The Spider and the Trap

What lessons can we learn from this picture?

The Flytrap must have seemed enticing to the Spider. It offered an attractive structure, bound to attract flies. The Spider must have thought it ready-made for his web, as you can see in the picture.

All that promise, though, was little more than a clever trap. There he is, swallowed whole.

Poetic justice from a fly's perspective, perhaps. Or maybe a warning of the dangers of hubris?

More likely, a simple reminder that there's no free lunch.

(Thanks to California Carnivores for selling such well-bred plants; it's worth the drive to Sebastopol, and they ship too.)

Google Book Search and my wasted youth

In college I worked as a library researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary. I had two main roles. First, I would verify quotations. They would send me a slip of paper with a citation from a book, journal, etc. I would locate that item in the library and verify the citation's accuracy.

More interesting, and more time consuming, was antedating work. As a historical dictionary of English, the OED strives to give the earliest quotation it can for each word. When the editors were working on a new entry, they would send me their earliest citations and ask me to find earlier ones.

Antedating led to some interesting adventures. I emailed Richard Stallman to ask about the origin of the term POSIX; he refused to offer any help until the OED was released into the public domain. Researching "ribbit," I combed the script archives at UCLA to find an annotation in an old Smothers Brothers script.

Most of my work, though, turns out to have been largely wasted. 15 years later, early uses I spent hours to find can be beaten within minutes using Google's Book Search. A sad (for me) example is "bow hunting". I looked through dozens of books about hunting with a bow to find an early use of that term, not to mention dozens of volumes of old magazines. The oldest citation the OED has is from 1947; that's the earliest one I could find after hours of work in 1993. Using Google Book Search today, it took me less than a minute to locate a citation from 1923. (Interestingly, Popular Mechanics won't allow the full citation to be displayed.) A little more digging could probably locate even earlier examples. As Google Book Search expands its corpus, the date could go even further back.

With all the controversy surrounding Google Book Search, it's easy to overlook its incredible importance for all kinds of scholarship. I was hired by the OED partly because I was in Berkeley and had access to its vast library holdings. Now anyone, anywhere in the world can do a vastly more thorough search. It's only a matter of time before each quotation in the OED is linked directly to the source material; someone could easily write a Firefox add-on to do just that, right now.

I'm not bitter, though. I think of myself as a Buddhist monk, creating a beautiful sand mandala, only to have it swept away upon completion. This is how it ought to be.

In search of durian-jack-fruit gelato

Before going to Seattle, I visited Vancouver. There, Kong Luke took me to the most wonderful place I've ever been. I want to shout it from the rooftops and tell all my friends and family about this paradise on earth. Unfortunately, I don't know its name, and Kong Luke is too busy practicing the erhu to answer an email query.

So, I thought I'd try some search engines. I went with a very straightforward query:
vancouver ice cream parlor 200 flavors

bing.com's first result tells me the name of the place, in the snippet. That's good, but it's a link to a discussion forum. It would take some more digging to get any solid info, like the parlor's address or phone number. Not until the #7 result do I get a link with that kind of info obviously displayed.

google.com's first result tells me the name, but it's a link to a flickr photo taken there. Not too informative, unfortunately; it mainly informs me how much Google likes to serve up results from sites with "authority". Results #4 and #5 give me the more detailed info I'd need.

yahoo.com's results are just bizarre. It gives me a yelp.com review of an ice cream parlor in San Francisco. I'm glad Yahoo knows I live in the Bay Area, but you'd think putting "vancouver" as the first word in the query would be hint enough I have other interests... The #4 result does give me what I'm after, though Yahoo needs to spend more time listening and less predicting.

None of the search engines gave me a link to La Casa Gelato's home page in the first 10 results. Changing "ice cream parlor" to "gelato" still didn't bring it up in the top 10 in bing.com or yahoo.com, though google.com figured managed to deliver the result in the #1 position.

Anyway, La Casa Gelato still strikes me with dreamy awe. The jack fruit gelato was light and punchy with just the right jack fruit flavor. Candied apple with caramel was also outstanding. After a sample, I can't really recommend nutmeg or their black sesame, but fig with shaved chocolate almost got my order.

SEO as Motivational Speaking

When clients hire you to do SEO, to optimize their websites to rank better in search engines, what they expect, and what they need, may be very different things.

The Technical and the Magical

Half expect some technical advice on how they can conquer Google by tweaking their META tags, doing mod_rewrite on their filenames, or fancy acrobatics with robots.txt. The other half want to be initiated into the "secret". They have no idea what that "secret" might be, but they want you to tell them, so they can rank #1 for their favorite term.

Of course, good SEO does include some technical tweaking, and it also involves imparting a few tricks of the trade. After all, why would they be paying you good money if you didn't have at least a few clever tricks up your sleeve?

I *AM* Tony Robbins

In the end, though, good SEO boils down to good motivational speaking. At some point in the process, your main contact will get a group of people together from the various departments: marketing, web design, sales, etc. They will ask you to give a presentation. You have an hour and people are there paying somewhat close attention. You have to make it count.

What are you going to spend that time doing? Showing PowerPoint slides on PageRank and optimizing TITLE tags? No. Your job, then, is to motivate. To show why they need to work hard on their websites. Why exciting content, that generates links, is vital to their success.

Most of all, you need to motivate them to actually do the hard work. They need to leave that meeting fired up to take on the Web, to conquer the search results. You need to give them confidence that they can do it, along with the knowledge of how it's best done. Without both, they're doomed to languish in obscurity.

See You in Seattle - SMX Advanced

I'll be at SMX Advanced in Seattle next week. If you're going too, drop me a line.

Foolish Consistency in Web Design

It seems logical that a website should be perfectly consistent. Navigation, title tags, layout and structure should form a seamless whole. As they hop from page to page, the users ride on a comfortable wave of templated uniformity.

Blogging and CMS software reinforce this. Everything needs to fit within the standard layout, or something close to it. The desire to do something "different" quickly gives way to the realization of just how difficult it's going to be to engineer a page that doesn't look just like the others.

Here, though, we should try to learn something from paid search. If you talk to paid search people, they will tell you about landing pages. "You paid for that click-through, don't waste it!" They will encourage you to create a page designed to convert that traffic into a sale or into a lead or into whatever it is you crave. "Break all the rules and get the job done!"

There's a lesson here for natural search as well. Each web site has its own, natural landing pages. There are pages that rank well for certain terms, attracting lots of fresh visitors with new eyes. Tailoring the content of those pages just makes sense, even if it means breaking the rules. Here are some tips:

Optimize the TITLE tag

People see, and click on, your TITLE tag when they reach you via a search engine. The TITLE tag for a page that generates a lot of search engine traffic is one that deserves special attention, since a lot of people are looking at, and potentially clicking on it. You should modify the TITLE tag with two goals in mind: get more people to click, and inform the people who do click of what they're likely to find on that page. This may mean creating a TITLE tag unlike any other on your site, but you need to think about who is doing that specific search, what they are looking for, and how to guide them correctly.

Create a landing page within the flow of your site

Consider those pages that come up in search results and garner a lot of traffic as landing pages. Though they may have evolved naturally as part of your site, once they become popular, they should be optimized to grab people's attention, entice them to buy, or just get them to stick.

The strategy will depend on the type of site you have. You may just want to put in some prominent links to your RSS Feed or Twitter or whatever just to connect with these people. It could just be making your phone number prominent or some extra links to your products or services. Or you may want to modify the page to offer a way to buy, right then and there, without clicking off of it.

Get Into Their Minds

The key to optimizing a page, to breaking consistency in order to seize on the opportunity, is correctly gleaning why people come to the page. What type of user searches on that keyphrase? What are they looking for? Try to get inside their heads and give them what they want. You have a lot more information about them than you have about most users, because you know something specific: they typed in a particular keyphrase.

How to Bing Yourself

So Microsoft has a new search engine. They call it "Bing".

Please, engage with me in this thought experiment.

What if it's a huge hit. What if people start using it as a generic term. In these, Google's glory days, people say, "I googled myself". What if they start saying "I binged myself'"?

That doesn't sound right, though. You don't say "I singed a song" or "I bringed my hat". So it doesn't sound natural to say "I binged myself."

Let's break this down based on analogy:

sing ---> sang
bing ---> bang
This is getting sticky: "I bang myself". Of course, with a name like "Microsoft" they are used to double entendre, but this still doesn't sound quite right.

fling ---> flung
bing ---> bung
"I bung myself". This sounds so morose, like you're putting yourself down.

bring ---> brought
bing ---> bought
That would be confusing, but fun. "I bought myself" would mean you did a search on yourself. Paradoxical and wonderful self-reference, if you ask me. I think we have a winner!