Historians in Britain have recently made an amazing discovery indicating that Shakespeare not only knew about SEO, he embraced it in his works. This little-known draft of a passage from MacBeth leaves little doubt about his penchant for the search sciences. 

With apologies to the Bard...

"Henceforth be nerds, the first that ever Googled
In such an honour named.  What’s more to search,
Which would be displayed newly with results,
As calling home our topranked site declare
That fled the snares of watchful formula;
Producing forth the ideal arrangement
Of this our phrases and our keywords found,
Who, as ‘tis thought, by links and virulent clicks
Build up our fame; this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Web,
We will perform in profit and in aide."

Who Knew?

	About the Author; John McTigue is co-owner and inbound marketing evangelist at Kuno Creative, a strategic marketing company based in Avon, Ohio. Our blog, "Notes From the Edge" focuses on inbound marketing, social media and seo for the internet marketing world (follow him on Twitter)

An interview with SurfCanyon

That title is a doozy, but it does exist! I recently had the extreme pleasure of meeting the gang at SurfCanyon, one VERY personal search engine (and FF add on). I was first turned onto this groovy tool more than a year ago and it was a thrill to hear from them. When it comes to personalization (and social search even) these folks really do take it to a new level. If you haven't already, be sure to give it a try (search engine here and FireFox add on here)

The following is an interview that sprang from those chats. (more on SurfCanyon at the end).

Enjoy!

Your source for SEO and IR videos!

Hey gang… I just wanted to give a quick head’s up on a little project we’ve been working on the last few weeks. As you may or may not know I have an SEO Video Library over in the dojo which are the best of the best from the video section of the newsletter.

Which was fine for me really. But some folks suggested we create a dedicated YouTube channel to house them for the folks at are at YT a lot. Ask and ye shall receive!!

Yup, we have a YouTube channel!! We now have them sorted there into what we hope is a logical structure for your viewing pleasure. And no, this isn’t going to be about Dojo videos.. (which are coming) but it is more of a collection of some goodies we find in our travels. We will keep adding more each week as we come across vids of interest. Have a video to suggest? Feel free to leave a note in the comments.

Be sure to go check it out and subscribe to the channel for all the latest SEO/IR vids (hint; add to your RSS reader so you get notified).

Enjoy!

Are we there yet?

I thought we could spend a few moments looking at the value, potential and implications for the world of (real time and) social search. I prefer to think of them as;

• Social search – using explicit elements (voting, annotating) in conjunction with standard search functionality.
• Real Time Search – searching the fire-hose of the social world (Twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed and so on)

But for the sake of this post, we’ll just go with RTSS (real time social search) to make things easier. While I personally believe there is a need for distinction, it would make things messy for this simple journey. For starters, a few examples….

Explicit data; Social Search

The Fire-hose; Real time search

While people tend to not make the distinction between social and real-time search, it is certainly important from an SEO standpoint, to do so. Now we have some associations in place, let’s look at the present state of affairs (from an IR standpoint).

Just for fun and because well, there are some many things that piss my off any given week, we ran a poll recently on the myths and crap out there. More tongue in cheek than meant as a serious study, it is fun to see what the SEO community feels about the whole thing.

Actually, we had more suggestions for myths to include (culled via Twitter) than we could fit in the poll. I shall certainly be putting a post together to wrap ‘em all up neatly for ye in the near future. For now, have some fun with the results (after 91 votes)

Which SEO myth/crap makes you laugh/scream the most?

1. 18.7% Submitting to search engines
2. 18.7% SEO is dead
3. 14.3% Keyword density X%
4. 13.2% PPC affects organic
5. 11%  Get indexed in a 24hrs!
6. 9.9%  U believe in ALL (aka smart ass)
7. 8.8%  LSI and Google

And there were more…. See the full results here.

It was interesting to see the ever-lovin’ ‘Submitting to Search Engines’ right up there with ‘SEO is dead’… some premo crapola to be sure. I for one would have liked to see the ‘LSI’ garbage higher… but hey, I would be like that. This week’s poll is about testing…. We’re curious what SEOs want to see researched so we can start organizing which things to work on first.

Take the poll in the SEO Training Dojo ; What would you like to see tested/researched first? (right hand side)

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