SeaWaves Blog

One of the most overlooked aspects of creating an online project is the information architecture. By this, we just mean the way information is categorized and organized on a website.

The larger a website is meant to be, the more critical it is to get information architecture right. Otherwise, changes that don’t lend themselves to the original structure will take days, weeks, maybe even months to re-organize. The use of tags or other semantic indicators can be very helpful in matching together related information.

One site that we’re working to develop right now is called College Crunch. This site is meant to be a comprehensive guide to college planning and college life. Because there are so many possibilities with the broad topic of “college” our biggest challenge has been choosing a limited set of top level categories to organize all the content under.

What we’ve chosen to do is break the site into 9 categories that we feel encompass almost all possible college topics:

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The holy grail of advertising and marketing these days is to utilize the influence of the blogosphere. One method is to use social media to gain influence on key distribution points.

But if social media isn’t conducive to the message that you are trying to market, you may need to turn to more traditional advertising. So how do you advertise on blogs without wasting money?

At the end of the day, the key is to identify your goals and then do a careful cost/benefit analysis.

If your goal is to brand a new product or service, then you should use a popular blog advertising service like BlogAds sidebar ads or PerformancingAds 125×125 blog ads. There are three things you need to consider when purchasing an ad on one of these sites:

1. Location of the ad on the site

It does you very little good to have an ad that’s hidden, out of view, at the bottom of the blog. You want the ad to be front and center, as much as possible. For sidebar ads, this means the ad should be visible when first loading the site.

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There are probably billions of blogs on the Internet. There are probably only about 100,000 or so blogs that are coherent. Of the coherent blogs, there are probably only about 10,000 that are interesting. And of the interesting blogs there are probably only about 1,000 that get read by a core group of 3,000+ committed readers on any given day.

At SeaWaves we refer to these 1,000 or so blogs as key distribution points. Your goal with blog advertising and marketing should be to find a way to get your message heard at distribution points and let the natural dynamics of the web go from there.

Let me explain a bit.

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At SeaWaves, we specialize in search engine placement. We manage over 50 websites and this gives us a fine-grained and diversified picture of how the search engines organize search listings.

One thing we’ve noticed over the last year is that static websites are at a disadvantage. Over the past few years, search engines have added elements to their algorithms that often prefer fresh data. Or, at the very least, the search algorithms of today tend to prefer domains that provide a steady stream of new content.

At SeaWaves, we tried an experiment by setting up a series of static, informative websites called Guru Guides. For example, we created a guide to online colleges. When we first put this content up, it did quite well in the search engines. And it continued to do well for about 9 months. But then, search referrals started to fade significantly.

There’s a rule on the web that most search professionals now recognize: the websites you work on and develop are the ones that will succeed.

If you are a website owner, keep this in mind. Don’t just let your website sit and go stale. Add to it on a monthly basis, at minimum.

We’ve recently hired several employees at SeaWaves, and perhaps the single biggest differentiating factor has been the resume that was sent. When we are sifting through job applicants, we are looking for cream of the crop applicants. Normally, we only hire candidates who “wow” us with their previous work.

When you are putting together a resume, you should think to yourself “How can I stand out? How can I make myself look so perfect for the job that the employer has no choice but to hire me?”

In our opinion, that’s the most important question to think about while putting together your resume.

Check out this article for some great resume writing tips.

Amazon has one of the most effective affiliate systems on the planet. Much of their success is due to the fact that they make it very easy to create individual product links. With many employees who need to create Amazon Affiliate links without associate ID, we were looking for a quick and easy way to generate links.

Here’s a simple tool we found for creating Amazon links easily.

SeaWaves was instrumental in developing a new social news site called Glamorati. Our concept with Glamorati was to develop a brand that simultaneously represented the average person’s A) love of celebrity culture and B) hatred of celebrity culture. In other words, “the Glamorati” stands for “common people who enjoy tracking the lives of celebrities, but enjoy mocking them too.”

As a social news site, Glamorati allows users to register and submit snarky (hopefully better than the original) headlines with links to their favorite stories. What sets Glamorati apart from the masses of social media sites on the internet is the emphasis on snarky celebrity headlines and the fact that user submissions are all vetted by editors, with the hopes of maintaining a high level of quality.

In addition to the main page, Glamorati is complimented by a celebrity news blog called News from the Glamorati.

SeaWaves is pleased to announce that we’ve hired Dan Stein as a fulltime edtor for The Dog Guide.

Our over-riding philosophy as an online web publisher is to enable smart and passionate people to building resources about what they love. Dan has been working with dogs in professional environments for many years, and he has a wealth of wisdom to share with us. We’re excited about his plans for taking The Dog Guide to the next level.

The Dog Guide is a premier dog information site that provides detailed tips and suggestions for finding and raising dogs.

SeaWaves is partnering with several high profile individuals online to test out the Advertising and Marketing niche in it’s latest project called AdSavvy. The basic idea behind AdSavvy is to analyze print and tv commercial ads and help identify the keys to creating ads that work.

The hope with AdSavvy is to create a smart but interesting center of advertising and marketing philosophy and to leverage this into high-profile consulting opportunities.

SeaWaves has launched a group microblog called Thrive which covers news in popular culture. As the web moves increasingly towards headline oriented information, microblogging is where everything is happening these days. Just check out Twitter.

Does your business want a Twitter presence? Or do you want to set up your own private microblog for brainstorming? SeaWaves can help. Contact us today.