Monday, August 24, 2009

SEO Tools - My Education Continues

SEO tools - this was updated August 2015 since it continues to get traffic but the info is out of date.

There are so many different types of SEO tools.  Learning about them and stayin gcurrent on them is an endless exercise. Many of the most useful and insightful tools that dominated have become unavailable over the last decade.  Here's a quick glance at the current SEO tools that I use, organized by what they do.

Find out my site's position by keyword - Google webmaster tools. Webmaster tools also provides vital info on site status as far as Google is concerned. It say if the sitemap has been set up right, if there's dead links, and what searches the site is placing well for and how many searches there. Also, the position and click thrus.
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. I use to use many tools for this such as Spyfu. Now I don't. 
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.

Long gone are the detailed kayword data that Google Analytics use to provide. Overture, which gave the volume of searches by keyword, also gone.  The Cool SEO Tool was one of my long term SEO Tool favorites. It's gone. sight.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Fanning and Tweeting and Friending, oh my!

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?

Digg!

del.icio.us

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Writing Tips

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:

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

Digg!

del.icio.us

Friday, August 07, 2009

Chrome - Second time is amazing

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.
Digg!

del.icio.us