Design Coding by Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper)
March 28, 2008
Leon Atkinson sent me a link to the video for the song Design Coding by Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper AKA Chuck from Pop Labs). It’s an awesome rap song explaining how to code your web pages to obey web standards and increase search engine optimization.
I loved the lyrics:
…Your Photoshop functions then slice that design
Do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
Please don’t use tables even though they work fine
When it come to indexing they give searches a hard time…
Poetic Prophet has a bunch of other videos including Conversion Closing Rap, Paid Search 101 Rap, Social Media Addiction Rap and Link Building 101 Rap. It’s entertaining stuff with solid explanations of online media concepts.
Japanese Advertisers are Abandoning MURLs
March 25, 2008
Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently returned from a trip to Japan and wrote a blog post about the disappearance of printed URLs in Japanese advertising.
In the United States we always stick Marketing URLs (MURLs) in TV and print ads. The idea is that people will see addresses like http://www.widgetco.com/billboard-offer and http://www.widgetco-tv-offer.com on TV or on billboards, remember them, type them in when they get to the computer and advertisers will be able to serve up a custom landing page and track the effectiveness of the off-line advertising campaign. This is usually a waste of time, because most regular people who actually care about the offering are just going to Google whatever information they remember from the ads, bypassing whatever special tracking and landing page the advertisers have set up. It appears that advertisers in Japan are accepting this behavior and starting to put pictures of search boxes with suggested search terms in their ads in place of MURLs. Advertisers can still put technologies in place to serve up a custom landing page and tracking based on the search terms that got them there but it does require your page to have excellent search engine optimization. Otherwise you might be sending people from your off-line ads to a competitor’s web site. This lack of control might make American companies drag their feet on this shift away from MURLs, but I am starting to see it more and more. One of the most memorable examples was this 2006 Leo Burnett, Google “Pontiac” ad.
It’s probably safe to bet that General Motor’s spent a decent amount of money on Google Ad Words and pages about Lyle Lovett’s 1987 album weren’t seeing a lot of search traffic while that TV spot was running .
via BoingBoing
