Squidbyte Blog

Blogging is cool.

I used to think that blogging was only for self-obsessed nerds that had nothing better to do with their time other than to write about themselves. I may have been wrong…

Funny as it may seem, if you actually have something decent to say then people may actually want to read that information. This is exactly the same principal that search engines use. Publish something worthwhile and if there is someone in the world who is looking for that exact same thing (it’s a big world so it’s quite possible) then the engines want your content to rank well and for your site to get found. Web users have little loyalty and if one search engine starts throwing up rubbish in the SERPS then users will jump ship in no time. The quality of the SERPS is at the top of Google’s mind.

Here’s a graph of the stats from Google Analytics to my entire site from both before and after I put up this blog. The main Squidbyte site has been around since about 2001 and is hardly ever updated – blogs are an easy way to add content to your site and let the world know something useful.

When I put the blog up the only thing I did was link to it from the menu on the Squidbyte site, nothing else. To be honest, I’m quite surprised that any of it is indexed in any of the engines yet at all (Google and Yahoo! have kindly done this already which is very kind). The biggest surprise of all is that I’m already receiving some traffic from Technorati even though I’ve not added any links anywhere…(they are fast those boys and girls).  Of course, I currently have ‘no authority yet’ in Technorati so I’ll have to work hard to keep them interested.

Reed Business Information and RBI Events are teaming up to host Search School, a one day crash course on Search Engine Optimisation aimed at small to medium business owners. The focus of the sessions will be to provide a check list so that businesses can take the information back to their developers and ensure they are following best practice and are aware of some of the specific issues to do with SEO….both what to do and what not to do.

Speakers include Barry Smyth from Search Strategies, Rod Jacka from Panalysis amongst others.

Sessions will be held in Melbourne on the 9th of October at Federation Square and in Sydney on the 1st of November at the Australian Technology Park.

A quick heads-up to some people that I met in San Jose this year.

Emilio from Blogsvertise – thanks for the great dinner and wine.
Dave Mihm – Dave does some great work for small businesses and builds some killer websites.
Lucas Ng from Fairfax Digital (SMH, Drive, RealEstate.com.au).
Roger Montti – another wine buff, aka Martini Buster
Natasha Robinson from News (MySpace Video, American Idol).
Patrick Sexton – aka Feed The Bot and has some really insightful thoughts on the direction of the web and what it means to the average person (whomever that may be).

This Saturday, just gone, I returned from a whirlwind trip to San Jose, California where I attended the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference. I attended the same event in 2004 and, probably as no surprise to most people, it just keep getting bigger with around 7000 people in attendance.

SES comprises all things internet but has a big focus on search engine optimisation as well as search engine marketing. If you want to play the SEO/SEM game, this is where you need to be.

In the next few days I’ll be giving more detailed updates on the goings-on and some insights into where things may be headed in the industry. So, watch this space.

Squidbyte finally becomes a blogger….God help us all.