It’s 4:30 on Friday afternoon… about to close out a beautiful week of weather here in Winnipeg. Except that it’s pouring rain right now. I suppose we were due. Too bad though, I was hoping to try out my new roller blades this afternoon.
I’m posting on a new blog – The Tipping Glass. It’s a fun place of random posts with a few bursts of pure inspiration. Go check it out.
Another place I’m blogging regularly is at the Canada’s Web Shop Blog. No real surprise there since I’m the Director of Online Marketing.
It was a bit odd at first to go from traveling somewhere almost every weekend to not going anywhere in three months. I admit, it’s been nice, but I’m feeling the itch to get out out of Winnipeg lately!
Good thing it’s almost June. I’m attending back to back conferences next week. From June 2-3, it’s Search Marketing Expo Advanced in Seattle and from June 8-9, it’s Search Engine Strategies in Toronto.
I’ve done the whole “I know I’ve been busy but I’m sure I’ll post more” thing, but it’s time to be honest!
Two months ago, I joined Canada’s Web Shop as the Director of Online Marketing. And it’s fantastic! I feel like I’m in a place that’s a great fit and working with clients is a fresh change from working in-house.
Part of my role is contributing regularly to both the blog and email newsletter for the Web Shop. On top of that, I’m also guest blogging biweekly over at Search Engine Journal.
Google Profiles are a new and, in my opinion, underused resource. Perhaps you didn’t like it because of the unfriendly URL, but you can now get your very own vanity URL with your Google username.
Example: http://www.google.com/profiles/lyndseo
And wait! What’s that? Adding links? And these links are crawlable?
Google Profile lets you add links with whatever anchor text you decide – and as of right now there is no rel=nofollow attached to those links. They do give you some guidances – “Examples: Online photo albums, social network profiles, personal websites” – as a fallback, I would assume, for those who may will try to manipulate it.
Well, I wasn’t able to make it down to PubCon, so unfortunately I’m not speaking.
But at this morning’s keynote by Matt Cutts, he announced a nifty new feature – Google Friend Connect API. It allows for user IDs to be centralized – letting a user login with his/her Google, Yahoo, AOL usernames and more.
I’ve installed it along with @jdevalk’s fancy plugin.
So if you want to test it out, why not log in and leave a comment?
In just a few weeks, I’ll be speaking on two panels at PubCon South – Career Gut Check (SEO/SEM Career Landscape) and SEO Design and Information Architecture.
For the Search Engine Optimization Site Design and Search Engine Optimization Deployment – Information Architecture panel (whew that’s a long name), I will be speaking on a few specific subjects:
- Using CSS for Effective SEO
- Page Structure: DIVs vs. Tables
- WordPress Design
- Using Analytics for SEO Design
So – tell me what you’d be interested in hearing more about. Even if you can’t make it down to Austin next month, I’ll be sure to talk about it more here when I get back.
Today at SMX West, the three big search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) announced a new tag to help reduce duplicate content on the web.
This new tool is called the “canonical tag”. If you’ve spent some time learning about SEO before, I’m sure you’re familiar with the term. Canonical refers to a page that has more than one URL. For example, the www and non-www versions of your web site are considered different sites. Google has had a tool through Webmaster Tools for some time to help with this, but the announcement of this new tag comes from all three search engines meaning that they *should* all obey it.
A lot has happened since my last post on December 31, 2008. Most notably, I am no longer working for WestJet Airlines.
I have decided to move back to Winnipeg where my husband and I have family. It’s been a tough adjustment for us in Calgary. We gave it two years, but never really felt settled.
Right now, I’m trying to figure out what that means for me. Either:
A) I look for employment as an in-house SEO
B) I look for employment at an agency
C) I take on clients independently through Lyndseo
We’re sitting at the Calgary airport waiting to board our flight to Winnipeg where we’ll spend New Years Eve and the next few days with our friends and family there.
Since I’m just sitting here not really doing anything overly important, I figured I would blog. But I really don’t have anything to blog about at this point in time – at least nothing that doesn’t require turning my brain on to full-strength and come up with something profound or exciting.
Twitter and brand name squatting
Twitter is finally starting to get some serious recognition as a legitimate social networking tool for companies big and small. And well it should. I’ve been preaching the greatness of Twitter for sometime now, even though I myself have only been an active user for just under a year.
Realizing the positive impact that Twitter can have on a company’s online visibility, I decided that I would start an account for WestJet. When I went to register the account, I wasn’t really surprised to see that @westjet was already taken – WestJet is a major brand here in Canada. Unfortunately, I had yet to hear about any other companies having success reclaiming their brands, and so I contented myself with the account @westjet_sales and went on with my project.
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