now I realise I’m probablyway behind he curve here, but this Lang Lang fella is an absolute genius. You can read more about him on his official site.

Something that’s been somewhat lacking up to now is a Wiki site for Twitter, and my friend Jason sent me this unofficial Twitter Fan Wiki which has some seriously cool stuff.

They’ve got all sorts of stuff on there including Hashtags which is a great way to categorize your Tweets by adding a hash before a keyword, e.g. #dancohen or #MSN, a list of NonHumanNonIndividuals and News & Media which is automated feeds and content from sites such as the work we’ve done with MSN Entertainment’s Twitter Feed and of course the obligatory Kittens and Cats feed.

I think this is a great example of the community-driven nature of the phenomenon that is Twitter and shows exactly why I love it so much.

As part of the ongoing effort to index the entire world, Google announced on their Webmaster Central blog the launch of a new pilot program to send the GoogleBot through HTML Forms.

The blog post says that “high-quality sites”, whatever that means, may have a polite number of form submissions to attempt to discover content which is normally beyond Google’s ability to crawl. This is often termed the Deep Web or Invisible Web and includes things such as product searches or date refinement of existing datasets on a page.