One of the semi-new features is the ability to geotag your photos.  I say it’s “semi-new” because as it turns out, it’s actually been available since the OS2 update, but not everybody knew about it (more on that later).   With the release of OS4, it’s more obvious – and actually usable on the iPhone.

Geotagging your photos on the new OS4 allows the iPhone (and various other tools and websites) to sort your photos by location.  When you open the photos app, you’ll notice two icons at the bottom – “Albums” and “Places”.  Selecting “places” will provide you a map, similar to this one that I grabbed from my phone.

The level of detail at which the photos are geotagged is pretty amazing, though with the iPhones GPS capabilities, should not be all that surprising. The map I uploaded is zoomed out pretty far, but if you were to continue zooming in you would see the little dots continue to split and multiply as photos are sorted into smaller and smaller groupings based on their respective locations.  That’s cool, right?  This will be great for vacations, or events – it’ll be so much easier to upload your memories to Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket or any number of places and have them automatically tagged by location.  Welcome to the future my friends, or if you are an Orwell fan, I guess it might be the past.

I reference 1984 and Big Brother because I suspect that most of the people (myself included) that bought their phones after OS2 was released, and therefore missed all the hullabaloo of the “new features”, had no idea their photos were even being tagged. On pre-OS4 phones, the locations services feature was either ON or OFF – for everything.  You couldn’t set specific permissions, and it didn’t tell you what apps were using it.  I (and again probably most people) relied on the apps to pop up and ask you each time.  Even the Google maps app had to ask me, or wait for me to push the “locate” button.  It was actually a pain that when I wanted to check movie listings, Fandango had to ask me every time if it could use my location.

However, I don’t recall my camera ever asking me.  I found a post over on Wired that talks about the new photo tagging in  OS2 that shows such a request, so maybe my old brain just doesn’t remember ever being asked – do you?  I’ve also discovered that there are apps available that would let you view photos arranged by the tagging, so clearly somebody knew about it, just not me.  Not knowing I had been tagging my photos for the last year or so, I was a bit surprised when I opened my photos app and saw all the existing photos already sorted.  I had to stop and think about what I had shared and with who.

Remember that day you were in the backyard playing with your kids, and a butterfly landed on little Susie’s finger?  Remember how cute you thought it was and that you just HAD to put a photo up on the web for the world to see?  Remember how you thought nobody would know where you or little Susie lived?  Sorry Susie, that photo was geotagged and now the whole world knows where your back yard is and where you sleep at night.

Scary, right?  Go check you photos.

Thankfully, the new OS4 location services settings are much more clear about what apps have permission and which do not.  Even better, it allows you to individually turn them on or off.  Taking pictures from the beach, turn tagging on.  Taking pictures in the living room, turn tagging off.  You can clearly see within the settings that the camera is using your location.  Unfortunately, you’ll have to remember whether it’s on or off, because unlike other apps that use location service, the camera does not show the little “compass pointer” to alert you they are turned on and in use.

Overall, I think this is a pretty cool feature.  And, if nothing else we’ll help make Google street view more useful, right?

What are your thoughts on the new(ish) geotagging feature of the iPhone?

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

iPhone Photo Geotagging – Who knows where you sleep?

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The quote below is word-for-word from a rather expensive looking insert, in an even more expensive looking direct-mail piece I recently received.  Ordinarily I like (Well, I don’t hate it) direct-mail, when it’s done correctly.  But this thing, which is titled “Who We Are” just talks in circles.  I’m sure I lose brain cells each time I read it.  I’ll hide the name of the company, partly because I think they are idiots, but more importantly, I don’t want to help them spread their name even a little bit.

“XXXXXX is a full-service social technology partner.
A global leader in the practice of digital consulting, community building, technology solutions, and digital measurement, XXXXXX helps our clients leverage the power of social media to drive greater value and success for their businesses.

Using expert cross-discipline strategic thinking paired with leading-edge customizable technologies, we create unique and innovative solutions that thrive in the ever changing and challenging online environment.”

BINGO!

I think what that means is they have to cool, new ways to use social media that will make more money for their customers.  If that is what it means, why don’t they just say that?  Or at least speak plain English.

The flip side of the piece does have some of the same techno-babble, marketing-speak but is actually understandable.  When I read the “what we do” section, I actually come away with a good idea of what they do.  It’s hard for me to believe the two sides of the sheet were written by the same people.

However, the bad taste and foul stench of the “who we are” blurbage makes me wonder if that’s how they’ll try talking to me if I were a customer.  No thank you.

Social Media is conversations and relationships.

It’s great to have tools and technology to help you with your Social Media, but keep in mind that a fool with a tool, is still a fool.  If you can’t (forgive me) engage your community, all the tools in the world won’t help you.  Techno-babble, marketing speak won’t help you.  Well, if you’re targeting 1992 era marketing people, then maybe they will.

You need to speak the language of the community you are reaching out to, and hopefully since they are your customers you know how to do that.

If you’re trying to sell tornado insurance to an Arkansas trailer park resident, you better not talk to them like they are playing a role in Macbeth.  And visa-versa, of course.

It’s not rocket science folks, this is old-time advertising gospel;  People respond better to images and language that reminds them of themselves, or who they want to be.

I don’t know about you, but who I want to be is NOT a 1992 marketing professional.

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

Social Media BINGO!

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I’m growing concerned that pretty soon people will be thinking the same thing about SEOs.

What if you were number 1 and nobody searched for you? Are you still number 1?

A while ago, I wrote about how to hire an SEO, and more recently about what questions you should be asking about your web measurements.  Both of those should help you become a more intelligent SEO shopper.  I’ve stumbled upon the site of Austin SEO company that made me realize there is still more you need to know in order to protect yourself from the snake oil salesmen.

This particular SEO Company had a pretty site, all full of keyword stuffed pages and links.  Their portfolio looked quite impressive, listing numerous clients that they had helped “shoot to number one on Google”.  Naturally, they provided screen shots of the page rankings so we could all see it was true, they even included some nice testimonials from the clients that were so pleased at now being listed so highly in Google.

We need an SEO BS flag.

There’s just one minor problem with the awesome rankings they achieved for their clients.  They are all useless.  All of them were for obscure phrases that have little, or no search traffic.  It’s great to rank well for a phrase, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  But, if nobody uses that phrase when they search, what good is it?  None.  I’d rather have a site on page two of a search with volume than page one of a search with none.  Rankings are good, traffic is better.

How do you spot BS rankings?

It’s actually a lot easier than you might imagine.  First, before you settle on your keyword list make sure your SEO company can tell you what the current search volume is for those words – if it’s low, it may not be worth the money needed to get the rankings (HINT: If your SEO company can’t, or won’t, tell you the search volume – get a new one).  Second, have a set of baseline rankings.  When you hire an SEO you should get a report telling you where you currently rank for the various words and phrases you have agreed upon.  It’s possible that you already rank well for these phrases.  Both of these will help, but it won’t catch all of them.  Google’s keyword tool will help you with the rest.  You’ll need a Google account to use the tool, but there’s no cost to use it.

After you log in to the tool you’ll see a box to enter a search word or phrase.  Enter yours.  Below the box you’ll see a check box marked “use synonyms”.  Un-check it.  This tells Google you are only interested in results for that exact phrase.  Click the “get keyword ideas” button.  The resulting page provides information about your phrase.  Look at the two columns called “Local Search Volume” and “Global Monthly Search Volume”.  These tell you approximately how many times that phrase has been used.  The numbers for local are for a recent month, for global are a yearly average.  Looking at a search for “jack leblond”, a phrase I (thankfully) rank pretty well for, you can see that locally there is not enough data to report, but globally it was searched 58 times.  I’m pretty sure 53 of those were my Mom (Thanks Mom!).  So, while I can be happy I rank well for my name, I have to be sad because nobody is looking for me.  When your SEO firm calls to congratulate you on your new and improved rankings, be sure to ask them what the search volume is for the phrase – hopefully you won’t be sad.

Try this with a few of your search phrases, are you actually ranking as well as you thought?

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

Rankings are great, traffic is better

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I’d say that horse is dead, can we stop beating it now?  Customer support reps are SUPPOSED to provide great service…it’s like, their job, right?

Who should we be talking about?  The people who earn their living doing something else, but still step up and try to help when they sense frustration directed at or about the company they work for.  I recently had such an experience (Guess you figured that was coming)

Last week I was trying to get an answer to what I thought should be a fairly simple licensing question.  You see, my company uses ColdFusion on its public facing web servers, I wanted to know if we could legally use the license on more than one machine at the same time.

Side note: I have been a fan of ColdFusion since its early days when it was created by two brothers in their Minnesota garage. I can’t fault the brothers for selling off the company, but as ColdFusion has moved from Allaire, to Macromedia and now to Adobe, the support has gotten just horrible.

Traffic has grown on the company sites to the point that we want to implement fail-over servers.  ColdFusion is not cheap (that’s one of its few downfalls).  I wanted to find out if we could share the license on both the public-facing and fail-over servers if only one of them had public traffic at a time.  Simple question, right?  Wrong.

Over the course of two days I was bounced from sales, to pre-sales, to tech support to customer support, to volume licenses and back again.  I think I may have even talked to a janitor at one point.  Most people didn’t understand what I was asking (at least it seemed that way to me), others understood, but said it was not their area.

I was thrilled when, at last, one of the customer support reps told me she had found a document that provided the answers I needed.  I was dumb-founded when she told me the document was for “internal use only” and she could not forward it to me or give me an official answer based on it.  Imagine my joy when she transferred me to technical support.

Throughout all of this I sent FOUR, tweets out to the world mentioning Adobe and my growing frustration.

Enter our Hero,  Jeffrey Tranberry.  Jeff does not (officially) do customer support.  Jeff is not involved with the ColdFusion product line.  Jeff is on the Photoshop development team.  However, unlike the people that passed me from one department to another, Jeff is one of those rare employees that enjoys his job and his company.  He wants to help whenever, however he can.  He reached out to me with a simple message “Let me know if you don’t get your issue resolved.”

After a very brief exchange, I emailed him my question and he forwarded it on to someone he thought could help.  Within a few hours I had an answer – in print – from an actual support person.  Hooray!

Let’s quit congratulating companies for adding Twitter to the list of tools they use for customer support.  In my opinion, if an issue gets to Twitter, it’s because some other method has already failed.  Let’s stop congratulating people who are supposed to be doing customer support anyway and just happen to be on twitter.

Let’s start celebrating those rare employees who reach out when they aren’t required to, who step out of their comfort zones to help a customer when they have no real obligation to do so.  Let’s all tell Jeff and the others like him, we appreciate them and what they do.

Have you been helped by a non-support person on Twitter?

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

Adobe’s Customer Support Hero – Isn’t in Customer Support

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If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a few years, you may remember the days when seemingly every Web site was constructed using frames.  I built more than a few of those myself.  On the surface they seemed to be an ideal solution to many of the problems both coders and marketers had with non-framed sites.  For coders it meant you didn’t need to copy your navigation, headers and footers into every single page – saving you lots of time.  For marketers, it meant that your menus. logos and other branding information was always viewable by your site’s visitors, no matter how much scrolling they did.  In the days of Yahoo and other directory pages, it was a perfect way to build pages.

Then came the next generation of search.  Instead of relying on human provided data to build a huge list of web pages, these new search indexes used “robots”, “spiders” and “crawlers” to automagically navigate the internet.  Following links, they located pages and read their content dynamically.  This is when using Frames become a bad way to build pages.

Most web developers slowly stopped building pages with frames, mostly on their own, some after repeated, severe beatings by SEOs.  They are a very rare thing today, but I happen to stumble across one this weekend that is a perfect example of why using frames is bad, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Frames are Bad for SEO

I’ve been planning to replace my above ground pool’s small paper filter (which seems to always be clogged) with a more robust sand filter.  Thanks to some good luck (and Sherry’s Craig’s list addiction) we scored a used filter for next to nothing.  Now we just need a pump.  I spotted one at our local Home Depot and rather than buy it on the spot thought I would do a bit of research on it.

When we returned home I turned to my good friend, Google, and asked it to show me information on “flotec pool pumps.”  Considering that I included the company name, I was surprised at the results.  They were on page one, but way down at number nine. It seems the Flotec brand is well known on the web, but most of the results were for resellers or local pool shops. The fact that they did not rank higher for a query including the company name was odd.
My puzzlement grew when I clicked through to the page. As you can see, it does have some navigation to various product categories, but no other site navigation or information about the company. I kept clicking through, eventually working my way to the pump I was interested in. It looked like it would suit my needs, but I wanted to know where else I could buy it, if Flotec offered a warranty, where they were located.  I could find none of that information.
Noticing that all of the URLs I had visited contained an .asp file and some dynamic code information, I decided to strip off all but the root domain name. Happily, I was greeted by a not altogether unattractive home page. The page had decent menu, branding and links to the additional information I had been looking for.  The layout seemed a bit too familiar to me though.
I clicked the “pool & spa” link to see what navigating from the home page would show me. The scroll bar revealed the answer to the mystery.  When the scroll bar does not go all the way to the top or bottom, you can be sure the page is loaded inside some kind of frame. This is also why the layout seemed so familiar to me.  Branding on the top, navigation on the left.  It was the same layout used by nearly every frames-based site ever built. This is why the pages I found in my Google search looked the way they did.

Search engines are dumb

You have to keep in mind that as “smart” as the algorithms get, they are still pretty dumb.  They do not understand images and do not care about layout – well, not entirely anyway.

The most important thing to the search-bots are links and content.

Even though the Flotec home page appears (to us humans) to contain both content and links, what the search engines see is just three links.  This is where the problem begins.  To the engines, each of these links exist as independent documents.  Some have content, some just have more links.  The engines don’t care, they just crawl and index as they move along.

Because the engines are dumb, they don’t know that these content pages contain no site navigation and rely on other pages to provide it.  So, when a query comes along that seems to fit the content, they deliver it in the results.

That brings us back to where we started – an interior products page, devoid of any navigation or branding.  Obviously, that is bad.

Bad SEO bonus points.

The Flotec site earns a few bonus points in the bad SEO contest.  Not only are they using frames, but they also have at least two domains serving the same content, and also allow the pages to be served by both www and non-www versions of the domain.  That makes Google think there are FOUR sites with all the same content.  And what’s even more fun?  Google site searches for each of the four return different numbers of results.  They are throwing Google goodness right out the window.

site:flotecwater.com – 68 pages
site:www.flotecwater.com – 61 pages
site:www.flotecpump.com – 191 pages
site:flotecpump.com – 192 pages

Yahoo’s site explorer reveals even more trouble for Flotec and their web site.  Each of these four valid domains has links pointing back to it.  Having links distributed to multiple domains like this (without properly redirecting them) hurts their overall rankings.

Now you know why frames are bad (and why canonicalization is good).

Oh – if you happen to know somebody at Flotec, PLEASE have them drop me a line, cause we seriously need to talk.

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

Frames: Good for pictures, bad for Web sites

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The U.S. Government has started rattling its sword at bloggers, saying it thinks bloggers should disclose when they have been paid (or given a free product) for a review.

The FTC guidelines concerning endorsements and testimonials already contain this text: “endorsements must reflect the honest opinions or experience of the endorser, and may not convey any representation that would be deceptive if made directly by the advertiser.”  In other words, anyone that does an endorsement must tell the truth.  If we, as bloggers, choose to endorse a product or service, we are already bound by this guideline. Why must we also tell people it’s a paid (or traded) endorsement?  Why the second rule?  Is the Government foolish enough to think that a blogger who is already breaking the honesty rule will think twice about breaking the notification rule?

I’m not so naive as to think that there are not bloggers in the world whose good review can be bought, or even companies that will fake reviews – I know they exist.  We all know.  I suspect, the public at large knows it too.  To support their logic for adding new rules, the FTC pointed out a few companies that were in blatant violation of existing guidelines.   One company, Urban Nutrition, created www.weknowdiets.com and www.googlediets.com.  These web sites gave the illusion of real product reviews.  However, the sites always had Urban Nutrition’s own products listed as the best.  Reading about it sounds bad, but when you look at the sites, I think you’ll agree that any reasonable person could conclude they are full of crap.  In my opinion, adding a notification to these sites would not have made a difference.

Does the Government think people are so dumb they won’t notice when every review a blogger does for a company is positive?  Or, will they not notice that some links are more prominent than others?  Do they think people read one review on one blog and say to themselves “OH.MY.GOD! I have to buy that right now!”  It seems that they do.

The truth is, when people shop for almost anything they rarely buy the first thing the salesperson shows them.  Most of us get second, third or even fourth opinions.  Are these pants too big? Noooo, they are great, just cinch ‘em.

Linda A. Goldstein, an advertising industry lawyer is quoted in a recent NY Times article as saying: “It’s analogous to a studio inviting critics to a free premiere. Taken to its logical conclusion, those critics would have to disclose in their review that they were allowed to see the movie for free.”

What’s next? If my kid gets a free balloon at our local pizza joint, will I be required to disclose that to my co-workers when I tell them the pizza was good? Will they then be less likely to believe me? Would Stone Phillips appear from thin air and bust me on national television if I didn’t tell anyone about the free balloon?

We already have enough rules the Government can’t possible enforce – why add to the list? Let’s all starting using the thing between our ears, and show them we’ll be fine without protection from the big bad bloggers.

My point is that people have to use their head for more than just a hat rack. Sure it’d be nice to live in a world where nobody lied and everyone was happy all the time, but then there always be that witch flying over head doing her crazy sky-writing about Dorothy. We can’t sit back and expect the government to protect us from everyone and everything that might be even a little bit bad for us.  As a people, we shouldn’t even WANT that.  We have to think for ourselves.  We have to be smart, informed consumers.

After all, this is the Internet, not the wonderful world of Oz.

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

People that don’t blog are idiots. . .

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