Free Web tools - new & old

Sadly, my favorite seo tool is not longer free. The Cool-CEO tool is now part of a subscription service. So I'm collecting some new free tools. For domain info such as DNS numbers, traceroute, ping, lookup, whois, and even email validation (what is that? Does it do SPF lookups (spam policy framework lookups?)

http://network-tools.com/

Education on Educational Forums

Wow, Turbine on V7 forum really knows his stuff. I've been looking for some advice on forums so I emailed him this.

1. I've been trying to tightly link some blogs and forums. My idea is that articles would go into the blog but the discussion could be in a forum. Have you seen any good examples of how to do this? I'm thinking that web home school or homeschool online could be used to stimulate discussion.

2. Along the same lines, I have a newsletter which invites feedback with a link to a thread starting with the same topic in my forum. This has some success. Specifically, the thread gets huge numbers of views but I don't seem to have found topics that alot of people want to comment on. My most successful is: "Why did you start homeschooling"

3. Take a look at my forum. One of it's purposes is SEO (not the links on the bottom). Other is to show that we have a vibrant community and a third if for member support. Does it look like it's well-implemented? Any obvious ideas for my homeschooling forum?

4. I had some people develop a site for me using joomla. We launched this month. Along with my long list of other complaints is that the forum uses Fireboard. Any experience in that area? Spelling forum.

Margo Foster - the lesson

Margo Foster taught me something. No, I'm not thinking about self defense and how reckless or courageous or tough I want to be. I already know where I stand on that spectrum (want to hear me crow like rooster? Cackle like a hen? Did you know that I believe not in kung fu but ning fast. As in RunNing Fast).

I blogged about Margo Foster of Lighthouse Points adventure on my karate blog since she trained in the same system that I did and her story was remarkable.

I just looked at my traffic pattern for that blog and her story produced traffic. In fact my traffic doubled. Now, is it traffic that is likely to convert into regular readers? Is my blog interesting enough to retain readers? I'm trying.

And I'm taking a writing course on blogging to take me down the right path.

Use the Right Tool for the Right Job

My dad always would say: "Use the right tool for the right job". It would drive him nuts when he caught me using a screw driver to dig a small hole in the wood - "Use a chisel". Or sometimes when I'd use the wrench to hit something instead of getting up and getting a hammer. I particularly remember his delight in taking out a pair of 18" clamps to hold some glued parts together until they dried properly. My instinct would have been to hold the parts until my hands grew tired and hope that was long enough for it to stick (it rarely was).

So, I was thinking of Dad in yesterdays product planning meeting. It turns out that in my tiny company, we are trying to use the right tool for each job:

Moodle - We are using this LMS (learning management system) to put up our own science courses with text, flash, multiple choice questions, student records, etc
phpbb - We have a homeschool parents forum built around this simple effective tool.
Blogger - This blog and my karate blog are built around blogger. Easy to get started with and with some add-ons (feedburner & HaloScan for trackbacks), it's more than adequate.
Wordpress - I was convinced by a number of people that wordpress would be great for a web home schooling blog since it was better for SEO & multi-authors. The jury is still out on this.
Joomla - This content management system - CMS - was chosen as the best way to handle the administration on the coolest spelling website ever that we've now built. At the moment, frankly, we think we really goofed on the choice. The implementation has been painful requiring more rework than development and at the end, the user interface is less than elegant. sigh. Should we rebuild?
Drupple - We want a full featured community for our students which is private and has all sorts of moderating capabilities. I keep asking why we can't use joomla or moodle or a php forum or some blog extensions. The answer seems to be that if we did, it would stink. Sigh.
Typepad pro - Next week, we launch our first course teaching blogging as literature. The first blogging course focused on storytelling. We need to be able to have a group of blogs under one private account and some group discussion capabilities. Our "writing sensei" selected Typepad Pro for the blogging and we're using Google Groups for the discussions.

We are also looking at a few live webinar technologies and surprise, none of our current technologies seem to have that integrated within them either....Three names that have popped up are Wimba, Centra, & Elluminate. Why not Microsoft Meeting?

Of course, our main sites are in .net or flash or php with lots of untemplated html, some javascript and java, and includes and iframes.....One part of our system (a part that we don't control) still uses Microsoft Agent (long sigh).

My point: There was a reason that my dad was great around the house....his collection of tools, his organization, and his determination to do things right. And we're trying to put together great systems. So many specific jobs, many technologies. Soldier on...

silly silly silly sales people

I went on a rant for no particular reason this morning but it's got me to thinking about an interesting test.

 I'm trying to see whether my post on silly silly silly sales people Heh, wait a day and then google: "silly silly silly seo salespeople" and you'll find that we just got to the top of Google for it! 

Want to pay me $3K to do the same for your site? That'll be $3K monthly please. (Yes, I built the google link right in so that I don't have to keep typing it - who is a lazy boy?...And a technical note: I put the google link in without the quotes) 

Now, I have met and worked with a number of very diligent thorough seo professionals but, and here's where I get cynical, to grow their business, they need to keep having the senior guys doing the selling and new junior guys doing the work. 

 Bottom line: they wanted to do my seo work in a very mechanical way by people who had not been in on any of the meetings when we discussed the trade-offs and nuances of what I wanted with my site.

 Wouldn't have mattered since the new guys were not rocket-scientists and didn't have the experience to appreciate the issues anyway. In short, my experience with seo is that I can do it alot better in house by spending a day-week on it. Two hours of reading on the web, six hours of prostituting myself for links. Heh, I meant positioning my site for links. sorry. I guess I should lay off the strong coffee in the morning. 

 The other choice is to find firms just starting that are trying to establish their reputation or sole practioners that are not caught in the "need to grow and build profitability dyanamic" where you can get value for money. Also, my advice would be to think really long term. 

  What will I find: 

1. Maybe the RSS feed wins 

2. Maybe this post wins but I've not resubmitted it twice since I made too many typos the first time. 

3. Since this is a silly silly post, I've backdated is to that my much better post: "Use the right tools for the right job" stays front and center (Am I the only want who would like a sticky option on blogger?) 

BTW - the term "the right tools for the right job" is pretty competitive. I'm not even in top 30 for google on it. Whereas I'm about to reign on "silly silly silly seo salespeople" 

4. When I backdate a post, does it go out on the rss feed? Do the ping services only look at the most recent post? Anybody know? And so what? Well, it will prove nothing per se but it will keep me thinking

Blog Subscriptions by Email - It Works!

My blogs have been a source of satisfaction and frustration to me.

They are satisfying in that, as blogger says, push-button publishing is possible.
They are frustrating in that, in the fine print, we learn: some assembly is required.

They are satisfying in that templates and more templates are only a mouse click away.
They are frustrating in that some template don't support some features.

Frustrating: I couldn't figure out how to let people subscribe by email.
Satisfying. I posted the email subscription to blogger question to the forum yesterday, and implemented the subscribe-by-email today (on my 2nd try but that's more satisfaction than frustration). THANK YOU FEEDBURNER / BLOGGER / GOOGLE :->


Satisfying. I can tell my story my way on my blog
Frustrating: I'm not that good at crafting stories.
Satisfying: I am going to take a course in story-telling focused on writing for blogs. I'm going to get a Black Belt in Blogging!

Blogging Software - Todays problems

I have a few problems with the current generation of blogging software. I wonder if my list is very different than most others.

1. Sticky. Most forums allow the moderator to mark a comment or thread "sticky". This means that this posting, even when it's not the most recent, stays at the top. I can't seem to find this feature in the blogger or wordpress, the two blogging systems that I use. I'm about to try Typepad so stay tuned..

2. Subscribe to updates by email. This elusive feature is one that I would really like. The comments section allows users (including the moderator) to get emails about new comments but I'm talking about having a simple subscription method to get emails about all updates to the blog. I gather that RSS would be better system but I don't seem to understand RSS and I'd really like it to be a simple email system. Even the feedburner addition to wordpress and blogger is lacking this.

3. More HTML functionality such as tables in blog posts. While it's cool to be able to post videos and images, I sometimes try to put some info on a blog post that is best done as a table. While I succeeded after laborious efforts, it should be simplified (by the way, I did figure out some of the bugs and workarounds in blogger for tables but I can't seem to find my write-up here. Maybe it's on another blog, maybe it's on a forum. Ask if you want to see it)

4. Integrated trackbacks, stats, and subscriptions. Basically, I like that google bought feedburner and is integrating them. I just want it done already plus, I'd like them to remember us mortal non-techie users and provide us simple emails subscriptions and de-emphasize the glitzy rss feeds that handle everything including podcasts (another technology that I've not yet gotten involved with).

5. Promotion. It would be nice if there was more automated pinging built into the blogs. Or, if there is more than I am aware of, more documentation on them. I tend to update my content and then to manually use:
www.pingomatic.com
www.pingoat.com
www.pingmyblog.com
www.autopinger.com
www.kping.com
But I can't tell if my efforts are useful or wasted. I do know that if I correctly join and participate in the blog communities, I do well.

Blogging Software - Incomplete out of the box

You would think that the leading blog software would be click and publish. But, it's not. Some of the basic features need to be added in by the users.

With blogger, the google-owned software for making blogs, you don't get trackbacks or subscriptions or any statistics. To get a subscription capability, you need to separately sign up for and install Feedburner. Feedburner also supplies visitor and subscription stats. If you want trackbacks, you can add halo but that seems to invite comment spam. BTW - Google bought Feedburner and I assume is trying to integrate it.

With WordPess, you also need to add Feedburner for subscriptions and stats. And halo for trackbacks.

Of course, with some templates and other modifications, Feedburner is incompatible.

And while Feedburner talks alot about chicklets and convenient RSS feeds, I'm having trouble finding out about the basic ability to subscribe to blog updates by email. I know it's a little simple but still, that's how most of us operate. I don't know what an RSS reader is and, just like news and other readers, I don't really have the time or energy to figure them out.

I'm about to try Typepad which I'm hoping, has some of these features integrated. Stay tuned.

Google Page rank - a contrarian view

Most SEO experts agree that:

The visible google page rank is a misleading short cut which we all use but which we shouldn't. It's a bad habit even glancing at that yellow bar.

I've said as much myself. But recently, I've developed a new view starting with the fact that page rank has recently been used by google is a novel way.

Google has dramatically dropped a number of people's page rank as a way of telling them that their site is breaking rules of conduct that google considers important. As Loren Baker explained:

In my opinion, by flipping the switch on changing the PageRank of some sites, Google is trying to send a message....

I think Google is trying to discourage sites from having an unfocused set of links on their site.

I've looked at a few of the sites that were penalized (admittedly, not as many as I would like) and surprisingly, I found them to be high quality sites. Where these sites seem to have run afoul of Google's sensitivities is by having links to sites in which Google could not find the relevance, the "common thread".

Google seems to want us to use text links to other sites only as natural links which is a component of content, not in any commercial sense. Google wants text links to be "natural" content links (around which they can build their search engine). Google seems to be saying that unlike banner ads which is an acceptable form (for google) of paid advertising, text links should only be used as part of "natural" content so they should be in paragraphs and only go to sites with relevant content. If they aren't, they should be run by java script (like adsense) or have "no follow" tags.

Returning to my original point. All the SEO pundits have been saying that although this time the page rank is actually a communication tool for google, it is generally a misleading and useless indicator. I'd like to disagree and submit a contrarian view: the google PR number is a useful measure of what it measures.

The fact is that I've seen a very strong correlation over the last four years between my viewable page rank and my position in the search engines.

I know that the page rank is easily manipulated. As far as I can tell, Google Page Rank is a simple time-delayed count of incoming links and a summary of their page rank without any dampening effect due to numbers of outgoing links or relevance. So, in my case where I am terribly white hat and spend my efforts generating original content and genuine links, my rise in page rank and in the search engines has been synchronous. For me, the Google PR is useful as a judge of my progress.

Blogging, SEO, Adsense, Traffic, ROI

The vocabulary.co.il site pulls an enormous amount of traffic. Alot is repeat traffic, alot is from links from sites that recommend it, and some is from search engines. The good news is that the site does very well for terms such as vocabulary (#2 on the BigG), build vocabulary, and building vocabulary for standardized tests.

We are making an effort broaden the terms for which the site pulls traffic. We are doing this by providing a blog full of interesting relevant original articles such as:

Teaching With
Crossword Puzzles

What's New? 25 New Topics

Learning by Categories

Word Retrieval Therapy

Vocabulary Instruction in Early Learning

Reading Comprehension

Hangman

Of course, I'm also very interested in providing grade by grade information to potential online students for what they can learn from Time4Learning. Check it out:

Preschool
Kindergarten
First Grade
Second Grade
Third Grade
Fourth Grade
Fifth Grade
Sixth Grade
Seventh Grade
Eighth Grade

Firefox link checker says my links are forbidden!

I just installed the firefox link checker and ran it on my sitemap. It didn't seem to give much in the way of results. Then, I pulled down the menus: tools - web developer - information - display title attributes.

Yikes! I got a mess of "Title=forwarded or forbidden link" messages. But the links look fine to me. Anybody understand such things?

BBB Online - The Kids Privacy Seal

I have joined my local BBB (with an annual fee) so that I could be eligible and then join the BBBonline which made me eligible for the BBBOnline seal (with an annual fee) that you see on my home education site.

Although I mention the fees, I know that this has worked out well for me since when I added it to my shopping cart page, my shopping abandon rate dropped by around 5% (actually, there were other changes made at the same time). Since my shopping cart abandon rate at that time was 80% (which is very typical), this increased my conversion rate and sales rate by 25%! :->

I just got an answer from the BBB about the Kids Privacy seal which I thought was particularly cute (you can see a copy of one on Club Penguin's home page) and which I have long coveted for my site. And I quote:

"The BBB Kids Privacy Seal is being phased out. A small number of companies are being "grandfathered" in their use of it, but we aren't accepting new applications for it anymore. It had very limited acceptance in the marketplace (less than two dozen companies signed up for it in the 7 years it was available) and the larger Privacy seal program of which it was a part if also being phased out."

So I'm looking around for more ways to demonstrate our commitment to privacy, coppa compliance, and no-advertising policy for kids. Any ideas?

And I'm still looking for a vendor of ads (such as google adwords) that will deliver ONLY advertisements appropriate to children....Any ideas?

CoHosted Links Discounted by Google - Truth or Myth

Following up on my question as to whether google discounts links from sites that are hosted together, I've found a new release that suggests other people seem to feel the same way....(and I quote / paraphrase)

June 28, 2007 - SEO Hosting, a division of Host Gator web hosting, announced today .... a new service enables customers to optimize their web sites for search engines by hosting on multiple C classes.

The new service stemmed from customers regularly asking Host Gator for multiple C Class capabilities because of their belief that search engines will penalize sites that have the same C class and are linking to each other. With multiple C Class capabilities, customers no longer have to work with different hosting providers to overcome this problem and can consolidate all their sites on SEO Hosting.

Does this matter at my small size? For instance, I have four generators of links hosted at the same place:
Todays Learners
Parent Homeschooling Forum
SpellingCity
Learning Games

Jim Boykin - Is Google Googling me?

Jim Boykin,

We spoke a few years ago and it started me thinking a certain way and building my site and links a certain way. It's worked well for me (I run a small online educational business). I've collected a few old domains from others, nurtured my own, and advertised/promoted without while staying under the radar. I've a question.

As background, we know that Google discounts the value of links from related sites. Well, to be more precise, they probably discount the value of large numbers of links from related sites. Google figures that two sites that share an IP address are probably related. So they would discount those links.

Do you think Mr. Google also considers the following as indicating that sites are related and so they are discounting the value of the links?

a Registered to the same person.
b Registered to people at the same address (physical or email).
c Sharing the same webmaster account
d Sharing the same adwords account
e Sharing the same adsense account
f From blogs that are part of the same google account.
g From blogs, adsense, adwords, and websites that share a common google account?

In short, how much research or googling is Mr. Google doing to value or discount links along these lines?

PS - Jim, I'm a big user and fan of your free tools. Especially the cool tool. Thanks.

Test Preparation - Advertising

Test preparation -would advertisements for preparing for tests be of higher value than advertisements for just generally building vocabulary skills?

At Vocabulary.co.il, we are engaged in a great google-adsense experiment. We're trying to find how we can adjust our page so that ads of more value per click appear.

We've been stuck in the $.09 basement for awhile with adsense touting vocabulary games, vocabulary activities, and free word games. By changing the title and building a few incoming links with words like test preparation or SAT preparation, will the ads change?

It seems to be that preparation for the standardized high stake tests merits maybe $.12 clicks which would be a 30% increase in revenue (which we would like :->)!