Welcome to Natural Search Blog
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.
In addition to natural search optimization topics, we also cover internet marketing, ecommerce, web design, usability, and technology.
Recent Entries
Upcoming Speaking Gigs
I have a few speaking gigs coming up for any of you who are interested. I’ll be speaking first in April at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, on the Images & Search Engines panel on the topic of Optimization Through Image Sharing Sites:
The talk focuses primarily upon optimizing via Flickr, since my comparison research indicates that Flickr has the best potential for natural search optimization. You’ll notice that my postings here at Natural Search Blog increasingly have illustrations accompanying them, and I’ve typically hosted those through Flickr just for the SEO value in an effort to “practice what I preach”. 😉
I’ll also be speaking at the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Engine Marketing in April (San Francisco), May (New York), and June (Chicago) on the subject of “Organic Search is All About Content”. These one-day conferences will have some other great guests such as Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts, Amanda Camp and Vanessa Fox from Google, Eric Ward the link-building expert, Paul O’Brien from HP, and others.
I hope to see you there!
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/25/2007
Permalink | | 
Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Upcoming Speaking Gigs | Comments RSS
Filed under: Content Optimization, General, Image Optimization AMA-Hot-Top-Series, AMA-Search-Engine-Marketing, American-Marketing-Association-Hot-Topic-Series-on-Sear, search-engine-strategies, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, ses, SES-Conference
Google Logo with Autographs
While I was vacationing in St. Louis last week, I stumbled across this curiosity — the Google logo with Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s signatures.
This is the Google logo from 2004, commemorating SpaceShipOne winning the Ansari X-Prize.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/20/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Google Logo with Autographs | Comments RSS
Filed under: Google Ansari-X-Prize, Burt-Rutan, Google, Google-Logo, larry-page, Sergey-Brin, SpaceShipOne
Could Nanotechnology Save Print Yellow Pages?
Technological evolution continues to change our everyday lives, and the speed of changes over the last two decades has caused an acceleration of impacts to traditional forms of business. Nowhere is this more evident than in the impact to usage of printed yellow pages directories. Once the mainstay for locating businesses, many consumers now treat the books as doorstops or fireplace kindling.
The Yellow Pages Association‘s annual report and other research indicates that consumer usage of print directories is on the decline while usage of online yellow pages and local search are increasing. The main divergence of opinion seems to be in how long it will be before print dies completely – ten years, fifty years, or a century? Simba research indicates that profits of core yellow pages are down while independent publishers are increasing at double-digit rates, indicating that advertisers continue to see value in print YP exposure. Even though the print biz still has lots of money and usage, those who have watched tech trends during the Information Age know that transitions of this sort can often reach a tipping point rapidly, perhaps rendering print YP irrelevant at the closer end of the timeline estimates.
In all the rush to sound the death-knell for print most folks are looking upon it as merely a dinosaur, soon to die as a result of the meteor-strike of internet search technology. But, could there be another future in store for print directories?
I’ve been watching developments in a number of converging lines of technology for a while now, and I foresee another potential fate for the print directories: nanotechnology. Read on and I’ll explain.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/20/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Could Nanotechnology Save Print Yellow Pages? | Comments RSS
Filed under: Futurism, Local Search, Online Directories, Research and Development, Yellow Pages iyp, nanotech, nanotechnology, Online Directories, Online-Yellow-Pages, print-yellow-pages, Yellow Pages
Travel by Amtrak – a bit rough
I mentioned earlier that my mother and I took my nephew for a train trip to St. Louis for Spring Break this past week. My nephew is a train fanatic (my former sister-in-law now refers to trains as “porn for eight-year-old boys”), so this was to be the trip of a lifetime for him — we arranged a destination which would ensure that we’d sleep overnight on the train, and we booked one of their first-class bedroom accommodations for the trip.
The trip was indeed a lot of fun for my nephew, and it was an intellectually interesting experience for my mother and I. But, it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as we sort of imagined before leaving.
Read on for further description and for my tips for Amtrak train travel.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/20/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Travel by Amtrak – a bit rough | Comments RSS
Filed under: General Amtrak, Railroad-Travel, Railway-Travel, Trains, travel
Book Review: Getting The Most From Your Yellow Pages Advertising
Last year, I criticised a press release promoting a book by Barry Maher titled “Getting the Most from Your Yellow Pages Advertising, saying the press release was self-serving and irresponsible. I disparaged Maher, referring to him as a “so-called expert” and calling the press release “self-serving”. Maher’s press release touted advertising in print yellow pages and questioned the value of advertising online in comparison, so I was highly critical of it since I believe there’s significant value in advertising online. At the time, I thought I was justified in my criticism, since I felt he was promoting his book at the expense of bad advice to small businesses.
However, others pointed out some irony in my criticism — after all, self-promotion is by nature supposed to be beneficial to one’s self, and it’s not at all unusual to emphasize a bit of controversy to make press releases more interesting to readers. Further, Maher’s responses and comments to my blog posting were well-written, wonderfully mild, and professional — leaving me to wonder if I’d been unreasonable in my attack of the press release.
As for the book itself, I found it to be very valuable for small businesses, particularly newbies who’ve never done yellow pages advertising before. Even the business owner who thinks they already know it all ought to read this and check some of their assumptions. Read on for a further review of the book.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/19/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Book Review: Getting The Most From Your Yellow Pages Advertising | Comments RSS
Filed under: Advertising, Online Directories, Reference Material, Yellow Pages barry-maher, directory-advertising, Online Directories, small-business-advice, Yellow Pages, yellow-pages-advertising
Dupe Content Penalty a Myth, but Negative Effects Are Not
I was interested to read a column by Jill Whalen this past week on “The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth” at Search Engine Land. While I agree with her assessment that there really isn’t a Duplicate Content Penalty per se, I think she perhaps failed to address one major issue affecting websites in relation to this.
Read on to see what I mean.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/18/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Dupe Content Penalty a Myth, but Negative Effects Are Not | Comments RSS
Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Structure, Spiders, URLs duplicate-content, Duplicate-Content-Penalization, Jill-Whalen, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, URL-Optimization
On Vacation in St. Louis
I’m on vacation all this week in beautiful St. Louis, hence fewer blog postings from me for the moment.
My mother and I are taking my nephew (8yr old) here for sightseeing, and because the Amtrak train from Dallas to here was perfect. He’s a train fanatic, so this was the trip of a lifetime for him. For us, the train wasn’t nearly so luxurious as you might’ve imagined… but, more on that I’ll save for a later post.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/14/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on On Vacation in St. Louis | Comments RSS
Filed under: General Arches, Gateway-Arch, St.-Louis
Google Cubed: Our Cubes are Bigger than Google’s!
This past month we noticed that a company started moving into the empty office space adjacent to ours. We’re located in Texas, inside the great Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The office space in the strip of buildings next to us has been vacant a long time. Some of our customer-care folx stopped and asked the electricians who was going to be moving in: it’s Google.
A few of us in management were a bit concerned, because it was entirely odd that Google would choose, out of the entire, huge, gigantic, sprawling metro area, to park themselves *smack* next to us! We couldn’t help but wonder if they were planning to lure away some of our advertising specialists! After all, we knew that they apparently had a small office in nearby Irving where they had AdSense optimizers, so it was conceivable that they might think that poaching our employees might give them skilled people quickly. There’s so much office space in the entire metro area, that it virtually defied reason to consider that they only coincidentally located offices next to us.
However, one of our marketing staff finally came back with the intel that this was to be offices for Google Radio (aka “Google Audio Ads”)Â — not something all that related to what we do. So, maybe it is coincidence, and not a snarky attempt to leach away our talent.
The workmen appear to’ve mostly finished setup, and it seems like people are starting to work in the building. So, I strolled over there after work and took some pics through the windows. I was stunned to see that Google’s cubes are actually smaller than ours!
(click on the pic to enlarge)
Read on for more description and more pics.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/09/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Google Cubed: Our Cubes are Bigger than Google’s! | Comments RSS
Filed under: General, Google cube-bling, cube-decor, cubes, cubicles, Google-Audio-Ads, Google-Radio, office-cubes, superpages, work-environments
In-House SEOs: The Aftermath
So, my article a week ago, Some Top In-House SEOs, got a surprisingly large amount of attention. The tipping point was likely when Search Engine Land mentioned it in a brief post entitled The SEOs Doing It In-House.
Yet the traffic we got from it was not solely parasitic referrals from SEL, but also lots of direct hits and referrals from elsewhere. It seems as though it tapped into some tiny, niche zeitgeist, resulting in lots of people in the industry sending it to their friends and acquaintances. Accidental linkbait! Read on for more details.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/07/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on In-House SEOs: The Aftermath | Comments RSS
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, SEO in-house-search-engine-marketing, in-house-seos, insourcing, SEOs
Game of Life Updated
I just noticed that my Chromatic Game of Life utility wasn’t displaying properly for FireFox – my bad! I had added in FireFox support when I built it, but I somehow failed to upload it.
| Â | Â | Â | Â | Â |
FireFox users would’ve called up the utility and not seen any grid, so it wouldn’t have been apparent that they should click on the squares to set up initial state patterns to iterate through.
This has been corrected, and I also added in very brief instructions to improve usability for those unfamiliar with Conway’s Game of Life. Check it out at the Chromatic Game of Life page.
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/02/2007
Permalink | | Print
| Trackback | Comments Off on Game of Life Updated | Comments RSS
Filed under: General, Research and Development, Tools cellular-automata, conways-game-of-life, firefox, game-of-life, games
