The phrase triangle of trust was first coined by the famous (and to some, infamous) Frank Kern. For those that don’t know, Frank got in fairly early to the whole Internet thing, but thanks to the boneheaded actions of someone he had zero control over, got noticed by the FTC. When I say got noticed, what I really mean is that they showed up at his door and basically demanded that he give them literally every single penny and valuable possession he had, or else they were going to arrest him for running a pyramid scheme. Now most people would have given up. Instead, ol’ Frank went on to crea…

The press release from Planetary Resources includes an impressive list of investors and advisors. In addition to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film maker James Cameron (of Avatar fame) is involved; so is Ross Perot, Jr., son of the former presidential candidate and chairman of The Perot Group. Peter H. Diamandis, one of the leading lights behind the Ansari X-Prize competition encouraging non-governmental space flight, is also part of this venture. So is Eric Anderson, an aerospace engineer and philanthropist long involved in a variety of efforts encouraging commercial spaceflight, including th…

The press release from Planetary Resources includes an impressive list of investors and advisors. In addition to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film maker James Cameron (of Avatar fame) is involved; so is Ross Perot, Jr., son of the former presidential candidate and chairman of The Perot Group. Peter H. Diamandis, one of the leading lights behind the Ansari X-Prize competition encouraging non-governmental space flight, is also part of this venture. So is Eric Anderson, an aerospace engineer and philanthropist long involved in a variety of efforts encouraging commercial spaceflight, including th…

Trond Lyngbo wrote a long and thought-provoking piece for Search Engine Land on this very topic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about their clients and their online reputation. If you worked as an SEO back in the early days of the field, of course, you can almost predict what’s coming – which only makes his points ring all the truer. If you didn’t, come with me on a short trip back in time. Before Google came on the scene, getting to the top of a search engine ranking often involved keyword stuffing and other practices considered shady or frowned upon today. Google introduced th…

Trond Lyngbo wrote a long and thought-provoking piece for Search Engine Land on this very topic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about their clients and their online reputation. If you worked as an SEO back in the early days of the field, of course, you can almost predict what’s coming – which only makes his points ring all the truer. If you didn’t, come with me on a short trip back in time. Before Google came on the scene, getting to the top of a search engine ranking often involved keyword stuffing and other practices considered shady or frowned upon today. Google introduced th…

By Blekko’s own analytics, the number of unique IPs it saw went from 1.58 million in December to 5.33 million as of the beginning of this week. Looking at their chart, the biggest spikes seem to have happened between December and January, when the search engine nearly doubled its traffic, and between March and April, when it went from 3.71 million unique visitors to 5.33 million unique visitors so far this month. Matt McGee notes that this represents a 337 percent rise in visitors just in this year – and April isn’t over yet. The year-over-year numbers are similarly impressive. McGee compared…

By Blekko’s own analytics, the number of unique IPs it saw went from 1.58 million in December to 5.33 million as of the beginning of this week. Looking at their chart, the biggest spikes seem to have happened between December and January, when the search engine nearly doubled its traffic, and between March and April, when it went from 3.71 million unique visitors to 5.33 million unique visitors so far this month. Matt McGee notes that this represents a 337 percent rise in visitors just in this year – and April isn’t over yet. The year-over-year numbers are similarly impressive. McGee compared…

Eric Enge discussed these issues with Warren Lee, who manages SEO for Adobe’s web properties. The web software company gets 48 million visits a month to its own websites thanks to Lee’s efforts. In Lee’s opinion, knowing what the most common hurdles to SEO are before starting a project can help prevent problems before they occur. They can also help you plan a winning strategy. The first of these four big challenges, as Lee sees it, is something he calls cross functional alignment. It stems from the fact that large organizations tend to separate their functional parts into silos: marketing, H…

Eric Enge discussed these issues with Warren Lee, who manages SEO for Adobe’s web properties. The web software company gets 48 million visits a month to its own websites thanks to Lee’s efforts. In Lee’s opinion, knowing what the most common hurdles to SEO are before starting a project can help prevent problems before they occur. They can also help you plan a winning strategy. The first of these four big challenges, as Lee sees it, is something he calls cross functional alignment. It stems from the fact that large organizations tend to separate their functional parts into silos: marketing, H…

Angie Schottmuller identified 13 of the top barriers to on-site social media engagement, noting that some were more evident than others. I won’t have room to discuss them all here, but I will cover many of the ones guaranteed to pull a visitor up short. I’ll also talk about the ways you can fix these problems. Let’s start with social sharing buttons. These are the buttons that make it easy for users to post a link to your item in their Facebook feed, Pinterest board, or what have you. The problem here is when you go to extremes, according to Schottmuller: offering your visitor either too few …