Shakira and Rafa Nadal

Shakira met Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in the 2009 Sony Ericsson Tennis Open.

See the video:

Rafael Nadal

Rafael Nadal, originally uploaded by paiasoloco.

I'm getting nice compliments for this photo of Rafa Nadal. This was on his first match of the Miami Sony Ericsson Tennis Open. Because it was a doubles match he played in the Grandstands court which is smaller and you can get closer. It was late in the day and the sun was going down rapidly so I had to be quick and shoot during the warm ups. You can see that the lower half of him is under exposed and the light shines nicely on his upper body.

New Decemberists Album!

Hazards Of Love - The December...

Search Engine Optimization and landing pages

Today I got anther thought provoking question from Mr. Phil. He asked about what I thought of a posting about SEO & Landing Pages and it made me think (like most Phil questions), so I decided to post my reply here also.

It's a great article and a good explanation of one way in which a website should be optimized. I have "issues" with the term "landing page" though. I like to work more with "entry points". This could be a personal thing I realize, because I got fed-up of seeing landing pages that had zero synergy with the rest of the site. It's like clients want or need to re-invent the wheel every time and not built-upon their already existing website content architecture. In this way they end up with a bunch of one-off pages that have a finite shelf-life and usually end up getting very high bounce rates (single page-view visits).

"Entry point" pages distance themselves from landing pages in that it implies, at least an evaluation of the current information architecture to find the best space through which to channel the desired highly targeted traffic. This is how I see them at least.

Although the concept is correct I'm just biased in this way against the term "landing pages", because if they are not understood and developed correctly they end up being not only "landing pages" but "take-off pages" above anything else.


The article describes all the right techniques for developing them though, which I can attest I have come across and use in my SEO compliant development as well. Namely using the actual keywords in page urls, using H title tags, metatags, "keyword centric" copy writing, etc. Which by the way, hold true for any page, not just landing pages. With search engine's ability to index almost all your pages and linking to them, all pages are potential landing pages, from the general (home page) to the particular (product leaf pages for example). They attract more or less targeted audience depending on the specificity of what you are talking about on a given page. The more you drill down on the specificity of any given subject that you talk about on your website, the more targeted your traffic will be, at least in theory and from traffic coming from search engines. Traditionally a traffic funnel has the wider end in the home page and the thinner end on the leaf pages, but also, these "entry points" will make traffic by-pass completely the wider mouth funnel which is a great time saver for users looking for specificity.

This brings me to the "long tail" concept that is mentioned also. It is a relatively new term in economics invented by Wired Editor Chris Anderson. The SEO article explains what it is as it relates to keywords but rather in an incomplete way in my opinion. Long Tail search phrases are called that way, not just because they have multiple words on them, which is what the article implies, but because the longer the phrase, the more targeted it is and the less people will search for it. This is why they are inexpensive to buy as adWrods, but if you add the complete volume of all the long tail search phrases that brought the site maybe one or two visits each, they add up to much more that the volume of hits gotten by highly popular keywords.

Very interesting economic concept that the internet help bring about with it's massive ability to reach millions and millions of customers at any given moment with millions of unique interests and needs. It has been the foundation of Amazon's success as we all know.

SEO & SEM

My good friend Phil Schwartz suggested I write something about the benefits of SEO & SEM. Not that it hasn't been written about (only just about a million times everywhere under the sun), but without searching I wanted to write about it on my own and based on my experience.

So here it is.

SEO Benefits
1. Immediate benefit of an optimized website is the improved page ranking in the search results list for a targeted keyword. This is very important because search engines can bring a lot of traffic to a website. 30,40 even 50% traffic sources from organic searches is what can be expected depending on the business category.
2. Another less apparent benefit is that it pushes developers, designers, webmasters, etc to a more semantic internet. A by-product of search engines implemented policies is that it if you care to be found by them (and pull those inbound traffic percentages), website owners / developers need to align the content that they put out with what people are searching for. Basically aligning their offering to people's needs. Website owners/developers need to make sure they really talk about what they offer or what they try to communicate in their websites. This seems like an obvious thing to do but more often than not, it doesn't happen in real life. There are many examples and anecdotes about this.

SEM Benefits
Also very simply to understand are the benefits of SEM
1. "Plug" the holes that you can't cover with SEO.
This means that if your website won't get enough or the desired visibility organically for a given keyword, it can be 'bought' or auctioned for in order to appear under the advertisement sections of search result listings.
2. Quicker turn-around times. Because SEO is slower to implement and slow to see the results, they are perfect for short lived campaigns or just as a bridge until SEO kicks in. People say that it also is needed as a support for SEO but if you are already in the top 3-5 organically for a given keyword, my advice would be to spend the moneys allocated to that keyword on another less organically successful.
3. All Search Engines have Advertising platforms that exceed search engine results. So, it is a way also to bring your brand/product to very well targeted audiences on websites, blogs, etc. that make use of adWords (in the case of Google).

There are more, but as I see it these are the most important ones.

Great Phrases

Obviously, the first one is the one that subtitles this blog:

1-"I am going to present you with the domain of your ignorance"-
I think I heard it on an audiobook of a lecture I heard on philosophy or something.

2- "Strong and wrong BEATS Weak and right" -
It was Bill Clinton who said this, in the context of the primaries, but the phrase might not be his originally.

3- "To lead people, walk beside them ... As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ... When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves!'" - Lao Tse

4- "Be fearful when others are greedy; be greedy when others are fearful" - Warren Buffet's maxim.

5- We don't know what we see, we see what we know instead. - Someone

Keep them coming!!

Everything's amazing, nobody is happy

Bruce Turkel shared this one and I think it's just hilarious. As a programmer I can relate to this. People working in any technology field has their standards set incredibly high these days. It's Conan O'Brien hosting comedian Louis CK on his TV Show.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

Sorry for the link, poster wouldn't enable embedding.