SEO and how to search on Google

From a recent project run for Masters in International Marketing students at Hult in conjunction with Greenlight, the SEO specialists, one of the key learnings for students was how to build links and the importance of link equity for SEO.

It is, therefore, always nice to see learning in practice - and this embeddable widget from OnlinePhD.org is a fine example of how to do it.  Their simple graphic was on Mashable and shared from Mashable's pages over 1000 times - and each embedded copy of the widget will include (if not explicitly deleted) a link to OnlinePhD - thereby making the site more popular in the eyes of the great Google and, therefore, more likely to increase its Google rank.

So, since it is useful, and to remind myself in the future how to get better results from Google, I have also embedded it here. Kudos to OnlinePhD (or their SEO advisers).

UPDATE: In January 2013 OnlinePhD.org contacted me asking me to remove the links in this blog to their site as they are accused of Google of 'over-optimising'.  Hmm... strange...but always one to oblige...the links have been removed...

How to put out a Flash in the pan...

Twitter has been loud this morning talking of Adobe killing off its fancy animation language 'Flash' for mobile devices.  The news first came, it seems, on ZDNet whilst the Adobe website still talks about creating Flash for mobile devices, but then Adobe wouldn't be the first company that failed to tell its web team what it had told the rest of the world.

Some commentators have been remarking, probably rightly, that Steve Jobs has finally won, beyond the grave, in his war against Adobe.  It was in April last year that the Apple anti-Flash venom started spitting.  Mashable ran a series of emails between Steve Jobs and an Adobe developer that suggested Jobs' hatred of Flash was purely about the stability of the platform and the ability of Apple to be able to lock in both app developers and iPhone and iPad users by making it harder to create the same app for multiple platforms (Android, Windows, RIM etc.).

The 'Roughly Drafted Magazine' blog ran an article just after the Mashable one that gives a nice summary of the real background to the Apple-Adobe spat.  In short, it has nothing to do with Flash. It has nothing to do with whether or not Flash is unstable or not.  It clearly has nothing to do with delivering a great user experience, as most websites had some element of Flash when the iPad first appeared (not to mention the iPhone before it) which could not be viewed by Apple users.

So if Adobe won't support Flash for mobile devices, surely it cannot be long before Flash dies out? HTML 5 will take over completely once Internet Explorer adopts HTML 5 with version 9, (despite many users still on I.E. 6, such as corporate clients too frightened to update anything once they have locked it down enough to make it secure) and no website will be developed using Flash.

So what is the fall-out to this?  Flash developers had better start retraining and fast. Flash trainers had better start teaching something else.  Accessibility experts had better start charging for something else as they won't be able to spend hours pointing out how un-accessible Flash is.

And pages will load faster...(take note Burberry!)

And the world keeps turning...it just no longer uses Action Script...

What if a robot could write this?

Ironically, only a day or two after writing the previous post about digital excess and transience, I saw this TED video (see below) by Adam Ostrow  from Mashable on how our digital selves - that is all the content we have created and uploaded during our lifetime - will be replicable by machines, to the extend that robots could continue producing content in our style long after we're gone.

What Adam, or the people he refers to, forget is that our online selves are often not our offline selves.  Our online content might be, as this blog aims to be, focused on a specific subject and not a general insight into our personal lives.

We may choose to publish nothing at all about our families, friends and home life.

Equally, we may choose to only show photos of our children and never talk about our professional lives...many still not seeing the value digital holds for every type and sector of business.

What would be interesting, however, is if the robots could be trained to produce content in our style while we're alive.  If the robots could be trained to do our work for us.  If the robots could be taught to give us more free time, to do with what we wish...

What if a robot had written this?  Would it know when to stop (I rarely do)? It would probably produce better and more logical tagging... and importantly... it would allow the world to see what a wealth of opinions I have without me having to think of them...

...roll on the future...