Squeak of the Week

Editor’s Note: In the first part of an ongoing series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), The Creative Department’s SEO BMOC, Chris Fryburger, rants that SEO don’t get no respect.

SEO practices have been around since at least 1995 and Google turns 10 years old next month, so why, WHY?!? in 2008, do I have to explain to businesses what SEO is and why it’s important? The acronym should be as prevalent as CRM, B2B, NDA, or POS.

Since you’ve already navigated the series of tubes to find yourself here, I’ll save you the trouble of surfing over to Wikipedia to find the definition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

So why does that matter? As the owner of Jabba’s Used Starfield Emporium why should you care?

40% of users abandon their search after reviewing the first page of results.(1)

That means if someone is looking for a quality, used starfield and they type “used starfield” into their favorite search engine, you better be on the first page, in the first 10 results. Otherwise they ain’t gonna find you and you’re gonna end up with a lot of dusty starfields lying around.

Google represents 62% of all search traffic.(2)

That’s right. Google represents more than half of all searches on the Interwebs. If you’re nice to Google, Google will be nice back to you.

What exactly does being nice mean?

Being nice to Google means making sure SEO techniques are prominent on your website and present on every web page. Employing SEO, tracking keywords (words that may be used by viewers searching for information, i.e. “used starfields”) frequently, and sweating every time your site moves up or down a Google ranking or two.

If you’re not currently using SEO and/or haven’t worked up a sweat yet, try typing in the words that your mom might search for to find your business – assuming that radio jingle you paid for didn’t drill your business name into her head. How many of your competitors are ranked higher than you in the results? For every competitor that’s ahead of you, that’s another sales lead that is going to someone else. That should make you sweat.

Hmmmm. Maybe a jingle is the way to get people to remember SEO… I’ll have to work on that.

Stay tuned for Part 2, when Chris goes into more detail about why SEO is important to your bottom line and why your marketing department should invest in it.

(1) iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study - April 2006
(2) Nielsen Stats - April, 2008

At least that’s what Miss South Carolina so famously led us to believe during the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant. The reason that 1/5 of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map is simply because they don’t have maps.

With all due respect to 3rd runner-up to the Miss Teen USA crown, I’m gonna have to beg to differ.

We’ve got maps. It’s just that they aren’t very good.

It’s possible that the 1/5 of Americans who can’t locate the U.S. on a world map work for a large, yet geographically challenged, corporation. After all, there are some companies out there who aren’t even sure how to find their own offices on a map. It’s a wonder their employees ever get to work.

Take Procter & Gamble, for example. P&G is one of the largest consumer products manufacturers in the world. They operate in more than 80 countries worldwide, but don’t seem to have a firm grasp on where their corporate headquarters are.

By the looks of the P&G map, Cincinnati isn’t in southern Ohio, it’s in the middle of a cornfield outside of Salina, Kansas (800 miles and 4 states west).

P&G’s Canadian offices don’t fare much better.

Torontoans will likely be disappointed to learn that their fair city has relocated from the shores of Lake Ontario to the shores of Wapawekka Lake in Saskatchewan (3200km and 2 provinces northwest).

Sadly, P&G is not alone. Enfatico, the WPP advertising agency created to handle one client – Dell – also has problems locating their Toronto office.

T.O. looks like it might be in Maine. Or possibly Prince Edward Island. Toronto is, after all, famous for their lobster.

There are plenty more bad maps out there, if you have a favorite let us know.

But for now take solace in the fact that you’re not trying to find the Ringwood location of Australian electronics retailer, Jaycar Electronics.

You could be driving for a long time.

A couple weeks ago, the Creative Department launched a new site for local photographer Tony Arrasmith. Besides the slick design and witty commentary, there are a number of cool technologies employed that make this a notable project for the company.

The primary goal was to create an online portfolio of Tony’s work, incorporating photos uploaded and managed through Tony’s personal Flickr account. With an emphasis on usability and speed, the portfolio was designed with a unique horizontal control scheme which allowed quick access to any of the available photos. Each individual photo carries a description that can also be managed through Flickr. Enlarged views for each image are available that illustrate the meticulous detail Tony brings to every one of his unique photographs.

Mostly for usability reasons, Flash was quickly ruled out as a solution. In hindsight, I’d probably reconsider this given that Flash content is now crawlable and there were a few logistical and privacy concerns we might have circumvented by going that route. But, nontheless excited at the proposition of building a usable, non-Flash solution to the problem, we settled on Javascript as the primary client-side technology.

Based on Mootools 1.11, we constructed a clean, object oriented solution using the Fx.Scroll and Ajax components among other common Moo-tilities. I wanted to use the recently released version 1.2 but haven’t had a chance to familiarize myself with it’s significant changes over 1.11 (not to mention, Google’s new Ajax Libraries API hasn’t made 1.2 available yet).

The server-side (that is, the part of the application that actually pulls data from Flickr and outputs HTML) is handled with automated PHP requests to Flickr’s publicly accessible API. Once an hour, via cron, a script is executed which requests all the latest photos from Tony’s Flickr account. Flickr returns that information in XML syntax, which phpFlickr hands back as an array. That array of photos is then passed off to the templating engine which simply outputs all of those files in raw HTML markup. When the page loads, the Javascript solution described above acts upon those image elements and rapidly builds the working components of the portfolio.

The cool technology of Tony’s site is not just limited to the portfolio section either. The homepage contains a few animated illustrations of Tony’s concepts coming to fruition in Flash. Elsewhere on the site we’ve skinned and integrated a copy of Wordpress, added an XML driven, Flash-based tour of the studio and implemented an AJAX-based contact form.

All of these features built on top of solid, standards-based XHTML/CSS make the new tonyarrasmith.com an intriguing technological case-study. We just hope Tony enjoys using it half as much as we did building it.

I just arrived back into the office from being a dean for a camp of eleven and twelve year olds in Falmouth, KY.

Camp Northward is a Christian camp located just on the outskirts of Falmouth in Grant County KY. next to the Licking river. It was opened in 1941 on the family farm of Raymond and Bell Odor.

The camp has dorms (not air-conditioned), a chapel and an air-conditioned dining hall/all-purpose building.

The weather was humid and sticky for the most part. Planning for a hot week we swapped class times for recreation events. Dodgeball in ninety five degree weather is rough on a thirty five year old.

Campers from many different backgrounds come there. Many of them come from troubled homes and have little to no positive role models. The week at Camp Northward provides them structure and compassionate staff who albeit for a brief time shows them attention and love.

The days are packed with learning, skits, trips, sports and more. At the end of each day we wrap everything up with a campfire devotion. We reflect on who we are and what kind of people we could and should be.

Some of the highlights…

I played a game with the campers called Knock-out. This is a fast and furious game of basketball where everyone lines up single file. You try to make a shot from the three point line before the person behind you makes it in. If the person behind you makes it in before you do then you are out of the game. Pretty simple.

On Thursday we travelled to Natural Bridge State Park and walked the 1.25 mile trail to the top. Getting old gets old really quick. Especially when you have eleven year olds running circles around you as you have your twelfth heart attack.

Everyone made it to the bridge itself and enjoyed the sites. It took a little less than two hours to reach the summit. From the bridge you could see for 8+ miles on the day that we went.

We played putt putt and grilled out that night after making our way back down the mountainside.

All in all, a great week. You hate to see some of the kids go back to the home lives they have. You hope that the things they’ve experienced in their time with you have planted memories that will last a lifetime.

Here’s some Friday fun to spice up the action on Squeak of the Week.

The Last Guy is a game that you can play on the pages of this blog. Click here to play (opens in new window).

Use your mouse to move your Rescuer around (he’s up in the Escape Zone in the left corner) to find civilians. Hold the left mouse button to run, and press the Z or X key (or scroll) to zoom in and out. Tap the space key to activate your thermal imaging device, which can be useful when attempting to locate clusters of civilians. Once you locate people, lead them back to the Escape Zone so the Mother Ship can pick ‘em up.

Watch out for baddies lurking around the blog and be careful around images and flash — they server as barriers to your progress.