Industry News

Even though the mere thought of giving up coffee and switching to tea makes me break out in a cold sweat, I really enjoyed Teresa Brazen’s The tea, leadership, loyalty axis. It’s a good reminder about the importance of being mindful and present:

These days, people who aren’t checking their phones, email, or doing some other kind of work in their head while in conversation with others really stand out. Have you noticed how good it feels to be around these anomalies? How often are your...

When you search at Google, in addition to search results, Google often returns a set of search suggestions that might be related to your query. Last month, I wrote about how some of those suggested query refinements might be created follow a method invented in part by Ori Allon, in the post How Google is [...]

The post Google Patent Granted on Fresh Related Search Suggestions appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Today finds me blogging from Australia, where I had the privilege of keynoting SMX Sydney and participating in a site clinic (wearing an SMX lab coat, which is always fun). While looking through the show’s program guide, I discovered that I was also supposed to be on a panel today! The description read something like this: Bill Hunt and Rand Fishkin will give away their best tips for advanced marketers, and take questions from the audience. 60 minutes

Well, crap.

For the last 6 years of...

Pick your survey, and one of the top activities on a smartphone is to use Facebook. That’s what the new Facebook Home is all about, making it easier for Facebook users to get Facebook. But it also makes another top activity — search — harder to do.

On Android devices, search is almost always just one touch away. Most current devices have an ever-present Google Search bar at the top (one that can’t be changed from anything but searching Google), while older devices have the old-style search...

Was an interesting month in terms of Google webmaster SEO related content. We had Panda start being more of a rolling update...

Good news! As best I can tell, the poor performance of Google Alerts that has plagued Google’s monitoring service for months finally seems over.

I asked, but Google won’t confirm that it’s made any changes. Still, it’s pretty clear to me that something has happened for the better.

I noticed an improvement that began on April 1 — and no April Fool’s, that’s really when things began getting better.

I’ve been watching my alerts closely each day, and the trend has continued. Google Alerts...

The use of HTML entities in Google's search results in order to make your snippets stand out is nothing new. We've been reporting on it for literally ten years. We've seen it in sitelinks and AdWords and we've even seen webmasters experiment with emoji characters...

I’ve long been fascinated by the links between coffee, craft, and product design. Peter Baskerville’s answer on Quora to the question How do you compete with Starbucks in the coffee industry? is another great example of that. His answer can very easily be applied to building an online product (my emphasis added):

I concluded very quickly that Starbucks was good for tourists and those folk looking for brand association, but their appeal to the quality espresso seeking locals was limited...

In Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage Derek Sivers makes the case that automation isn’t always the best option:

When everyone else is trying to automate everything, using a little human intervention can be a competitive advantage. The problem is when business owners see it as a cost, instead of an opportunity. Trying to minimize costs, instead of maximize income, quality, loyalty, happiness, connection, and all those other wonderful things that come from real human attention....

Ryan Holiday’s Our Regressive Web is the best thing I’ve read so far about the importance of services like Google Reader and Delicious. He starts off with this statement:

The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.

Ryan explains how RSS helps to reduce noise and clutter, and he provides a theory for why it never really took off beyond geek circles:

In an...