Learning SEO & Online Marketing - Intermediate

Hows Google Plus and Search Working out?

2012-01-29T15:52:00.000-08:00

I've noticed on a bunch of ads recently that there is a google plus hanging off it. When that happens within the context of a search engine, I guess it's a good thing or at least, nothing that I care about. But, when that happens in a content ad that is on my site, I think it is very confusing and something that I do NOT like.

Check this out, isn't this confusing?

The Google plus sort of floats so that sometimes its hard to tell whether it's about the advertisement or the website. Also, it looks sometimes like you are supposed to click on the G+, not the advertisement.

On another note, when did ads require you to fill in all this info before you could click on them? As a website owner, doesn't it make sense just to ban these?

Translating Classic Sales Process Thinking into Online Sales

2011-11-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

I was trained in classic organizational sales. I have managed international direct sales forces whose bread and butter was modelling and executing on a sales process. I just ran across a beautiful online presentation describing the sales process. This reminded me of where I come from: consultative organizational high value sales

However, I don't operate in that world anymore. I operate in the world of online sales of educational services generally priced so low that there is no profit in a process if it involves any human contact. So I build sales funnels for my sites that somehow tries to translate the process of selling into a few webpages and follower up newsletters. We still operate with the concept that prospects need to be moved several steps from idea to buying and that an attempt to close too quickly will not work out well.

However, I also have spent time learning about the direct marketing and mail world which preaches compressing the hook and the close into such a tight two-step that I have trouble discerning a real sales process. Later, I'll show how our sale funnel, models the process of building rapport, learning about the customer, and then moving them to buy-in to our solution, as steps to having them buy.

gplus

2011-11-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

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Friends don't let friends build bad websites

2011-11-03T09:56:00.001-07:00

I'm going to plug a service just because I think it deserves a plug. I've used it, it's great. And they sent me this marketing this morning that just cracked me up:

Friends don't let friends build bad websites - UserTesting.com

Display of Google Paid Results

2011-10-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

Is it just my imagination or is the advertisement pink box around the advertisements on the top of Google getting increasingly faint so that now, it's almost impossible to discern? Additionally, didn't they use to limit it to two results?

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Compete.com - A little more disclosure please?

2011-10-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

Compete's Table Explaining Data Differences
Where's the point about school and business-based computers?

Compete.com says "Compete's data comes from a statistically representative cross-section of 2 million consumers across the United States." They elaborate on how their data differs from log data but in all of this, I think they side step a really big point. In the case of my site (SpellingCity.com), the reason that they differ from my logs is that most of my traffic comes everyday not from home computers but from computers inside K12 institution. ie Schools. In short, there are three big sectors of our economy:

business and government
education
consumers at home

In the old days, all the computers were in business, government, and educational institutions. Today, however, consumers also have computers at home. But many of these same people leave their homes during the day and go to jobs where usually, they have another computer. These same people do a lot of their shopping and see a lot of ads while they are at work. Schools in particular, have a very large number of computers which get used in many cases over 50% of the time since they are often on carts going from class to class or in a media center with classes filing in and out.

I know that in my case, the reason that Compete's numbers are misleading, the reason that they report less than half of hte full traffic for SpellingCity is that they don't measure the traffic from schools. Should they? I do not know. Should they admit and highlight the fact they are no reporting this data? Absolutely. This table is misleading and misses the biggest reason that at least in my case, local logs don't match what they report.

Googles kills off its losers

2011-10-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

A fall sweep (copied from the googleblog.blogspot.com)

10/14/2011 10:03:00 AM

We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.

Here’s the latest update on what’s happening:

Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won't be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it usingGoogle Takeout.
Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle's social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.

In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.

Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.

SEO Periodic Table of the Elements

2011-10-10T17:51:00.000-07:00

I thought this was silly. Actually hysterical. Its the SearchEngine Land's Periodic Table of the SEO Elements. Speaking of ridiculous inside jokes....
http://searchengineland.com/seotable/download-periodic-table-of-seo

Google Analytics Premium

2011-10-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

This past week, Google introduced Google Analytics Premium. Quoting the little-known industry pundit Brian May,

..."the new premium option is targeted at enterprise clients and the messaging is that there will not be any change to the regular Google Analytics as it stands today and that the Premium version offers advanced features and phone call technical support....This is strictly aimed at companies like Webtrends, Coremetrics, and Omniture to offer the kind of support and guarantees that are necessary for some large enterprises to adopt Google analytics....This could be a way to force existing large volume users to adopt the premium version. When the problem occurred a few months ago, it was because of a switch to “Fast Access Mode” which meant that Google Analytics was taking a sampling of your real data to build reports rather than usual all of the actuals. If they roll this out as default on the non-paid version, there may be a need to switch to the paid version to get consistent reporting.

The cost of Google Analytics Premium is in the $150,000 range which makes it very competitive with the other web analytics software providers.

Here's Google's Announcement.

Paypal Reserves of 20% on a Paypal Merchant Account

2011-10-05T07:09:00.001-07:00

Does anyone have experience with Paypal reserves and getting them removed from your paypal account? I just realized that on one of my paypal merchant accounts (I have two), they are withholding 20% of my money for 90 days!!!!!

Let me start by saying that I'm generally thrilled with Paypal as my merchant account vendor. With a total expense rate of 2.7% and a high level of reliability, they are better than the other vendors that I use to process credit cards. I give them high marks for low cost, high reliability, great technology, and great service.

I've previously had one big frustration with them in that their reporting sucks. I have several product lines being sold (I'm in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenues in a year with the average payment way under $100) and Paypal isn't really able to help us track by product line. Even when we have the payments come in under different emails, they can't sort them out. It turns out the solution is to open a child account. The process was cumbersome, basically, open a new account, get it approved, get it linked to the old one, drop out all the fees, and the child account can ONLY withdraw money up to the parent account. And it's an automatic process which happens nightly. Which would be fine except we have some refunds (we do a money-back offer) and about 4% of our customers take the refund. Paypal does an automatic withdrawal every night but on the days that there are refunds, they try to withdraw too much and it produces all sorts of emergency warnings and failure notes.

Second big problem I just released. My account has reserves. In fact, they hold onto 20% of my funds for 90 days on a rolling basis.

Paypal's rules say this but they don't seem to apply to my case:

[I]Reserves are funds that belong to you but have been set aside. We hold money in reserve just in case you receive payment reversals or chargebacks and your PayPal balance isn't enough to cover them. Reserves are typically applied to merchants who handle:
· large sums of money,
· high dollar items, or
· items in high-risk categories[/I]

Quantcast Marketing Statistics

2011-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

One of my sites is enjoying a particularly strong back-to-school rush. Take a look at these statistics published by Quantcast (which you can view realtime on their site). Notice that:
1. VocabularySpellingCity.com (url is spellingcity.com) is getting over two million people visiting monthly. If you change the pulldown on the top left (you'd have to be on the Quantcast site to do that), you'll see that Spellingcity site is growing past 5 million visits/monthly and has already passed 60M page views monthly. This is big.
2. Quantcast ranks VSC number 692 in the US by number of people visiting. Number one is Google, two is YouTube, three is Facebook, four is Yahoo, five is Ebay, six is MSN, seven is match....and #692 is SpellingCity.com. Does that make us the top K12 educational site? Sadly, Quantcast doesn't rate by industry otherwise, I could give you an answer.

Quantcast SpellingCity.com demographics, 9/28/2011

3. Quantcast also has some data about the demographics of users of the site. (See the second image). Here's my first problem with this data, it misses the point. SpellingCity is mostly used in schools on school computers. This vital piece of info does not show up anywhere in their analysis. I would think that the basic info on a site would distinguish between sites used in offices, homes, schools, and mobile devices but none of that is evident. A second problem with the data is that it's wrong. Mostly,SpellingCity is used by elementary school students but Quantcast says that it is used mostly by kids over age 12.

Lastly, here's some very popular games and resources on VSC:

Common Craft on SEO

2011-09-27T03:35:00.000-07:00

Common Craft makes some of the most simple appealing how-to videos in the world. They're fantastic.

Topsy just alerted me that they had stepped up to explaining how search engines and SEO work. Its a showcase of how to use a simple analogy to illustrate a very complicated concept. Take a look:

http://www.commoncraft.com/video/search-engine-optimization-seo

BTW, I thought this video was good but not necessarily their best. I first discovered Common Craft was I trying to figure out Social Bookmarking, a few years ago:

http://www.commoncraft.com/video/social-bookmarking

And, whenever we do howto videos inhouse, I keep in my the effectiveness of CommonCraft's minimalist approach to explaining things.

Email Marketing - Newsletters & Blasts

2011-09-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to upgrade our marketing team by building a broader team with sharp marketing skills. So today we held a session on newsletters and marketing. The basic idea is that there are lots of great videos and articles about newsletter / email marketing. We can watch them as a group and discuss them.

Here's the few that I found this morning.

Here's the Newsletter marketing principles that I'm collecting for us to think about:

Test and measure results. Be clear about what we want in the results.
Have a methodology to quantify. Estimate the value of a signup (or other action) and an unsubscribe.
Be statistically savvy. There's way too much decisions being made by not nearly enough data.
Relationship. When someone gives us their email address, they've responded to something and a relationship is being started. Build the relationship. Think about our personna. Are we are place for sharp deals? For people interested in education?
Segment and personalize the list. Try to talk to the new members about their issues, the people in Alaska about theres...
Branding. The email is part of our brand. This is sort of like the relationship.
What changes when we are sending out a newsletter which could have a role as part of support and education and an offer/blast trying to clearly sell. How well can these be combined?
Pretty does not mean effective.
The offer and the information should be clear, concise. I often think the main goal is just to maintain some mindshare and show them we care.

Training materials:

Marketing Experiments

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/email-marketing-strategy/the-five-best-ways-to-optimize-email-response.html

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/email-marketing-strategy/the-five-best-ways-to-optimize-email-response-part-3.html

Aweber

https://www.aweber.com/users/video Watch Part One Watch Part Two

http://www.aweber.com/blog/live-webinars

Vertical Response

AUGUST

Subject Line Savvy
Thu, Aug 4, 2011 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM PDT

Blogging For Your Business
Thu, Aug 11, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT

Creating a Successful Email Newsletter
Thu, Aug 18, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT

Create Winning Calls To Action
Fri Aug 19, 2011 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM PDT

Lifecycle Marketing
Thu, Aug 25, 2011 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Social Media Tools: Listening and Engaging
Thu, Aug 25, 2011 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM PDT

SEPTEMBER

Advanced Email Creation
Thu, Sep 8, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT

Starting Out With SEO
Thu, Sep 15, 2011 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Creating a Successful Email Newsletter
Thu, Sep 15, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT

Quick Tips for Effective Email and Social Media Copywriting
Wed, Sep 21, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT

Social Media Tools: Does Your Facebook Measure Up?
Thu Sep 22, 2011 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM PDT

Email Delivery and the Inbox
Wed, Sep 28, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT

Lynda?
Youtube?

Old Email Addresses Remembered by Gmail

2011-09-09T05:37:00.000-07:00

This problem has plagued me for years. The problem is that some of my contacts have switched email addresses (or I once typed in their email erroneously) and the old emails keep popping up in my gmail. I can't seem to remember which is which (old vs new) so I'm constantly having to look it up or risk making mistakes.

This has turned out to be a very sensitive issue in the case of one attorney that I work with who switched firms. But his address at the old firm pops up and I'm worried about sending sensitive stuff to the wrong law firm. And the actual emails are obscure lawfirms names like: ibsolaw.com vs aobtlaw.co (ibsen, broderdick, and ostrich law partners). I have the same problem with our book-keeper.

Solution: Click in Gmail on Contacts. There are three groupings. "my contacts", "most contacted", and "other contacts". I found the problems under other contacts and removed it.

Steve Jobs - I idolize him

2011-09-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

I've never met him and he has had an enormous impact on how I work, how I think, and my ambitions. I was at 3DO when he was NeXt, we shared a cafeteria. I stood next to him in the cafeteria line a number of times. He wasn't real friendly or approachable. I tried not to stare.

I have a small library of big Steve Jobs stories that account for the impact he has had on me. One was shortly after Jobs returned to Apple. It was told to me by a friend name Rick who was one of the supergeeks, independent at the time. He loved the NeXt interface and for his amusement, ported it onto the Mac (or copied it) and started distributing it. One day the phone rings, it's Steve Jobs who wants to know if he would have time to come over to Cupertino to meet him. Steve shows him around Apple, discusses a number of philosophical and technical issues, gets to know Rick, and even shows him (after Rick agrees verbally not to discuss them), some upcoming products. Takes him to lunch in the cafeteria. Long lunch. Introduces him to all sorts of people. Walks him to the car after lunch and asks casually in the parking lot, "Heh, hows that going with your NeXt software clone? Would you stop distributing it, its an awkward situation for us?"

Problem solved. No enemies created. No waste of time with lawyers. Very efficient use of Jobs time overall. I found the vision and savoir-faire in that one story (which might not be dead-accurate), forever inspiring.

Prior to 3DO, I worked at SGI. At SGI, I worked with a software partner called Pixar that had some software for 3D rendering called RenderMan, some artistic ambitions that were only seeing the light of day in their annual Siggraph animation, and some people who were electric to talk to. They radiated vision, know-how, creativity, and work ethic. And patience. George Lucas had ditched these people as too dreamy and too expensive for him to continue supporting. A guy named Steve Jobs thought their vision was worth investing in. Year in and year out.

Steve Job's achievements were no accident, he was a genuine visionary and operator. Although I've never earned an Apple paycheck, I bleed in rainbow colors, I've drunk the cool-aid, I'm a total believer. Who else would use a logo of the forbidden fruit with a bite taken out? Its in front of everyone's face all the time but seems rarely to get much attention. Take a minute to appreciate what a statement and positioning that is! The logo was prophetic of an ongoing revolution. Forget Mao and his Red Book, Steve's revolution is truly ongoing!

Thanks Steve. It's been great. You lit the fire!

Unscrambling the Online Marketing Statistics

2011-08-24T04:05:00.000-07:00

I like the numbers to work out. So I tried this exercise. Here are some real numbers from one of my websites. Any ideas on why this stats don't make sense.

UnScramble
Take the term unscramble.

When you type "Unscramble" into Google, my site is 10th. I'm only looking at organic rankings and traffic in this article).
When I look at my analytics traffic over the last 30 days, I see that I have received 2,072 visitors who arrived using some search term containing the word "unscramble".
When I look at the Google Adwords tool to get a sense of the traffic on this term in the last 30 days, it reports 301,000 searches. So, it appears that I got around 0.7% of the traffic. This makes some sense to me. I'm 10th and get less than 1%....could be true.

Sound-alikes. My site is first or second for this term (Meaning: Same sounding English words but with different meanings and spellings).
Analytics reports 18 visitors whereas Adwords reports 3,600 searches for the past 30 days. So 0.5% came to my site. This does not make sense to me. I'm the first or second term, how come I'm getting less than 1% of the searches.

I think the first example makes some sense but the second one doesn't. I would think that as the first, second, or third in the rankings, a site should harvest between 4-25% of the searches. Unfortunately, I have far more examples where the numbers don't make sense than where they do. Any ideas? Anybody have any experience trying to reconcile different pieces of Google-based data?

One possibility is that that the adwords tool is showing not just the searches but all the impressions that would be created if an advertisement was created to be run against the word Unscramble.

Communication Skills, Comic Strips

2011-08-07T01:08:00.000-07:00

Building a website or a business online is always about communication. I'm often amused how programmers put up wording on sites that makes perfect sense to them but to all the likely users, it's just Greek. Recent examples that I've seen on my sites are when programmers, thinking they are simplifying but helping people find info, put a link to filters. Can non-technical people make any sense of why there is a link to filters?

The cartoon below in in the same vein. It made me laugh. The site that it is from (XKCD.com) says it's OK to use it so long as its properly referenced.

The xkcd site cracks me up. Even the forum topics were witty and dry. http://forums.xkcd.com/
For instance:
Serious Business
For the serious discussion of weighty matters and worldly issues. No off-topic posts allowed
Mathematics
For the discussion of math. Duh.

Google Analytics, Derivatives of my Name, Useless Data!

2011-07-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

Here's my pet peeve about analytics which I wish they would fix. I'm ranting again because I just read that Google has extended Analytics into social media tracking (generally, a great idea!) but have not fixed this basic but important item. Grrrrr.

I like to look at the percent of my traffic that comes from natural search vs say direct. Natural search suggests that they use some keyphrase but then up on my site (bless them).

But over half of the "natural seach" that Google reports is people entering some derivative of my domain name into the search bar as a lazy-mans way of getting to my site. So the data becomes meaningless until I manually massage it.

I'd like Google to help me out here but dedicating a little programming resources to having an automated way that I can select variations of my name and henceforth see them in the direct data, not the natural search area.

While this is not so intellectually exciting as analytics for social media, it would be useful!

Love Hate Google Plus

2011-07-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

I've heard that Google plus is starting off huge so I went thru my emails, found a google plus invite, and joined. I', ten minutes into it and I already love and hate Google Plus. Henceforth known a Gplus.

What do I love? Its about time somebody gave me some control over my information so that I can have one set of messages for my work colleagues, another for my soccer buddies, and a third for my family. This seems so obvious to me but Facebook somehow seems stuck in an everyone-sees-or-nobody-sees mode. Yea Google. Thanks Google.

What do I hate? Its not really that I hate it but the question of how to organize my friends and contacts is non-trival. I started with "current colleagues" and "old colleagues". Then I divide it into "colleagues that I trust" and "work contacts." Now I'm sitting here staring at the possibilities and trying to figure out what to do. So many possibilities, so little experience on whats going to be useful and streamlined...

And now I've found a blog post with some useful suggestions: http://www.virante.com/blog/2011/07/18/four-things-every-google-plus-n/

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Learning Online Marketing

2011-07-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

Two people in one day have asked me for info to get them started on online marketing. One is a training partner at my dojo, the other is one of my engineers who is trying to learn about SEO.

So I thought I'd write up a general response to the question of how someone learns about online marketing so they can start marketing a product. My first reaction is that its a great career move for people to learn about (actually, maybe not for engineers who might do better as programmers than marketers) but for most people, it's a good career area so learning about is seems worthwhile. The flip side is that learning it can take make years and is never fully finished. There's a lot to learn and things keep changing.

Where does one start? One you can read through this blog, take a blog writing course, or otherwise go reading about the web. Locally, you can join groups and go to their meetings listening to the speakers. I did a lot of this for years. There are meetup groups on SEO and online marketing and social media. There is SFIMA and the Interactive Direct Marketing Group and other local groups.

Here's a free ebooks on online marketing. It's a Hubspot marketing piece but as agencies and services go, they are topnotch. (no, they did not pay me to say that although I'd appreciate a little link-love from them).

There are some good newsletters (websites) to read current and back issues such as:
http://www.mequoda.com
http://searchengineland.com
http://www.hubspot.com

What are the areas within online marketing:

SEO - Search engine optimization. The art of trying to get your website to appear in a good position in natual (ie non paid) search results.
PPC - Paid advertising in which you pay for each person who clicks on your advertisement. Google's adsense is the biggest program.
Affiliate Marketing or PPA - Advertising in which you pay per action (usually signup) of the visitors. People offer their programs and the publishers pick which ones to put on their site. Big ones are CJ, Ebay, Amazon, AffiliateFuel, etc.
Sales funnel - A part of a website designed to convert interested visitors into paid customers.
Network marketing - A type of online advertising.
Social media - Learn how Facebook, Twitter, endless forums, Ning Groups, Yahoo groups, blogs, even YouTube, and so one can be marketing tools.
Email/Newsletter Writing and Management
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Optimizer
Web design

One thing that I should mention is that trying to "learn online marketing" is a Heruclean task. I have taken it on since I felt it was key to my career and future but most people prefer to think of their business as soemthing else and just to pay others to do the online marketing. I instead think of marketing as everything I do. Like as they say in the film: "everything is kung fu!" This one of my types of analogies.

Note to self. It would be fun to build a online marketing term game on VSC.

Best Use of Idle Domains?

2011-06-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

What do you think is the best use of idle domains. Lets say for instance that I had a site called TimeForLearning. Does it make sense to get sites like http://www.time4math.com ,http://www.time4reading.com, and http://www.learningtime.com and save them for future diversifications? I would think so. But what should I do with them?
- Park them for cash?
- 301 redirect them?
- Fill them up with blogs and content?
-Leave them idle?

Flash on an iPad: isifter

2011-06-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

I showed everyone in my office a magic trick. I showed them the flash games of spellingcity running on an iPad!

My wife, not the CTO or other geniuses that I work with, figured it out. First, you download isifter from the app store. Then, you load isifter and enter spellingcity.com and you're off and running.

It's a browser with some flash-like player built-in. It only works on the iPad (not the iPhone) and only in landscape mode. While it worked for 14 games, it didn't work on one (LetterFall).

Pretty cool & confusing!

Google Plus One - What do we think?

2011-06-06T07:31:00.001-07:00

I got this email from Google this week:

Hi John,

Thanks for getting back to me. To give you some context, my call was
regarding Google +1, a product which Google launched yesterday. Adding +1
buttons to your pages is a great way to help your content stand out in
Google search. By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your
search results and search ads could show up with +1 annotations more
often, helping users see when your pages are most likely to be useful.
Here are a few important links which can help you:

Start Up Guide: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/
Example Website:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kung_fu_panda_the_kaboom_of_doom/
Technical Background: https://code.google.com/apis/+1button/
More Information:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/06/add-1-to-help-your-site-stand-out.html

All the best with trying out this great feature which will help your
content stand out on Google Search and let me know if you need any help!

Best,

(name removed)

Google Partner Development

1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
Mountain View, CA 94040

Webmaster tools - is it accurate?

2011-05-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

I have been puzzling over the data in webmaster tools and I'm now wondering if the data makes any sense. Here's the case that has me doubting its basic accuracy.

There are a lot of searches on my site's name which is a term that I created. There are dozens of searches on variations of the site name. Here are a few for example from the top ten terms for my site listed in Webmaster tools.

The site is SpellingCity.com. There are searches for:

spellingcity
spelling city
spelling city.com
www.spellingcity.com
etc etc etc

Here's an actual piece of data from Google Webmaster Tools with monthly data regarding the key phrase search query: ""www.spellingcity.com""

Impressions 140,000
Visits 22,000
Click thru rate. 16%
Average position. 3.2

Questions.

1. As far as I can tell, my site is always first on google when you search on "www.spellingcity.com". I'm also 2nd -5th (with different pages from the website). Why would they think that on average I'm around 3rd? Are they averaging all the different pages on my website or just averaging the first time that my website appears for this search?

If people typed my actual URL into the search box, aren't they looking for my site? I mean if someone actually searched on "www.spellingcity.com", I would assume that they are trying to get to my site but are using the search bar instead of the address bar. I assume that they use the searchbox instead of address box is a sort of lazyman's way to not having to typed it accurately or completely.

Here's the questions: Where are the other 84% clicking through to? Did they change their mind and not come to my site? Why? Google has pages from my site as the first five results so I would just assume people would come to my site. Are they saying that 84% didn't go to the first instance of my site?

There is of course the paid search possibility.There are some people placing paid ads next to this search. For instance:

Spelling City Games - Get Spelling City Games | ask.com

Search for Spelling City Games
www.ask.com

Spelling City Games

Search for Spelling City Games
Find out more on Yahoo!

My conclusion: the data is just way wrong or I'm totally misinterpreting it. Or maybe ASK and Yahoo have unlimited budgets to snatch my users on the way into my site.

Any ideas?

John, aka the Confused Mayor of SpellingCity.com

www.yahoo.com

Are they really getting 84% of the clicks of people who put my site's URL into the search box? THAT's ANNOYING. But frankly, I just don't believe it. It just makes no sense to me.

SEO Directories, Honey Pots, & Google - Are they smarter than the local cops?

2011-05-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

I was jsut on a well-trafficked directory where scads of people are talking about how important it is to get listed in directories for seo purposes. It makes no sense to me since directories, created for seo purposes, are probably of NO value. Here's how I think think about.

Wouldn't Google monitor the lists of directories created for SEO purposes and demote the value of their links to zero. Or, if they are asking people to buy links for seo purposes, to actually have them count negative?

Put yourself in the shoes of Google, why wouldn't you maintain a list of directories that only exist for seo purposes and NOT consider those links?

Better yet, create you own directory for seo purposes, keep track of who submits to them, then consider those sites as potentially spammy sites. Your local cops create these honeypots by leaving purses in parked cars with videotapes to catch would-be thieves. Isn't google at least that smart?

Blogging and social media

2011-05-17T03:08:00.000-07:00

When I first started to blog, blogging was the hot social media. The old ones were yahoo groups and forums. Today, the discussion of relationships between social media and blogs could be endlessly long. My point for today is just a simple one about the ease of integrating social media in blogs.

First, adding "gadgets" to blogs has gotten really easy. This blog is done with Blogger, it's just as easy with WordPress: Click Design and you'll get to click to pick a new gadget.

By default, you are in the Basics menu. The social media icons are not today considered basic.

I clicked on Featured and found some more commercial gadgets such as the the Amazon deals. Scroll down and you find two social media selections.

One, the one that i picked for this blog, is a share icon for Facebook and a Tweet This for Twitter.

There was also an "add this" for doing a larger number and trackable implementation of social media. Layal readers will know that I'm a big Add This fan although I think their stats are underwhelming.

That's todays show folks. If I had a blog about blogging I might quote or paraphrase this post there.

del.icio.us

Viral Lift Calculation from Addthis

2011-04-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

I'm unimpressed, or at least confused, by Addthis' analytics. I'm new to Addthis.com and generally, I like the breakdo2wn by service, some of the ability to look at timeframe (why not allow people to pick a specific time period so they can compare March vs February), and the overall presentation.

But the table about effectiveness should, in this user's humble opinion, provide this:

I would think that the columns information that I'd like to get are:
- page impressions of the addthis.com gadget
- number of shares - total or by service
- the percent of shares
- number of click throughs from the shares by other users
- the percent

Instead, there's this viral lift concept which I think is just the last point. I think.
I'll go ask this question on their forum and see what they say....
I've posted it but, I'm not sure that I did the signature right. Probably, I'll be banned now...sigh.
http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Add this.com viral lift

2011-04-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

I've started using addthis.com on VSC and I'mconfused by the concept of viral lift. And i quote:

Viral lift is the percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks. Essentially, viral lift shows you how viral your content is – if your shares are getting a lot of clicks, your viral lift percentage will be high.

The AddThis Analytic’s viral lift feature is a valuable tool in making editorial decisions and tailoring future content. It allows you, as a publisher, to see what shares are sending the most traffic back to your site. If you head into your analytics dashboard, you will see that we flag a page as viral if it’s generating more clicks than shares. Then head into the Content tab, sort by clicks and you can easily see what content is really resonating.

End quote. I'm confused in that I feel that if content has a high share to visit ratio, it's already worth flagging it as having some viral potential. In fact, if people are sharing it, its a GREAT thing. A second question is whether the shares generate cliks. This could be driven by the quality of your page title, image , and meta description which is what shows up on a Facebook share.

Add this!

2011-04-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

When you run a website, there's so much to do. Actually, if you run a website, you can do as little or as much as you want. Let me tell you about my experience running websites. First of all, I don't run them by myself. We are no up to 30 people working on these sites.

There's also so much to do. Our priorities:
1. Customer service. Answer the phones. Well! And find out what issues our users are having and resolve them.
2. Build great new content and services.
3. Maintain our advertising and SEO efforts.
4. Try to be current with all the cool new stuff like social media, social bookmarking etc etc. You'll notice that this blog still pops up some outdated icons at the bottom of each post (I often delete them). I see a blank form, technorati, delicious. We finally, on one of our major sites; VocabularySpellingCity.com, put up an Addthis.com on every page on the site. Addthis give some pretty cool stats and should be easy to update in case Twitter and Facebook don't remain the big dogs. Hard to imagine but then, they just arrived in the last three to four years so we'll see.

So pop over to some of our pages on VocabularySpellingCity and share or tweet the pages, would you? thanks.

Word Lists

Capitonyms - New!
Compound Words
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - New!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum
Possessive Nouns

Sequential Spelling Program

Sound Alike Words
del.icio.us

Facebook like this page, FB like your FB page, Facebook Share

2011-04-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

I think I finally understand this. The icons here are from a typical page on the Time4Learning website: http://www.time4learning.com/education/third_grade.shtml .

The F icon there is a "share this page" icon. It will place on the user's Facebook home page some info about this page from our website. Specifically, it'll put up a user comment, the page meta title, the page metadescription, and an image from the page. This is different than the following two cases:

Facebook Like this page. Many websites have FB likes that have the user "liking" that specific page of the website. If you click on them, you've liked the specific page (or post in this case since we're in a forum).

Facebook Like set up to Like their Facebook Page. This is how the likes are set up on the home page of the Time4Learning website. A person who likes any of the Facebook Like icons on these page becomes a friend of ours on Facebook. It's very different than liking the page. For instance, they get updates on their Facebook page from our Facebook page. Visually, I don't think there's a way to know the different between the two.

Facebook Sharing - What content gets chosen?

2011-04-03T04:07:00.000-07:00

I've just been running some tests about how the Facebook share icon works in terms of what image, title, and message it picks up. I'm pretty sure that when you put a share icon on a webpage, as we've done on so many of the T4L webpages, here's one for example:
http://www.time4learning.com/secular/index.shtml
the share icon picks up the page title, the meta description and the first image on the page. Here's a test:

However, I've been trying to figure out how Facebook picks the image. In this case, it gives the user a choice of 12, all of which can be found on the page. The first one is an odd choice, it's not the first image on the page. It might be the largest. It's not the one that's closest to the top in the center either.

Sign of the Times - Another first

2011-03-23T11:13:00.001-07:00

I needed to sign a document emailed to me and return it. I printed it but I couldn't seem to get my durn HP gadget to scan it into my computer. I finally got frustrated, pulled out my phone, turned on the flash, took a picture of it and emailed it to myself.

Big Google Update

2011-03-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

It's early 2011 and the NYT and other major press have all been abuzz about a major Google search engine algorithm release. "The biggest update in five years!" I've heard.

So with bated breath we keep checking our SERP. So far, nada. No big increase in position (which we had hoped for), no loss of position (which we feared).

I had hoped in the removal of the algorithmic sites which are made for Adsense generating menus and topics by formula and ordering articles for $11, my sites would rise. Sadly, no visible progress and no loss of ground either. It's exciting to have SEO on the front pages but ultimately, a little anticlimatic for me.

Adsense - Trying to Help with Context

2011-01-31T03:17:00.000-08:00

I'm involved in a very large website which runs Google Adsense. I've noticed that on same pages, we don't succeed at getting contextual ads. I'm trying to figure out what to do about this since I think the non-contextual ones earn less (less dollar per click, lower click through rate). OFten, I don't even get an ad served up on these pages.

List page not getting contextual ads!

There are three reasons that I can think of that this"list" page is not getting enough context. Some are easily solved, some are not.

1. The URL is not SEO-friendly. (see A) All the other pages on the site have SEO friendly URLS but on this huge site, 50 million monthly page views and over a million pages or word lists, we designed to manage our resources and did not implement a look up table for SEO friendly URLs. This is unlikely to get solved.

2. The text on the page, especially near the top, does not give much context. In fact, looking at the code, I see:
We're using some sort of standard text for the meta keyword and description. It's probably the same across all one million list pages. It's really long too. The title tag seems to be picking up proper context by providing the grade level, school name, teacher name, city, and state.

I guess that this could be fixed by putting the words: "vocabulary list", "teacher", and "school" into the title tag. And the keyword and description should also be customized for these pages with this data. On the other hand, the page does have the school name and teacher name on it. This is not really less contextual custom text than are found on the other school pages, it's just that the balance is different since these pages have these long word lists which to a search engine, are so much gibberish.

3. The page is marked "do follow, don't index." I wonder if that affects contextual ads?

School Page: Good success with Contextual Ads

In contrast, the teacher and school pages do have more relevant custom text on the page, they have SEO-friendly titles, and they are "do follow, do index". For example, here are examples of teacher and school pages both of which have very nice and appropriate ads.

Another mid-term potential project is to allow teachers, parents, and students to put up more comments on their pages which would ultimately provide more original text (user generated) which would endear us to the search engines.

Or, if I let kids put up too much graffiti, I might get in heap of trouble.

Teacher Page, Getting Contexual Ads!

Am I loser if I'm following more than followed?

2011-01-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

I run a small online education company and so far, I have had one of our teachers (ie a freelancer) manage our Twitter account. I looked at the account this week for the first time in awhile and saw that we had about 650 followers and were following around 900 people.

I feel like we're a loser. We are following more people than are following us. What do you think? Other than the fact that this is a pretty small number by our standards, shouldn't we have attracted more followers than we're following?

getting the hang of social media

2011-01-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

I talked to some people including hearing a talk this week about the tricks of building a community around social media. So I tried a give-away. Cool, in less than 24 hours, 200 comments on Facebook. I think I'm getting the hang of this facebook thing.

SpellingCity comment got 200 comments!

Google Adsense, Burst Ads, Move to DoubleClick

2011-01-04T06:12:00.000-08:00

Does anyone know about any good articles on this topic?

About half of my Google Adsense ads in 300 x 250 box on my site are showing survey ads.

Google Adsense has it's own stream of Burst survey ads with no filtering whatsoever. So these are ads that Burst sold advertisers and which Google places. We have no way of knowing what the ad rates were as Google hides all that from us on a per impression or even a per network source basis.

These network flows and the filtering capability are something new that we have been working with over the past 3 weeks. One of the difficulties is that the previews in Adsense do not accurately reflect the set of running ads. The Burst ad stream was new on January 1 as were a number of other Adsense ad streams. It takes a while to sort these things out, especially with this being a brand new set of functionality and ad flow in Adsense.

Google Adsense is not as easy to optimize as it was one month ago. It is essentially a brand new product in terms of control and optimization. They are moving everyone towards a DoubleClick optimization model and level of complexity.

Forums online

2011-01-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

Forums contnue to boom!

Despite Facebook & Twitter, the useful online forums continue to buzz and be useful for sharing info on a variety of topics. When I have a question, be it on kids education on non-religious homeschooling, the forums are the places that I'll go to to get thoughtful in depth expert discussions.

Facebook has groups and specialized areas but the in depth discussions seem to be on the discussion forums and boards. Twitter too has a lot of volume on many topics but not much depth.

The technology for the forums seems to be moving towards Vbulletin 4 and Ning groups. Php forum and Yahoo groups seems to be in rapid decline as forum hosting technologies.

BTW, I'm involved in managing forums using an array of technologies for the forum discussions, some a lot more successful than others. I have two discussion forums using Vbulletin 4.0, one on Joomla, one using BuddyPress on a WordPress site, and then four different Facebook pages.

Blog Disclosures

2010-12-02T13:33:00.000-08:00

I've been using blogs and bloggers for promotional purposes for half a decade. About four years ago, I adopted a disclosure policy and a year after that, I started urging our collaborators to disclose any relationships. I think its a good healthy trend. I'd like the government to mostly stay out of it and I'd like an educated readership to expect and insist on it from writers they follow.

In case you don't know, I run and founded Time4Learning.

I just read a great review, with a clear disclosure on it which made me smile. Its a Time4Learning review. And I quote:

As I've said before, homeschooling has not come to me as naturally as I'd anticipated.
I had visions of very structured mornings - first we'd do our daily devotions, followed by quiet playing for Brooklyn and Simeon while Lincoln read and practiced his handwriting and I taught Judah how to read. Then we would seamlessly transition into handwriting practice for Judah while I went over math lessons with Lincoln. In the meantime the younger kids would be done playing with blocks and would quietly begin putting together Lego castles....(continued)

I won't spoil the surprise but as you can imagine, homeschool days don't really run like that...Surprise!!!

Learning SEO & Online Marketing - Intermediate: Link Building - Hit on your vendors!

2010-10-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

Learning SEO & Online Marketing - Intermediate: Link Building - Hit on your vendors!

del.icio.us

Link Building - Hit on your vendors!

2010-10-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

One simple way that I can think of to build links is to hit on all my vendors.

If you've done some graphics work for me, before I've even paid your bill, I have sent you an email with a quote endorsing your work and suggested that you post it on your website. And, I've included the link back to me that I want.

My graphics people feel that I'm being helpful to them by providing them credibility to help with their marketing. And I'm getting links.

To like or share, to tweet or to follow?

2010-10-30T05:57:00.001-07:00

I've put together a reasonable social media strategy across my range of sites. I'm now interested in optimizing it.

In places where I put up Facebook icons, I've had to decide whether to ask them to:
- like our facebook account
- like our web page
- share it to their Facebook account

On Twitter, I have to choose between an icon that:
- tweets a suggested message
- follows our tweets

Does anyone have any insight or methodology or case studies on how to compare the benefits or optimize at this level?

Private domain registrations hurt email deliverability

2010-10-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

I read (on The Institute on Social Internet Policy website) but I'm not sure that I believe that:
...one of the first things many email delivery and anti-spam specialists will do when presented with a “is this spam?” situation, is do a WHOIS lookup on the domain - either the sending domain, or the domain being advertised as a link in the email.

And guess what happens if that WHOIS returns nothing but “this domain is privately registered”, with no way to really determine who is behind the domain - with nobody willing to take responsiblity for the domain - nobody saying “if there is a problem, the buck stops here”?

You look like someone with something to hide.

And if you have something to hide - or even look like you have something to hide - your email isn’t going to get delivered. After all, if you aren’t willing to put your name to your business, then why should you expect an ISP to deliver the email from that business.

They won’t, and you shouldn’t.

Private domain registrations. A bad idea for legitimate email sending businesses.

What do you think?

A Book Worth Reading

2010-10-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

I've been told and so I'm making a note of it that this is worth reading:

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

by John Battelle

I'll sample it on my Ipad and see if its worth it.

I know Bob! His business advice is good.

2010-10-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

I just got this email (paraphrased and edited) from Bob Reiss. I met him maybe a decade ago when he gave a talk at a local HBS business group about how he had taken advantage of the Trivial Pursuit craze long ago. It was great stuff.

I've just posted my first two You Tube videos with the hope it'll help a Small Business audience. Check it out!

www.bootstrapping101.com

Blogs, links, and canonical URLs

2010-08-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

If on different articles on a blog, we include links to the same page, is this a total waste of time?

I think of it like this:

If the canonical URL for each article is the name of the article, then each article is a different page. So the additional links might be a little worthwhile.

If the canonical URL for articles is either by tag, month, or the front page, then many of these articles on the same topic are a waste of time.

How does blogger and wordpress treat this? Is it a setting that we have control over?
Matt Cutts, I just watched your video on canonical URLS, you didn't mention how blogs fit into this....

Education: Learning to Write Links that Count!

2010-08-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

Learning to blog has been a fantastic educational experience for me. As a modern form of literature or writing, the blog is a popular media and motivating topic for students learning to write. Public self expression is a very motivating writing prompt that has kicked many students into caring about what they say. Reluctant writers are not born—they’re made. Instead of assuming your child doesn’t like to write, try a little motivation in the form of a good writing prompt. An interesting question that is much discussed is whether writers can be made or not. My answer is that anyone can be taught the mechanics of good writing. It starts with a language rich environment no later than the preschool educational years. The preschool curriculum should primarily be a life style, it's too early for formal education but still, you should make an effort to speak with real sentences and rich vocabulary. Books should be a constant companion.

The preschool years are educationally the most important years of children’s lives. Research demonstrates that in the first three years of life, participating in a lively language-rich environment with plenty of adult interaction and attention are vital to building foundation skills. From ages three to five, the stimulation should start to include some activities focused on building specific skills in language, math and fine muscle control. These are the primary areas where an online preschool program can contribute to children’s development.

The homeschool community is beginning to think more about literature in terms of how they are portrayed. The first directory of homeschool literature has now appeared on the web.

-----------------
This post builds on the materials convered in link mechanics.

The above is an example of a very nice SEO effort.

Each link is to a different website. This avoids the decreasing value of each link. When placing ads or writing articles, avoid wasting links by multiple links to the same website. If you must link several times to the same website:

Put the most important link first
link to different pages each time.

The paragraph includes many keyphrases important to the sites that are linked to. Even the page title (article title) works in terms such as education, learning, and to write which build the perceived relevance of this post to the target sites.
Deep linking. A number of the posts link to content deep in the site. The anchor text is relevant to the targetted page.
Try to quote a bit from the page that you are targetting. This saves a lot of writing time and it appears to be a more natural citation.
Title tags could be added to each of these links.
Efficiency, speed, and effectiveness are important. This lesson both teaches and, at the same time, I squeeze a little juice out of it. This is the standard of effectiveness that we strive towards. Getting the most impact for the least effort.

How many and which social media icons?

2010-07-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a collection of what others are doing:

Squidoo.com- Notice that there is both a fb share and friend.

V7N.com/ forum - Notice that their share list is kept to a small list. The obscure ones are left hidden behind the More button. This way, real users, can find the icons they want without getting discouraged.

T4L Plan - The top level list is good. Arguably, it should also have FB-like but maybe that would interrupt the flow of someone across the site. The More (plus) button takes users to an unrefined list which needs to be refined. The next step in design is to review what it tweets or shares as a message. Is it the same for every page? Does it take the page title? How does it work?

To like or to share, that is the question!

2010-06-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

y big question, can you have a combined facebook/bookmark and facebook/like icon? Are they distinct? As I researched this question, I found this row of icons on a forum....

{Grrr. it's not cutnpasting...take a look:}
http://www.v7n.com/forums/social-network-marketing/196383-facebook-like-vs-bookmark.html#post1425406

Background. Like many, I have littered my sites with little icons or widgets such as the following:
del.icio.us

But, my other sites have other icons related to bookmarking such as:

Another site has a single icon which has everything in like this:

Some others focus on RSS subscriptions:
Subscribe in a reader

Or, we ask you to subscribe as either an email or RSS reader:

Subscribe in a reader

In addition to bookmarking and subscribing, you can friend (now like/facebook) or follow (twitter) or visit (facebook).

You can write your own code or, if you google "facebook twitter icons", you'll get oodles of sites that will provide you icons and generate your code for you. I wonder if their code will on Facebook, both create a link and an icon.
Widgetbox will give you icons and generate the code.

Link Mechanics

2010-06-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick summary of the link quality portion of an internal seminar that we had on SEO.
1. If I put two links from one page to another page, does the second link help at all? NO. NOT AT ALL! The second anchor text and link are totally ignored.
2. Are links from images or links from text more valuable from a SEO perspective? Text links are preferable.
3. Are text links within the body content more valuable then links elsewhere on the page? Links from within the body of a paragraph are considered more likely to be organic references and hence, count more.
4. How many links per paragraph is considered too many? A very rough rule of thumb is that one link per hundred words is optimal.
5. Is a sidebar link superior to a content link? This is really a repeat of question 3 above. In content links are considered the best.
6. Is it better to use a shotgun or a rifle? Of course, what I mean, is it better to target a page by using the exact same anchor text over and over again or to vary it slightly? Slight variations are more natural. So if you are targetting "delicious hot dogs", you might try variations such as "hot dogs","hot delicious dogs","tasty hot dogs","delicious dogs","delicious sausages","yummy frankfurthers". The idea is for it to be natural, not highly organized. I'm betting that Google will start figuring out synonyms soon (ie latent semantics in the jargon of search).
7. Are run of site links valuable? It's hard to tell, they certainly aren't very valuable. On one hand, Google might consider them to be bought and worthless like so many footers. Or, like so many blogs, they might be considered truly natural endorsements.
8. How important is the relevance of one site to another, of one page to another, in terms of the value of the link. VERY Valuable. If you are on a site called homeschool freaks and you link to another page using homeschool freaks as the anchor text and that page is titled homeschool freaks,Google takes that endorsement very seriously.
9. How much more important is a good site from a great site, a PR of 6 over a PR of 3? This is a great mystery but I would guess that each PR (all else being equal) is one order of magnitude more important than the previous level. So, ten links from sites with NO page rank equal the value of a PR of 1. A link from a PR of 5 is ten times more valuable than a link from a PR of 4. Note that I say; "all else being equal" which means relevance, number of outgoing links etc. Also note that I have not seen anybody else even attempt to quantify this which means that they are all wimps.
10. Does a site's organization matter in terms of link quality? Yes, Google likes content sites organized into content areas that it understands. This is a confusing and ambiguous area. Is Google looking at internal link structure or to folders? One one hand, I hear that they discount pages that are far from the root directory by every folder so I try to keep everything close to the root. On the other hand, this simplistic rule makes no sense to me so I don't want to take it too seriously.
11. How can you tell how credible a site is to Google? Easy, search a bunch of relevant terms and see how high in the search engines it is?
12. Is there a simpler way to see how credible a site is? Maybe, try using a link counter and then evaluate the quality and relevance of the links. Also, check out how old it is. And see if the links come from .govs or .edus which probably count more. There are tools for this.
13. Do title tags on text links and alt tags on image links help? What about adding a title tag on an image link? All the tags help, the title tag on the image is a little extreme but maybe worthwhile.
14. What's the best links to focus on? This is really a rehash of much of the above especially the rifle vs shotgun and run of site vs natural questions. The best thing is to have a natural looking mix of links which grow steadily. Growing by 10% in a day or a week is, for established sites, an upward limit. More is weird an merits being looked at. Just keep tryign to get more links of many different types on an ongoing basis focusing on mixing it up and mixing it up. This is the natural pattern of the messy world and shows that the links are natural. LOL!

Tools
majesticseo
yahoo website explorer
Google's wonder wheel
seomoz.org
raven-seo-tools.com

Terms

Trust
edgerank
title tag
alt tag
halo link

Statistics and Online Marketing

2010-05-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

This being my personal blog to ponder the mysteries of online marketing, I'll take it in a different direction. I am testing the market so if you have a reaction, would you please leave a comment? I wrote this email today which reminded me of a set of articles, book, or even online course that I'd like to create. It would be about online marketing and statistics. Here's the excerpt from the email...It was in response to one of my colleagues commenting that she's giving up on predicting what will work in terms of online marketing efforts.

Here's my experience,

I generally feel that for every three or four things that we try, one works.

Then we take the thing that works and try to improve on it or at least do a lot more of it.

And we study the ones that didn't and see what we can learn from them

Then of course, usually whatever worked the first time stops working.

The things that didn't work get tried again and work the second time.

Is it random? Maybe,

My personal theory if that the logic is in the numbers. We are usually working with small numbers so that the statistics are misleading. It's only when we have tens of thousands of examples that patterns become clearer but we're often trying to interpret results based on dozens or hundreds of examples. Which is too small.

BTW, if I ever get to do my own math curriculum, interpreting data and statistics will move from a peripheral issue to a mainstream one. It horrifies me how many people can take differentials (ie do calculus), calculate sines and cotangents (geometry 2), and solve differential and quadratic equations (algebra 1 & 2) but can't answer the basic questions of, "we need a 25% response rate for this effort to be cost-effective, we've sent out a hundred random emails. Ten people responded. Should we keep testing or is it decided?" (BTW, I too am not sure that I know how to answer it).

Canonical URL and Multisite Architectures

2010-04-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

We had our wise and well-informed SEO guru in today and asked many questions about how to construct a few sites that we're planning with many thousands of overlapping pages. He answered our complex question with a single magic phrase. Canonical URLs.

I said huh and he answered with, but I'm not sure that it'll work for multisites. So I googled multisite canonical URLs and learned from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication

you can use the rel="canonical" link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.

del.icio.us

Link Tools Roundup by Search Engine Land

2010-04-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Another Big Roundup of Link Tools

by Debra Mastaler

One of my previous columns here on Link Week showcased a number of tools commonly used in link building. Since that post, a large number of new tools and services have come online, so I thought an update would be helpful. Not all of the sites listed will be traditional linking tools, I’ve also included a number of social media and general informational sites which can be used to find link partners.

Before we move on, the obligatory disclaimer. I have no financial involvement with any of these tools, they are presented as source options only. Some are free, others are not, always read their fine print.

This looks like a great list.It's from Search Engine Land. Thanks!

Standard link building tools

When you hear the term “link building tools”, the type of tools listed below are usually what comes to mind. Most of the tools here are anything but standard, they all come with multiple options (except Yahoo SE) and share one point of commonality… they list out backlink results.

Here’s a handful in alphabetical order:

•Analyze Backlinks

•BackLink Watch

•BuzzStream

•Link Diagnosis

•Light Insight

•Link Manager

•LinkScape

•Majestic SEO

•OpenSite Explorer

•Raven Tools

•SEOBook Tools

•SEO Spyglass

•BackLink Summary

•Who Links To Me

•Yahoo Site Explorer

•Yoast Link Analysis

Using backlink data to create a strategy and determine tactics is important when building links, so find a tool (or three) you’re comfortable with and start checking out who’s linking to whom. Most of the paid tools have free trial offers. Take note of the sites your competitors are linking to and any media mentions they’re getting. Start a database with the journalists you find and include them in future press release submissions.

Non-standard, outside of the box link tools

One of the biggest challenges in link building is finding quality sites to partner with. Competition for link real estate is keen, so be aware of opportunities popping up in your niche. Since you can’t spend 24/7 in research mode, having leads and opportunities sent to you goes a long way in securing good links. Here’s a handful of tools to help identify trends and uncover link potential.

Backtype is a “real-time conversational search engine” which indexes blogs and social media networks. While it’s helpful for finding hot trends/ideas to write about, the real link building juice lies in their Connect and Backtweet services.

Connect is an email alert service which monitors blog comments for keywords while Backtweets searches Twitter for URL’s. Both tools are great for finding sources/enthusiasts talking up your industry. Often, I find links in comments are better resources than those in the feature post! Go after those sources and find a way to secure them as a link partner.

Xmarks is a bookmark sync service with multiple options, but their Smarter Search feature is a great way to find pages being bookmarked in quantity. Why? People tend to bookmark sites with good content which means the source sites have potential to be good link partners. Find out what’s being bookmarked and work to get your link-filled content on those sites.

Over on the Spiced2 blog, there is a great article on How To Check To See If Your Email Has Been Blacklisted. If you send email link requests and aren’t seeing the response rates you’d like, this might be a good one to read.

Two Twitter tools we can’t live without are Twitter Feed, which adds your RSS to Twitter and Facebook automatically and Twilert which tracks specific keywords being used in tweets. When the alerts come back from Twilert, we use the information to look for potential host sites and for quality people to follow. Hopefully, they’ll follow in return which broadens the base of people seeing the links to our blogs and/or other web properties.

Widget marketing is all the rage and with good reason, it’s a great way to take a link campaign viral while building brand and driving traffic. If you’re not a programmer, no worries, sites like Widgetbox and the Widgipedia Forum are around to help. Spend some time there and on StickiWidgets looking at popular widgets and see if you can create something similar for your niche. Once your widget is done and launched, announce it’s creation via press release, to your customer base and on the forums you frequent.

Lastly, check out Dapper.net and Feed For All, both applications create RSS for static pages. Keep in mind you can create a feed for pages on your site as well as link embedded content you’ve placed on other sites. (Think article directories.) Submit the feeds you’ve created to the RSS directories as another way to drive link popularity.

Link building may be hard, but it’s not impossible if you consider the opportunities behind each of these tools. Look beyond the basics and find unique sites to host content and pull links from. Broaden your reach and the links will come.

Google juice question...

2010-04-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

I just got this in an email from a lady who I do a blog with....

"I wanted to ask if you know anything about Google Juice for the blog? I know that both you and John mentioned it before but didn't know if that was something that needed to be set up? I haven't had any experience with it, we didn't use it on my husband's blog."

Woops, I wonder which of my comments confused her....

Unsubscribing and Can-Spam

2010-04-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

Is this compliant?

A company sends me an email. There's no unsubscribe button but it says, "forward this to remove@domainname.com" to unsubscribe. But it doesn't work. Are they compliant or not?

Here's the next level of detail. I have my mail forwarded from one email box to another. If their bot is only reading the "sent from" account, it cannot connect it back to the original email in their database. But if their bot reads the "reply to" or looks at the attached email and who it was sent to, they could remove me from their database. They do neither.

Instead, they send me the basic: "you now need to login to your account or email from the original account message:. Here it is, the name of the company in question, Audible.com, is included:

customer_service@pobox.audible.com

to me

show details 9:16 AM (14 minutes ago)

This is an automated response.

We were unable to locate an audible.com account with the email address provided.

Please choose one of the methods listed below to change your email opt-out status with us:

1. Reply to this email and let us know your full name, Audible username and/or
an alternate email address that may be listed in your account. The email
address in your account should be shown at the bottom of emails that we send
to you.

2. If you can send email from the address listed in your account preferences
(this address should be shown at the bottom of emails that we send to you),
resend your request to remove@audible.com from that address.

3. If you know your audible.com Username and Password, go to
http://www.audible.com/mypreferences to remove the check from "Please
include me in audible.com's email updates."

If you have forgotten your password you can go to
http://www.audible.com/passwordreminder

The New Online Better Business Bureau

2010-03-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who noticed that the BBB, the Better Business Bureau, has just made a dramatic shift in online policy?

Previously, the BBB has a BBBOnline logo that looked good and helped us look credible.

I recently got a call from the BBB that they were obsoleting the old logo and I had to switch to a new one. Oddly, although it's an important trademark and logo, it comes with no guidance on its usage such as whether we can change the size or color to make it work better on the page.

More interesting, I just clicked on it and it turns out that there is an entire review program built into the system. A sort of Angie's-list-or-Ebay-rating&review-the-site program with all sorts of opportunities for competitors to do damage and for people on my side to generate positive reviews. So they are a late-comer to the user-generated content party.

Is this well done? Anybody have experience with it? Do they have any idea what they're doing? I wasn't told anything about this new review system that I was putting a link up to from my website by them but in terms of truth in advertising, it's a pathetic effort. I've noticed that the BBB has cycled through several online programs in the five years that I've been in business. They had a kid safe program and logo and a privacy seal and logo both of which were obsoleted two years ago. When I joined, I had to first join a local group which cost a few hundred dollars just so I could then join the online group which cost another few hundred dollars. Now, that program is being obsoleted for this new one called Trustlink.

The BBB told me it was a different logo, they didn't say that it was a different program with reviews that anyone could post which were now linked to from my site! I'd like to see them off the web since they just don't seem to have any idea how to behave or what to do.

Anyone know a good alternative for online use with decent credibility?Maybe I'll drop them.

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My Online Identity - Windows Live

2010-03-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

I'm following up on my previous post about my online identity by tracking my experience with Windows Live. As background, everytime I have booted my computer for the last few years, the Windows Messenger software has asked to get updated. Until this past week, I've always said no. And in my office computer, everytime I start a Microsoft Windows application, it asks me to participate in Windows Live. In neither case did I have any idea what would happen if I said yes.

This past week, I accepted the Messenger update which was a long update. Near the end, I unchecked a bunch of boxes so that my search engine (Google) would stay the same, my home page would stay the same, and that my computer would not be tracked to help Microsoft for their debugging or marketing. I note that the choices were clear and visible in plain English so no complaints there. There was one pop-up which I dislike both from websites and software installation. This one asked me if I would install some of their software on my computer "as a thank-you." Being very suspicious of such things, I declined.

Urchin vs Googl Analytics: Score One for the Old School

2010-03-03T02:44:00.000-08:00

Query - Name a very useful feature of old Urchin (analytical tool) that newfangled Analytics doesn't do?

Answer - Track downloads.

Urchin was bought by Google a number of years ago and their software was upgraded and repurposed to Analytics which we all use. But many of our hosting companies still provide for free the old Urchin software. Recently, when I wanted to track the PDF downloads from my site, I found that Analytics somehow doesn't have this feature (or I just couldn't find it) so I fired up old Urchin and found how many people had downloaded my handy-dandy ebook, Learning about Homeschooling. It's free, take a gander.

Feng Shui for Websites

2010-03-01T14:56:00.000-08:00

Feng Shui can guide designers, architects, builders, and planners towards a harmony that provides health, peace, and prosperity for the residents and visitors. It is increasingly popular in modern American culture. Great strides are being made to understand the balance with nature and what can be done to protect it or recreate it within our structures.

There is also an art of Feng Shui for designing websites. I have dwelved in the ancient mysteries and science and commissioned some new translations so that I can work with the most traditional principles of the art. Soon, I will reveal and publish:

The Feng Shui Guide to Web Design.

I cannot at this time announce my collaborators but I have had some very significant luck in finding authoritative collaborators. Soon, the net will know a new harmony.

My Online Identity

2010-02-27T14:50:00.000-08:00

It used to be that when I surfed the net, I was anonymous. If I wanted to comment on a forum or blog or group, I could use my name or create a new one. I was an unknown.

I'm now often astonished to be linking at some random website and see that there is a list of recent visitors that includes me. Amazing and scary. I think they do it through my blog catalog identity.In fact, if you look to the right side of this column, you'll see a recent visitors box put there by blogcatalog which tracks visitors.

I also have been amazed to visit some groups on the web and find that I have another persistent identity which has announced me. My Ning ID.

Of course, once we get started on this, I realize that my blogger ID appears everytime I try to comment on a blogger-based blog. On the other hand, I have a number of wordpress blogs and my identity does not seem to travel with me. Does anyone know what Wordpress identity is used around the web? Wordpress.org? .com? Or any wordpress blog that I've installed and it's just a question of activating something.

I'm thinking about this since of course, the big one, is my Facebook and LinkedIn IDs which I've noticed a number of sites asking about recently. Lastly, I just accepted to update my Windows Messenger software (whatever that is) and in the notice, it talked about my Windows Live ID which I think is their effort to be the central internet passport office.

The future sure is going to be fun....

MMO Affiliates - Very Aggressive These Days

2010-02-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

I run the advertising on a very large educational games sites which is a great advertising location. I thought I'd share this correspondence with you. I've removed the names for discretion.

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: "Jonathan ***>
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 11:33am
>> To: spellingcity.com
>> Subject: SpellingCity.com: Business Proposal: Other
>>
>> This is an enquiry e-mail via http://www.spellingcity.com/ from:
>> Jonathan l<jonathan@***.com>
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> My name is Jonathan ....from .....
>>
>> I would like to buy some traffic from your site. I have a very
>> interesting Business Proposal for you.
>>
>> Please contact me back ASAP. I want to close a deal with you.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Kind regards
>> --
>>
>> Jonathan

>> Jonathan,
>>
>> Thanks for your inquiry.
>> You can site-target SpellingCity.com in Google AdWords by using their
>> placement tool.
>> Alternatively, if you prefer, you can advertise directly with us.
>> The cost for 300 x 250s is $2CPM. Minimum purchase is $1,000.
>> Other information is available on the site.
>> http://www.spellingcity.com/General/advertising.html
>>
>> If you have other ideas, please email them along.
>>
>>
>> john
>>

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 5:31 AM, Jonathan Eshel <jonathan@adotomi.com> wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Hope you have had a great weekend and thanks for your response... :-)
>
> We would like you to place reviews (which we can provide) for our MMO games
> on your site with a link to join the game. Every user that then joins the
> game will earn you a commission in addition to your display advertising.
>
> Please can you let me know:
>
> 1) What countries does most of your traffic come from?
> 2) With what companies are you monetising reviews for?
> 3) How many MMO players are you having visiting you each month?
>
> I am looking forward to your answers and to progressing forward...
>
> Best regards
>
> Jonathan
>
> On 17/02/2010 22:54, Mayor, SpellingCity.com wrote:
>>

You are about the fifth MMO world vendor to contact us this month with the
promise of riches based on performance. The answer is no.

If you'd like to advertise, you have the info. I think at least one
of them is currently advertising on the site. Good luck.

john

BTW, the MMO vendors targetting SpellingCity:

FreeRealms
JumpStarts 3DOnline World

Adotomi - This seems to be an affiliate network focused on games.

SecretBuilders
and some others whose names I've forgotten....

Hardest Unsubscribe Evers - What are yours?

2010-02-12T06:04:00.000-08:00

The CAN SPAM law has helped but there are emailing lists that it is hard to get off. What's your worst experience in trying to unsubscribe? I had two this morning. I'm tired of getting so much email that I don't read so I'm trying to get off lists.

Here's one from Home School Enrichment, Inc. When you click unsubscribe, you get to a screen that requires you to fill in a captcha and enter your email address. Seems like a lot. But then, you still have to click on another email that they say that they'll send you to get off the list. Of course, I clicked on it twenty minutes ago and so far, no unsubscribe email has arrived (surprised?). Probably, they make sure that their marketing emails are not labelled as SPAM and filtered out. Is it too cynical of me to wonder if they make the same effort for their unsubscribe confirmations? Of course, to be clear, I think the idea of adding an email to confirm your unsubscribe on top of the two manual steps of correctly typing in your email and filling in a captcha (type these hard-to-read letters into that box correctly) is an aggressive antisocial way to maintain their mailing list designed to make it difficult to get off their lists. Is that compliant with the Can-SPAM?
PS - I just rechecked my email and their email confirmation did arrive. I clicked on it and got a pleasant: "Sorry to see you go" message. I still think that last step is one step too many but it did appear to work.

The Lowe's Hardward store list unsubscribe button generates an email back to them automatically to unsubscribe. Nice concept but not if you are me trying to get off their lists. Here's the gotyas.

- Unless you are in the email system that has the email on the list, it won't work (to explain, I forward my home email to my work email so since I was in my work email system, they'll get an unsubscribe email from an address that they don't recognize so I won't be unsubscribed)

- Unless you are on a system in which they can call up Outlook, it won't unsubscribe. This is where it gets funny. My home email system is a web email and when I hit the link, it tries to open a mail handler on my system (Outlook Express) which I have never connected. And of course, while my office has Outlook, it's got a different "return-to" email address. So as far as I know, there's no way for me to get off their mailing list.

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Press Releases in 2010

2010-01-21T05:30:00.000-08:00

I'm interviewing for a new head of marketing in my little company and I've heard all sorts of people talk about their marketing expertise. So far, I'm not all that impressed. I've met some very self-assured people who talk broadly about their expertise and accomplishments in SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate, PR, and so on. But, when I get specific about these areas, I find that there tends to be less solid expertise than just routine experience. One exception was when I asked one lady about her approach to press releases.

She explained that in addition to having them get picked up by automated aggregators, you need to write them a certain way for them to be used by publications with human editors. She explained that in the old days, press releases were supposed to provide the fodder for human writers to build an article around. Today, they need to be republishable pretty much with zero editing. So she writes like a journalist, not like she's writing a press release.

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Google leaves China - What does this mean?

2010-01-13T17:01:00.000-08:00

In todays news and discussion about Google leaving China, nobody seems to have dug into what that actually means. Does that mean closing a physical office and laying off some employees? Yes. I saw that in was estimated that $300M in revenue, roughly 1% of Google's revenues, would be lost. How?

I googled Google China and found, in addition to an official statement by Google, that there is a google.cn which means a Google search engine for China. I suppose they spider all the .cn domains and provide them as preferred results on searches conducted from .cn sites.

But, if a person in the US using Google.com googles using Chinese characters or another search which is best served by providing a web page in China, will Google still provide them in their results? Or are they going to completely stop spidering anything with the .cn suffix. Now what about searches that originate inside China but go to Google.com, will they be completed or will they be shut down too?

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Run of site links - Google poison or juice?

2010-01-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

It is natural to think that many links would be better than one. But, lets think about that for a second. If you were Google, would you consider a single link from within an article on a website to a site to be a more authoritative vote of confidence than a link to that same site but which is repeated on every page of the site in the same place?

Put differently, from an SEO point of view, what is more valuable, a single link from within a paragraph of text or a run of site link on the bottom of every page.

I feel that Google would prefer the single natural appearing link over the apparently paid-for run-of-site link. But, I also think it's pretty gray.

For instance, think about a blog. Aren't my listing of "blogs I like" on the sidebar, which are run of site links, a significant statement of endorsement?

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So many violations in one paragraph!

2009-12-10T17:02:00.000-08:00

I have removed the names to protect the guilty but there are two major legal and ethical problems in this paragraph that I received from a big-name educational website!

BLANK.com December 2009/January2010 Educational Newsletter

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all you participants! BLANK.com has NO FEES. This site offers 2500 pages of interactive word puzzle activities that focus on learning Latin/Greek roots. XXXX and YYYY appreciate your sharing information about its content with colleagues and friends. YYYY[at]BLANK.com will send copies of the newsletter directly to them if you provide their email address. Participants may also use the Monthly Newsletter button (green box on the left side of the home page) to sign up. Thanks for clicking on ads as your efforts help defray some of the expenses of this voluntary effort.-----------------------------

Did you catch them?
1. A CAN-SPAM violation in which they solicity third party names and say that they will email them!
2. Asking people to click on ads. If anyone at Google gets wind of that, you forfeit your adsense account and lose your position in their search engine.
A third possible problem is that they say that the site is run by volunteers. My estimate is that the couple running it pull in a nice six figure income.

Should I tell them?

Free Business Advice for Facebook

2009-10-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Facebook,

I read the business advice given to you recently by Time magazine and Wired. Don't be dumb, don't listen to them, listen to me.

My guidance is good, my insights profound, and I'm a sage business advisor. Here we go. A corporate strategy for your success in a few hundred words. Here's the summary:

1. Give me multiple Faces and categories for friends and contacts.
2. Provide me for a fee a digital archive or vault service. I'd happily pay.
3. Allow me to use Facebook as my single place for discussions, groups, clubs, and forums. Right now, I use way too many phpbbs, yahoo groups, ning groups, and so on and so forth, It's only because your groups and discussions are so weak.

Facebook's great two challenges are:

1. Lock in your users. Otherwise, you risk being a Myspace or Friendster. You need something more than just being the best place to be. We've seen that people are willing to abandon years of building their sites and links and friends for a better "scene". Don't be complacent. It's not enough. Imagine the horror of other really good entries into the social networking space which are really well combined with other popular areas such as music and games or mobile computing. I can imagine some Apple initiatives where they combine the Iphone, their music business, a partnership with say Electronic Arts, and a social media system which would be a very major threat to you. I can scare you with other scenarios. Your apps are good but you need to keep making Facebook indispensible to us.

2. Business model. Recurring cost-effective revenue. Ongoing growth in revenue per user. These are your challenges. Right now, your business model....is... nascent...a hope and prayer....in development. In short, you don't have one and you take some comfort from the fact that Google figured one out before they got to a real crisis. Of course, others sites (think YouTube and Twitter and MySpace) have not.

Here's the good news. The solution is not difficult. You can complete your emergence as a company by offering a few more features and services that resolve these two challenges. It's easy to implement, no real tough technology. Here's what you should do. As a package, it's coherent and will work. It still allows you to a lot of other things.

Facebook Strategic Plan

1. Allow individuals to have multiple Faces and categories of friends/contacts. One set of my friends might be my family. Another might be my old college friends. A third could be friends from karate. And another big set of contacts could be my business contacts. For each of them, I have a slightly different Face. So family gets to see lots of pictures of my kids but they don't have to suffer through my posting of information about my business. So each time I post a picture or post, I'll need to check which Face it shows on. This allows Facebook to become really useful for business and avoid some of the awkwardness that currently impinges its use.

2. Archiving my digital assets. Right now, all computer users seem to have the same problem of managing our digital assets. We have lots of pictures and contacts and files. We're getting use to the fact that we have home computers, office computers, a portable in the trunk of our car for when we have time to stop at Starbucks, and our Iphone with all of it's pictures. The storing and archiving of all of this digital stuff is a problem. The best solution that I've found is Carbonite.com but there are others. Essentially, it's a centralized archive place where you can store stuff for some small amount. Why not allow us 10 MB of free storage forever with each Facebook account? That way, we have our pictures and videos in Facebook and it's easier to check which ones are public (and for which Face) and which ones are private. And, if we need more storage, we just pay a simple $4 for 100 MB per month. I'd probably trust Facebook to keep it safe and would like the convenience of having a single storage place. I'd like to have a direct link between Facebook and the original. And I'd like that my Iphone and camera already deal with Facebook so I could imagine it would be easy to get my photos automatically archived there. Would I pay $4 a month? In fact, being a packrat, I'd probably be paying $8 or $12 month and since it takes several days to get everything uploaded the first time, I'd probably stay forever. Soon, I'm paying maybe $12/month, $144 per year to Facebook and it's the center of my digital assets world. And I'm happy for the convenience.

3. Make groups and subgroups and clubs work. Right now, if I want to start a community, I use Ning. You should fix your discussions and groups and fan pages so that there's no need for others to create specialized communities with endless different identities and logins and passwords.

This post sponsored by:

Time4Learning.com - Online learning for homeschool, afterschool, and summer study, PreK-8th grade.

Time4Writing.com - Eight Week Online Writing Tutorials to Build Writing Skills & Confidence

SpellingCity.com - The fastest-growing educational website.

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SEO Tools - My Education Continues

2009-08-24T00:07:00.000-07:00

There are so many different types of SEO tools and learning about them is an endless exercise. Mostly I don't use tools but when I look at them, my head spins. Here's a quick glance at them, organized by what they do.

Find out my site's position by keyword - Google webmaster tools (very limited)

Find out my site's incoming links - Google webmaster tools

Find out my sites incoming traffic my keyword - Google analytics

Find out other sites' position by keyword - none

Find out other site's incoming links - there's many. For instance: http://www.seo-forensics.com/

Find out other sites' incoming traffic - http://searchanalytics.compete.com/site_referrals/ And this is the point of this post. This is an interesting tool that I'd never seen before. I learned from it that someone else is doing well on math assessment and educational software blog and phonemic awareness lesson, both being terms that I'd like to dominate.

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Fanning and Tweeting and Friending, oh my!

2009-08-18T21:57:00.000-07:00

I do some online marketing which use to be pretty simple stuff. I asked all my friends to link to my website and I wrote page titles and urls that made some sense. ba da bing and heh, look at me, I'm atop the search engine for my little phrases.

But now, these durn social media things. I"m tweeting to twitter and posting to facebook. I'm retweeting my friends and following many more. I'm friending many people and inviting them to fan our fan page.

Should I be forming facebook groups or are they lame? Should I have identical posts and tweets or handcraft each one? Why do I have 500 fans on Facebook but only 150 followers on Twitter. Do I tweet to much? Not enough? Do I not tweet so well?

Does all this social stuff mean I can drop those confusing technorati , digg, and delicious tags that someone made appear on each post of this blog? Can I forget everything that I learned in that old blogwritingcourse and ignore the parent chat forums? Do emailed newsletters still get read or do tweets only matter?

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Writing Tips

2009-08-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

I thought this ways hysterical. I was looking for some ideas for some great content to summarize teaching writing and found this. It's a little subtle for our audience. Would the homeschoolers online get it? Some are subtle and funny, some are literal and very earnest. I wonder if I could write such a thing for the SEO community.

A Handy Checklist for Writers

In his book Brain Train: Studying for Success (London: E & FN Spon, 1996), 164, Richard Palmer offers great insights on how to study... and enjoy it. One example of the information he delivers is this memorable list of Rules of Grammar for Report Writing:

Remember to never split an infinitive.
The passive voice should never be used.
Punctuate run-on sentences properly they are hard to read otherwise.
Don't use no double negatives.
Use the semi-colon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.
Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.
Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
No sentence fragments.
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a lot of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
Give slang the elbow.
Conversely, it is incumbent upon us to avoid archaisms.
Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 onwards or more, to their antecedents.
Hyphenate between sy-llables; avoid un-necessary hyphens.
Write all adverbial forms correct.
Writing carefully: dangling participles must be avoided.
Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
Take the bull by the hand: always pick on the correct idiom and avoid mixed metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Don't string together too many prepositional phrases unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
""Avoid overuse of quotation marks.""""
For Christ's sake don't offend your readers' sensibilities.
Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

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Chrome - Second time is amazing

2009-08-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

About six months ago, I tried Google's Chrome and after a few weeks, discontinued use of it. Didn't feel good, had stability issues, and there was no compelling reason to use it.

I use three different computers in the course of a week. My home office, my office office, and a portable that I use when I'm out and about. On each, I have different browsers. Over the last six months, I have used Safari on the PC (pretty good), a few versions of Firefox, and IE 6, 7, & 8. Frankly, I hate IE, it just keeps crashing no matter how many times I reinstall and update.

Firefox is nice but it annoys me that I can't seem to find how to set it up so it launches right into my preferred homepage (igoogle). It must be there somewhere (for new tabs and new browsers) but I can't find it.

I've reinstalled and been using Chrome for the last few days. What a dream. Slick and fast and easy to configure. Makes using a computer fun again.

I'm also a big user of Google docs but I routinely curse their clumbsiness and I tend to stick to MS stuff for their ease-of-use and features. Of course, on my little laptop, I've gotten cheap and have not yet ante'd up for the microsoft tools so I'm really hoping that Google gets the tools upgraded soon.

What do I really want? I want someone to come up with a simple central storage place for all my stuff for all time. It would be great if it was google or facebook. I'm willing to pay ($10-$20 month) so long as it's efficient, big, secure, and permanent.

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The directories are a waste of time and other insights

2009-07-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

I just read a great pair of articles, by Jill Whalen Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? and then a commentary on it by Eric Ward: Betting On The Link Building Boondoggle Bonanza.

They seem to be focusing on the enormous amount of nonsense and expense that SEO firms spout and cost when they drag their clients through all sorts of ineffective exercises.

I agree with a lot of the article, particularly that people are spending endless time and money on techniques that are old fashioned and mostly ineffective: listing in directories and posting press releases. These are tired old techniques that google knows for what they are. Thin attempts to get links rather than natural attempts.

I disagree where they start listing techniques that have no value when in fact, the jury is still out on them. How much can link sculpting let you concentrate juice in some place? Can switching to user-friendly URLs make a big difference (I'm betting it can)?

What I like best is that he encourages the use of common sense and testing. And admits how much BS there is in the SEO industry. I've heard way too many of the people in the industry defend their approach as "Industry-standard best practices" which is a clever way of saying, everyone else does it, so it must be right.

Education and Parenting Domains

2009-07-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

What do you think of:
http://www.parentingbible.com
http://www.mathcity.com
http://www.parentaltech.com
http://www.vocabulary.co.il
http://www.vocabularycity.com
http://www.analogycity.com
http://www.grammarcity.com
www.homeschoolcurriculumcity.wordpress.com

Are they good domains? Should I look at them?

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Duplicate Content

2009-07-08T17:25:00.001-07:00

Most people usually think of duplicate content as either articles that are republished or pages that appear with only the slightest variation on a website.

I'm sure Google discounts or ignores these pages. If content is widely copied throughout the web, I would suspect that Google awards the original source with some special points since everyone appears to be copying and citing the original source.

To illustrate what I believe, assume:
- an article first appears on site A
- the article then appears all over with the web with same outgoing links in it to site B, but also with links back to the original site A
Then, Google will:
- highly count all the links back to site A since it appears to be content that is widely cited evidenced both by the links back and the copying of content
- will not heavily count the links to site B since it's basically the same link all over the place
- will neither reward or punish all the copycat sites

I started thinking about duplicate content since there is a major article on sphinn which deals with detecting duplicate content within a website. And it mostly seems concerned with duplicated page titles and meta descriptions. This is a sloppy error that I'm sure my sites have a lot of. sigh sigh sigh. The article is by Shimon Sandler: Finding Duplicate Content with Free Tools

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Top Five SEO Mistakes

2009-07-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

What are the top five mistakes that I see? Here's what my education online has taught me.

1. Trying to optimize a site that doesn't stand a chance since it's got the wrong name, wrong structure, wrong content. If it's not going to do well in the search engines, don't bother playing with links. Start again. Maybe keep the old AND start with a fresh domain that feeds traffic to the old one.

2. Paying attention to what matters. The domain name matters A LOT. Learn this. Don't jsut be catchy, pick a name with the keywords that matter. You'll learn that your url gets mentioned a lot, including on your pages and incoming link anchor text.

3. Paying attention to what matters. The page title matters a lot. The other meta data, the content, the H tags, title tags, and alt tags also matter but don't screw them up weird just to impress the search engines. Present them as they are.

4. Content should be findable. Simple text. Not buried deep in code. Build with CSS. The content on each page should focus on a few concepts which relate to a few related keywords. The search engines understand and reward focus on a page.

5. Site structure. Build sections that relate to each other. Interlink among those sections. Put them in a common folder. The search engines like tidy and organized.

PS - did you notice that I know the difference know between A LOT (Correct) and alot (incorrect)? Thanks to the vocabulary lessons online.

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Forums

2009-06-06T17:59:00.001-07:00

For those of who don't know, there are several distinct reasons to use online forums:

- Get help
- Give back help
- Find contacts
- Marketing (thru discrete signature references)

And there are forums on every topics:
Parenting, coding, marketing, etc etc

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California Cancelled Summer School

2009-06-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

California Cancelled Summer School!

Gov. Schwarzenegger told a joint session of the state legislature Tuesday that if the $24 billion budget deficit isn't closed, the state won't have enough money to pay its bills next month. Because the budget has to be cut more, L.A. Unified School District has canceled most of summer school.

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'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Dies

2009-06-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Died today. I heard a long discussion of it on NPR. It touched me since I had LOVED that show. I also wondered how I could play in the SEO game of breaking news. Obviously, I am half a day late to participate in that game but I've put it up on my martial arts blog. And here I'm building links to the article about the Kung Fu hero dying. I wonder if I'll get hits and traffic?

Actually, I care a lot more about links but that's another question.

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kaboodle unsubscribe

2009-05-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

I think the can-spam law is great. I should be able to easily tell me to stop mailing me. I'd like it if there were real penalties and more standards.

I tried to get off a list this morning which reminded me how important good implementation is if you are NOT going to anger potential customers.

For instance, what about email lists that you can get off only if you remember your password? Of course, you can always ask them to send you your password and then unsubscribe. Still, it's a pain. Is that compliant?

What about lists where there is no UNSUBSCRIBE ALL option? I mention this since I just had to check 30 boxes to completely unsubscribe from a Hearst publication called kaboodle. What a pain! That'll definitely keep me from giving up my email to another hearst publication for awhile.

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Alabama Education Homeschooling

2009-05-07T18:32:00.001-07:00

If you wanted some info on Alabama education, here's some choices. You can get Alabama homeschooling info from Joann. You can participate in an Alabama homeschooling discussion with Joann. There's also all the spelling lists that have been saved by schools in Alabama.

Homeschooling in Alabama

Hi, my name is JoAnn, and I am the Alabama state representative for Time4Learning!

I am 46 years old and I am married to Perry and we have 3 children and 1 grandchild. I homeschool our youngest while Perry's work takes him away from home throughout the week. I keep a busy schedule and never have a dull moment!

How We Homeschool in Alabama

We belong to North Alabama Christian School out of Valley Head. We meet once a week for PE, weather permitting. We also schedule several field trips throughout the year. As far as an average homeschool day for us, I don't have a strict schedule that I go by. I incorporate everything as a learning skill or experience. Breakfast by 9:00 and reading is always after. With dyslexia, reading is our most difficult subject, so I get it done early. We generally do Bible study next, along with music. By 2:00, my son is ready for Time 4 Learning, where we do more reading and language arts, math, science and social studies. By 4:00 we are done and usually out the door to the park!

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Whats a real blog?

2009-04-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting post that took a new spin on a question that I've discussed at some length in our How to Blog Course. What is a blog?

We were interested initially (the course has evolved) as teaching blogging as a type of creative writing. For us, it was related to the diary, journal, or confessional but had an episodic or serial structure and most importantly, the writing included elements of audience participation, promotion, and an involvement in the world around us. Our approach to explaining blogs was to create categories saying that there are personal blogs; there are hybrids of personal blogs with either business, advocacy, or non-profit purposes; and there are sites which use blog software as a CMS (content management system) but which aren't blogs at all.

Edward De Leau has a post in his blog Why the whole world is wrong about weblogs in which he makes the distinction between weblogs as a media format and weblogs as the technology or CMS behind a website. He belabors it at some length but his definitions are tight and his cartoons are nice.

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Vocabulary

2009-04-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Learning Vocabulary Fun is the number two site on Google for "vocabulary". How to broaden it's appeal while focusing on keywords of real value to customers and advertisers. Watch this!

Vocabulary Flash Cards -
Vocabulary flash cards have traditionally been a key vocabulary teaching tool. Today, vocabulary flash games online are preferred vocabulary teaching tools to traditional vocabulary flash cards. Note that vocabulary went from nowhere on the search engines to number 13 last week by adding this discussion of flash cards versus flash games!

Expand Your Vocabulary

Word Power:-Developing your Vocabulary
GRE Verbal Tips
Improve Through Active Learning

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Craigs List - Bad Writing by a College Student

2009-04-25T05:28:00.001-07:00

My company now posts all of our job offers on Craigs List and we do our hiring there. This response made me laugh.

Hello im a college student and have great communication skills computer skills.. i would love for this position.. if you can please contact me nicole (sic).

Pretty nice demonstration of her great communication skills, huh?

PS

Watch me direct google towards a certain image of John Edelson. from this post about john edelson.

SpellingCity.com

2009-04-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

SpellingCity.com is my favorite website these days for fun spelling time. Check out these awards:

Parents' Choice Award
The Parents' Choice Foundation, the nation's leading experts on quality childrens' media and toys, recently selected the SpellingCity.com website as a Parents’ Choice Recommended Award.

Golden Lamp Awards Finalist
The Golden Lamp Awards are one of educational publishing's longest-running and most prestigious traditions. SpellingCity has been recognized as one of the four finalists in the Technology Innovations category.

Homeschool.com - Top 100 site
Homeschool.com is the number one site for homeschooling. In January, Homeschool.com announced their top 100 websites for homeschooling in 2009. Eleven websites were selected in the language arts area among them, SpellingCity.com!

Larry Ferlazzo - Top 5 Choice for Best Online Learning Games
Larry Ferlazzo picks SpellingCity as one of the Best Online Learning Games on the web. Larry Ferlazzo is a well-known language teacher and blogger about language arts and ESL websites. He provides two rankings of the best sites: one he ranks sites himself and the other ranking is based on his readers votes. On both rankings, SpellingCity.com was selected as the second most useful learning games website on the web!

ThePioneerWoman
"My recent find is SpellingCity.com. I love straightforward sites like this. The site is focused; it does one thing - and it does it VERY well. I did not have to join to use this FREE site, but I chose to create an account so SpellingCity would save my word lists, making it easier and faster to use the site for daily visits or weekly/monthly reviews. The site has various Spelling uses, like testing or teaching words; it also offers 8 Spelling and Vocabulary games."

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Florida in Education

2009-04-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

Florida education online is a weird online marketing theme. But oddly, it's one that I now have several lines in the water on. Florida is a big fishing state so that'll be my metaphor for today.

People need information on homeschooling in Florida. Time4Learning has a page of information to help.

People need to study to pass the vocabulary portion of the FCAT. The vocabulary education site has that need nailed.

For all your spelling needs, there is a page to help you find Florida schools on SpellingCity. Is this a page that Google will be able to use?

And while there is not yet a discussion about Florida, there is a great discussion forum for homeschooling parents.

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Monetizing Content - The future of media

2009-04-06T11:40:00.001-07:00

Newspapers are going out of businesses. Top bloggers are abandoning their industry-leading blogs as not worth the effort financially. Information wants to be free. The outlook for content and journalism is pretty bleak, if the media reports are to be believed.

I think the future is ours to make. Here's my two cents for the media people to think about.

1. Education is a very very profitable industry.
2. Journalism as supported by advertising and subscriptions is failing.
Think about it.
I'll add a third point of departure for my suggestion.
3. The classic concept of education, running from K-12 followed often by college, sometimes by advanced degrees, is pretty out-dated. There's huge opportunities for new models of education.

Rather than proceed with a macro-industry meta-discipline analysis, I'll switch to the mode of some personal advice.

If you are a journalist or blogger with a good following but a shakey business model, pay me $700 and in a three hour one-on-one seminar, I'll teach you how to keep doing what you love (assuming that's journalism or blogging), build your following, and make it into a solidly renumerative business with control in your own hands.

Sound impossible, keep reading.

Actually, I'm kidding about the $700 and the seminar. I'm too busy to do that. Although, now that I've opened up the question, it might make a good business. Here's what I'd teach you in that seminar.

1. You have an audience that admires you. They listen to you and they read from you. They think you know more than they do about something of interest to them. They read you not because they want to click on ads, they read you because of your expertise and writing skills.

2. In your fans eyes and hearts, you are a celebrity.

3. If they had a chance to learn directly from you, to take a course, many of them would like to. Not all would but many would.

4. My point is that while your routine blogging and journalism might not make enough for you to live on, you can supplement it by selling your expertise in courses to your following. This will deepen your relationship with your audience and allow you to repurpose your expertise as courseware. Frankly, writing and teaching are very closely related. Not identical but they are close.

5. Todays tools for pulling together courses using public domain or cheap learning management system and online community sessions makes the creation of these mini courses practically available to anyone. It's not quite as simple as blogging yet but within maybe 12 months, with a little effort from the right groups, it could be made that easy.

6. Depending on your following and their level of involvement with you, you should structure an online or in-person course in which you charge them a significant amount of money and they get to interact directly with you. How about:

A three week $199 course for groups of twenty with two one hour sessions each week each plus email etc. This could gross $4K each time it runs and could run 12 times per year. That's $48K of revenue. Or, how about charging $499 per student? Or $999? Selling courses at these prices in the abstract sounds very hard. But, if you have a following who already admires, respects, and follows you, I think that it's likely that there is a significant demand from your audience for more than just your regular writing.

A friend of mine (kenny) had asked me a few days ago to write up something about how journalists should get into training. I had intended to write this but then forgot until I looked at my email today. From a group who "gets it", the search engine marketing group, I got an invite to have them train people at their next show. Are they expecting people to pay up? Check out these rates: Workshops $1,345/$745 Cost 8:00-5:00pm. If I had more time, I'd write up about the seminars and conventions that the NYT and Economist seem to run sometimes. And how colleges are beginning to wonder if the future of education is not so much a four year involvement but a lifetime opportunity to sell education to someone.

Journalists and bloggers should think of their writing efforts as the media and rather than accept lots of other advertisers selling things that your audience doesn't care about, sell them what they want. More from you. Cut out the middleman. Journalists should be educators with education being the profit center.

just a thought.....john

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USA Geography

2009-04-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

If this isn't one cool implementation and tour de force of seo and marketing prowess, I don't know what is. It's from a Geographic US & World Search Function.

Alabama,
Alaska,Arizona,Arkansas,California,Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas

Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina

North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota state Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin
» United States Military
Armed Forces Americas (AA)
Armed Forces Europe (AE)
Armed Forces Pacific (AP)
» United States Overseas
American Samoa
Guam
Northern Mariana Islands
Palau
Puerto Rico
Virgin Islands
» Other Countries
Canada
Australia
United Kingdom
New Zealand
Other Countries

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Dental Games

2009-04-02T12:54:00.001-07:00

Yes, we have created a new genre. Games with Teeth!!!!

I'm not kidding. A few people in my office worked on a project when I wasn't paying attention and now we have a page of dental games. Go figure.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to market such a thing?

Actually, i just checked google and found:
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,200,000 for dental games. (0.21 seconds)

Heat Maps - Google is not the be-all and end-all

2009-03-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

Google analytics has a nifty feature that it'll tell you what links people are clicking on. But, it's not the be-all and end-all. It falls short in that it:
- groups all the links that go to the same page from a page. So you have no idea if they clicked on the "more info" link at the top or bottom
- it only tracks clicks onto links. Not confused clicks onto things that look like links.

Does anyone track such things? Apparently they do;
Crazy Egg & Click Density.

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School pages into the search engines - ?

2009-03-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

According to webmaster tools, the SpellingCity page on First Presbyterian Church School is not listed. I'll do a google search to see whether this school can be found on SpellingCity.com: First Presbyterian Church School site:SpellingCity.com. The answer is that while some other school pages are found which have links to that page, First P's home page is not yet in the Google index.

Why isn't First Presbyterian Church School's home page on SpellingCity.com in the index?

This is weird in that:

There are at least two schools that I found that link to this home page which have links to them from their schools (Tinsley Elementary School & Greenville Elementary School). Of course, the links at the bottom of these pages in which the local schools link to each other should ideally have well-less than 100 links on the page. Unfortunately, these pages seem to have about 260 other schools listed which could account for the links not being counted.
There are two blog posts from twenty days ago which have direct links to this First Presbyterian Church School. School pages not appearing and School home pages.
I have been hoping that this page would appear in the index and mostly, my dreams do come true.

Any ideas? Since we have 125K school homepages that we're hoping will begin to get listed, this is a question of some importance. I could imagine that Google is reluctant to include these pages since they are short on content and links. Still, over 5K of these schools have links directly from the schools to them so it's hard to imagine why they don't get listed. Maybe, too many of these links are images?

http://learnseowithme.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/school-home-pages/

Public School Review

2009-03-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.publicschoolreview.com is a partner site of Boarding School Review, the leading online resource for evaluating private secondary boarding schools, and Private School Review, a unique resource for researching private day schools across the USA. They have pages competing for each school in the country and try to make money through partners in a variety of ways:

Their find a classmate link goes directly to classmates.com.
They have google adsense on the website.
Mostly, the partner sites are not filled in: http://www.publicschoolreview.com/site-partners.php they are "under construction". Maybe the site has a good business model but needs a goosing.

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GlobalScholar.com

2009-03-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

Global Scholar.com might be a good vehicle for my plans. They are:

Well-financed. They have Milken money and involvement (Mike and Lowell) through Knowledge Universe plus Ignition VC and some well-heeled xMicrosoft guys.
They're trying to get educational traffic but not succeeding.
They're competing with a page for each school in the US and not succeeding. I looked at their rankings and they're failing to hit the first page in every spot check that I look at. They are the 32K most trafficked site in the US with 43K visitors last month which makes them nobody. In contrast, my site is at the 3K rank, rising every month (except the summer) and got 600K visitors last month. Greatschools.net, the leader for these things, is 459th and had an even 3 million visitors last month. I figure that I can match them in October 2009.

BUT:
- they are at the far end of the country
- they have the appearance of a company that is difficult to do business with.

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School rankings 2

2009-03-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd peek at the rankings for BCC high school. I'll just note what's different from Somerset.

Wikipedia
GreatSchools.net ranks very high.
realestate.yahoo.com
highschoolsports.net
education.com 11th
alumniclass.com 14th
ibo.org
greatreunions.com
classreport.org 18th
stores.colorworkspromotions.com 25th
publicschoolreview.com - 28th - a partner site of Boarding School Review, the leading online resource for evaluating private secondary boarding schools, and Private School Review,

psk12.com/rating/USindexphp/STATE_FL.html - not ranking but using some clever feeds...

School Rankings

2009-03-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a look at who ranks for a lot of schools and why. I just entered a random school (Somerset Elementary School) on Google and found, listing only the big players, who was in the top 30:

I should then figure out the business model and approach of each of these to see if one wants to partner, take investments, buy ads, or can be imitated. Note, I should do this for a few elementary schools to find out the major players. Then check to see if it's dramatically different for high schools or private schools.

GreatSchools.net - 5th
schooltree.org - 7th
localschooldirectory.com - 8th
localschooldirectory.com - 9th
classmates.com - 11th
findlocalweather.com - 12
muninetguide.com - 13th
trulia.com 14th
merchantcircle.com - 15th
city-data.com - 16th
publicschoolreview.com - 17th
education.com - 18th
zillow.com - 19th
globalscholar.com - 20th
mysummercamps.com 21
citysearch.com 22
alumniclass.com 23
classmates.com 25
neighborhoodlink.com 26
greatschools.net 27 (again)
nationalrelocation.com 28
amweather.net 29th

www.greatschools.net - Their content is a complex mashup of:
- public database of schools including public domain test scores, etc
- info pulled on the local real estate market which is provided by Sperlings Best Places.
- They partner with donorschoose.org to raise money for the schools.
- They have oodles of articles.

The business model is advertising. The ads are handled by double-click ad and are solicited on the website. Current advertisers: MSN, K12, cafemom, sylvan, and FishHawkRanch.

Advertise on GreatSchools.net and get your message in front of our large audience of active, educated and affluent parents. GreatSchools can target your campaign by state or grade level; we offer all traditional ad units as well as newsletter sponsorships. Advertisers include Crayola, Century 21, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, K-12, Kaplan, Nissan, Quaker, SCORE! Educational Centers, Staples, Target, Zip Realty and many more. There are some plain google ads on specific pages.
GreatSchools is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with a very professional management team and board of directors. It seems to be SF-based. Bill Jackson is the Founder, President and CEO. GreatSchools, an independent nonprofit initiative that empowers parents to support their children's educational success, has been awarded $20 million to use Internet and social media technologies to empower needy parents with the insights they need to prepare their kids for college and beyond. The funding was from: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robertson Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.
1. Can I see the financials for a 501C3. I'm very curious as to how much they bring in through advertising.

free tools for seo update

2009-03-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

Here are three sites that allow you to estimate other sites' traffic: Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast. I'd say Alexa is the most skewed since it's based on easily manipulated toolbar installations.

There are also tools for looking at incoming links: Yahoo Site Explorer, Linkscape, and .... HELP _ I"ve lost the others....

School pages not appearing

2009-03-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

On SpellingCity.com, there are a lot of school pages. Say 100,000.
But most of them are not active. But many are and they have links from the schools. Yet they are not showing up in webmaster tools as page with incoming and outgoing links.
I think they should.

Time to test: First Presbyterian Church School as of March 3, 2009 now has a link to it's home page. There are no teachers listed so presumably it's only one link in. Is this enough for it to show up in webmaster tools.

Spirit will look for this. And just to be sure, I'll build a similiar link from another blog.

john

The blogging course - should it be something else?

2009-02-21T14:10:00.000-08:00

My little company runs a blogging course which is very popular with those who take it. The problem is, not enough people do take it. I can think of two ways to broaden the course's appeal.

1. Get more serious about educating people who want to blog for a purpose such as supporting a business, a non-profit, a cause, or to make money. The blogging course was conceived of us a writing course. The idea is that creative writing courses for adults have traditionally been very popular and now it's time for creative writing to take a new form. No longer poetry or short stories or novels are the hot creative force. It's now blogging. That's where we started. But, it appears that another approach would be to do more for these more purposeful, less creative, type bloggers. We could expose them to blogs of these sorts for starter such as:

- business blogs:

- non-profit blogs: One blog, Making Waves,

- blogs for a cause:

- journalistic blogs http://www.pbs.org/engage/

- blogging for profit:

2. Shift the course from being a how-to-blog to being an introduction to web 2.0 in which each week, we get people started and involved in:

a. A blog - which they keep through the course as a way of keeping notes

b. A forum

c. Facebook

d. Twitter

e. Wikis - wikipedia & a more modest one

f. Youtube

g. Linkedin, Flikr, Myspace, Friendster, Livejournal

h. Technorati, stumble upon, diggit,

Now that would be a very cool eight week course!

3rd Variation on the course - Include much more on concepts of how blogs integrated with twitter, facebook, and blog communities.

4th - Focus on wordpress and it's amazing capabilities to create a variety of websites with no programming.

Of course, we could accomplish most of both of these by slightly changing the course focus and curriculum and positioning. For instance, blogs seem to work well when supported by a facebook and twitter accounts

Blogging and Making Money

2009-02-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

While this course is about writing a blog and gathering an audience, many people have questions and aspirations relating to their blog and money. To be blunt, many fantasize about earning a living from their blog. Is such a thing possible? Well, if you believe, then anything is possible.

OK, now trying to be helpful, here are some points to take on board at this point in the course. We'll circle back to financial possibilities, how to understand them, and how to pursue them later in the course.

1. Traditionally, 7 out of 10 new business ventures fail or are abandoned within the first two years. If you think of your blog as yet another business venture, the odds are 30% that in two years, you could still be at it. Hopefully in the black and harvesting cash flow.

2. There are success stories of people who got very rich through blogging. It's about as likely as you'll turn out to be the next J.D. Rowling (third richest woman in the world, author of Harry Potter). But it does happen and some people do strike it big. (examples: John Chow or Ree Drummond)

3. You won't make any money with your blog unless you have an audience. It's a good strategy to first find something interesting to say, then to win an audience, then to try to figure out how to monetize it.

4. Many bloggers with some talent and dedication, do make some money from their blogs. It can be $25 per month or $25 per day and sometimes much more. Your results will vary. Sometimes it's just enough for "shoe money" (BTW, there's a famous and profitable blog by that name), sometimes it's enough for you to quit your day job. Sometimes, it can be combined with your day job.

5. When you pick your blog topic, if making money is eventually on your mind, you might what to consider the potential financial implications as you pick your focus. I'm deviating slightly from point 3 here by suggesting that you think ahead about financial implications, even as you pick your topic and personna.

The rest of this article will help you consider how to factor this in.

Do you have an existing business which could benefit from increased exposure across the net? If so, supporting and expanding the existing business is a good way to monetize your time spent blogging. Many small businesses and charities have started blogs which integrate stories about their professional work with whatever aspects of their private life that they want to share. And they've effectively won new supporters and deepened their relationships with others. (eg Making Waves, One blog)

Let me share a discussion I had with a hypothetical friend of mine name Mike. Mike wanted to start a blog. He was a poet by nature, a paralegal by day, and he has a messy personal life caused in part by what he calls his "poetic" nature which could not be constrained by social norms such as honesty, living monogomously, and oh yes, living within his means. His initial desire was to write about poetry, something that he lived for and had great insights into. He was thinking: "Metaphysical Poetry & Lyrical Reflections." But, as we discussed it, it turns out that Mike was thinking that this would be a profitable effort and we concluded that pure poetry might be pure poverty. There's just not that many people reading poetry or advertising to people interested in poetry.

We also considered him writing about his personal life but it presented a number of problems and no particular financial hook.

After some reflections on the likely financial implications, he shifted towards: "This poet's unfolding tale of Love, Lyrics, and Looming Foreclosure." This allowed him to both indulge his poetic vision with lyrical reflections on his dilemma while also airing his ongoing lessons on how mortgage companies react when you stop making payments, how a "short-sale" works and whether 'tis better to default on your credit card bill or mortgage. He soon had a readership and some lively informative discussions by people with similar problems, many of whom appreciated his poetry: "Whether 'tis nobler to...etc". Then one day, he posted an "advertise here" button and a rate sheet (traffic count and advertising rates) and several credit lawyers responded.

The other part of the discussion with hypothetical Mike was whether he should bring his messy personal relationships into it but, given how truly messy it was, we all agreed that he should be less public, even in an anonymous form, which his irresponsible ongoing escapades.

Yes, Mike is not real, but it's food for thought to provide you with some thoughts on direction.

You'll hear more form us later in the course about how advertising works on blogs. You'll hear about PPC, CPM affiliates, widgets, Adsense, and rate sheets.

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This page is not in the webmaster tools as having links

2009-02-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

It's weird. Google does not count the internal or external links to this page. I'm pretty sure that it has external links but to be extra sure, I'm placing one right here.

It's a link to a Grade by Grade Curriculum Overview .

Now this page has a link from our site map and a link from each of about 30 pages on our site which deal with scope and sequence. The page has been up for about three months. Yet Google webmaster tools do NOT show any internal or external links to this page.

Why? Is it too short of content? That's my guess. But my previous research on why pages languish in the supplementary index do not support that.

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Ad Sizes for spellingcity

2009-02-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

I'm working on redesigning SpellingCity's internal pages. We are going to do some internal promotion. So each school, teacher, and spelling list page will have internal ads explaining features and games. I'd like to build the spots in standard formats in case I ever want to place other types of messages. For instance, why not Time4Writing promotional efforts.

So, I'm revisiting ad sizes:

Current hot sizes for CPM Vendors:

728 x 90 - leaderboard
160 x 60 - wide skyscraper
300 x 250 - preferred

I had thought the banner (468 x 60) was the standard but it's apparently a has-been.

So far, our model page has:

300 x 250 - check
two 300 x 60ish ? What do I do with them?

Also, while I'm at it, I thought that I would make a random test of whether google will count a spellingcity school page as having an external link. Did I mention that I have friends who went to an elementary school in Alabama called VESTAVIA HILLS ELEMENTARY CENTRAL SCHOOL ?