The Icing!

SEO, Show Notes, Enhanced Podcasts, Pitches

2 June 2009

Agenda

• SEO• Show Notes• Ehanced Podcasts• Pitches

SEO• SEO – search engine optimization

– The art of increasing legitimate site traffic from search engines using targeted keywords

• White Hat– Practices that are related to good design

• Black Hat– Practices that are frowned upon (ie, not legitimate)

such as “invisible” or “hidden” text or cloaking (serves different page depending on if the request is a “human” or a spider)

– SE look at meta and javascript redirects as spam

How Do Search Engines Work?

• New content added and linked to; existing linked content modified

• SE spiders (bots) crawl the site– Look for robots.txt file or metatag– Text, metadata, page titles, URL– Follow links – looking for # links “in” and #

links “out”– Index key terms, count word frequency

• Weigh these things somehow (algorithm)

Search v Findability

• Consumers use “search” to “find”• It’s not that they “want to search” … it’s

that they “want to find…”

Terms

• Unique visitors (IP address)• Bounce rate (visit 1 page and leave)• Average visit, page duration (seconds!)• Most requested, entry, exit pages• Hits v Page View• Referrers• These data come from your server logs!

What Stats To Use?

• Referrers tell you where your visitors are coming from

• For example: some referrer data• Google: Webmaster Tools • Also, Trellian keyword discovery or

WordTracker

Who To Study, Read?

• Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineWatch.com, Search 101

• Aaron Wall, SEOBook.com• Slideshare • Google:

– What is a sitemap and why should I have one?

Show Notes - Relevance

• How to increase traffic – good content!• Link Sharing• Update your content• Know your keywords (SEO again)

How Do We Read (erh, scan)?

• Eye-tracking research– Top to bottom– Left to right

• Then there’s the “above the fold” thing

Enhanced Podcast

• Apple implemented in 2005– AAC format– Chapter Markers– Images

• MAKE Magazine “how to”• Jake Ludington’s “how to” for WMP

The Pitch

• Effective presentations– Presentation Zen (buy the book!)– 5 Steps to Slide Design for Non-Designers

• Guy Kawaski– The “Pitch” [inspirational plus example of

effective presentation style]