Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 13, 2008 – 12:04 am
Zee M Kane, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
In a slightly surprising move, Google has launched via its webmaster central blog a best practice guide for search engine optimization. Why surprising you may ask? Well, Google is notorious for being pretty quiet on this front leaving it to SEO’s, designers, and developers to figure out what works best.
This being so, professional SEO’s needn’t be too concerned as it very much a basic guide and more useful to small business owners looking for ‘just the basics’. I quote…
“Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types.”
All hail the mighty Google.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on November 11, 2008 – 4:38 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last month we bought TheNextWeb.com in an auction at Sedo.com for only $1000. It took a while to transfer the domain to our hosting provider but it worked out and today we decided to take a deep breath and switch our blog from TheNextWeb.org to TheNextWeb.com.
The .org version of our domain will always work too but now redirects to the .com url. No need to update any old links! We will also start using the .com version for our email addresses but the old ones will also keep working.
So far it looks like everything still works but we are keeping an eye on it and if you see something that doesn’t seem to work as expected please do let us know. As far as I know there shouldn’t be any effect when it comes to Search Engine Optimization but I can imagine that readers are more inclined to return to a blog that has a .com domain name. Right now almost 30% of all our traffic comes from Google so we are keeping on eye on that too!
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Written on July 29, 2008 – 1:42 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:
“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”
Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:
Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christian Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.
The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.
(more…)
Written on May 26, 2008 – 3:37 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
So you have just launched your fancy new Web2.0 site, you are sitting on a brand new domain, you have no history to speak off, no links to your site, no one talking about you on blogs, and you have absolutely no traffic. That’s when you figure it out! You need to be at the top of Google when people search for ‘red widgets’.
But you have a little problem see, a couple hundred thousand other people also had the exact same idea, only they had it years ago. So now you’re at the back of that cue and there are no prizes for last place in this game.
Never fear, while Google penalize new domains for important search terms for two years, in the mean time they offer a solution called Adwords. You can pay them a few bucks a click to get featured at the top next to others who also bid for a spot in the paid listings. If you have enough cash you’re laughing. You can simply pay to get your advert in the search results AND on all related sites where others can share the profits with Google.
This system is almost perfect but there has been one little thorn annoying Google for a few years, it’s these people calling themselves SEO’s. They claim they can game the SERP’s (results) thus getting companies to the top. Google have been fighting a war on this front for years and with this latest update it looks like they have finally cracked it.
In the previous to last update we saw the Google hammer come down on paid links, Google reduced the Page Rank and trust of sites offering paid links which were skewing the organic results. In this update we have seen the effectiveness of normal SEO ‘tricks’ officially scuppered. There are no secrets anymore, even Google know how the tricks were done and they are not laughing!
(more…)
Written on May 20, 2008 – 1:32 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My personal blog attracts between 150 and 250 visitors a day but has more than 800 Feedburner subscribers. This is a fact that I discovered today and it might have some impact on how I blog. Most bloggers spend a lot of time optimizing for search engine and making sure their websites look good.
Here at the Next Web Blog we always look for nice illustrations to go with our posts because we know people like to look at nicely formatted posts. In general I write my posts with a preview window open next to it so I can see how the text flows around the images and what goes below and above ‘the fold’.
What I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it”. So why bother spending too much time on it?
Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that. One example are the images. The image I used here is scaled down a bit in html and placed on the right with a CSS class. All of that is ignored in RSS. That means that if you read this post via your RSS reader the image is huge and displayed right on top of the article.
With more and more traffic going straight to RSS it makes sense to start optimizing for it. I want a Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘preview this post’ button so I can preview it in both the browser AND in RSS readers.
Then we get to the issue of cross platform compatibility. You might have your HTML and CSS working fine in Explorer and Firefox on Window and Macintosh and Linux but how does it look in Google Reader? Or My Yahoo? And have you checked NetNewsWire on a Mac VS NewsGator on Windows?
As RSS becomes more popular this becomes an aspect of webdesign we can no longer ignore…
Written on January 15, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This article is written by affiliate- and search marketeer Eduard Blacquière.
A few days ago I noticed one of the most creative Google AdWords Ads I’ve ever seen:
But…it’s not allowed!
Just a couple of hours before I saw this remarkable AdWords ad, I went to a Google training about Google AdWords. They had used the exact same ad to illustrate that overuse of punctuation isn’t allowed.
Is Your AdWords Ad Remarkable?
This example illustrates the importance of the fact that you have to be remarkable. Your ad has to diverse itself from your competitors. Of course you run into restrictions of the Google AdWords policy, yet that’s where creativity comes in. (more…)
In a slightly surprising move, Google has launched via its webmaster central blog a best practice guide for search engine optimization. Why surprising you may ask? Well, Google is notorious for being pretty quiet on this front leaving it to SEO’s, designers, and developers to figure out what works best.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
