Monthly Archives: April 2006

Starting a new SEO career

Damn, I’ve been very busy this week. On Monday, I started my new job. I’ve been hired by a french SEO company based in Paris called Aposition. I’m glad I found a company that suited my needs and that has the same vision of SEO than me. It’s actually a big company, they have about 40 full time employees, including around 20 full time SEO specialists and consultants. I thought SEO was very shallow in France, I guess I was wrong – at least it’s not the case for this company.
One thing that I’m really excited about is that this company mainly work for big clients, whose sites contain thousands or millions of pages. For example, they have managed or are currently managing the SEO campaigns of half of the CAC 40 companies (40 most significant French public companies).

Therefore, their methods are slightly different from what I’ve been used to. When you manage ecommerce sites with million of product pages, your approach is more statistic and scientific.

This week has been more focused on introducing the firm, their methods, clients, and tools.

I really look forward to fully start managing the SEO campaigns of some of their clients, it should be fun.

How Bloggers are Influencing Society

Instead of sharing your ideas at your local pub with a few buddies, it has become pretty easy to share your ideas with thousands, or millions of people thanks to blogs, but also forums and all kinds of websites.
According to Technorati, they are now more than 35 millions of blogs, who are most of the time targetting small audiences but also some that are read by thousands or millions of people.

China Daily today published an article called “Study: Bloggers punch way above their wieght” in which they comment a recent research from Jupiter Research.

From the article:

Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the Internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23 per cent only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net through messageboards, websites and blogs are helping change national conversations, say researchers.

From, this research and this article, we understand that bloggers and web users are becoming really influential and are often the subject of “public conversations” and “are creating business trends”.

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed.”

The article notes that thanks to search engines like Google, everyone can easily spread his ideas online.

Companies like McDonald’s, lock manufacturer Kryptonite and computer firm Dell have all fallen foul of Internet buzz in recent years. Because search engines like Google can allow grassroots campaigns to become highly visible, industry insiders agree decisions can be shaped by a small number of activists.

Whois.sc no longer exists

I’m a big fan of the SEO Firefox extension called SEOpen. It’s a great tool to check many SEO related information with only one right-click with your mouse. While I was checking a Whois record for a site with this extension, I noticed that the famous whois.sc‘s website doesn’t exist anymore.

It has been replaced by a site called DomainTools.com, owned by the same people from the original whois.sc, but the site now provides more tools related to domain names.

From DomainTools’s site:

Whois’ was a great name for a site but we are now broadening our focus.
We are now a little more tool focused and a lot more domain focused.
Our name change comes from a desire to let you, our visitors,
understand what we do and to more effectively communicate that ‘Domain
Tools’ is a place for every type of diagnostic widget related to domain
names.

While I appreciate the decision to broaden their focus, I find it kind of sad that you know have to register to use their tools, even for the Whois one. I registered today but haven’t received a confirmation email yet…

Google’s Web Office is (almost) there

Well, you all heard that Google officially anounced the release of its Calendar application today.

Richard MacManus posted a nice chart on his ZDNet’s blog comparing Google’s applications with all the elements included in a Web office suite, and it clearly shows that Google’s rapidly progressing.

Today, it seems like Google would only need a Spreadsheet program (such as MS Excel, or OpenOffice Calc), a Presentation application (i.e. Powerpoint) and a Database application (Access) to provide a complete Web Office suite.

Just wait a few months and Google will just know more about you.

16% of web sites still use frames

I visit hundreds of sites each week and I sometimes see a few websites that still use atrocious frames. But I didn’t know that the average number of websites using frames accross the Web was around 16% in 2006.

Security Space published a study called Technlogy Penetration Report that shows the penetration rate of a number of client side web technologies, including Javascript, CSS, or Frames. A more complete chart is available here.

The study was based on a sample of 1,358,991 web sites, so you can imagine that the numbers can be quite significant.

It’s interesting to see that 50% of all web sites now use CSS for their design, but it’s still very sad to read that 16% of web sites still use frames. I guess this just shows that many people still need to be educated if they want to make a good use of the search engines to get traffic.

Source: ZDnet’s Web 2.0 Explorer Blog

SEO 2.0

Again Todd comes up with a thoughtful post about SEO. He describes how SEO must be now, and has to switch to a “2.0 era“. He sees SEO as an Internet Marketing technique with a comprehensive understanding of usability, design, traffic, trend, economics, conversion, risks, budget and other detailed principles.

I think this post should be read by all the SEO consultants who are still doing approximate work for their clients, and who are willing to still be there by the end of the year or even earlier.

With the growing number of businesses allocating a budget to SEO, and with search engines trying to use other factors to evaluate the quality of a website, those who still apply shallow techniques will have a hard time achieving succesful SEO campaigns.

MyBlog3D: Welcome to the house!

Would you like to be able to have your own virtual house on the web, invite friends to have a talk, share your last pictures from your trip to Thailand or even play paintball with them?

A french company called I-maginer, based in Nantes, has developed a revolutionary application called MyBlog3D that allows you to create a 3D blog in order to create your own environment online and personalize it, and share things or discuss with your friends.

With MyBlog3D, you can:

– Create your own online world and personalize it (colors, images, etc)

– Create your own 3D character and personalize it with your own picture so that it looks just like you!

– Talk with your friends through Voip or even chat

– Share pictures, videos, songs

– Organize multi-player games such as paintball

MyBlog3D is not available yet but you can now subscribe on their site to receive an invitation to create your own 3D blog after the 26th of April. I signed up with the French version of the site, however it seems that there’s no link in the English version. I’ll check back later and also try to get in touch with them to see if they’re planning to fix that.

I really like the concept, the graphics aren’t quite perfect but I’m sure they’ll improve that very soon.