Viewmark sponsors Denver's Performing Arts Project

Viewmark announced today that it has inked an agreement to support Denver's Performing Arts Project with knowledge, technical expertise and financial support. The plan provides a roadmap for upcoming Colorado productions and/or touring shows to use Viewmark resources. We are confident that our commitment to Colorado and the Performing Arts Project will make Denver a better place to live.

Viewmark staff near Fairplay Colorado

Viewmark Update

It's been over 30 years since I founded Viewmark. We were one of the first web design firms in the country and were on the ground floor of an exciting new industry. It's hard to imagine a time when you could visit all the new websites of the month, I remember Bill Gates saying the web was just a passing fad. One year, Viewmark won gold, silver and bronze for web design at the Colorado BMA gold key awards. We built the eCommerce system for Baby Einstein (now Disney), the ticketing engine for Central City Opera and the CMS for so many more.

Right before the millennium, we won "best education site" on the web with HP, we received an International EMMA award and I met Tim Berners-Lee at the MOMA awards ceremony in San Francisco. It really has been quite a ride and I really have enjoyed every minute of it. Life has lots of twists and turns and you never know when an opportunity like that will present itself; in any case, over the last year I've been able to wind the company down and position it more as an organization dedicated to supporting the performing arts in retirement. Here's to the next chapter, cheers and happy new years to come!

Celebrating 20 years of Pubcon!

This year we're celebrating 20 years of Pubcon. Seems like it was just yesterday we were in London. Now 20 years later, we're all gathered to talk about search engine marketing and optimization in Las Vegas for a simple one day affair at a downtown Pub on Fremont street. Congrats all!

Joe Laratro, Brett Tabke, Dana Todd, Glenn Alsup (Pubcon Keynote) 2006

Glenn Alsup Pubcon Super Session 2006

Hosting Milestone with AWS

We've maintained a rack of servers at Viawest (now Flexential) and formerly RMI (Rocky Mountain Internet) for 25 years. So it was quite nostalgic to breakdown our cabinet and move all our servers to storage and recycling. Over the last few months we've moved all our customers to the AWS platform. We even have a physical server in Frankfurt for our German customers. We have no regrets with Viawest, they were a good company, but the Amazon cloud was just a better fit for us moving forward.

With international SEO, a little goes a long way.

I have been fortunate to have traveled internationally rather extensively in my life. Early in my career I worked for a very small company that was acquired by a very large one. At the time, there was no such thing as video conferencing or the internet and we (the product marketing staff) were asked to visit a lot of different areas in the world to discuss 3D modeling technologies.

It’s ironic because the intensive traveling actually inspired me to start Viewmark. It was just a coincidence that new digital delivery platforms emerged, like CDs and the internet, that helped solve the intrinsic burdens associated with global product marketing. In essence, the new digital communication mechanisms allowed anyone to “have their cake and eat it too” by making it easier to sustain professional relationships around the globe without sacrificing significant time with family and friends.

Still, I can tell you from personal experience that there can be a lot of value in immersing yourself in a foreign country. Any American who has worked in Europe for an extended period of time will tell you that making an effort to speak the language of the country you are in goes a long way, but I readily admit that many of the responses to my attempts came back in English.

This reminded me of an experience I had in Sweden many years ago. It was in the late 80s and I was on one of those whirlwind marketing tours of Europe. I arrived in Stockholm after a long week on the road and decided to take a quick swim. The solarium was on the top floor of the hotel and when I entered I found that everyone was swimming naked. This is not commonplace in the States, but I said to myself, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”. After taking a short swim, I settled near the entrance, then several Americans walked in. Stunned with my appearance, they ask me, in English, if there was a sauna in the area. All I remember was responding with the only words I knew at that moment “Krona, Krona, Krona”.

In some ways international search works the same way. We have found that regional search engines like, Baidu, Naver, Yandex, etc. favor results for web pages where the titles and descriptions can be easily deciphered in the native language of the search engine and the major search engines have country specific sites where the results focus on links that are written in the country’s main language.

There are published reports that show the US percentage of global search traffic at 22% and if we add ~11% for countries around the globe that use English as their first language (UK, Australia, Canada, etc.), we can surmise that only one third of the world uses English when searching on the internet. Note: This is not to say that only one third of internet users will read English content. We feel this is significantly higher.

When a user arrives on your web site you can easily detect their language preference. Translation firms use spreadsheets or APIs to integrate content into their systems for localization and the costs for doing so are relatively low. At the same time, content management systems give you the ability to seamlessly provide the localized content on your web site.

International SEO is not one size fits all, but a little can go a long way! We have seen double-digit percentage increases in a company’s overall search volume by simply localizing page titles, meta descriptions and message bundles. The question to ask is: How global is your company and how well are you prepared to leverage the international search opportunities that are currently available?

VIP – Are you part of the link paparazzi?

It can be fun to draw analogies between the real world and cyberspace. For most people, the acronym VIP means “Very Important Person”. The media, and especially the tabloids, focus a lot of time and effort on following their every move. We all seem to get in on the act; for example, when someone knows a VIP there always seems to be a tendency to name-drop them whenever possible.

In cyberspace, I think of VIP as “Very Important Page” and the analogy to a very important person can be made in an eerily similar way, but keep in mind, search engines don’t understand human traits like infatuation. Traditional advertising concepts like “celebrity sponsorship” are not familiar to search engines and don’t really work very well.

I’m glad search engines don’t seem to get “star struck” like humans and try to concentrate on web pages from topic authorities instead of the celebrity sites. It makes the search engine optimization (SEO) process a little bit more predictable. However, many web site owners and search engine marketing (SEM) firms still seek out web pages with high page rank (PR) in an attempt to get a link placed to their web site from them.

This reminded me of a time in my life when I was required to travel coast-to-coast a few times a month on business because our New York 3D graphics firm had been acquired by an engineering software company in Los Angeles. Well, I quickly became an American Airlines Advantage Gold Member and was upgraded to first class on just about every flight I took. As a result, I flew with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Richards, Whitney Houston, Andy Williams, and Frank Gifford to name a few.

My colleagues were all excited about it since they got to hear a lot of interesting stories about the celebrities, but for me it was just too much time away from family and friends. Interestingly, search engines would have probably considered my Hollywood anecdotes valuable information if my business was celebrity gossip, but they certainly would not have indexed them in relation to engineering software design.

There are many instances where a link from a specific type of web site can quickly move your rankings higher in the major search engines, Sites like Wikipedia, Academic and Professional Associations deliver much higher value than any celebrity site ever could. Search engines pay very close attention to how sites link to you and how you link to them.

So this brings me back to the VIP analogy. Of course it is important to have links from sites with high PR value, but I believe it is more important to concentrate on links that are from authority web sites from within your vertical industry or community. Soliciting a link just because it is located on a web site with a high PR value is like grabbing a camera, jumping on a motorcycle and joining the link paparazzi.

One picture is worth a thousand words, but a video subtitle is worth a thousand pictures.

Many years ago I worked for MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) in Elmsford, NY. The company was a pioneer in computer generated imagery and 3D modeling technology. In 1966 they started developing software based on the concept of tracing radiation from its source to its surroundings. Eventually, the software was adapted for use in computer generated imaging by tracing light instead of radiation, making it one of the first systems to implement the concept of ray tracing.

The software was a solids modeling system, in that the geometry was a series of solid primitives (boxes, cylinders, extrusions, etc.) along with combinatorial (Boolean) operations. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing made it a powerful system for generating high quality images like those seen in the movie “Tron”. The graphics and engineering application side of MAGI, called MAGI/SynthaVision was started in 1972 and finally sold to Lockheed in 1985 to be integrated with CADAM.

At the time, CADAM was one of the most widely used CAD/CAM systems on the planet, but considered by most to be just a computer aided drafting system. I remember traveling around the world speaking on the subject of solids modeling. I often used the expression “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a solids model is worth a thousand pictures” since we could make an infinite number of pictures from a single 3D model.

I did a little research on the saying and found that Fred R. Barnard originally created it when he coined the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words.” Printers’ Ink, 8 December 1921, p. 96.  He changed it to “One picture is worth a thousand words” in Printers’ Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114, and called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously.”  It was immediately credited to Confucius.

This got me thinking about how search engines have a hard time building context from web videos. Unfortunately, spiders can’t watch a web video and extract the relevant information like humans can. Metadata can provide an overview, but is fairly limited in size. Well, this lead me to the video subtitle and the possibility of using an XML document to feed the subtitle to the video, as well as the search engine.

There are several methods for identifying spiders visiting your website. Once you’ve identified your visitor as a spider crawling for keywords and phases, you can replace the video on the page with the exact “word-for-word” account contained in your video subtitles. Clearly, you would NOT want to abuse this technique since search engines have been known to verify user agent delivery implementations and there are a variety of tools to view your website as the search engines do to validate your results.

This method seems to be particularly powerful for localized content since video subtitles are commonplace in foreign countries, but you’ll want to translate your page title and Meta description too. The cost to translate a video script usually comes out to be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.35 per word so providing the context of your video in multiple languages is very reasonable today.

So this brings me back to the old saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. I wondered if Mr. Barnard were alive today if he would agree with me to reprint it for Internet users as “One picture is worth a thousand words, but a video subtitle is worth a thousand pictures”.