So Google bought MetaWeb a couple of weeks ago. That’s old news in the fast-moving world of tech company acquisitions, but very few commentators have really understood what that means for the future of the web so I wanted to write this post to further the discussion.

What Is FreeBase?

Freebase is MetaWeb’s flagship product and is the central reason for Google’s purchase.

It is often touted as a database of things AKA an entity database and grew out of a project to add semantic data to Wikipedia articles. The result is a beautifully curated database of companies, people and events.

Freebase does provide web pages for its topics, but the real strength of the database is that it provides an RDF representation for each of its topics. This is hugely important for people building linked-data where subjects and objects are links to RDF documents.

FreeBase Has Authority

There’s much more to Freebase than just things - a big part of its database is concepts. Basic concepts like North, Aluminium, House, Kitten etc are also present. These RDF documents are the very foundations of the semantic web - an enormous number of third parties use them to describe their own entities.

So if I want to create some linked data stating that my shoes are white, I would link to Freebase’s representation of white, rather than creating my own.

Similarly, if I wanted to find a set of people who have white shoes, I would start at Freebase’s white node and traverse the link graph searching for white shoes and their owners.

All this means that FreeBase is the Wikipedia of the semantic web:

• It has lots of inbound links
• It does not link out
• It has age and human curated data
• It has authority!

What Does Freebase Mean For Google?

Google just bought a big chunk of the semantic web (relatively cheaply) with only one real competitor - DBpedia. OWL’s sameas method of mapping entity equality pretty much takes care of any competition from DBpedia (from an indexing and linking point-of-view rather than a commercial perspective).

Freebase gives Google an instant foothold into the web of linked data and you better believe Google knows a lot about links!

As more and more web documents get enhanced with semantic markup, Google will be indexing and ranking that data. It is a good bet that the search engine is going to enhance its results using that data. I would put money on a new onebox appearing for select queries and displaying factual data much like Wolfram|Alpha.

I’m also hoping that Google will provide some new APIs that provide very fast graph traversal for all this data.

What Does It Mean For Web Publishers?

The semantic web is heating up and with all this investment from some big players I think we’ll see consumer applications emerge soon. When that happens, the linked data graph will become another SEO battleground.

Web site owners should prepare for that future by publishing linked data about their company, products and services right now (I’ve been advocating semantic search optimisation for a while now).

Build authority for your data by:

• Capitalising on your current domain authority
• Publishing accurate and timely data
• Build links to yourv entities

Some SEOs complain about Google’s love for Wikipedia but unless they start paying attention to the linked data web it will happen again.

Shout out to Chris Lewis - at least one SEO gets it.

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More From Us On The Semantic Web

• Twitter Annotations Are A Big Deal
• User Interfaces For Semantic Search
• 7 Tools For The Semantic Web

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Eric M Martin.

Damon Cortesi (@dacort of Rowfeeder.com and Untitled Startup) was tweeting about the Twitter Annotations Hackfest (I was very jealous that I couldn’t participate):

After my last blog post on Twitter annotations was very well received, I’ve been thinking about how they might be used in practical applications.

Twitter Attachments

One of the immediate parallels to explore is attachments to emails. Multimedia, like MP3 files, video and pictures are obvious and I’m sure that many, many developers are exploring those avenues. Other forms of email attachment offer some less crowded domains to play around in.

Sharing Microsoft Word or Powerpoint documents is pretty redundant over twitter: lots of tweets link to documents (in HTML) so uploading a document to share it has been done to death. Sharing privately via a public-private key exchange would be very useful though and has similarities with attaching your PGP public key to emails (hat-tip to Ed Borasky for the original idea).

Another common use of email attachments is to exchange contact details and it’s a common pattern in twitter backgrounds (like mine). This thinking lead me to tweet an idea:

Rich twitter clients for smart phones could make great use of this, but for desktop or web-based clients we’d need a standard API for contact management.

Commenting Via Twitter

Another interesting application for Twitter annotations would be to allow users to attach a comment to any URI. Just like blog comments, but remember that in the time of the semantic web anything can be identified by a URI.

Many systems like Disqus and Intense Debate already pick out URL mentions from the Twitter public stream but they are treated much like trackbacks rather than adding to the conversation. Twitter clients (and/or blog plugins) could use metadata with technologies like PubSubHubbub or Salmon to tightly integrate with the conversation back into the blog post and twitterers could enhance their comments with tags, star ratings and more.

Just having one hundred and forty characters would severely restrict blog comments though - the average length of non-spam comments on this blog (HTML stripped) is 281 characters. Many are much longer. Mobile friendly blogs and tumblogs are likely to benefit more from Twitter comment integration.

How about the ability to pull up a stream of tweets about a product you’re thinking of buying, identified by its barcode? Or a restaurant you are stood outside? Hotels, movies, travel destinations and more could really benefit from the realtime semantic web.

There are many sites that present this kind of information already (Yelp, TripAdvisor etc) but they don’t offer the realtime element of twitter - nor the social features.

Here is a great presentation by Joshua Shinavier on the power of semantic twitter annotations.

Searching Twitter Annotations

A hugely important step in unleashing the full potential of twitter annotations will be the need for powerful and comprehensive search.

Remember how annotations are specified by namespace, key and value? They need to be searchable on those foields too but in a sensible manner.

Search must be available on namespace alone or namespace, key and value. I cannot think of any practical application of searching on namespace and key (no value), if you can please leave a comment!

Examples of searching on namespace alone are searching for all tweets annotated with RDF, or all tweets with video.

Whilst search against namespace, key and value could return all tweets with reviews of the Twilight Movie or tweets where people checked into a particular restaurant.

There has been no mention from Twitter as to how annotations will be handled in their Search API, but I am confident that it will be available soon after the full launch of annotations. If twitter don’t provide it themselves, rest assured that someone else will step up.

Annotations Are For Humans

One of the really heartening aspects to emerge from the Annotations Hackfest and the developer documentation is that annotations are being used to enhance the user experience - not simply feed hungry bots.

Twitter have recommended that common attributes for annotations might include a title, URL and image. That means they want users to interact with the meta-data and that’s a good thing!

One of the Hackfest projects even put together a "Rich Tweet Format" including Twitter Style Sheets - CSS for tweets. This might be an awful thing - how long before your twitter stream is as ugly as a teenager’s MySpace page? - but it shows how developers are working to create and share standards that bring more functionality to the user.

Facebook have recently got a lot of flak for changes to their default privacy settings, terms of service and strategic partnerships. People (and applications) are moving away from the social networking platform and the list of reasons to do so is quite compelling:

• Ten reasons
• A security leak
• Another security leak
• Their blatant landgrab for the semantic web has annoyed me and others
• Third parties adding apps to your Facebook page

I signed up for a developer account, read the Terms Of Service and played around with the API. I’ve also experimented with advertising on Facebook and after a while it becomes obvious that Facebook’s business model is to rent your data out to those willing to invest time (in developing free applications) or simple cash.

However, I will continue with Facebook and here’s why - my Facebook friends.

Friends: Not Fans, Not Followers, Not Community

The vast majority of my Facebook friends are people that I have met in real life, that I have worked with, been to school with or had a beer with and I want to interact with the way non-geeks do.

The geek in me prefers to share photos via Flickr; cool sites via delicious; status updates on twitter; longer messages via email; music via Last.fm and use a host of other specialised services that blow Facebook applications out of the water.

I’m no big fan of Facebook but my friends are on there and that is why I’ll stay.

Facebook is the lowest common denominator of online sharing and that suits a lot of people - people who struggle to keep their email contacts up to date, or don’t understand upload quotas, or cannot install browser plugins. For those people Facebook just works - we developers must remember that.

I Will Be Keeping An Eye On My Privacy

Whilst all of the information in my Facebook profile is available on other websites, I will keep an active eye on my privacy settings and recommending that everyone disable instant personalisation (howto guide here).

I also block a lot of Facebook applications - I just don’t trust them to follow the terms of service even after Facebook has weakened its data-retention rules. I recommend that others do the same, but I also recognise that many are willing to trade privacy for Bejewelled Blitz, Farmville or Mafia Wars.

Facebook Will Die One Day

Just not today.

Communities are fickle, and Facebook is a behemoth with a lot of traction in the lives of ordiniary people, just like Yahoo was and AOL before it. What is needed to make people move is an alternative that is very obviously better in the eyes of the average user (not just the techies currently pushing towards an open, decentralised replacement).

Remember when Google replaced Alta Vista as the most popular search engine? Heh, maybe not; that was a long time ago in internet-years, but I do. All the geeks shouted about how a new search engine’s results weren’t influenced by advertising, how you couldn’t buy placement, the purity of the algorithm, etc.

When Joe Schmoe visited google.com for the first time, he saw a text box and two buttons - and that was better than the busy portals offered by its rivals. Then he tried it out, and the results were good - better than competing search engines - and so Joe had a new favourite search engine. The algorithm didn’t matter; the revenue model didn’t matter; the user experience did matter.

So, developers should not just make an open Facebook, they must make a better social networking site. One that is obviously much better from the first glance and stays better the more you use it.

Facebook are reacting to user concerns too, but it remains to be seen whether this is just PR, or if there will be a root-and-branch change in the company’s practices. I suspect not, they make money by offering access to your info to advertisers and developers so a new revenue model would be needed.

Are You Deleting Your Facebook Account?

Go you! You’ll be part of a mass movement if you quit on the 31^st May 2010. The instructions are here.

See this screenshot for what to expect (it’s quite sneaky).

Leave a comment and tell me which (if any) other social networks you’ll be using in future, or if you will stay on Facebook, tell me why.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Franco Bouly.

Contents

1. Annotations
2. Namespaces
3. Semantic Web
4. Size matters
5. Consuming
6. Displaying
7. Creating
8. Further Reading
9. Conclusion

Twitter’s Chirp developer conference had two big announcements:

1. They are buying the Tweetie iPhone application
2. The addition of meta data payloads to tweets - called annotations

The first announcement was greated with dismay by many twitter application developers - Oh noes! They is eatin our lunches! - but the more far-sighted commentators focussed on the possibilities that annotations will bring.

Robert Scoble has a great post covering the basics of annotations and twitter themselves are gradually releasing more information as the details get hammered out.

What Is An Annotation?

Simply, an annotation is some extra data that can be associated with each tweet - data that followers might never see.

Each annotation has three fields: a namespace, key and value - and each tweet can have several annotations.

The namespace explains what the annotation describes. It could be a book, a meal, a place or pretty much anything.

The key and value provide data within the context of the namespace - the author of the book, price of the meal, etc.

It will be up to twitter clients to create and display annotations as they see fit. So all those Chirp attendees that moaned about Tweetie becoming the official iPhone app for Twitter should stop worrying about dealing with just 140 characters because Twitter just gave them a huge new sandbox to play in.

Namespaces Are The Key

Namespaces are a means of describing the context of an annotation.

Early indications are that Twitter will allow any text as the namespace value making some people call for a centralised authority for namespace registration. This would be counter-productive for developers and would sacrifice flexibility for consensus as to the meaning of the namespace.

Far better to take a leaf out of the semantic web’s playbook and have the namespace describe itself. Make your namespace a URL that points to an XML document describing the data (keys and values) that can exist within the namespace.

A good example is the FOAF RDF schema at http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/index.rdf.

A big advantage of this approach is that schemas can be extended and combined with ease - and without having to ask permission from a central authority.

Semantic Web Annotations

Much of the semantic web is presented as RDF triples, which can be combined to describe almost anything.

A triple has a subject, predicate and an object. For example:

andymurd checked in at Rundle Mall, Adelaide

gives us:

subject	andymurd
predicate	checked in at
object	Rundle Mall, Adelaide

Each of the subject, predicate and object can be represented as a URI - in the above example, the subject might be http://foursquare.com/user/andymurd.

But twitter will only provide key-value pairs, not triples so we must fit our RDF ontologies into this model:

namespace	http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns
key	subject
value	http://foursquare.com/user/andymurd
key	predicate
value	checked_in_at
key	object
value	http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/en.rundle_mall_adelaide

Many linked data tweeps are justifiably excited about the potential of embedding an RDF payload in tweets, and I think they are right!

Keep It Short

Twitter will be limiting the size of annotations (intially just 512 bytes) so we need to keep our meta-data succinct.

A lot of URLs for RDF ontologies are quite long, as they include versioning information, so I expect that many developers will make use of URL shorteners for annotations too.

It is also likely that standard will emerge to abstract meta-data into an external document in order to overcome the size limitations. Some kind of "See Also..." for annotations. This would also allow editing of annotations (something which Twitter doesn’t plan to provide) but will also introduce security implications for application developers.

Consuming Annotations

Semantic data is produced for machines - typically search engine indexers or graph query tools, and now we can add twitter bots and clients to that list.

Open, discoverable standards are important for communication between these consumers and RDF has a broad base of support. Google already does a good job of indexing RDF and microformats and using the data to enhance its ten blue links with relevant information about product reviews, document authors and more. I really want to see that integrated with their realtime search results.

Yahoo technologies like YQL and BOSS can facilitate search mashups that make use of RDF too. Hopefully we’ll see some twitter SearchMonkey plugins shortly after annotations are released.

Twitter adds more data into the mix - tweets have authors, timestamps, replies, locations - as this excellent tweet infographic shows. One issue for data consumers to tackle is to decide whether these are relevant to the annotation.

Displaying Annotations

We’re about to enter an era of much richer twitter clients. They will be capable of displaying video, photos, maps, playing mp3s and much more.

Developers will need to consider which annotation namespaces are deserving of being displayed to their users. Certainly some equivalent of the media RSS standard would be a prime candidate.

Other namespaces will gain authority as de facto standards with developer support and we should be looking to existing web meta-data formats to predict which will be implemented in twitter clients first. Microformats like hCard and hReview are an obvious first choice but new ontologies will be created to exploit the real-time nature of twitter.

How about a standard for location based services (Gowalla, FourSquare, BrightKite, et al)?

Pluggable twitter clients (like Seesmic) will become more common and a supplemental developer eco-system will emerge for third party plug-ins that manipulate annotations. Maybe we will eventually see a standard for twitter client plug-ins.

I would like to see web-based twitter clients (maybe even twitter.com) publishing RDFa (HTML & RDF mixed together) where the annotations are appropriate. It would also be great to see semantic data mixed into Google’s realtime search results.

Of course, spammers will try to exploit any security loopholes in a twitter client’s annotation handling, so annotations published on the web will need to be sanitised like any other user generated content.

Creating Annotations

A very big job for twitter application developers will be building user interfaces to create annotation data. The semantic web is lacking a simple UI that makes it easy for everyone to create linkable data.

I don’t believe it is practical to automatically derive accurate semantic data from just 140 characters of free text that makes a typical (manually created) tweet. However, many websites integrate with twitter already (@andymurd favorited a video on YouTube etc.) and they will be well-placed to automatically add annotations to tweets. Also RDF/SPARQL equivalents of twitterfeed and tweetmeme will emerge.

My hope is that application developers will rise to the challenge of providing simple user interfaces that allow everyone to easily create linked data and share it through twitter. All the semantic web authoring tools I’ve tried have been complex, unwieldy things that need in-depth technical knowledge to use effectively.

I think that the twitter developer community can change all that by focussing on the user experience.

Further Reading

Lots of people have been discussing the potential of annotations:

There’s a Google Group with some good ideas.

There are also quite a few blog posts:

• Doug Petkanics talks about sharing an API virally
• Matthew Markus argues for a walled garden of namespaces
• Venturebeat comes up with some ideas
• Marshall Kirkpatrick came up with a thoughtful post

Several initiatives have attempted to utilise twitter messages for transmitting semantic data. Every twitter user is aware of hashtags but interested readers should also check out what RoboCrunch, SemanticTwitter and TwitterFormats have been up to.

Conclusion

These are exciting times for twitter developers and semantic web proponents but there will be some big challenges ahead:

• How do we promote open, extensible namespaces?
• How are spammers likely to exploit annotations?
• How can we get users to love, create and use annotations?
• We’ll need an icon to indicate that a tweet has annotations!

All these challenges must be solved whilst remembering that twitter is a tool for humans. We must add value through annotations, value that makes people want to use the new breed of rich twitter clients that leverage this technolgy.

These problems are not beyond us and I believe that twitter could provide the impetus to make the semantic web a part of our daily lives.

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Creative Commons licensed photos by Shira Golding and MiriamBJDolls.

How would you like a big spike in Flickr traffic to one of your pictures, like this:

It’s easy - just tag your photos with star trek like Alex did with this photo.

Sigh... sometimes the internet just conforms to stereotypes.

If you have photos of more than chicks in Star Trek costumes, then DoshDosh’s 2007 article on traffic building via Flickr is still one of the best out there.

When Damon Cortesi announced the Rowfeeder application a while back, my interest was piqued. I’d been meaning to try out a One Forty application and Rowfeeder looked like something I could make good use of.

OneForty is a directory of twitter applications that allows developers to receive donations or charge for their hard work - kind of like Apple’s App Store for the iPhone.

Rowfeeder is an app that will dump the results of a twitter search into a Google Spreadsheet over a period of 48 hours. It provides a bit more information than the standard Twitter Search API as it includes the number of friends and followers for each tweeter. It would pretty straightforward to hack together a script that does this but since it only costs USD $2.49, I would say that writing your own is a waste of time.

The OneForty Experience

I signed up to oneforty.com and immediately purchased a search for wine as I know there are a good many wine drinkers and wineries that use twitter on a regular basis.

As usual, I created a new email address for the sign up, as I like to track where spam comes from and who sells their email lists. This turned out to be a mistake as the Google Spreadsheet was being shared with this new address, so I quickly created a new Google Account for it.

Payment was painless, with Paypal being used to collect your money.

Rowfeeder started working almost immediately and I could watch the spreadsheet being populated as it was working. After the forty-eight hours were up, I had about 41,000 rows in the document.

The Results

As advertised, I had a spreadsheet with a couple of days worth of tweets mentioning the word "wine". One issue is that the timestamp of each tweet does not contain a timezone indicator (I hate that) but @dacort told me that they are PST. I exported the Google spreadsheet to a CSV file and used it to test a term extractor that I have been working on.

It turned out that my massive investment of $2.49 was well worth it - the data showed up a couple of nasty bugs in my code. With the bugs fixed, I can add another unit test to my suite.

There is some bad news which has nothing to do with Rowfeeder - a lot of twitter is just crap. Those of us with carefully curated streams of interesting people will be surprised at the gibberish that people tweet.

Ummmm, what?

Any developers hoping to leverage the firehose to extract anything meaningful are going to need to build some kind of idiot filter.

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Like this? You might also like these great posts:

• Into Digg and Twitter?
• Twitter Domain Names
• Cool Twitter Map

When South Australia’s Country ire Service started to provide an RSS feed of incidents last week, I (along with many other SA geeks) immediately thought:

Map Mashup!

So, slightly hungover after a great New Year’s Eve celebration, I fired up Yahoo Pipes and set to.

It was a pretty straightforward task - strip the suburb name out of the feed title, append "South Australia" to help the location builder module and grab the output as KML. You can see the pipe here so feel free to make a copy and mess around with it.

Here is the finished map (RSS readers will need to click through to the story to view it)

Read the full text of this article...

I try to keep my political views out of this blog but with recent news that the Australian Government is to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level, I must add my voice to those that are crying out against this massive reduction of freedom of speech.

If you haven’t heard about the Australian Labour Party’s plans, they involve forcing all ISPs to implement a Chinese-style great firewall that will prevent access to domains and URLs that are listed on a secret list.

NoCleanFeed Elsewhere

A great deal of discussion has centred around this issue and I won’t go into why censorship is bad or why the plan is doomed to failure. Instead here are a bunch of links discussing (well, attacking) the Communications Minister’s position far more eloquently than I can:

• Cory Doctorow, on BoingBoing.net - Great Firewall of Australia will nationally block sites appearing on a secret, unaccountable list
• Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr - Australia Confirms Censorship Plans, Tells Fibs On The Filtering Trial
• Slashdot Geeks discuss the issue
• Even the Australian Government’s own report suggests that the filter can be easly bypassed

For more up-to-date commentary, see the No Clean Feed site from Electronic Frontiers Australia or even see the #nocleanfeed hashtag on twitter.

NoCleanFeed Censored Twitter

I’ve made a (admitedly frivolous) twitter toy to raise some awareness of this issue, that shows the #nocleanfeed twitter stream and Kevin Rudd’s tweets with random words blacked out - unless they contain some swearing.

I hope you enjoy it and it provokes some discussion, so please RT!

The NoCleanFeed Twitter Toy is here.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Tarale.

If you want your web pages to create a buzz on social media, you need to make it easy for your visitors to submit your posts to their favourite social bookmarking sites. Adding some buttons at the bottom of each post is a great way to help your readers and give them a visual reminder to submit your content.

This is a list of icons representing social bookmarking sites that are free to use. Some are distributed under the terms of one of the Creative Commons licenses or other, similar, conditions so be sure to check the terms of the license and attribute the author where necessary:

Matte Blue And White Square Icons by Icons-Etc

Number of icons:	108
Link:	http://icons.mysitemyway.com/gallery/post/matte-blue-and-white-square-icons-social-media-logos/
License:	Free to use

Sweet Social Media Icons by Custom Icon Design

Number of icons:	35
Link:	http://www.customicondesign.com/free-icon/35-sweet-social-media-icons/
License:	Free for non-commercial use

Socialize Icons by DryIcons

Number of icons:	12
Link:	http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/socialize-icons-set/ & http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/socialize-part-2-icons-set
License:	Free with linkback

Circular Social Media Icons by Blog Perfume

Number of icons:	27
Link:	http://www.blogperfume.com/new-27-circular-social-media-icons-in-3-sizes/
License:	Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Social.me by jwloh

Number of icons:	30
Link:	http://jwloh.deviantart.com/art/Social-me-90694011
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Social Media Mini Icons by Koko Media

Number of icons:	30
Link:	http://www.komodomedia.com/blog/2008/12/social-media-mini-iconpack/
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Free Social Media Icons by WeFunction

Number of icons:	14
Link:	http://wefunction.com/2009/05/free-social-icons-app-icons/
License:	Free, with linkback

Social and Web Icons by Iconspedia

Number of icons:	57
Link:	http://www.iconspedia.com/pack/social-and-web-2282/
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

Social Icons #4 by Tydlinka

Number of icons:	16
Link:	http://tydlinka.deviantart.com/art/Set-of-social-icons-no-4-110796162
License:	Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

Pixel Perfect Social Media Icons by PsdTuts

Number of icons:	27
Link:	http://psd.tutsplus.com/freebies/icons/81-pixel-perfect-social-media-icons/
License:	Free for personal and commercial work, no attribution required

Polaroid Social Media Icons by WebToolkit4.me

Number of icons:	16
Link:	http://webtoolkit4.me/2009/03/17/polaroid-icon-set/
License:	Free for personal and commercial work, not for resale

Bevel Dark by Tutorial9

Number of icons:	10
Link:	http://www.tutorial9.net/resources/free-icon-pack-bevel-dark-social-icons/
License:	Free for personal and commercial work, not for resale

Pretty much all of these icons sets have made it into my delicious bookmarks so you can always join my network to keep abreast of any new finds that I make.

I hope I have correctly attributed the original authors (it can be a bit tricky with all the icon aggregators around). If you think I’ve made a mistake, then please leave a comment or contact me directly. Oh and, by the way, see those little social bookmarking icons at the bottom of this post? Please use them, thanks :-)

A while ago, Glenn Murray (aka DivineWrite) put out a call on Twitter looking for people to review his latest ebook, SEO Secrets.

Despite being hugely sceptical about the whole ebook genre (too many scammers charging for misleading or out of date information in that space, IMHO) I volunteered because I know that Glenn’s previous work is of a high quality and, as I follow him on delicious, I know he’s been doing a lot of very diligent research.

First Impressions

On downloading the PDF and opening my review copy for the first time I was struck by how nicely designed and well laid-out the book is. The title page matches the design of his website and the typography is unusally readable for a PDF. On to the coontents page to what topics it covers and... JEEZ! IT’S HUGE!. One hundred and ninety-nine pages long!

Sure, the layout uses plenty of whitespace and Glenn’s attention to detail means that he included a three-page introduction, glossary, bibliography and index but 199 pages makes for a long ebook.

The First Few Chapters

SEO is a very broad subject and Glenn has attempted to cover a lot of it. Experienced SEOs won’t gain any insight into cutting edge techniques or shady greyhat practices - this is a book for bloggers and web designers wanting to get to grips with the basics of search engine optimisation.

The first chapter explains what SEO means (I said it was for beginners) and why you would want to be aware of good practices in the art. After that, the next chapter covers keyword research and contains a number of good examples, often culled from divinewrite.com itself.

Glenn’s On-Page SEO Advice

Chapter three is a meaty one at thirty-four pages and covers the technical aspects of SEO, such as canonical URLs, duplicate content, semantic HTML and so on.

Everything presented here is solid, sensible advice - my experience is that if you follow these pointers, you’ll rank for keywords that aren’t too competitive. Glenn backs up his instructions with lots of links and examples making the book is all the more readable for it, if you want to dig deeper into a particular issue he provides some good pages to keep reading on the web.

Configuring Wordpress For SEO

The fourth chapter covers Glenn’s recipe for optimising a self-hosted Wordpress install and, again, it is good advice. I think, however, that this is the section of the book that will age fastest.

Wordpress is continually releasing new versions and its ecosystem of third-party plugins and themes is enormous. I think it is worth looking at the advice in the book and hunting around (or thinking laterally) for other ways to acheive similar ends. If every Wordpress blog installed the list of plugins in SEO Secrets, there would be no competitive advantage.

Chapter 5 - Submit Your Site(Map)

Nop surprises here: Glenn recommends submitting a sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing’s webmaster tools and to their Local Business Centres, where appropriate.

He also mentions the two remaining directories that have any search engine love - Yahoo and DMOZ. I personally don’t think that Yahoo directory is worth $200 per year, but your mileage may vary.

Create Great Content and Optimise It

This is DivineWrite’s core expertise - copywriting for SEO - and it shows in the next couple of chapters.

He starts with the oft repeated premise of create great content and people will link to it and then discusses in detail the types of posts that can act as linkbait (taking the 20 post types from Problogger’s book).

The next chapter builds on the keyword research from chapter one and discusses techniques to ensure that your articles are packed with good keywords whilst still keeping your text readable and feeling natural. This is good stuff, and something that I need to practice. I particularly like the use of wordclouds to illustrate keyword density.

After writing and optimising your content, the book then gives some pointers on creating a buzz around it with social media and some (very whitehat) linkbuilding strategies. I am not going to go into the details of the rest of the book - suffice to say it covers the full range of SEO basics.

Conclusion

I would recommend this ebook to those starting out in SEO. It is well-researched and informatively written and provides excellent value for money at $39.97 (USD). I know that Glenn put a lot of work into its production and it shows - this is not the typical twenty page, cut-and-paste ebook rip off.

If you are starting your first blog then a resource like this book will save you a lot of time trying to sift through misinformation and rubbish. The techniques presented here will work and provide a great foundation to your SEO campaign.

Want to get the download? Well, here it is.

If you want to check out the quality of Glenn’s work before you buy, here is his presentation on Content Creation For Search Engines: