I like tennis, I like the spirit of competition, and I can appreciate getting out and being active, so when Rob sent me over this article about Yahoo! and Google getting together for a friendly tennis tournament, I was pretty interested. In what seems to be typical Google fashion, there were four times as many people from Google interested in playing, one of them being a former Stanford tennis player that was but 2 years from her time at the institution. There is no end to the talents that Google can call their own. However, Yahoo did prevail 163 - 157. Complete domination, isn’t it?

Click here for the Flickr photoset.

Jib Jab has reached near icon status, creating a variety of different orginal cartoons that provide a satirical look at everything from politics to big box retail to prescription drugs. Here is a link to the Jib Jab Originals. The site itself is nothing out-of-this-world, filling a somewhat common niche that YouTube, StupidVideos, and eBaumsworld share, but Jib Jab has it’s own unique spin.

Founded in 1998 by a pair of brothers, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the company has been around for almost 10 years, has an original clip that has been viewed over 80 million times, and is one of the best examples of viral marketing. An combination of business smarts and award winning art talent, the two brothers and their website managed to survive the dot com crash by creating a toy based on a character in one of their originals, Nasty Santa, writing a children’s book for Disney, and producing a series of shorts for Sony. In 2004, with the release of This Land (linked to earlier in the post), the site took itself to the next level.

Jib Jab now releases their video on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. They use their subscribers’ images in their shorts, with over 1000 different faces in Big Box Mart (linked to earlier in the post), and with their second Year in Review being released yesterday night. These types of sites that combine traditional or standard digital content with a splash of their own original content will become more valuable as the trend towards online media continues. Having already tackled more traditional sources of revenue (that are less traditional online), Jib Jab will likely be one of the more interesting online stories that represents this decade.

Design
I’m still surprised how many articles there are on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). People often ask: “What is the trick?” The answer is simple - there is no trick, rather a few simple rules. So, pay attention and quit looking for shortcuts because there aren’t any.

Choose a domain name that is not indexed.
You want to start with a fresh name so try to find something that is not already in Google’s index. This often happens when you register a domain that may have been active not that long ago. Check here to see if your site has already been indexed.
A good friend of ours ran a successful web design company for many years under the domain EBusiness-Apps.com. However, E-Business applications were everywhere and didn’t leave them very much room to stand out. When the company decided to re-brand and launch as Nitobi, they were clean and clear in Google’s eyes and able to make a fresh start.

Metadata.
Metadata is very important and often overlooked by designers and developers. The title, description, and keyworks should be different on every page. Do not get in a habit of including a header file that dumps in the same content on every page. Rather, create a function that has three string parameters, title, desc, and keywords. The content in your metadata should appear several times in the body/content area of the page.

Use clear markup.
Web 2.0 is all about style, but let’s not get carried away. Traditional inline styles like h1 – h6, strong, and hrefs can all be replaced with span and JavaScript, but that will not do anything for your page rank. These tags are called text weight, and any words weighted more should be keywords and appear in your meta. One other note: “click here” are not keywords, so don’t use them in your hrefs.

XHR and SEO
XHR or Ajax is a huge part of Web 2.0, but that content is not indexed. Unless that content is hard linked on some other page, don’t rely on it helping your page rank. Consider having the content available as full pages and link that to your sitemap. When creating your sitemap, remember the new standard that is being established.

What is in a name?
Don’t forget your domain name, directory name, and file names are all weighted higher so use them, too.

Lastly, lets get fancy.
Dynamic content or database driven content should use mod_rewrite to change to friendly urls. For example:
www.example.com/viewcat.php?id=5
would be better described as
www.example.com/category/books/

In our example we wanted to view a category 5 which translates to books. This can easly be setup with some forward thinking. Here is a great article on how this can be setup.

Post Lanuch
Now that your site is live, SEO is even more important!

Make sure you manually add your site to the big three - Yahoo!, Microsoft/Live Search, and Google. It is easy to buy some magical software package that will automatically include your website in 1000’s of search engines – don’t be fooled. After the search engines are done, move onto directories and submit your site there. This will take a lot of work, but it is critical and worth it! Check Google for a list of free directories.

Forums, blogs, emails, and all other marketing material should have your domain name, brand, and logo on it. Make sure you are building relationships with other people in the industry, and work on keeping your content fresh. Make sure you give your site time to grow, and don’t be tempted to change everything when you don’t see results right away. It can take up to 4 months before results start pouring in – Be patient.

Further Reading
I hope you have enjoyed this article. Please check out the following great resources for more information on SEO:

Matt Cutts - Matt Cutts works for the quality group of Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.

SEOMoz.org - SEOmoz is a Seattle-based SEO company that provides SEO/Web Marketing services to companies around the world and serves as an educational and news hub for the SEO/M Community.

Number one on this list should be the server change and how slow the server seems to be, but we won’t even go there. I’m sure Rob and I have enough to worry/complain about without adding that.

1. Re-organization at Yahoo! - Something that was probably in the works already but was hastened by the infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto. I still don’t agree with that entirely, but I agree that Yahoo! needs change. They need to take more advantage of their properties - and that includes the employees that bleed orange and purple.

2. Sxipper - I think I’ve talked about this plenty, and all I have left to say is definitely go try it out. A great idea that needs to continue to grow, but the Sxip team is on to something big.

3. Yahoo! Acquisitions - Nothing to confirm or deny, but important. Yahoo! announces reorganization, and is rumoured in deals with Metacafe (article here) and Facebook (article here). I do like Yahoo! and they could be big, but Yahoo! really has enough to leverage on their own - they just acquired Jumpcut, a Metacafe-like site. I think these are more about preventing the enemy from moving in than needing them for themselves.

4. Digg = 2 - Digg is a huge part of the Web 2.0 revolution, maybe not directly, but as part of the vision. Many people use the website to help filter their daily content and to stumble upon (pun intended) new and interesting information and writers.

5. 2006: The year in security - It’s that time of the year. Probably the first of many year-end reviews. This one focuses on 5 of the biggest stories in security. Here’s another one from Mashable on MySpace add-ons.

Honourable mention this week is from Rob - 24ways.org. A tutorial a day to impress your friends.

Three quick links that should be of interest to everyone.

1. 2006: The year in security - Five of the top stories from 2006 in the world of computer/IT security.

2. Oracle spurs single sign-on surge - A little different than what Sxipper is doing but speaks of the general trends.

3. Microsoft Research fights critics, targets innovation - Despite accusations of being a follower, first in 1995 with the Internet and more recently with competitors Apple and Google, Microsoft Research is not a branch of the company that should be taken lightly (the must be keeping Ballmer out of it, eh?).