Craig Bailey on Microsoft

Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit

Craig Bailey — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:16:24 +0000

If you are interested in knowing a little more about the IIS SEO Toolkit (I give it the big thumbs up), I’ve written a little review over on my XEN SEO blog (note I originally wrote the review based on the beta version, but it has been updated based on the release in mid Jan). Plus, as mentioned in my previous post, I also discussed the SEO Toolkit with Andrew and Michael on Frankly Speaking last week.

And if you are in Sydney tomorrow (Wed 10 Feb), I’ll be presenting on it at the Sydney Windows User Group (here’s the SWUG post with details). Tomorrow will be a big night – its the first SWUG meeting for 2010 and Nick (@aussienick) has some great prizes lined up including a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. He’s also presenting on the latest Entertainment Technology news straight from the horses mouth – Robbie Bach that is – and an update on the latest Microsoft product releases. See you there! You can RSVP for the meeting here.

Frankly Speaking on SEO

Craig Bailey — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:06:40 +0000

A big thank you to Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi for having me on their Frankly Speaking podcast to chat about SEO. You can listen to it here.

Frankly Speaking (for those who aren’t yet familiar with it) is an Australian Tech podcast (or perhaps even an Australian Microsoft podcast) and listening to it should be on your weekly To-Do list.

SEO is a big topic of course so we only scratched the surface, but here’s a summary and links to the various items we touched on:

Danny Sullivan on SEO for Bill Gates – in which Danny reviewed Bill Gates’ new site The Gates Notes and provided a bunch of suggestions for how he could improve his search engine rankings. (By the way, in the podcast I referred to Danny as the grandfather of SEO, I meant to say the grandmaster of SEO )
Bill Gates on Twitter: @BillGates
Search innovation – Google releases 100-120 experiments each quarter
Ranking factors – I recommend this Ranking Factors article from SEOmoz for a full run down of important items to consider, and for simple basics that you can action today take a look at my SEO for bloggers overview.
Plus make sure you read Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF download here)
Ego surfing: Michael Kordahi on Bing, Michael Kordahi on Google and of course: google street view nude
ASP.NET 4.0 improvements for SEO – see Scott Guthrie’s post here
Self hosted WordPress
Topsy – WordPress plug-in for showing Twitter mentions as blog post comments
IIS SEO Toolkit – Recommended for analysing issues on your site and highlighting problems. You may be interested in the full IIS SEO Toolkit review I did over on the XEN SEO site.
To check how many people are searching particular keywords try the Google Keyword tool or the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Excel plug-in (review here)
Google analytics – other analytics tools I use include: Clicky, Chartbeat, ClickTale and Mint (note: Mint is self hosted and requires PHP & MySQL)
Mark Vozzo (on Twitter) <- SEO guru
Building a niche – Copyblogger article
Link building – excellent overview by Aaron Wall (from SEO Book) <- highly recommended
There’s tons of good SEO resources out there (and plenty of noise as well). Here’s a list of the main SEO resources I recommend for getting up to speed.

Have a listen here.

BTW I wanted to apologise for the volume of my voice being low at times. This is due to one of the following reasons (I’ll let you decide which):

I’m really shy and talk softly
I have bad microphone technique and even though Michael spent a while giving me tips at the start and then repeatedly gesturing for me to speak closer to the microphone throughout the interview I kept moving away from it.

In any case, they did a great job boosting up my volume in the final cut. Thanks guys.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, congrats to Christian Longstaff on baby number #2 arriving this week.

Putting the boot in to Microsoft

Craig Bailey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:45:26 +0000

Apparently February is ‘put the boot into Microsoft’ month. I must have missed the memo. Or perhaps it only got sent to the ex-senior-management@microsoft.com mailing list. In any case it’s been good to see that some have taken the directive to heart. Oh hang on, cancel that – there actually hasn’t been much said by former softies at all. Instead it’s just all the noise of journalists (and Microsoft!) reporting on what one or two (and perhaps three) former softies said.

If you haven’t yet written your own second-hand post about the internal woes of working at Microsoft and how they are doomed to failure, you’d better get started. Otherwise people will think you’re behind the times in reporting what Dick Brass in the New York Times outlined as Microsoft’s main ‘problem’: making billions of profit every year from the same products (it’s sooo not cool).

Thankfully we have Mary Jo Foley to sprinkle a little common sense around and Todd Bishop to put it into perspective.

Search as an Experience

Craig Bailey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:10:29 +0000

It’s easy to think of search (ie searching on Google or Bing) as simply a (boring) research activity. And in turn, to think that all the innovation in search is about providing a ‘better’ result. But what does ‘better’ mean when it comes to search?

Joseph Pine’s TED talk on what consumers want is a good insight into how the search game is changing (and hat tip to Michael Gray for the link and thought). Joseph’s talk is from 2004, but his point is relevant now. It’s essentially this: people want an experience. And they want an experience with authenticity.

Consider how the UX and designer communities have grown in the last few years and you’ll have in an insight into how people want to interact with their programs/gadgets/sites… even their line of business (LOB) apps. They want a pleasurable experience. Something that they can relate to.

Why should search be any different? When searching, we want an experience. It’s why Bing added pretty pictures, flyouts and visual search, and why Google is pushing things like personalised search and social search (to name just a few examples – the rate of innovation in the engines is huge). It’s more than just the results. It’s how we relate to the results that matters.

Search market increases in 2009

Craig Bailey — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:39:00 +0000

It should come as no surprise that search engine usage is increasing – but perhaps the rate of increase will (come as a surprise that is). comScore figures released this month show that search usage (note: includes search engines and related properties) increased by 46% in 2009. Google sites were in the order of 58% increase.

That’s significant. How many industries do you know (or work in) that have that kind of increase? Whether you take the numbers as a threat or an opportunity is up to you, but either way you should be acting on them. It’s rare to find a business these days that doesn’t have at least some exposure via the web.

If you are a web developer (or web designer for that matter) SEO should be part of your core skill set (and not left to high priced consultants). Sadly though it tends to get neglected, or even worse, discouraged. On the positive side however, I’m glad to see that SEO questions on stackoverflow.com are increasing, even if some of the answers that get voted up are unhelpful (in my opinion). Part of the problem is that SEO performed on sites is hard to immediately test. If you’ve got a question on javascript you’ll get an answer you can test and know straight away if it solves the problem. But with SEO you’re in the dark for a while until the results start to show (via analytics, rankings, conversions or other metrics). It’s a difficult scenario for analytical types to accept. But with the increased importance of search optimisation (even Bill and Steve are getting it now) it’s a mindset developers need to foster. Start experimenting yourself (here’s some simple seo suggestions) and make a point of learning more (here’s some recommended seo resources).

(via Aaron Wall’s excellent post this morning on Selling Hope to the Hopeless)

Angus McDonald discusses Watir

Coding Kihon

Craig Bailey — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:56:26 +0000

I loved Sara Ford’s thoughts about coding katas. Yes, most coding should really be referred to as coding kihon (as you practice daily), and coding kumite when you’re deep in a project. Nice one. I also enjoyed Steve Andrew’s post on Shotokan Development that Sara linked to.

Oh, and good luck in your new role Sara.

Links: TFS + Git, .NET Performance Testing

Craig Bailey — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:14:17 +0000

Some interesting resources noticed recently.

Richard Banks has a writeup about getting Git and TFS Working Together.

Meanwhile Paul Glavich has a nice 180 page free download about .net performance testing and optimisation. It’s part 1 of a new book he’s writing. Download available here.

Bing Finance and Data

Craig Bailey — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:54:04 +0000

Bing’s new Finance updates are nice. I guess. Here’s a search for ‘msft’ on Bing.

Click on the Investor Data button and you’ll see this:

Yep, that’s a charting error. But let’s assume that little issue will be resolved soon (and it may even be something on my machine – there’s a bit of beta stuff installed I have to admit). Clicking on OK gets us to the details:

A nice layout and links to the relevant analysis I’m interested in. You can click through to more details on MSN Money.

Here’s a comparison with the Google experience:

Clicking through to Google Finance gives this:

The big difference is the charting abilities. You can compare stocks, indexes and timeframes very simply. I much prefer the Google interface.

Finally, though a lament at the lack of localised updates. The Bing shots above are based on me choosing US as the location. Searching as an Australian, here’s all I see:

No Investor data, Yahoo Finance gets the top billing and even the sponsored results are lame.

Angus McDonald on User Stories

Craig Bailey — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:04:00 +0000

I really liked Angus’ recent post on User Stories (Wikipedia link about User Stories here) and how he grapples with question of whether they are even needed. User Stories feature prominently in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 releases, so you’re sure to hear more about them (in the Microsoft space that is).

The value in Angus’ post is how he outlines the issues (and thoughts from a variety of sources) without dividing it into a ponderous project-specific debate. Methodologies and approaches (hello Planning Poker) are usually horses for courses decisions in my experience. They’ll work in some places and not in others – there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. And perhaps even if a methodology fits a project, it may not suit the team in place (ie they might be resistant) – and you end up facing whether to change the methodology for the team or change the team for the project…

Interestingly (for me at least) much of the agile thought process that’s been thrashed out in developer circles over the years has started working well for me in the SEO space. Clients are keen to avoid big ranking/traffic/PPC-spend proposals, and instead work on weekly goals (they’re almost iterations). At one client I even use cards each meeting to nut out the high level goals which we then prioritise, allocate resources budgets to, etc. In fact, if I were looking to write a link-bait story I think something along the lines of ‘7 Tips for writing SEO User Stories’ would have legs

Note: I used to work with Angus at Elcom and whilst I hold his opinion on most things in high regard, when it comes to his thoughts on Avatar he is clearly out of his mind** . Speaking of ex-colleagues, Anthony Milner’s post yesterday on HTML 5 in Google Chrome was fun, and Sam Fu’s blog is always worth a read.

*Image taken from SSW’s User Stories rule.

** UPDATE: Angus has posted his full thoughts on Avatar here, where he goes into 3D, gaming and Project Natal.

Azure in Australia

Craig Bailey — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:07:47 +0000

I’m looking forward to the upcoming Azure launch in Australia, if for no other reason than finally learning what the proper pronunciation is Is it a-zue-er or is it azsh-or ?

Tuesday Feb 23 in Sydney is the official launch. Mark your calendars!

But for added goodness, get along to a user group and hear David Lemphers talk about it non-stop (that’s right he scales!). Andrew Coates has all the Azure User Group details. He’ll be in Sydney on Thursday Feb 25 for a night meeting. Mark that one too.

I’m pretty impressed with the Azure stuff (as you might have guessed from previous ramblings), not only because of the technology, but also the strategic direction it demonstrates Microsoft is pursuing. PHP, Java, MySQL – all welcome here.