Posts filed under 'Search Engine Optimization'
- Update: The Obama Camp Dials It Forward. Post-primary conference call plays it subtle, while all is well in ClintonLand.
- McCain Launches Spanish-Language Website. Wonder how the Minutemen (no, not THE Minutemen) will feel about THAT one?
- Bury bad news with online press releases. Somebody forward this to Hillary Clinton. C.f. Craigslist Ad Of The Day.
- The critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. From gin to sitcoms to lolcats, via Henry Copeland.
- Bunches o’ Studies and Stats on Nonprofit Marketing.
- How-To: 10 Tips for Launching a Solid Podcast.
- Two new guides to presidential online advertising from Clickz, Online Presidential Display Ads Leading to the 2008 Primaries and All Primaries Are Local: 2008 Presidential Campaigns Buy Local Online.
- The Tale of the E-mail. Hillary and Barack’s constrasting post-Indiana/NC notes. C.f. She’s Still In, And She’s Still In To Win.
- Pew Study Confirms Cell Phones Rule.
- Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth.
- Right now, I’m watching the President of the Utah State Senate on my desktop. Julie, you had me at “desktop.”
- Google Reader is becoming more of a social networking application.
- Twitter Post Rescues Jailed Journalist, but Egyptians ignore Facebook call.
- How the White House lost 5 million e-mails.
- Jailed Chinese Journalist Shi Tao’s Poem Follows Olympic Torch’s Route Online.
- Matt Stoller on how liberals rule the web, and The Baltimore Sun on how Matt and friends raised 400K for Donna Edwards. Via tPrez.
- Phantom Obama Vote Appears on NJ Voting Machine.
- Web Ads from Left and Right Advocacy Groups Signal More to Come.
- Media criticism in context: “Yes, it would be nice if the press spent less time on inanities and more time on how candidates planned to actually run the country. But this view of the media is just too simplistic.” Via Salon.
- North Carolina Radio Host Reports Anti-Obama Chain E-Mail Distortion As Fact. C.f. Pennebaker: Clip Doctored, about the Mickey Kantor video distortion. (also via tPrez).
- Union-organizing emails get employees of a social networking site fired! Sent around by Michael Whitney.
- Clinton’s and McCain’s Gasoline Tax Holiday Reimagined as a Phishing Scam.
- National Intelligence Agency Breaks Out RSS Feed.
- 6% are Natural Born Clickers.
- Twitter frenzy! Using Twitter for Your Organization, Use TwitterFone For Easy Voice-To-Text On Twitter, and Political Junkies Congregate and Comment on Election Results Through Twitter. Plus, 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence and The Bivings Group Does Twitter.
- Yes, a Montana cattle ranch is using banner ads combined with search ads to sell their premium beef via the internet.
- 10 Valuable Tips for Shooting Web Video. Via Frogloop.
- Google, YouTube and the city of New Orleans try to host their own presidential forum. Via Mike Allen.
- Video: how primary-season attacks have been amplified in the general election.
- FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret ‘National Security Letter,’ Loses.
- Harold vs. Markos. Not everyone wants a unified Dem ticket.
- META Keywords are Legally Dead.
- Be very afraid: Engineers find ‘missing link’ of electronics. Robots take next step toward world domination.
- A minute and a half with Shana Glickfield…is enough to spark any man’s dreams.
- Clone-tool war on nipples continues. Complete with tragic casualty figures.
– cpd
May 7th, 2008
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Vikki Porter passed along an article today from Rob Garner at Media Post’s Search Insider which details the results of the company’s recent research into political search trends in the ‘08 elections. Below are some high points; check out the full piece for more.
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April 23rd, 2008
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These tips are for an Advocates for Youth/Choice USA online organizing training session on April 16, 2008, and you kids can look at them in greater depth in the relevant Online Politics 101 articles, particularly the ones covering marketing and promotion, websites, blogger relations and search engine optimization. They’re aimed at organizations and campaigns that are on the resource-poor side, since those won’t be able to do much paid promotion, but the basic ideas apply to most sites regardless of scale. See also that enduring classic from November of 2006, How to Build Traffic to a Blog: Ten Tips.
10 Ways to Build Traffic to a Website
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April 15th, 2008
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- The Shock of the New. What the history of the electric dynamo teaches about the future of the computer (we ain’t seen nothin’ yet). Related idea: It’s the Use, Not the Tech.
- Return of the Live Commercial. Another attempt to outwit Tivo users.
- SEO Pros Sip Web 2.0 Kool-Aid
- Does Sex Still Sell in B-to-B Marketing? Surprisingly, not always.
- Who’s With Fred? A Look At Thompson’s Web Team.
- Hits and Misses on YouTube
- Democratic Presidential Candidate Expenditures. Obama’s spending the most online, by far. Via techPres.
- And here’s one place the $$$ is going: Obama Parlays Internet Strength into ‘Walk for Change’. A nice offline-online conversion story.
- Google Gives Advertisers More Control. Via Bivings.
- Authenticity in Blog Comments and Product Reviews. Sincerity, baby — if you fake that, you got it made.
- Does Online Engagement Lead to More Money? Future cloudy; ask again later.
- Candidates Will Have to Take Questions Submitted Via the Video-Sharing Site. The Rabble Speaks! Another techPres find.
- A couple of Beltway Blogroll pieces: How Blogs Shaped The Immigration Debate, and Ky. Prosecutors Investigate Republican Blogger (uh, oh…).
- You, Too, Can Be a Senator from Wyoming — just fill out this handy web form…
- Note: science background strongly discouraged, since Most Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution.
- PBS News Hour Looks at Online Campaigning. Via the prolific David All.
- Political Watchdog Follows the Money Online. The green-eyeshade brigade is on the march.
- Chinese virtual world to focus on business, not politics. Ancient Chinese secret = pervasive censorship, self- or otherwise.
- Surprisingly, Pre-Roll Video Ads Work. Hmmmm, longer is also apparently better. Jokes “appropriate” to this moment are left as an exercise for the reader.
– cpd
June 12th, 2007
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I’ve-been-out-sick, gotta-catch-up-fast, quick-hits-on-steroids edition (no drug-testing in the blog world, thank god.)
- The guy behind the Hillary Clinton/1984 parody ad, initially anonymous, is outed as a Blue State Digital employee (oops), is fired because of the fallout, and defends himself to the world. Does he have a past as a dirty trickster?
- Hillary courts the blogs; gets snubbed. Perhaps she can try citizen-generated media to compensate…on second thought, maybe not.
- Getting in on the ‘Mobile’ Internet. Nice intro from venerable how-to site Webreference.
- The Post covers online politics: Online Firms Boot Up for Political Campaigns, but Candidates Try Web Video, And the Reviews Are Mixed (maybe video’s better when some random guy does it?).
- What [He] Learned At The Blogger Ethics Panel. Blogger ethics — oxymoron or dangerous trend?
- Fired Attorney Documents Crowdsourced. The collective “intelligence” of the Interweb goes to work. Via DIA.
- Online Sympathy ahead of Edwards Announcement, proving that the ‘net CAN actually be sincere (on rare occasions).
- MySpace Seeks to Make An “Impact”, Launches New Political Channel. In the process, MySpace sends me into anaphylactic shock by using the word “impact” to refer to something other than a physical collision (”Nurse, get me 20 cc’s of epenephrine, stat! Can’t you see that this man’s dangerously allergic to bureaucratic-speak?”).
- Politics Online Conference highlights and analysis from the Bivings Report, as Jeff Jarvis reports from the conference’s web team discussion.
- How Google Blog Search Ranks Results. Ethically, one hopes. Via Micropersuasion.
- Two ReelPopBlog finds: Ask a Republican (”We never got the opportunity to serve [in the military], but many of the sons of our housekeepers do…”). And, all bow before the King! Ron Jeremy to host new tech vlog at Heavy.com.
- What I’ve learned about donor management. A Ha-Hoa Dang suggestionTM.
- Will the Right Develop a Netroots Equivalent? “Since the beginning, conservative blogging has been marked more by punditry than activism…and most are content to keep on doing just that.”
- Online game to look at something not-so-funny: “World Without Oil is the first major project to invite the Internet’s staggering collective intelligence and imagination to address a real world problem: a realistic global oil shock.” A tip from my NET colleague Monica Walters.
- GoogTube Buying Ads on Political Names. “Try outbidding Google for your own brand name…”
- Vogue’s Anna Wintour hates the word “blog” (and I don’t blame her — while we’re at it, how about using “writer” instead of “blogger?”).
- The best places to find video art online. The art-criticism intro is a bit long, but the resources are good if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
- A video I’m glad is satire (or is it?). Waterboarding advice, suggested by Jeff Swanson. Now THIS is video art!
– cpd
March 22nd, 2007
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National Journal’s Heather Greenfield has put together an excellent article looking at Google’s use as a political tool, which Danny Glover reprinted yesterday in Beltway Blogroll. MyDD’s 2006 political Google bombing attempt got some coverage back in the Fall, but Heather goes into a lot of detail about how influencing Google search results works and the pluses and minuses of trying. Signficantly, she spends more time on targeted Google ads, though, which are likely to be much more useful as a promotional tool down the road.
For example, besides tossing Google bombs, the guys at MyDD also bought ads on the search engine targeted at politically relevant key terms (example: placing an ad that reads “Learn about George Allen. Did George Allen use racial slurs?” on results pages seen by people looking for information about the candidate). MyDD’s Chris Bowers claims a ridiculously good return rate, obviously from reader forwards, since the search ads seem to have yielded 14 page views per penny spent (if true, damned impressive).
If Heather’s piece has only whetted your appetite for search-related information, try this Tech President article on Wikipedia’s expansive influence in candidate search results — think the campaigns are excited to find that a citizen encyclopedia often rates higher than their own official sites?
– cpd
February 27th, 2007
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Now, 100% zombie-free! (Apparently, and sadly, zombie humor is a bit too obscure for primetime.)
- IPDI interviews Jeff Mascott of the Adfero Group on 2006 as a breakthrough year in politics and technology, the rise of user-generated content, and integrated CRM as a key to victory. Nice techno beat, too.
- Two tasty morsels from DIA: Goldilocks Samples E-mail Frequencies (too hot or too cold?) and a look at a Kintera shareholder revolt.
- Blog P.I. uncovers the first instance of online political networking.
- Zack Exley: Will Obama be the first candidate to fully embrace online media?
- Hillary Clinton In Blog Ads Flap. Via PoliticsOnline’s Weekly Politicker newsletter.
- Apex Reached? Moving From Bloggers To Communities. By Chris Bowers of MyDD.
- The YouTube Gotcha Game. How web video could sink a presidential candidate or two.
- The Distance Paradox. If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever?
- Interview: Steve Hall of Adrants, a site I read often and that not coincidentally is obsessed with sex in advertising. Via Micropersuasion.
- Three takes on the John Edwards blogger flap, from Hotline, The Wall Street Journal and PDF.
- Attack of the mini-Googles! Reminds me of a certain political search engine of legend that survives now only as a museum piece.
- In Campaign 2008, Candidates Starting Earlier, Spending More. No surprise, but they have numbers to back it up.
- More on the presidential races from the Bivings Report: McCain and Blog Outreach and Peer-to-Peer Campaigning.
- Video press releases alive and well, unlike our friends the zombies. In case you were worried.
– cpd
February 8th, 2007
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How-to site edition.
– cpd
November 30th, 2006
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Slate points this afternoon to a post on MyDD from shortly before the midterm election that looks at lefty bloggers’ attempts to googlebomb Republican candidates. What’s a googlebomb? A concerted effort to influence the search ranking of a given web page on a certain topic — in other words, an attempt to pop a page to the top of search engine results.
In this case, bloggers encouraged site owners across the web to link from chosen Republican candidates’ names on their own pages to specified unflattering articles on the web. The goal: to push those articles up the list of results for searches on the targeted candidates (see the section on search engine optimization for more on how search engines work).
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November 27th, 2006
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Hey kids, let’s boost our Google rank and become immensely popular and get to sit at the cool table at lunch and stuff. We know the basic methods because we’ve done our homework, but how do we keep track of the results?
A site called ToolURL.com (”search engine tools for webmasters”) is a good place to start. You can use it to check your Google page rank (damn, e.politics is only a 5 — but it just launched two weeks ago) and Alexa ranking, find sites that link to you, get SEO suggestions, etc.
And, if search is a significant part of your marketing plan, you should be checking two sites regularly: the venerable Search Engine Watch and a site that’s relatively new to me, SEO Chat. Both have tools and tips and also keep up with the latest news in the Intriguing World of Online Search.
– cpd
August 1st, 2006
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Getting found on search engines is usually vital if you want to have any kind of online prominence, so search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the Holy Grails of online marketing (and marketing is what we’re doing here: we’re selling ideas, right?). So, how do we get Google, Yahoo and MSN to notice us? (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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What good is a campaign if no one knows about it? Inadequate promotion is a painfully common problem in the online world — rarely can you hide your light under a bushel and expect your site to shine. Let’s look first at the basics of getting attention, then we’ll look at how to keep those readers you get. (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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