Google Eyes by Blue Fountain Media is a plugin for Google’s Chrome web browser that allows users to quickly pull up the Google Cached Text-Only version of nearly any website. This is an excellent way to view a website through Google’s eyes.

One cool use is to quickly and easily check the raw structure and layout of a page and see how well it’s header tags are optimized.

Once installed, a “T” (as in “Text-Only”) icon will appear on the right-hand side of your address bar. To activate Google Eyes, visit the site you want to look up and click the “T” button.

[DOWNLOAD]

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There’s been a lot of speculation about Google Caffeine. When will it launch? What will change? What will happen to my results?

The speculation needs to stop. Caffeine is almost certainly live right now—the next query you type into Google will probably reflect Caffeine’s changes.
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If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that Blue Fountain Media is a leader in web design and development (even Google says so). You probably know that online marketing—including search engine optimization and social media marketing—is the fastest-growing part of the company.

What you might not know is that everyone in the marketing department, from analysts and copywriters to project managers and the department directory, started out as an intern. We’re actively hiring interns for 2010.

Are you ready?

We’re looking for enough skills to contribute from day one, plus the potential to join our team full-time. We have some exciting new projects coming up in 2010, and we’re getting ready to take them on.

If you’re interested, you should have all of the following skills and characteristics:

• An interest in online media and online marketing.
• A blog, Twitter, podcast, Youtube channel—something that shows that you’re active on the Internet.
• Good writing skills (you should be able to inform, convince—and effortlessly sprinkle your prose with high-value keywords).

You should also be able to do at least one of the following:

• Code in HTML.
• Code in PHP.
• Design in Photoshop.
• Create the kind of attention-grabbing content that finds its way to the homepage of Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.

The internship starts in January. Internships typically last for six months, after which they generally lead to a full-time offer. After the first few weeks, we’ll help you specialize in one of the major components of SEO: on-site analysis, link-building, social media, or copywriting. The compensation for this internship is $500 per month, with frequent raises for interns who demonstrate skills.

To apply, send a cover letter, resume, and a writing sample (e.g. a blog post, school essay—anything over 500 words) to careers@bluefountainmedia.com.

At the SMX East Ad Agencies discussion, a few of the panelists have discussed the problems they run into when they scale up SEO, particularly as part of a large company or a complex marketing plan.

Blue Fountain Media has approached the same problem—we work with large, Fortune 500 companies; we work alongside PR companies and ad agencies; and we often work with websites that use legacy software, and companies that face strict regulatory issues. Here’s what we’ve learned about integrating search engine optimization into larger campaigns.

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The BFM team is here at SMX, learning everything from the depths of duplicate content issues to the intricacies of web copywriting. Which is a great reminder that the easy part comes first: any small company can rank on page one for highly targeted searches, by following a few fairly simple steps.

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Three members from the Blue Fountain Media marketing team, Alhan Keser, Zack Sinkler, and Byrne Hobart attended the first day of the annual Search Engine Marketing Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Monday.
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At Blue Fountain Media, we create most of the content on most of the sites we work on. That gives us the ability to choose titles, headers, content, and copy that will bring in search visitors. But many of the largest, most popular sites don’t use this model at all: Yelp, LinkedIn, and Ezinearticles have all been able to rank highly on Google even though their content isn’t controlled by SEOs.

(photo source: Jerry Luk)

Here are some of the techniques they use—the internal linking structure, the user guidelines, and the content aggregation methods they use to rank well even if they don’t know what they’ll rank for.
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(photo source: Nima Badiey)

Mistakes are bound to happen! We all make them – but in life we try to avoid them. Sigmund Freud was once quoted:

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”

But when businesses are hard-pressed for time and money, mistakes are not an option. Even if you are a Fortune 50 company, you may be in greater danger to succumbing to SEO ignorance. Upper-level management may not understand what it is or why it’s even important. Here are five common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

1. Self-centered Marketing

Just because a landing page looks nice and has a lot of content doesn’t mean that it has any relevance. If your homepage is full of your “company”, chances are that relevance for your consumers as well as search engines is lost. Many companies make the mistake of adding too much of themselves on a landing page, without explaining to the user what they do, and how that will help the user. Make content relevant and straight-forward.
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New York clothing store, RAG New York‘s traffic from search engines continues to rise, months after search engine optimization by Blue Fountain Media was performed on the site from April to September 2008.

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(source: kainet)

I recently started re-reading some Chinese philosophy and it got me thinking about link building. I  am a fan of Sun Tzu （孙子）—the Zhou Dynasty author of The Art of War. Even though the book was written over 2,500 years ago, it’s quite relevant to the world we live in today. In fact, one of Sun Tzu’s quotes is directly applicable to link-building!

“Analyzing your competition is much like preparing for battle.”

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