Welcome to the November 2008 issue of ZooNews, from professional Web site design company Zoonini Web Services. Don't hesitate to let me know what you think about this issue, or share ideas for future topics.

It's been a while since I've talked about search-engine optimization, but a good opportunity has arisen to discuss it again. Last week, Google came out with a 22-page Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide PDF that explains the basics in a clear, non-jargony way. (If you don't want to download it now, we've also added it to Zoonini.com's SEO Resources section.)

Using an easy-to-follow fictitious example of an online baseball-card store, Google illustrates the importance of elements like unique page titles, writing good anchor text (text used to link to other pages in a site or to external sites) and promoting your site in as many non-spammy ways as possible.

It's very gratifying to see Google confirm what my SEO partner A.C. Riley and I are always emphasizing, which is that quality content should always come first:

"Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it."

Google says the guide is aimed at "webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines," but I think it's also of value to business owners who'd like to understand better what goes into SEO. While it does not cover every single aspect of SEO, nor does it reveal some magic formula that will guarantee a #1 ranking in Google, this is a valuable guide for beginners who would like to understand some of the key factors that go into helping sites rank well in search-engine results.

Ever flipped through images at Flickr or another photo-sharing service and come across the phrase "Some Rights Reserved" instead of the usual "All Rights Reserved"? In this digital era, when it's so easy to take another's work, some creators have chosen to explicitly allow others to freely use their works under certain circumstances by giving it a Creative Commons (CC) license, instead of a traditional copyright.

How does this work? A musician, for example, may let her MP3 songs be used without payment, as long as a credit is provided. CBC's technology show Spark incorporates Creative Commons music into its radio program and provides a verbal credit at the end of each episode as well as a mention in their blog. As Spark explains, using CC audio tracks makes the creation of a weekly podcast less complicated and expensive in terms of music rights.

As an author, you may want to consider allowing reprinting some of your articles on other folks' Web sites, if a credit with a link back to your own site is offered. In addition to giving you some free publicity, the incoming link will give your site some "link love" – i.e. help with search-engine optimization, often making this scenario a win-win, as long as the site that's linking to yours is non-spammy and relevant to your industry.

In the visual realm, a photographer may allow some of his images to be used with attribution and a link back to their Flickr page. In fact, my brother recently was surprised to stumble on his photo of Bubby's Pie Co. prominently featured on a travel site. In this case, even though the site was theoretically abiding by the terms of the CC license, it would have been a nice courtesy to notify the photographer that his photo was being used.

A Creative Commons license isn't necessarily carte blanche to do whatever you want with a creative piece. Some rights are often reserved by the creator, such as permission to produce derivative works; if that's the case, forget about selling T-shirts with that cool CC image you found on Flickr. If you find a CC work you'd like to use, first be sure to check the license terms carefully to make sure the creator authorizes your intended use.

Interested in finding out more? Check out the Creative Commons hub for their "free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry" or read more about CC at Wikipedia.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

I'm proud to announce the remake of Box of Crayons, Michael Bungay Stanier's Great Work headquarters. The site is tied into a WordPress content-management system, allowing Box of Crayons to update the site's text and images through an intuitive Web-based interface, without risking damage to the site structure or functionality. The Great Work blog also benefits from WordPress's many blogging features and plug-ins. In designing the site, we tried to abide by Box of Crayons' creative brief, which specified that the site should be "on the edge of corporate not in the heart of corporate." With its colourful but not-too-whimsical look-and-feel, we hope we have achieved just that.

Just over a month ago I finally joined Twitter, a micro-blogging service I wrote about in a recent issue of ZooNews. (Find me on Twitter here.) I signed up mainly to follow the progress of Emru Townsend, an old friend of my husband's who was diagnosed with leukemia last December. Over the last year, he and his remarkable sister Tamu used a variety of social media – including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr – to raise awareness about the need for stem-cell donors, particularly from minority ethnic communities, in order to fight a range of unforgiving diseases. Against all odds, Emru found a donor match last spring, but despite a bone-marrow transplant in September, his cancer did not go into remission and Emru passed away last week. In honour of Emru's legacy, I am passing on the word about stem cell and bone marrow donation, as I marvel at the good for which social media can be used.

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner