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The evolution of hubs – from Wes to WordPress

February 10, 2010

Welcome back!

: Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Anytime you’re trying to organize, coordinate, and communicate with more than two people over more than a few days, you’ll realize that relying on email (or Facebook, or Twitter) to carry the burden will drive all of you crazy. Someone’s going to miss a message, the “right” people won’t be cc’d or (worse) everyone will be cc’d. On every message. Good times.

After a few of these “I can manage the whole thing via email” disasters, hopefully you’ll start to realize that a centralized “hub” for your team / project / organization might just save your sanity.

A Brief History of Hubs

Then came the “quality” movement and its efforts to quantify and codify the information available from the Wes’s of the world. “Sure, you could go talk to Wes, but we can’t all talk to Ted at the same time, so let’s just write down what Wes said and then we can go back to that the next time we have a question.”

_{Note: This would have been a great time to buy stock in three-ring binder companies. Especially the really, really big three-ring binders.}

And, just as everyone was becoming comfortable with their bookshelf o’ binders, along came the internet and widespread use of personal computers. In the (ultimately futile) quest to become paperless offices, documents were scanned into “document management systems”, we created our “shared drives” and uploaded files to our corporate “intranets” and suddenly all workers had access to all the information they needed, right?

Not quite.

Now, not only had the information been separated from its human hub (which could interpret context and apply judgment), we’d added more layers of bureaucracy and abstraction. A two-minute call to Wes had been replaced by “where’s that #!@* procedure on the intranet? … No, not *that* version, the *new* version…. What do you mean I have to send it to X to get it approved so that Y can post it? … Never mind, I’ll just find that email that A sent me, I think that was the current version…”

Unicorn (via ffffound)

So, if bureaucracy was the problem, then the solution must be self-service, right? Enter the wiki. Now everyone can create their own content and make it available to others who can then edit and improve and contribute and then, in the magical land of unicorns and rainbows, we’ll have a dynamic and robust source of institutional knowledge and tribal wisdom and we’ll all live happily ever after….

Well, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen too many unicorns lately.

The great wiki experiment has had some notable successes (um, Wikipedia anyone?), but outside the realm of technologists and large organizations (who have lots of those technologists), I think the usefulness of wikis has peaked. If I want to share information with my friends, I use Twitter or Facebook. If I’m working collaboratively, I can use Google Docs (or perhaps Google Wave), or a variety of 37signals products. And, if I’m going to organize, coordinate, and communicate with a specific group of people, I’m going to use WordPress.

Coming soon: From Wiki to WordPress (why we’re making the switch)

Advanced SEO Tactics (IMU)

June 25, 2009

Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights:

Expert opinion and correlation data both agree that links are still king – around 75% of Google‘s ranking is based around (or affected by) quantity/quality of links.
Use keywords in your title tags and as close to the beginning as possible; data shows a linear decline between the position of the keywords in the tag and the impact in search results. For example, “John’s Used Cars” would be better than “John’s dealership and repair shop for used cars.”
Although experts recommend including keywords in your H1 tags, the data suggests that this will have little to no impact on your search results.
Substantive and unique page content, along with page recency/freshness are some of the most of the important non-link factors.
- Getting lots of people to link to your substantive and unique content really cranks up your SEO.
- Static pages (with substantive and unique content, of course) aren’t bad, but they probably won’t be crawled as often (which may or may not affect your rank).
Using W3C compliant HTML, another non-link factor, has little to no impact on your search results.
The number of unique domains linking to you may be more important than the actual number of links. For example, 500 unique domains that link to you is better than 100 unique domains with 500 links.
The fewer number of domains (and subdomains) you use, the better. Example:
- http://blog.company.com – ok
- http://company.com/blog – better
It’s a good idea to use keywords in your URL and common keywords are probably readable even if you scrunch them all together. For less common keywords, it’s better to use a hyphen than an underscore. Example:
- http://company.com/healthinsurance.htm – ok
- http://company.com/health-insurance.htm – better
- http://company.com/health_insurance.htm – worse

Here’s Rand’s presentation:

#6 IMU: Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research (GF401)

View more documents from Hubspot Marketing.

SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz’s New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data (mt-soft.com.ar)
Keep Your Company Out of the Internet Dead Zone (startupprofessionals.com)

Using Email Effectively and Making Sense of Analytics (IMU)

June 19, 2009

IMU wrapped up with presentations on old-school email marketing campaigns and web analytics and both speakers managed to provide meaningful suggestions, tips and tricks for small, medium, and large businesses.

Read the full article →