Last week I went to the Refresh San Diego meeting over at Platt College (here in San Diego), a gathering of web developers and search marketers. Bill Bonnefil from Digital Telepathy gave a good presentation of how their company works in terms of their creative process, how they “get stuff done”.

I had the chance to ask Bill a few questions about the future of the web and what the term web 3.0 meant to him. A lot of people laughed when I asked, one guy in the audience even commented:

I think I’ll wait till they fix all the bugs and then go for version 4.0

(thought that was funny). Anyhow, Bill seemed to take the question seriously and started off by giving his idea of what 1.0, 2.0 and then what 3.0 means.

• Web 1.0 was the “one-way” interaction the user had with a web page. You view a web page… and that’s really it, moving onto the next page.
• Web 2.0 is now the “two-way” intereaction a user has with a web site. You view a web page but now you can place content onto the site and see what others are doing, i.e. YouTube, myspace, facebook, ebay, etc. It’s the people that build the site and the communities.
• Web 3.0 is the “two-way” interaction PLUS the site generating or comming up with new information based on past user information it already has already collected. Another way to look at it would be any extra logic or intelligence a web page can “mash up” in terms of, for example, offering suggestions on products other people bought from this site or what to do with your specific current stock portfolio now that you have X amount of dollars saved up… sort of a way for the web site to become “smart” and act more like a human would.

lets just hope web pages don’t start getting too intelligent… I like my artifical intelligence non thretening

I want to illustrate some pretty good results we’ve had with a recent client using pictures from our analytics. Obviously I blurred out the specific data to keep our client’s information safe but you’ll get the general idea from the upward sloping graph.

You’re looking at non-paid keyword searches from October 13th through November 12th, in other words, how many people found the site through keyword searches on the search engines.

Our client site in this example was getting around 5 organic keyword search hits per day before contracting with Best Rank. After about 2 months from our SEO services, traffic began to dramatically increase to around the low 40s in terms of organic keyword hits per day. That’s an 800% increase in site traffic and the campaign is still relatively young.  At this point in the campaign cycle, the site ranks in the top 10 for a lot of it’s terms but only ranks #1 for a few of it’s keywords - just image what kind of traffic it could pull if it ranked #1, 2 or 3  across the board!

If you’re interested in learning more about how we work or to see our specific client examples/results we’re happy to talk over the phone 858 427-0825. Happy SEOing!

I was just checking analytics traffic for my special effects website and came across a startling number: today alone, as of 2:30pm, I’ve had 138 referral visits from lowcarbfriends.com. “What the hell?” I said to myself… I usually have a LOT less referral traffic to that site. It looks as if somebody liked the video I posted on the fat chick losing weight using adobe photoshop (I love that program by the way). I think from this particular incident I’ve learned a few things:

• Interesting/good ideas spread: not only did one person link to my blog site but there were other people commenting about that person’s link, creating more links to my site in the process.
• Obviously, referral traffic (if you can get it) is good. There are many other ways to gain referral traffic, just take a look at Digg or Del.icio.us
• “Filling the gaps” is key: If you want more referral traffic try playing on people’s interests or unfulfilled concerns. In this case, a weight loss support web site linked to my video about losing weight via photoshop. I wasn’t looking to get links from a weight loss site, but naturally people found what I posted and found it interesting. How about reading forums or blog comments and look to see what questions people pose… then fill the gaps with answers in the form of something newsworthy!

So all in all, I give referral traffic a big thumbs up. Thanks guys.