Anatomy

Netflix: The Future Is Streaming —

Netflix expects its DVD-by-mail business to peak in 2013, at which point it believes its Watch Instantly streaming service will be driving its growth. That’s the gist of a slideshow posted on the company’s jobs site that details its plans to transform itself into the leading streaming subscription service for TV shows and movies.

According to the Netflix Business Opportunity slideshow, the company sees streaming as a “huge potential market,” pointing to the 100 million households that have pay-TV subscriptions in the U.S. Netflix had 14 million subscribers by the end of the first quarter, a number it expects will rise to 17 million by the end of the year. And it believes that as both it and the Internet improve, it can get boost that figure even more.

“To have profitable growth in such a huge market, you find a segment in which you can gain and maintain leadership,” the slideshow says. “Netflix [sic] segment is consumer-paid streaming of movies and TV shows.”

With greater adoption of streaming video, Netflix says it can put more money toward building the catalog of content available through its Watch Instantly service. Its cost of goods sold in 2009 was $1.4 billion, of which more than half was spent on postage and handling. But as the company’s DVD-by-mail business peaks — which it expects to happen around 2013 — Netflix will be able to spend more money on licensing content. By 2020, if it can continue to aggressively grow its subscriber base, it expects to be one of the world’s largest licensors of movies and TV shows.

The goal, it says, is to “have content so broad, engaging and affordable that everyone subscribes to Netflix.”

All that said, Netflix has a detailed list of the competitive threats it faces in the online streaming business, which includes cable, satellite and IPTV providers that are bundling on-demand video services through TV Everywhere initiatives; cable programmers like HBO and Epix that could go straight to the consumer with their premium original content; Hulu, which is expected to launch subscription services any day now; and giants like Apple and Amazon, which could launch subscription services of their own.

The company also says it faces potential threats from piracy, $1 DVD rentals, ISPs increasing the price of their broadband services, high CPM-targeted advertising, very cheap pay-per-view services and content producers selling their content directly to consumers.

Despite all these competitive threats, Netflix believes it still has a winning value proposition for leading the subscription streaming business. But at the end of the day, the company boils down its success to one key messag: Its business depends primarily on keeping its customers happy. “It’s pretty simple,” the slideshow says. “If subscribers keep raving about Netflix, we will prosper.”

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Slow and Steady, Netflix Pulls Ahead in Streaming Video (subscription required)

Graphic artist Ricky Linn created an awesome new Star Trek infographic, 15 Things About Star Trek You Probably Didn’t Know About Star Trek. Check it out, after the jump.

Read the rest of this post on SlashFilm.com…

Here are some possibly related posts:

• Cool Stuff: Anatomy of a Tribble
• Movie Trailer: Star Trek Documentary Trek Nation
• VOTD: Vintage Behind The Scenes Documentary For Star Trek: The Motion Picture
• VOTD: How JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Should Have Ended
• VOTD: 50 Movie Spoilers of 2009 in 4 Minutes
• LOL: Worth 1000’s “Mate a Movie 15″ Movie Poster Mash-ups

On the day Facebook introduced "instant personalization," I updated my status to this:

Facebook has sneakily rolled out a terrible "feature" to give your data to 3rd party websites, and GUESS WHAT, they opted you in without asking you. Go to Account --> Privacy Settings --> Applications and Websites & disable "Instant Personalization." Tell your friends.

The "tell your friends" part was entirely intentional — I was trying to get it to go viral. I had two goals for doing so: one, I wanted to express my frustration at Facebook's actions by inflicting a non-trivial amount of damage to them (in terms of getting users to opt out), and second, I wanted to see if it was really true that most people just didn't care about privacy any more.

Searching for public statuses a few days later revealed a hundred or so that originated from mine, including the inevitable mutations. Keep in mind that users whose statuses are public are much less likely to pass on a message about privacy, and so the true number of status messages is probably an order of magnitude higher. Assuming that each such user opted out of instant personalization themselves and also got a few of their friends to do so, that would mean that several thousand users opted out. Very gratifying, in terms of either of the abovementioned goals.

The interesting thing about memes is that they almost always either die out quickly, or go viral to reach a significant fraction of the population. Those that reach some intermediate level of success, like mine did, are rare. This means that a tiny difference in the original wording could have caused it to collapse or to explode. (For the mathematically inclined, this is because it changes the "branching factor" of the meme.)

A meme, like a virus, has two components — the payload and the replication mechanism. The payload is the part of the meme that urges you to do something. The replication mechanism is the part that urges you to pass it on. As you can imagine, changes in the wording of the latter have a particularly huge effect on the branching factor.

For example, it is entirely possible that if I'd ended my message with "Tell your friends!" instead of "Tell your friends.", it would have spread to ten times as many users. This mystifying power that tiny strings of text have over masses of intelligent human beings is what makes memes a fascinating object of study for researchers and a salivating prospect for marketers.

Even as I wrote my original message, I knew exactly how to word the replication mechanism to maximize impact, but I didn't because I felt it wouldn't be truthful. But someone else figured it out:

FB Privacy heads up! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization," which shares data with non-facebook websites, and is automatically set to "Allow. "Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Applications & Websites->Instant Personalization and UN-CHECK "Allow." Please copy and repost because if you 'un-check' this and your friends don't, your friends are still sharing info about you!

That meme got started the same day (around two weeks ago), and is still going strong, being reposted at the rate of once every minute or so, and that's just the public statuses, on a Saturday night! I'd estimate that tens of millions of users have seen that message.

Note the difference: while my meme appealed to people's altruism to get them to replicate it, this one appeals to their self-interest :-) "Repost this for your own good." It amuses me to think about whether users who copy-paste that are actually hoping to get every single one of their friends to opt out. Needless to say, it doesn't significantly affect you if your friends opt out or not (which I why I didn't feel comfortable using the more powerful wording.)

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that if privacy advocates seek to have any real effect on user behavior, they need to stop pontificating and learn to craft a successful meme. Or more generally: go where the users are, word your messages in a way that appeals to users' concerns, and make it easy for users to follow them. Because the groups that benefit from users giving up their privacy have long mastered the art of creating killer memes.

50 Helpful Typography Tools And Resources —

We love beautiful typography, and we appreciate the efforts of designers who come up with great typographic techniques and tools or who just share their knowledge with fellow designers. We are always looking for such resources. We compile them, carefully select the best ones and then prepare them for our round-ups. And now it’s time to present a beautiful fresh dose of typography-related resources.

To help you improve the typography in your designs, we’re presenting here useful new articles, tools and resources related to typography. You will learn the fundamentals of typography, find out how to combine fonts and know what to keep in mind when choosing a typeface. We also present typography-related slideshows, glossaries, layouts and experiments.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
• 25 New High Quality Free Fonts
• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
• Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter!]

Typography: References and Useful Resources

The Taxonomy of Type
This article’s purpose is to help us as designers to distinguish basic properties of types. It explains the type classification and provides examples of each type. Short, but nice article.

Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces
Typedia is a resource to classify, categorize, and connect typefaces. It is a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them, very much like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type.

Typeface Anatomy and Glossary
Many fonts have abbreviations in their names. Some relate to glyph sets and font formats, others to design traits and foundries, and so on. A comprehensive list of these abbreviations and their explanation can be found in The Abbreviated Typographer from Unzipped.

Typographic Marks Unknown
There are many typographic marks which are familiar to most, but understood by few. Most of these glyphs have interesting histories and evolutions as they survived the beatings given to them through rushed handwriting of scribes and misuses through history. They now mostly live on our keyboards and in our software, and a few are used often, so it seems only fitting to know where they come from and how to correctly use them.

Periodic Table of Typefaces
A reference table for most popular typefaces and their classifications.

Fonts for iPad & iPhone
This reference table features all fonts that are available on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Font Anatomy (Wallpaper)
A nice overview of all typographic terms and subtleties. Do you know what an ‘arm’ or ‘beak’ is? Time to find out.

Typographic Rules Checklist (PDF)
Useful typographic checklist that contains not only some general typographic rules, heuristics and guidelines, but also reminders for typography in your projects.

Typography Checklist (PDF)
Compiled by Jason DewinetzIf, this list contains some useful typographic checks that you may want to consider for before launching your next project or printing your next brochure or book.

So You Need A Typeface (Infographics)
A nice infographics that can actually help you select a typeface for your design work. You may want to search for the path to Comic Sans.

Finding The Right Type

The Right Font for the Job
A few years ago, you had to make a decision between TrueType or PostScript and Mac or Windows. Today, the choice is usually fairly simple: OpenType is the most convenient and full-featured font format, compatible with all modern screen and print workflows. All the extras that are commonly spread across multiple PostScript or TrueType files can live in one OpenType file. Best of all, OpenType is a truly cross-platform format. You can use the same font on Mac or Windows machines without converting the font or fearing reflow.

Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips
With the invention of “desktop publishing”, designers found themselves setting type on their computers for the first time. Until then, they had made type specifications for typesetters and left the job up to the professionals. As a result, you can still see classic inaccuracies in typesetting, even in top-quality printed matter. Here you will find some tips from Erik Spiekermann, designer of FF Meta¨, Meta Design founder, co-author of ’stop Stealing Sheep”, and a FontShop founder, which will prevent some of the more obvious blunders.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface
For the first ten years of my career, I worked for Massimo Vignelli, a designer who is legendary for using a very limited number of typefaces. Between 1980 and 1990, most of my projects were set in five fonts: Helvetica (naturally), Futura, Garamond No. 3, Century Expanded, and, of course, Bodoni.

Picking Type for Web
Picking Type for Web As a part of the visual design process for MIX Online’s upcoming redesign, I’ve been experimenting with typography. The task of finding a typeface that’s both aesthetically pleasing and legible, however, is a tricky one.

How To Choose A Font
Have you ever had the problem of not knowing what typeface to use? Well of course you have, everyone has. This is a guide on how to choose a font. These pointers have been gathered from Robin Williams great book “The Non-Designers Type Book” that I recommended in the top 5 typography resources of all time. Have a think about each of these before choosing your next font.

On Choosing Type
Typography is not a science. Typography is an art. There are those who”d like to ’scientificize”; those who believe that a large enough sample of data will somehow elicit good typography. However, this sausage-machine mentality will only ever produce sausages. That typography and choosing type is not a science trammeled by axioms and rules is a cause to rejoice.

Combining Type

Fundamentals: Combining Type With Helvetica
With this issue of FontShop Fundamentals we debut Guest FontLists. Building on our own lists, we asked experts we admire to round up typefaces that share a common use, style, or concept.

Four Ways to Mix Fonts
Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ’s Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.

How do I choose paring fonts ?
When I have to chose type for a project, I always rely on my feelings and lots of testing, wating for the love/hate Alchemy to happen and decide for me. This method, mostly based on luck, is often time consuming, and I often found myself needing to ask for help on the forums.

Type Design

Beginner’s Guide to OpenType
OpenType (OT) is a cross-platform type format that includes expert layout features to provide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control. Using OT technology you can substitute your characters for different glyphs1 using many different methods; Ligatures, Small Caps, Oldstyle Figures, Fractions, Superscript/Subscript, Ordinals, Alternates, Titling Characters and many more. This beginner’s guide will help to illustrate some of the more common features found in OT fonts and when they should be used.

Making Geometric Type Work
For graphic designers beginning to experiment in type design, a geometric or modular typeface is a natural starting point. Illustrator and other programs offer a simple collection of elements such as circles, squares, and triangles which can be combined to create a passable alphabet. This is the same route I took when dissatisfied with the limits of commercial fonts at the time. I twisted and distorted each character to fit into a few simple, incredibly strict rules of construction. Invariably this produced a wide range of exotic letterforms, some more legible that others.

A few things I’ve learned about typeface design
Teaching on a postgraduate course feels very much like a spiral: the annual repetition of projects, each a vehicle for a journey of education and discovery for the student, blurs into cyclical clouds of shapes, paragraphs, and personalities. There seems to be little opportunity for reflection across student cohorts, and yet it is only this process that improves the process from one year to the next. Having passed the tenth anniversary of the MA Typeface Design programme was as good an opportunity as any to reflect, and ILT’s offer to publish the result an ideal environment to get some ideas out in the open. Although my perspective is unavoidably linked to the course at Reading, I think that the points I make have wider relevance.

Case-Study: The Making of Vesper
A nice case-study about the creation process of the Vesper typeface, from its designer Rob Keller. “Vesper was developed over the course of almost three years. For this article, I’ve divided the process into two stages: #1 during my studies at the University of Reading; and #2 After Reading. Hopefully through this highly-condensed-yet-still-rather-wordy account of this project you will learn some interesting bits regarding my first major type family, the design process, and the MATD program.”

Typographic Tools

TypeIt: Type accent marks, diacritics and foreign letters online
The service allows you to add typographic accents and special characters (e.g. punctuation marks) as you’re typing. Instead of clicking on buttons for the accents, you can also use pre-defined shortcuts, like Control + N, to insert the characters: just point your cursor to the desired character and you’ll see a tooltip.

Web Font Specimen
Because web type renders differently with only subtle CSS adjustments, seeing it exercised in a variety of ways can help web designers typesetÑand also help them decide which typefaces to purchase for their projects.

Typograph: Scale & Rhythm
This page is both an essay and a tool. It sets out to explore how two, intertwined concepts, often playful but sometimes cheeky, can be encouraged to dance in web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you are about to play upon it.

TextMod 2.1
Unlike dummy text generators, in TextMod you can modify a real text to match your current character set and use it for testing your font. Your TextMod settings are stored in a cookie. By now, TextMod only works with Latin and Armenian.

Readability
Readability is a simple bookmarklet that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

Free Typographic XHTML/CSS-Layouts For Your Designs
A collection of beautiful typographic (X)HTML+CSS-based layouts created by the design community and released for free.

Typography Keyboard Layout
A simple, yet useful tool that lets you enter characters that are usually unavailable on a keyboard with ease. Hopefully it will help you achieve better typography in your designs.

{ font-family }
A resource for web developers and designers to provide recommendations for alternatives in the font-family CSS style.

EmChart
This tool maps the ratio between your base size and your child elements font size.

MyFontbook, A Browser-Based Free Font Viewer
myFontbook is a free tool for viewing, classifying and organizing fonts installed on your system from your web browser.

Font Finder
FontFinder is created for designers, developers and typographers. It allows a user to analyze the font information of any element on a page, copy any piece(s) of that information to the clipboard, and perform inline replacements to test new layouts.

Unicode Codepoint Chart
This chart is broken down neatly by type of character and symbol (and by language in many cases), with a visual reference under each category. From there, just click on the symbol or character you want and you’re brought to a page with detailed information about the character, along with a browser test page, an outline (in SVG format) and a variety of encodings and character sets (HTML entity, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-8, etc.).

Create Your Own @font-face Kits
An online generator for creating ready-to-use kits for your fonts, using @font-face.

XHTML Character Entity Reference
This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C.

HTML Entity Character Lookup
Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters. This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks, e.g. like an < or the letter c.

CopyPasteCharacter.com
This page allows you to copy one or multiple special characters and paste them in your applications.

Surveys and Research

Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
Even with a relatively limited set of options in CSS, typography can vary tremendously using pure CSS syntax. Serif or sans-serif? Large or small font? Line height, spacing, font size and paddingÉ The list goes on and on.

Visual Search and Reading Tasks Using ClearType and Regular Displays
An academic paper exploring the usability performance of ClearType vs. Regular displays. Result: For most users ClearType-enhanced text produces a significant improvement in performance times on tasks involving extended eye-on-text interactions.

‘Font’ vs. ‘Typeface’: font terms survey results
According to this study, the overall opinion is that in today’s world of digital typography “a typeface” means the general design, including all its styles, regardless of how it’s instantiated, while “a font” means a single style of a typeface, such as Myriad bold condensed italic, in a specific file format. However, this is not necessarily true.

Font or Typeface?
As we”re collaborating with multiple authors on the FontFeed, we compiled a list of guidelines for ourselves and guest contributors. One of our concerns is that we should attempt to ’speak the same language” when using typographic and related terms. Because these terms evolved over a considerable period of time and saw several transitions in technology, they can sometimes be interpreted in varying ways. This resulted in a terminology that is often perceived as at best esoteric, at worst plain confusing.

Rules for good and beautiful typography

A Guide to Web Typography
Typography for the Web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee flipped the switch in 1991. Back in the days of IE 1.0, good web typography was something of an oxymoron. Today things are different. Not only do we have browsers that support images (gasp!), but we have the opportunity to make our web pages come to life through great typography.

The Principles of Beautiful Typography
For most people, typography is simply about arranging a familiar set of shapes to make words, sentences, and paragraphs. Having the ability to set type with only a few strokes on a keyboard has allowed us to forget about the creative and artistic possibilities of this medium.

Simple rules for good typography
Here are some basic rules to improve your typography across either web or print. Of course, these rules are only to start with, and rules are meant to be broken. But if you want something to look neat, clean and generally well designed they are a good set to follow.

Typography is the backbone of good web design
An overview of some typographic techniques to keep in mind for your next website design.

A 20 Minute Intro to Typography Basics
“Typography plays a big role in graphic design and can be one of the hardest things to get right. My aim here is to introduce some of the basics and the most common areas of typography that will be important in your design work.”

11 Essential Tips for Good Print Typography
Typography is a huge part of design and design is a huge part of type. You can”t just throw text on a page, it has to be laid out and organized in a clean way that adds to the information being presented. Here are 11 typography tips to help you convey information in print the right way.

It’s Type O’clock!
“One of the key qualities of a good information designer is attention to details and since typography is the new cool trend we now seem to care more than ever about presenting text online correctly. The following article is based on my personal experience, yet there’s great probability that much of the following has already been said by somebody else. What you’ll find here is a few tricks for setting type on web I’ve learned over the past few months some of which, amazingly enough, I hardly ever see being used.”

What is typography today?
“Most people think Typography is about designing and selecting fonts. This is true as far as architecture is about designing or selecting furniture. In reality neither is a purpose but a means to an end. That end with architecture is (hopefully) accommodating its inhabitants, for typography it is accommodating the human mind, making the reader read, the viewer watch (not only look), drawing and keeping the attention.”

The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing
As printed typography enjoys the fruits of high-DPI glory, proudly displaying its beautiful curves and subtleties, its on-screen counterpart remains stifled by bulky pixels, living in a world of jagged edges, distorted letterforms and trimmed serifs. Until display manufacturers produce affordable 200 or 300 PPI monitors, we”ll have to rely on software advances to fix these problems.

Type-Inspired Interfaces
One of the things that terrifies me most about a new project is the starting point. How is the content laid out? What colors do I pick? Once things like that are decided, it becomes significantly easier to continue design, but it’s the blank page where I spend the most time. To that end, I often start by choosing type.

CSS and Font Embedding

Revised Font Stack
Serious efforts are being made to get more typeface choices on the web to enhance web typography. Still, most of us prefer web-safe fonts like: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman and Arial. Though choices are limited, yet the number can be increased by exploring other pre-installed fonts.

Becoming a Font Embedding Master
I’ve spent a couple days worth now trying to figure out the best and most complete approach to font embedding using @font-face. It really is a dark art that must be mastered. It is by no means a straightforward process.

Web Font User Guide
An extensive reference guide for designers, developers and system administrators. It explains how to get started using Web fonts for display on your website. It also contains information for system administrators about which configuration changes may be necessary to successfully serve webfonts from your web server.

Inspiration: Showcases, Blogs etc.

we love typography
A showcase of type, typography, lettering, and signage.

FINDINGS
Yet another blog featuring beautiful typography.

typo/graphic posters
typo/graphic posters is a directory of typographic and graphic posters.

The Journal of Urban Typography
TJOUT is dedicated to the documentation and study of signs, word fragments, and typography created with utilitarian intent in urban environments.

Pressing Letters: A Collection of Inspirational Letterpress
The project is an effort to catalog work and promote creativity in the letterpress community. Anyone can submit their letterpress work, references, tips and links. The website has many different categories, including business cards, books, calendars, identity design, music sleeves, stationery and posters. A blog definitely worth bookmarking and visiting regularly.

Alltop: Top Typography News
An aggregator of typography-related news, articles and tools.

Last Click: Typography-Related… Games!

FontTrainer
An interesting tool that help to train you pay attention to subtle differences between fonts.

Your Personality, Summarized in a Typeface
If you’ve ever sat down with a type designer, what you quickly realize is that they rarely talk about fonts in purely aesthetic or even functional terms: They talk about assertiveness or calm or friendliness. In short, they talk about personality traits. It makes sense, then, that your personality could be translated into a typeface. And Pentragram has done just that, in this lovely microsite, What Type are You? (Password: Character)

TypePong
TypePong is a retro iPhone gaming with a modern twist. It allows you to play PingPong with your favourite fonts. You can also challenge your friends and the world on our global score board.

Deep Font Challenge
Are you a sharp shootin’ font-master or a no-good calamity who can’t spell Futura? To prove your design know how, shoot the font mounted on a target which is displayed on the banner. Points are scored for each successful round and the speed with which you complete it… but be warned, during the game the tables will turn, so keep on your toes.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
• 25 New High Quality Free Fonts
• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
• Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

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Post tags: typography

Hello Guts: A Look At Hello Kitty's Anatomy — This is glimpse into Hello Kitty's anatomy as imagined by artist Jason Freeny, best known for his other anatomical renderings. I thought perhaps the most interesting part of this piece is the fact that Hello has a skull but no brain and teeth but no mouth. WTF!? She's like one of those blind salamanders that lives its whole life in a dark cave. What are those called? Computer nerds. Yes, them. Jason Freeny's Website Thanks to liquid Tension, who I'll take over awkward Tension any day.

SEO 101 - Part 14: Everything You Need to Know About Link Anatomy —

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L'Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Link Analysis Progression

I said in my last post that each link is essentially a vote for the page that's being linked to. That, essentially, was the original link analysis factors. Things have come a long way since then. Today's link analysis factors are far more complex.

Over the years what gets analyzed as part of the link has changed in order to provide better search results to web users.

The search engines started out looking at sheer link volume. He who gets the most links wins. This created link farms, link trades, link pages and so on. Before Google changed the game in link analysis people did everythign they could to create mad quantities of links to their site. Relevance of the linking page to the linked content didn't matter. While sheer link quantity continues to play a role, it is no longer the only factor in link analysis.

Then Google came a long and started analyzing link text. The words in the link started to matter. The words spoke about the page it was linking to and therefore when the words match up with the text on the page the more relevant your page became for those keywords.

Next, search engines started looking at the quality of each link. Does it come from a low authority website or a high authority website? The higher the site's authority linking out the more link value was passed.

Link age became a factor as it was assumed that the longer a link stayed in place the more "serious" the linker was about the site. If the links came and went then that might say somethign about the quality of the site being linked to, or if the link was an ad purchased under the radar.

As link buying became more and more prominent, the search engines started fighting back. It's impossible for the search engines to determine with 100% accuracy whether a link was purchased or not but there are some signals that they have learned to detect.

The Anatomy of a Link

There is more to a link that meets the eye. As the progression of link analysis has changed, that means we need to pay attention to our links in order to make sure that we are getting the most value out of each. Lets break down the link into its core components as relevant to the search engines.

Anchor Text: As noted earlier link text factors pretty heavily in the search engine rankings. Any clues the search engines can get about the content of the page from external sources weighs heavily. It not only tells them what the page is about, but that someone else found it as a valuable resource for what it is. That last part is important. Linking to a site is one thing. Linking to a site giving your readers context to what they'll find on that site is another thing altogether.

Links you give (and receive) should be keyword rich. Instead of linking out using the name of the website you are linking to, use keywords relevant to that site. Don't say "you can find a good used Honda Accord at Joe's Dealership." Instead, say "you can find a good used Honda Accord at Joe's Dealership."

Where it Appears: Where the link appears on the page tells the search engines a great deal about the link itself. Search engines try to determine the value of the link by its placement on the page. Links in navigation are weighted one way, editorial links are considered more relevant and links in ad spaces are generally ignored.

Editorial links (those linked in the the midst of the page's primary content) are deemed most valuable. These are generally links that are there not because they were purchased (though clearly that can be manipulated) but because the writer of the content finds it relevant to the readers.

Type of Link: There are a lot of different types of links and each carry their own weight. Many people will tell you that reciprocal links are worthless, but that's not entirely true. Context matters a great deal. The same is true for whether the link is a one-way (non-reciprocated) link pointed to the site but not returned. Known purchased links have the least value (none), but can still be useful for driving traffic and getting an audience which can also produce natural links.

Link Style: Text vs. Images. Linking actual text (words) gives the search engines more information as to what the destination site is about. It adds to the page's keyword focus from an external site. Image links don't do that as well. Images can use the ALT text which can be factored in but likely aren't weighted with the same value as a pure text link.

Link Age: How old a link is and how long it's been in place can effect the overall value of that link. In general terms the longer the link remains in place the more power it sends to the linked page. This isn't true in all cases, for example I believe blog links give out some immediate value that then fades back into the normal aging process after a few months. News links likely fade over time rather than build strength. But with these (and possibly a few other) exceptions, the link gains value over time.

Linking Site: The site that links out plays a strong role in the value of the link itself. The higher authority the linking site is, the more link value is passed. The page the link is on is also considered. A low authority page on a high-authority site may not have as much value as a lower authority site linking out from its home page, or the reverse may be true.. The topic of the page, how relevant it is to the topic site, can also be factored into how much relevance and weight the link sends out.

There are other factors as well, and I'm sure Google is always looking at ways to improve their link analysis algorithms. Links from Twitter and Facebook profiles can factor in as can links from other social media sites.

Whether you're buying a link, asking for one, or looking for exposure in social circles, the key is to get as many quality links from quality sites as possible.

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords
Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Part 11: Everything You Need To Know About SEO Copywriting
Part 12: Everything You Need To Know About Page Content
Part 13: Everything You Need To Know About Links

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Let’s deconstruct the Google snippet in all its glory — from the Posts/Authors/Last Post line, to the document date, to the Keywords in Context (”KWIC”), to the ellipses, to the inside-the-snippet anchor links. But before we do, it would probably be a good idea to define the term snippet. Google defines a snippet as “a description [...]

*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the "View Original Post" link below. ***

In early February reviews of hot new streaming TV site TVGorge.com started appearing.

“If you’re outside of the US and sick of not being able to see good TV online or just tired of waiting for Hulu to get your favorite shows, you’ll want to check out TVGorge and its huge archive of shows,” wrote Lifehacker.

“The amount – and quality – of the content on TVGorge is nothing short of impressive,” wrote TechCrunch. “All episodes from all eight seasons of 24 are on there, for instance, in addition to dozens of episodes of shows like Californication, 30 Rock, Heroes, Lost, CSI, Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, and so on. I counted 128 TV shows on the site.”

TVGorge was an indexing service and didn’t carry any material on its own servers. The site’s engine found sources for new TV episodes stored on other sites and either embedded or linked to the videos found. Users flagged broken links and also added their own links to TV shows.

The videos available via TVGorge came with no geo-lockouts, meaning that anyone worldwide could enjoy them without being bugged by “this show is not available in your area” type messages.

In total TVGorge linked to approximately 5500 episodes, 10,000 embedded videos, offered 60,000 external links, and reached 3 million people a month.

While nearly every review of the site was positive, most contained an element of doubt. Is TVGorge actually legal? Could it survive longer term? The general consensus was ‘no’ and ‘no’. Although it could be argued that the answer to the first question is still possibly up for debate, the latter proved fairly accurate.

Around a week ago, TorrentFreak received information that TVGorge was being threatened with legal action. At that stage the site was still fully operational, but very quickly the situation changed. We are now able to confirm that TVGorge was ordered to cease and desist by the MPAA on behalf of the companies they represent.

“TVGorge has recently been advised to remove all of our indexed content,” said the site’s operators in a statement.

“We understand content owners have a need to protect their content and we can only hope they take the initiative to provide easy access to all of their great TV shows at an international level. If anything, hopefully we have shown them that people are desperately looking for a place to watch their favourite TV shows.”

The site’s operators are remaining upbeat and say they will continue to index streaming sources for the TV shows they list, but of course, these will now link to authorized sources instead with the same restrictions that drove people to sites like TVGorge in the first place.

Nevertheless, TVGorge won’t stagnate. The site will take on a new shape by becoming a TV guide featuring breaking news, forums, episode guides, TV schedules, show and episode reviews and linking to or embedding authorized sources from around the world.

Although TVGorge’s legal woes may be over, TorrentFreak has been informed that many other streaming sites are also currently the subject of legal threats and unwanted attention.

Considering the seriousness of the situation it would be irresponsible for us to publish the information we have been given without absolute confirmation, but we are told that in one particular case in a European country, a police investigation is underway against a major site. We asked the site and its host questions, particularly since the news we received corresponded directly with some site downtime, but the responses we received were generally pretty vague.

It may well be that their hands are tied. Time will tell.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Links for 2010-06-08 [del.icio.us] —

• Understanding the Psychology of Twitter | Psychology Today
• More on the Psychology of Twitter | Psychology Today
• Wrapping It Up: The Psychology of Twitter | Psychology Today
• The Psychology of Twitter | World of Psychology
• elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
• Lars is Learning: Welcome aboard! Onboarding Model

Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Audit – Part 2 —

With SMX West this week, I was going to hold off on the 2nd part of my hands-on SEO Audit series.  Then I remembered that heck – I’m not going to be there so I bet enough other people in our industry won’t either that it will be a great way to give all the non-attendees a leg-up on the competition, as they all run around the conference hoping to grab actionable information.  :-)

If you haven’t read part 1 in this series, I encourage you to go read that first since it sets the foundation for what follows here.  Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Okay did you actually think I was going to wait for you to read that before I continued writing?  I sure hope not.  Because if you did, you seriously need to work on your gullibility.  If you’re too gullible, you’re going to get toasted in this industry.  :-)

Also while you’re at it, another other great resource I highly recommend when it comes time to writing up an SEO audit is Glen Gabe’s  “SEO Techinical Audits“.

Don’t Give Away The Farm

In this part of the series, I’d like to focus more on some of the things that should and shouldn’t go into an SEO audit.  This seems to be one of  the biggest areas of confusion for consultants just starting out.  And as I mentioned in part 1:

a site Audit isn’t supposed to be an advanced course in SEO.  It’s to point out problems and recommend methods of solution.

If a client is curious to know how I came to my recommendation, we’ll discuss that during the phone or in-person review of the audit, but only in broad terms.  Because I expect my clients to trust that I know what I’m talking about, not teach them my business.  That’s not why they’re hiring me.

 

Aaron Wall came out with an article today entitled “How to Construct Great Proposals“.  In that, he offers his own take on why we shouldn’t be giving away the farm. Yeah. Go read that.  I’ll just wait.  Again.  Because I care.

The fact is, I used to give away the farm.  We’re talking about detailing every single step of work – providing spreadsheets with page names, suggested page Titles, Meta content, URL seeding, and even suggested copy.

And that was professional self-sabotage.  Both because it took a lot longer to produce my audit/action plans, and because it set me up to have the client think they didn’t need me for anything.  Which is just crazy.  Right?

Now, I couldn’t do that on a large scale site, but then I used to only think I should work on small sites anyhow.  Which in itself was self-sabotage.

Not because I think there’s anything wrong with small business sites.  It’s just that it turns out that when I focus on big clients, it’s much more likely that they’ll have the budget needed for truly comprehensive SEO.  And in turn, that they’ll be much more likely to appreciate the work and respect my knowledge.

Limit What You Give Away

As I began focusing on clients that had the mind-set that SEO is a front-line critical aspect of most any marketing effort, I began paring down the document, and only including EXAMPLES of my findings and subsequent recommendation.

Sure, they’re real-world examples – taken right from that client’s site.  Which gives validation to what I’m saying is both a current challenge AND an industry best practices resolution.  And, too, even with only a few examples of each specific issue, I cover so many aspects of SEO that it really ends up being a soup-to-nuts comprehensive document in how thorough it is.   And the overall depth of it far outweighs, in long-term value, what most of my competitors provide.

Don’t Give Away What You’re Giving Away

Now if you remember, even in this type of scenario, I do NOT give away even this much information for free.  I charge for my audits.  By charging for audits, you immediately inform the prospective client that you’re serious.  A true professional.  That if they want access to your knowledge, they’re going to need to prove THEY’RE serious about this.

How much you charge is going to be up to you.  It needs to be commensurate with your experience, as well as your own belief in what you do and why you do it.  If you think you don’t deserve to get $1,000 or $5,000 for a site audit, you won’t ever get that.  Or if you do, it’s going to turn out to be a night-mare of a client relationship.  Because you’ll feel guilty.  And think you have to give away the farm in some other way to compensate.

Example Data

Whether you choose to use spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations, or a high-gloss full color bound book isn’t ever as important as the quality of the information you provide within the document.  So be sure to focus more on the quality of the content.  Just like you’re doing for the actual SEO for your client sites.  Right?  Right!

Competitive Landscape

One of the most challenging aspects of getting new clients to understand how serious the work is to come, is to get them to wake up to the competitive landscape.   All too often, they think “hey – if I just spend this money, POOF, I’ll be on the first page of Google.”

No, we’re not even going to get into the noise about how many companies out there use pure hype to make it sound so simple.  Because if we do, this will become a rant.  And then I’ll have to move it to my own blog.  Because THAT rant will get ugly.  Fast.

Instead, I’m going to just talk about the need that exists for sometimes jarring clients into reality.

This is why I like to use a Competitive Analysis chart.

In this one chart above, I really lay it out on the line.  I make it crystal clear exactly where they stand when it comes to the competition.  Sugar-coating not included.

Honestly Is Yada Yada Yada

Note – in that chart my client’s got the first row. So that sets the tone.  From there, I don’t sort this in some biased manner, or only show competitors that have 8,000 more pages or 5,000 more back-links.  Because ultimately, I don’t have to.

And later on in the notes section, I go on to mention that the statistics within the chart are only numeric values, not keyword ranking related.  And that’s really important.

By first showing your client that their site clearly needs work just when held up against the competitive landscape in terms of content depth, link depth, social networking depth. and THEN, afterward, throwing a competitive landscape Keyword Ranking chart, you are throwing the one-two knock-out punch.

Caveats Rule The Day

Throughout every SEO audit/action plan I create, I pepper the information with caveats – warnings and disclaimers.  Because it’s important to help clarify what you’re presenting.  If I didn’t explain, for example, that the above chart is only a SAMPLING of competitor sites, or if I didn’t also mention in my disclaimer that this chart’s understanding can ONLY come from matching it up against the competitive keyword ranking data, it would leave the client open to assume too much.

And that’s dangerous.

By clarifying these realities, even if a client IGNORES them before hiring you, they exist as a point of reference to go back to if you ever need to do that.  You’re protecting yourself, your business, and your reputation.

Generalize While Being Specific

Note in the chart above how I provide specific counts for pages indexed?  I don’t need, in this proposal, to get into the specifics of “indexed in Google’s Public “Site:” method as compared to Google Webmaster Tools”.  And for the social networking comparison, I give an N for not present, a Y to say yes, they’ve got one but it’s not so great, G to represent that it’s pretty good, and VG to say it’s the hottest thing since sliced bread.

Yet I don’t go into specifics to explain what my criteria are for each rating.

It’s enough that I, myself, know what goes into that subjective rating system.

But of course, if I include a disclaimer about the fact that “just because competitor X has a VG in Facebook, doesn’t mean that I’m recommending THIS client needs one”, that sets the stage for later in the proposal where I specifically cover social networking.  In it’s own section.  At the end of the document.  After all the ON-SITE stuff.

Every Site Is Unique So Every Audit Needs To Be Unique

Another reality is that I can’t sit here and provide you with a comprehensive laundry list of every single thing you should be covering in your audit.  Because every site is unique within every market.  And  every site owner’s got a pre-determined expectation as to what they are going to ask for.  And you’re going to need to ask a lot of questions up front to understand this.  Then you’ll need to tailor each audit accordingly.

Maybe you don’t go into any depth covering the social networking.  Perhaps it’s because that specific client has an offering that has no business being promoted in social networking environments.  Like former CIA spies who now operate a competitive intelligence business.  (Yes, I’ve got such clients, thank you very much).  Or maybe you already know that the client’s budget is already bursting at the seams.  So you just briefly touch on social networking and say something like:

While we believe social networking will need to be one more part of your comprehensive marketing efforts, this document does not detail any recommendations in that regard due to previous discussion with you and is therefore not included in our action-plan for this phase.

By saying “this phase”, you set the stage for future work, should the opportunity present itself.  And that’s another important concept.  Consideration may need to be given to the fact that even clients who truly appreciate your worth, and respect your recommendations, need to operate within budgetary financial constraints. And that’s okay.  Because you can take the “multiple-phase” approach.  Which means you’ll have plenty of work for many years to come.

And that’s always a good thing.

So there you have it – an overview of what to include and what not to include in the typical audit.  Of course, I didn’t go into specifics as relates to keyword ranking or keyword evaluations.  Yet by now you should have gotten the idea.  – Give just enough to show you know what you’re talking about, specific to each client.  And that in turn will open the door for you to propose more comprehensive work.

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00.  Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com.  Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column here at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Audit – Part 2

Another wave of Twitter phishing has erupted this afternoon, with a spat of direct messages that read “somebody wrote something about you in this blog here” with a link to an ominous short URL.

That short URL asks users to login to Twitter, but one look at your browser’s address bar indicates that it is not Twitter you’re logging into, but a third-party site that looks like Twitter. Once you provide said site with your login details, it DMs your followers, hence creating the viral loop that is the anatomy of a Twitter phishing scam.

Twitter posted some tips for avoiding these scams on Friday, but apparently the message didn’t get through to everyone, because lots of users (including several high ranking execs that have been duped and sent me such DMs) are still getting duped. Lately, Twitter’s phishing scams seem to share a common theme, with a message from someone you conceivably know (at least a little bit since you follow them) sending you a DM that implies something about you has been posted somewhere on the Web.

While that’s certainly a tempting piece of bait, there’s no conceivable reason you should ever have to give a third-party website your Twitter credentials — let alone a site you’ve never heard of — especially now that most reputable Twitter apps use OAuth. Meanwhile, if you think you’ve fallen victim, we remind you once again to change your password.

As Twitter noted in it’s blog entry on the topic, the last wave of these scams often involves the phishers using compromised accounts to send out spam messages, meaning if you don’t move quick, your account will continue to be a source of embarrassment.

Tags: phishing, twitter

Avoid 'Phishing' Scams — Over the past few days, Twitter has been helping folks victimized by a phishing attack. Phishing is a deceitful process by which an attempt is made to acquire sensitive information such as Twitter usernames and passwords. The bad guys masquerade as someone you trust and may send you a Direct Message (DM) with a link. This DM may say something along the lines of, "LOL that you??" followed by a link to a fake Twitter login page. If you enter your credentials on that fraudulent page, the phishers can sign in as you and trick more people.

Anatomy of A Phishing Scam

Generally a phishing attack against Twitter users breaks down to a three-part process. First, accounts compromised in the manner described above send out messages to all accounts following them. Second, accounts that are newly compromised send out more messages. Third, the scammers behind the phishing attack make an attempt at monetization by sending out spam links instead of links to a fake login page. We fight phishing scams by detecting affected accounts and resetting passwords. However, it's better to stop them before they start.

Avoiding Phishing Scams

We designed the Direct Message system so that you could only get DMs from accounts that you choose to follow—this cuts way down on spam and attacks. Our Trust and Safety team identifies and deletes spam accounts every day. Still, we recommend against indiscriminately following hundreds or thousands of accounts without having a look first. To learn how you can avoid falling victim to a phishing scam or if you have other questions about keeping your Twitter account secure, please read Keeping Your Account Secure at our help site.

For regular status updates on related issues. please follow @safety and @spam. There is also a Twitter status blog that we update regularly. For a lot more information about Phishing, check out this article on Wikipedia.

Trailrunner7 writes "SQL injection has become perhaps the most widely used technique for compromising Web applications, thanks to both its relative simplicity and high success rate. It's not often that outsiders get a look at the way these attacks work, but a well-known researcher is providing just that. Rafal Los showed a skeptical group of executives just how quickly he could compromise one of their sites using SQL injection, and in the process found that the site had already been hacked and was serving the Zeus Trojan to visitors." Los's original blog post has more and better illustrations, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.