Come Ride With Us

Written by David Harry

Thursday, 15 July 2010 13:18

The Trail is Growing!

Hey gang, we going to be expanding things over the next while here on the Trail and adding some fresh blood into the mix. Over the last few years we've had a TON of great guest posters and have decided to step it up. So what we're after are;

Regular writers - these will be columnists who will have a regular spot on the site and their own dedicated bio page. We're not looking for a lot, maybe 2 posts per month.
Guest posters - will be folks that don't have enough time for being a regular, but can drop a post every now and again, much as we've had in the past.

We have been putting a little shout-out on Twitter and already have a few folks in place. I will introduce them all to you next week. It hasn't been an easy process as I am not going to just take the first so-and-so that comes along. While experience is great, it isn't key. I am more intherested in people with the drive to express themselves and a good personality/style to their writing. Topics can vary as we have sections here on SEO, Analytics, Conversions, Social Media, Learning SEO and more.

It is a good opportunity for writers old and new. At least I like to think so. The site is reasonably well known in the search industry and has won SEMMY's 2 years running. Last year even a few guest posters were among the 7 nominations. We get some coverage from locales such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal and Watch. Not to mention MediaPost and even USA Today.

If you're interested in learning more, leave a comment, contact me here or track me down on Twitter.

Add new comment

Strength in numbers

One of the most important elements that we wanted to bring when we created the SEO Training Dojo, was a lack of egos. All too often in the internet marketing world we see jackasses strutting around with their peacock feathers fluffled for all to see… I can’t tell you the number of times people have come to me about such-and-such (cough) A-lister SEO all but brushing them off at a conference acting puffy and pompous (or related tales). This is something we sought to avoid.

You see, regardless of people’s odd affinities for hero worship, we’re simply a bunch of search marketers nothing more, nothing less. There is NO SUCH THING as rock stars or A-listers… the concept has always left me shaking my head, that’s for sure. No one outside of our little niche has a clue who we are. And ‘industry leaders’? There are few of those I’d dare say are suspect as well since most of the more prominent SEOs tend to be ‘more prominent’ from a profit motive than one to lead.

Facts, Fiction and plenty of Tin Foil

Now that the cat is finally out of the bag, I'd been getting some questions as to my personal thoughts on the world of Caffeine. So, here we go... say it once, then we're moving on with life. For those that missed the memo; Google's Caffeine updates is now LIVE.

FIRST – this is infrastructure folks, plain and simple. If there's anything we've seen that is important with all of the recent movements is that this comes with a concerted 'need for speed'. We can only guess that it is a response to the many new elements since the last major update, Big Daddy such as, (bot not limited to);

Social (social search and Buzz)

Real Time (RTS and even QDF implications)

Universal (video, local shopping etc..)

PubSubHubub (and feed pushing)

Salmon (coming soon?)

Meta data (RDFa, Rich Snippets, semantic)

Google TV (Android etc..)

New Interface (far more options, Wonder Wheel etc..)

You get thin idea. While there are no direct ranking algorithm changes directly, there is the possibility for them to be looking at deeper processing of existing signals and getting the infrastructure in place to deal with future implementations.

SECOND – what we do know. Beyond the fact that Google has a need for speed, we can take what we have so far (on the record). According to Vanessa Fox, (via SEL);

“The Caffeine infrastructure provides more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored with a document.” - Vanessa Fox

...and Matt had said that,

“It’s important to realize that caffeine is only a change in our indexing architecture. What’s exciting about Caffeine though is that it allows easier annotation of the information stored with documents, and subsequently can unlock the potential of better ranking in the future with those additional signals.” - Matt Cutts