Maintaining rank and attracting organic traffic from Google requires constant, continuous work, and there are plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. We all compete for this traffic; getting angry at Google and writing a pissed-off blog post won't change her ranking - stepping up to the plate and competing for the traffic using white-hat SEO, semantic markup, webmaster tools, syndication through social media, etc. is the only way forward. SEO has changed - adapt or die.
Single page sites with scrolling animations and large fonts seem to be all the rage right now. I'm on the fence - this can work, but I agree, it's already become a 2013 web-design cliche.
My thoughts are, your competitors can already scrape your Twitter followers. It's a legitimate concern, but you also can't live in fear of your competitors.
How about a native app for iOS & Android with a big red button that, if they click it and confirm, puts the user immediately on the phone with a suicide prevention counselor.
SEO has evolved however much of the published SEO advice is stuck in the past. People are proclaiming "SEO is dead"... that will only be true the day people stop using search engines to find information, more like "SEO has changed". There's a new SEO in town. What exactly is the new SEO you ask?
Currently this is only a basic SEO auditing tool, mainly on-site factors. I built this last night using PHP & WordPress as my starting point. Going to make this much more sophisticated over time, and the goal is to keep it free. Think of this version as a bare-bones "On-Site SEO Auditor", it's a great starting point for SEO work.
Right now it provides the following checks: Current Pagerank, Website URL, Blacklist Records, Website Speed, Domain Name Rating, Homepage Title Rating, Description Rating, Keywords Rating, Rich Content Rating, Image ALT Tags, Image Titles, Title Headers, Robots.txt File, Inbound Links, Outbound Links, DoFollow Links, NoFollow Links.
I think it's cool that Heroku treats programming as art and a form of craftsmanship. I'm not a Ruby developer, but looks like it was an awesome conference!
A Facebook search engine would be cool, but I don't think it's coming any time soon. I heard someone suggest they could have 20% search engine market share overnight with their 1 billion + users. What do you guys think?