If you tried to visit Wikipedia or Reddit on January 18th, you may have been surprised to find the sites blacked out. Additionally, you may have noticed Google with a broad black censor across its logo. These were acts of protest against the unconstitutional SOPA & PIPA bills.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its senate-based counterpart Protect IP Act (PIPA) were two bills under deliberation on Capitol Hill. The alleged goal of these bills was to prevent the theft of intellectual property (music, movies, TV shows, and other content) from unofficial websites.
However, these bills would usher in several consequences including a breakdown of Internet security and privacy, as well as government censorship. If SOPA and PIPA had gone into effect, it would allow corporations to shut down competitor websites by simply writing a letter. This violates both our first amendment rights to free speech and is on the verge of infringing many anti-trust practices.
Before the protest, SOPA and PIPA had strong support in both the house and senate, and all across the entertainment industry. It was expected these bills would pass without even the slightest hiccup. But in one week, SOPA and PIPA lost a vast majority of it’s support, all because of Internet Marketing.
How was the SOPA/PIPA protest so effective? The campaign was largely spearheaded by Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and a few other Internet giants, who didn’t just explain why we should oppose SOPA, but they asked us to do something about it. Craigslist posted a large banner ad that lead to a fact page. On this fact page there was a link to OpenCongress.org which provided you with a pre-written letter that could be sent with just a simple click of the mouse to your district’s representatives and senators to oppose the bill.
Millions of people got on board with this campaign. Eighteen senators withdrew support for PIPA and the house decided to table SOPA for now. This serves as an inspirational example to us Internet marketers, to help us reach our target audience and get our message out. By using a strong call-to-action within our marketing materials and making it as easy as possible for recipients to perform those actions, you can have an effective campaign to stop a bill in congress, or just promote your business.
Archive for the ‘Ethical Search Engine Optimization’ Category
How SEO Stopped SOPA & PIPA
Monday, January 23rd, 2012Is Your Website Mobile Optimized?
Friday, December 16th, 2011It’s no surprise that a large majority of Internet users these days are using mobile devices, such as smartphones and personal tablets. Because mobile browsing operates on limited hardware when compared with its related desktop counterparts, a mobile website must be designed with much simpler features in mind. For this purpose, you should optimize your mobile site in a similar yet separate way from the desktop version. You’ll still be including keywords, headlines and other standard text techniques, but you’re building a site strictly for mobile devices.
Exclude Flash from your mobile web design. Some high-end phone models may be equipped to handle Flash while browsing the Internet, but many will not. If a user navigates to your site and gets the annoying “Sorry, you need to have Adobe Flash to view this content,” he or she quickly becomes disinterested and continues on with the search. When search engine bots crawl your website for relevance on mobile SERPs, Flash deters any notoriety your site may have had. You shouldn’t forfeit the information before users have a chance to even use it.
Build a simple code with 100% validated XHTML 1.0 code. Your mobile website needs to be bold yet painfully easy to operate. Aside from tablets, mobile browsing usually offers limited visual space for users when compared with desktop computers. Valid XHTML code will be highly visible to mobile search engines, giving you the results you deserve every time. Likewise, a complicated CSS will clutter and confuse your human readers.
Submit your mobile website to Google or Yahoo! for instant spidering and indexing. That’s right, the top search engines have made your life a bit easier. After a recent Google report indicated that 1 in every 7 web users were using a mobile device, search engine giants have focused their attention on duplicating that same magic in desktop search engine algorithms for mobile users.
A Site Re-Design Can Help Boost Your Site’s Traffic
Monday, November 21st, 2011Optimizing a website is certainly nothing new for online businesses, and more bloggers and tech journalists are incorporating keywords and relevant topics into savvy content aimed to generate buzz. But web optimization doesn’t end nor begin with key phrases, inbound links and other tricks, it actually begins with your website’s design. Is it visually appealing to your visitors, and will it work well with
search engines to provide as much information as possible? There are some strategies you shouldn’t live without, while other designs are doing nothing for your website.
Keep your website simple and easy to use. Advertisements are fine, but they should never block any content or become the center of attention in a website. Your services and features are the most important sections of your website, and it’s what brings people back for more. With that said, splash pages (intros, loading screens) and Flash have got to go. Because your home page rests at the top of
your website’s page hierarchy, it is usually the address with the most inbound links. When search engine bots scour for relevant sites, your splash page will offer little to no information about your page. Likewise, Flash doesn’t help your website’s appearance to search engines. As mobile use on the web continues to increase, Flash becomes invisible to many users, as well.
Design your site with a common theme. Attract your visitors and engage interaction with something they will want to regularly use. If you need some guidance in creating simple yet effective web design, use a blogging service such as Blogger or Wordpress. Headlines and body copy are your best sources for search engine text crawling, as these bots cannot pick up text embedded in background images.
Blogging services also let you develop site-wide font themes, include metadata for search engine communications and manage pages and posts more easily than any other sites.
