Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 16 years 11 months 16 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
I’m at the Seattle SMX Advanced Show, and last night Microsoft hosted a welcome party. They fed us all the Coconut Shrimp we could eat, along with Spring Rolls, Shrimp Stuffed Filo dough pastries, and an assorted selection of flatbreads, cheeses and fruits.
There were servers walking around with trays of the appetizers, and there were three separate bars with no lines, all serving complementary beer, wine, and cocktails. Nice!
There were also cocktails being served by people walking around that were served in martini glasses. I thought it was pretty hilarious that they chose to color them blue. What would you call a blue cocktail served by Microsoft? Well the server called it a cosmopolitan, but most of us called them BSOD’s for Blue Screen of Death.
I got to spend some quality time talking search with a couple of very clever people, one a huge affiliate marketer (my passion) about a new trend, and from another guy (who must have drank plenty of BSOD’s), I learned a “secret strategy” that I had to promise not to blog about (sorry). That’s all I can say, because I promised, but that’s why I love to come to these shows, and if you’re a client of mine, watch for more inbound links headed your way.
Robert Wright (Mr. Web Guru) told me about some new software he’s developing, and Todd Mintz and I talked for almost 10 minutes with Bruce Clay, as he extolled on the virtues of “siloing” your webpages.
I didn’t have much to offer the conversation with Bruce, because it wasn’t until I got back to my computer that I figured out that “siloing” and “theming” are basically the same thing. (Sometimes it’s embarrassing what I don’t know!)
Now that I know what the heck he was talking about, I agree wholeheartedly, and see why he’s such a proponent of this strategy. I do engage in that practice wherever possible, and it’s really just common sense.
Theming and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) are becoming what the search engines are all about – that and links;) – and will be even more important in the future, as the AI of the spiders gets better. Learn it, know it, and apply it in all sites you work on. A really good explanation of “siloing” is here, in this Search Engine Guide article by Lisa Barone
Today promises to be hugely educational and entertaining, and it’s time to get going before the free donuts are gone…
Thanks, for the blog, Scott.
You almost took me right there with your blog entry.
Cheers.
Great meeting you at SMX.
I think “siloing†and “theming†may be popular, but the AI of the search engines is quickly falling behind the actual human intelligence of the search engines.
I think Google and Yahoo will move away from AI, as they’ve found better ways to score human intelligence and relate it to proper categories. The ad mix they’ve been relying on has been bumped pretty aggressively by the way behavioral targeting has evolved in the past six months, and I expect that Google will especially move in this direction as the ad networks are aggressively targeting Google’s source of income.