5 iPhone Apps You Won’t See Anytime Soon

Posted on October 9th, 2008 by Rick Maggio

Recently, Google released a new feature for Gmail aimed at helping users keep their cool in times of disparity. Mail Goggles is a new feature in Gmail that seeks to prevent you and your friends from drunk-emailing. Try to blast off an email at 2am from the Gmail interface and you’ll be greeted with a message and series of simple math questions aimed at finding out whether you actually want to send that special someone an email.

After this came across my RSS, I got to thinking about other ways that technology can help us stay out of trouble and deal with difficult situations. So I looked around and the next thing I found comes from LG. The LG LP4100 is a cell phone with built-in breathalyzer. Not only can you verify your intoxication before driving home from the bar, but the phone will also allow you to block numbers based on your level of intoxication. This is the perfect Christmas gift for the chronic drunk dialer in your life.

Now, as an iPhone junkie, my first thought was to find existing apps that can help me keep me deal with difficult situations. Granted, I’m not much of a drunk dialer or emailer, but there must be other ways that iPhone can help me out. Since I couldn’t find much that already existed, I dreamed up a few apps of my own. Maybe someday if I have the time or inclination, I’ll get around to contributing to the slew of existing iPhone apps. Here are my ideas:

Honey, I Think I’m Pregnant App

For any ladies that are having trouble breaking the big news to their boyfriends, the perfect solution is here. Answer a few questions about your relationship, the father (or at least the guy most likely to be the father) and your feelings about the situation and this app handles the rest. Not only does this app automatically generate a series of text messages and emails to your baby’s daddy, it also provides links and information on being a father. This app will first inform dad of the surprising news and then will provide dad with information and links to resources which will help him cope with the end of his freedom.

The ‘Breakup With My Girlfriend’ App

After answering a few brief questions about your relationship and your soon-to-be ex girlfriend, this app sends a series of self-generated text messages and emails to your unlucky lady. Forget about the awkward silences, yelling and screaming. Let iPhone do the dirty work for you.

The initial messages generated are soft and prime her emotions for the big let down. Once she’s been primed, the final messages in the series send a clear message, in a respectful tone. She won’t be happy with the news but there’s really no better way to deliver it. The best part is that she’ll never know that it wasn’t you that did the breaking up. More importantly, the system won’t let your emotions get in the way of getting the job done.

The ‘Quit My Job’ App

This app is similar to the Breakup With My Girlfriend App in that this app sends a clear message of seperation. This app is more geared towards being professional and polite. To begin, this app creates and sends a professional letter of resignation. There are several professional templates to choose from. Next the app issues a series of alerts as to when you should perform important tasks like duplicating your work hard drive, copying important documents and smuggling office supplies. On your final day, this app will also generate farewell letters to all the co-workers you want to keep in touch with and to the ones you never want to see again. All you have to do is set the date of your final day of work and this app does the rest for you.

The Happy Birthday App

This imaginary app is perfect for those of us who can’t remember our own birthdays, let alone the birthdays of the ones we care about. Enter in the birthdays of your friends and families, set a budget and this app will not only send happy birthday messages to your loved ones through email, Facebook and text message, it will also order a gift and have it delivered on time for the big day. Your friends will love you and you won’t even have to work for it. Only a jerk would forget a birthday, so don’t be that guy/gal.

The ‘Sorry but You’ve Been Laid-Off’ App

This will be a favorite in corporate America, especially in these hard times. Notify the system of the employee that you’re letting go, answer a few questions and this app will not only notify the employee of their firing, but will also send email job reccommendations based on their work experience and education. What better way to say goodbye than to help out a former employee by recommending a few new opportunities. By default, notifcations of firings will be sent out Friday evenings after working hours to prevent a scene in front of other soon-to-be-laid-off workers.

I’m sure this list could get much longer but the point is that we’ve only scratched the surface with what technology can do for us. Imagine how easy life is going to be when our phones and computers can deal with all the difficult situations in life for us.

Tags: iphone, technology | Category Rants

Will SEO for Links

Posted on September 29th, 2008 by Rick Maggio

It may be ironic, but you can’t write it off as a bad strategy. An SEO who begs for links can’t be a very good SEO, right? Well, I beg to differ. Doing SEO work in exchange for backlinks may be one of the most effective ways to build high-quality links.

Here’s why-

In general quality websites with great content often build the most links over time. Since there are many high-quality websites that have really never had SEO in mind (and don’t have a clue), there may be great opportunities for SEO’s willing to work in exchange for links.

The benefit for the website owner: Quickly increase traffic to their website. As most of these websites already have high PageRank and trust within the search engines, small tweaks to on-page SEO factors may be enough to quickly these sites to top of SERPs for high volume keyword phrases. Many of these websites may not really understand that a little SEO help could greatly increase their traffic.

The benefit to the SEO: Keyword-rich footer link from a trusted website that already has high PageRank and a reputable client to add to your client list.

From the perspective of the SEO, the time investment in such a project may be fairly minimal. If you select a website with a high number of quality inbound links, you won’t likely have to spend much time on link building. The main time investment will be in researching and implementing keywords, adding sitemaps, robot.txt and handling any canocalization or other technical issues.

A challenge in implementing this strategy is finding partners to work with. If you have programming and/or design skills, considering offering those services as part of the deal.

Potential partners to offer assistance to:

* Non-profit agencies

* Industry resources that are ‘behind the times’ when it comes to their websites

* Community colleges or small universities

* The local Chamber of Commerce

When dealing with organizations that haven’t yet embraced SEO as a channel for promoting their cause, remember that they probably don’t understand it. The most important thing to remember when making an offer is to clearly outline the benefits to your potential partner. Many may not understand your offer or how it can help them. For this reason, the best approach for finding a good partner may be to attend an event they are having or to visit them in person. Again, explaining SEO and what you’re offering may be difficult to do in a an email.

For the tight-budgeted SEO business, the ‘will work for links’ approach may be a good one because the only costs and investments involved are your own time. If you consider the amount of time it would take to build links as high in quality through other link-building strategies, you may spend no more time on this strategy than any other. Additionally, following the above approach is an effective way to build your client list with reputable clients. Listing non-profits and other trusted organizations as clients can do wonders for your companies image.

Tags: features, link building | Category Organic Search

Why SEO is Similar to the Stock Market

Posted on September 17th, 2008 by Rick Maggio

I like to trade stocks and I like SEO. I think the reason that I like them both is because they are actually similar in many ways.

Risks and Rewards

In stock trading, it’s not secret that there are risks and rewards. In general, the bigger the risk, the bigger the potential for reward. Day traders are especially familiar with this general rule as they tend to take higher risks than medium or long-term investors. In SEO, I think the same logic can be true. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

First, let’s assume that you’re a small fish in a big pond, as most of us are on the Web. If you want to run your own website and compete for the most popular search terms related to your business, you’ll likely have a lot of competition. By developing content, building links and slowly trying to make your way to the top of search rankings, you can invest a great deal of time, money and energy. If you make it to the top for your targeted keywords, you’ll likely reap the rewards of high traffic volume to your website along with, hopefully, high conversions. Now, let’s say that you run out of resources before you make it to the top. What happens then is that you may end up with little or no traffic and conversions. In the same way that a stock trader made lose big on a risky deal, you’ve lost big. Conversely, taking a more conservative approach and targeting less-competitive markets may have yielded a better result than nothing, but not as good as the potential in the more risky scenario.

Next, consider that you run a website in a lucrative and highly competitive market. Over the past few months, you’ve seen decreases in traffic and conversions from organic search which is costing you’re company a good deal of money. You also notice your competitors using less-than-honest tactics to inflate their search engine rankings. What do you do? Well, a high risk, high reward strategy might be to follow suite and use similar tactics to stay competitive. The risk involved is that the search engines may penalize you, if and when you’re discovered. This would certainly put you in a worse place than you started. If you’re never to get caught however, then you’re good to go. The more conservative approach in this scenario would be to continue following SEO best practices and try to ride out the storm, hoping that you’re competitors tactics don’t work in the long run. The reward to this low risk strategy is that you’ll be able to maintain at least some level of organic traffic, just not the level that you’re used to.

Rough Waters

Just like the stock prices in a volatile market, websites also occasionally experience shake-ups. In the stock market, world events, economies and governments can drastically affect the price of stocks. On the web, these shake-ups are usually caused by algorithm adjustments on the part of the search engines. While these changes occur regularly and often have little noticeable affect, there are situations where the opposite is true. Just like stock investors, SEO’s have to reinvent their strategies during volatile times if they want to come back out on top.

Successful Traders and Successful SEO’s

Successful stock investors and successful SEOs have personality traits in common. The first important trait is the ability to re-invent themselves when the market calls for it. There’s no time in either field to sit back and wait for things to happen. While the fundamentals of both games stay the same, their application of these fundamentals needs to evolve to stay competitive. Second, successful individuals in either field need to be able to recognize when to apply high risk strategies and when to apply lower risk strategies. Different situations call for different responses and making the right call in critical to success.

Tags: seo theory | Category Organic Search

Google Chrome: Yet Another bold Move by Google

Posted on September 5th, 2008 by Rick Maggio

This week, Google announced the Beta release of their new web browser, Google Chrome. With Chrome, Google takes yet another stab at software giant Microsoft whose Internet Explorer has been the leading browser for several years now. Other popular browsers today include Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera.

So, is Chrome worth checking out?

I’ll start by saying just about anything is worth tryin at least once. Since I’ve downloaded Chrome, I must say that I’m pretty impressed. First, the interface is pretty clean:

Overall, web pages also seem to load a little quicker with Chrome. Some cool features include:

* Independent tabs – Each tab within the browser functions on its own. This means that if one tab crashes, the rest won’t be affect.

* Home page history – The opening browser page displays your recent browsing history:

* A search feature within the browser allows you to search through recent pages you’ve visited

* Create application shortcuts from your desktop. Basically, an icon on your desktop will launch the borwser to a specified web page

* Open source – That right, the browser is open source so we can expect to see a plethora of pugins and apps that will enhance the browser

Uncle Sam is Watching

Google was nice enough to allow users to automatically send their browsing history and behavior back to Google. Yet again, Google is mining a little more data about our interent habits. Hopefully, this data will be put to some good to help improve search results and web searchability.

Overall, I’m not switching to this browser any time soon but I am excited to see what happens with it. If you’re curious, check it out.

Tags: browsers, google, google chrome | Category Industry News

How Google Suggest will Affect Your Organic Traffic

Posted on August 29th, 2008 by Rick Maggio

The folks at Google recently announced and applied a pretty big change that will affect both searchers and searchies (that’s right, I invented a new word…). In summary, the default Google search interface now includes what Google Labs used to call Google Suggest and what the current Google toolbar on your browser (if you have it installed) does.

What Google Suggest and Google Toolbar did and now Google regular does is try to ‘help’ searchers by providing keyword suggestions as the user begins to type a search phrase. Based on what the user is typing, Google provides keyword suggestions in the order of search popularity. In the example below, I started to type Google sucks but only got to Goolge s and some great ’suggestions’ appeared. Here’s what it looked like:

From the standpoint of some searchers, this is probably a pretty nice feature. We’re all pretty lazy and if Google gives us another tool that thinks for us, well, we’ll use the hell out of it.

From a behavioral perspective, this will change the way we search. Possibilities:

* As we’re given suggestions on keyword phrases, we’ll tend to take suggestions that aren’t exactly what we meant because it will save us from typing. As a result, we’ll have to click around more or perform more searches to get what we’re looking for. I mentioned in my example above that I was going to search for Google sucks but those great suggestions changed my mind. Instead, I click on Google Stocks and became depressed as I realized yet again that I bought at the wrong time…

* Searchers will come to rely on this tool and it will become a standard on all engines not yet doing it.

* We’ll have exposure to less of the what’s out on the internet as we’re driven to the websites that rank best for popular phrases more than we previously were.

* Spammers will work feverishly to tick Google into suggestion terms beneficial to them.

From a search perspective, the effects of this change can be pretty big. My predictions:

* Keyword phrases that were already popular will become more popular as searchers are ‘funneled’ into choosing a given set of phrases.

* Long-tail keyword optimization will become a less-attractive optimization strategy as searchers are ‘channeled’ into the most popular phrases.

* Costs per click on popular keyword phrases on major paid ad networks will increase as marketers bid for top positions and can no longer rely as heavily on long-tail phrases. Many advertisers may have to back off on PPC advertising because they can no longer meet their ROI needs with rising costs.

* SEO Agencies and professionals will, and already are, struggling to adjust their strategies as the market is going to become more competitive for the most popular phrases.

Let’s not forget that Yahoo has been providing suggestions for quite some time now. The reason I’m most interested is that Google is ’standardizing’ this feature at they host about 70% of searches in the US. This will impact the way we search in a substantial way.

How will this change affect your traffic immediately?

* If you currently rank well for popular phrases, you may see significantly more traffic for those phrases

* If most your traffic is based on long-tail keywords, you may see a drastic decline as searchers are guided to more popular terms.

For those of us in the industry, it’s exciting to think about how search will evolve in the upcoming years. Every time the deck is shuffled, we’re forced to adapt or give up. I can think of several strategy changes that I’ll implement to best take advantage of new opportunities. I’m sure that SEO’s around the globe will do the same once search stats are available or sooner.

Tags: google suggest | Category Industry News