My math pages are sinking, sigh. Live and learn.

Do you believe in link inflation? Got any data?

For you SEO learners, elementary and middle level, consider this a little course in link building. Note that an algorithmic spider based in Mountain View will come by and see that the title of this post contains the words: math and learn. That little creepy crawly will "understand", based on that title, that this article is about math education. I reinforce this idea by peppering the writing with keyphrases related to schools and education. For instance, I can ask the question, is this helping you to learn? Am I teaching you something useful.

The reader feels that I'm writing for his edification, the search engine understands that this is relevant to math education. You might now see how this related to building the education business...

I know that the math pages on my website use to pull oodles and ooldes of traffic from google but somehow, they've slipped. Time for a little educational reinforcement. So here, I'm putting in a plug. Don't you want to know what the math standards are for each year of education: K-8th grade? Here are the math standards are spelt out in plain english. You should mention them as a valuable resource on your educational websites and perhaps steer people towards them. G-D forbid that I should ask you to link to them. Please.

PreSchool Math At this level, the math and language arts are integrated.
Kindergarten Math Curriculum mapping at the K to first grade level is tricky since there's alot of repetition and reinforcement required.
Elementary Math
First Grade Math
Second Grade Math By second grade, the curriculum stops spiraling back so often and so deep.
Third Grade Math
Fourth Grade Math
Fifth Grade Math Hear, algebraic concepts start to come into their own.
Sixth Grade Math
Seventh Grade Math This is essentially prealegebra but at a slow pace. Faster students might jump right to the algebra class which includes prealgebra.
Eighth Grade Math
Algebra




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Webanalytics 1 - Back Story

I'm getting geared up to install Google Analytics on our site: Time4Learning. I'm trying to learn enough so that we do it right the first time. Have I got some history? Oh, yea.

Adwords Conversion Measuring
I've long been haunted by a mistake that we made when we set up Google adwords. Adwords lets you set up several types of conversions to measure. In our case, we wanted to measure how many people signed up for our free newsletter and how many people joined (ie paid for) our educational learning service. BUT, all types of conversions are not equally supported by Adwords tool chain. We made our most important conversion, the payment, to equal the variable "sales count". It seemed logical at the time. But, as we worked with adwords, they have all sorts of automated tool support for one type of conversion, unfortunately, the one that we set up as signing up for our newsletter. Over time, we've stopped even tracking newsletter sign-ups and we continue to invest all sorts of time in optimizing our "sales count" conversions by keyword, by bid, by landing page, by type of demo shown. For instance, should we bid more for the term learning games or educational games? Which one converts at a higher rate? And can we change it by having landing pages optimized for those terms.

Sadly, the conversion that we care about requires us to download reports from Adwords, not to use their convenient tools. This problem chews about about 15 extra minutes everytime we have the slightest question on adwords and keywords. After three years, that's alot of time and more importantly, it's alot of research that we didn't bother to do since we tend to be in a hurry.

Other Time4Learning history to consider in setting up analytics.

We have adwords under one google account, webmaster tools under another. Which one should we put analytics in? Answer: Adwords. there's more synergy of tools.

We have more than just one site that we care about. For instance, many visitors (we think) visit our parents forum which is hosted on Time4Learning.net as part of the process of checking us out. How would we track this?

We sign alot of people for our newsletter and we hope, that it is step towards signing up with us eventually, We 'd like to track that.

Lastly, we have several types of pages: .htm, .shtml, .html, .aspx, and some secure ones (https). We use includes. How does this affect the implementation process?

So stick with us as we work through these problems. A real live case study. More reality blogging. And of course, if any of you have great advice on these questions, I'm interested. I have hired a SEO guru to come visit us periodically at "lawerly" rates per hour. After session one, I'm pleased.



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Search Engine Relationships

People will do the most amazing things for links. Here is one of the most interesting linkbaits that I've seen: An interactive chart showing the relationship between the search engines over time!

You can see who is using whose search results and advertising at what point in history.

It's very cool. I'm pleased to reference this useless intriguing amusing gadget. It does make the point that there are only a few sources of search engine results and not that many more sources of context sensitive advertising.

See it for yourself. Now! Free! The amazing Search Engine Relationship Chart!


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The SEO Process

I found a great series of articles on the SEO process that I'll share with my staff to give them an overview of what we do, day in and day out.

It's a ten part series of articles run by WebProNews. Below is the table of contents from article 6.

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
   
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
   
7. PPC
   
8. Statistics Analysis
   
9. Conversion Optimization
   
10. Keeping It Up

BTW - I wouldn't organize the topics this way. I would have an article on "on-page" issues which, perhaps, is what content optimization is actually about. Stay tuned while I read these articles...



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Twitter monitoring

There are many social media to choose among. The oddest social media is Twitter. Twitter makes you keep it short.

You can even monitor Twitter. Here's the twitter monitor for SpellingCity.

Makes me feel old.



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24/7 Support - Don't LIE to me.

Everybody has vendors. Some we love, some we tolerate. My pet peeve these days is vendors who advertise on their site 24/7 support and it's just not true. I'll name some names but not all of them.

Webstream - They were my initial hosting service. Their site when I joined had 24/7 all of their website. The fact is, nobody answered phones or emails at night. They started around 8am and finished around 8pm at night. That was not the only dispute I had with them but it one of the one that finally convinced me to ditch them and move to a vendor that does provide the 24/7 support that they promise.

My Credit Card processor - Their site also said 24/7 support. As Time4Learning got big, there were a number of times when we got very frustrated when things went down over the weekend and in the evening and we had to wait until someone started working. Since we got quite large, I eventually had a conversation with them and they provided a phone number which, when we had to, we could call at any hours. I am no insanely happy with them. (Although I do watch my credit card fees from them, the bank, and visa like a hawk)

One of my current hosting companies - which I won't mention since I haven't ditched them yet - is actually based abroad and works regular business hours which seem to start around 6pm our time and last through the night. It's incredibly inconvenient. We will migrate away from them this year.



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Before the WorldWideWeb, there was Move!

In 1992, I was in marketing at SGI and there was an internal product developed called Move! It could be used to post information or for presentations. It had a client-server model so you could view content on one computer, but host it elsewhere. It could handle text, images, audio, vector imagery, video, and 3D objects. New data types could be added. It was operating system, network, and hardware independent. It was called Move! (sometimes it was called Showcase).

We didn't really know what to do with Move!. I was one of the early and big users of Move!. I used it for presentations. Some of the engineers that it was the future of computing but I couldn't really see why.

It had an integrated authoring tool which was great.

In retrospect, it was basically the technology for the world wide web which we developed, played with, and then moved on to other more immediate projects. I sometimes think back to Move! and wonder if anyone else remembers it. Surely, the engineers who put it together must think about. I wonder if the technology was robust enough to have gone all the way.

I wrote this post after looking at an article by Alex Vorn which notes today is the tenth anniversary of Mozilla.




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Free SEO tools

These free tools are tremendous. I've not yet paid for an SEO tool.

Web Site Grader - It says that I'm doing a great job. 93%.

Quantcast - It gives you amazing stats on your site.

Yahoo's site explorer - Gives info on links.

Google's Keyword rating tool - The adwords tools made available for everyone.

This article somewhat obsoletes the previous one on SEO Free Tools.



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BBBOnline

THIS SITE IS NOT A BBB MEMBER. THESE GRAPHICS ARE HERE FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY!

I really like these icons from the better business bureau online. I see them online alot I see them on many websites. I borrowed these from WildTangent. BUT, whenever I contact the BBBonline people, they tell me that they're being phased out and that despite my annual paid membership (and compliance) to both my locall BBB and the national BBBonline, I can't have them.

I'm confused. It would be great for the BBB to do some COPPA compliance monitoring and other save kids stuff. Why did they start such a good thing and then drop it? Anbody from BBBOnline want to comment?

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Second Grade - 2nd Grade Leading Website Analysis

I thought I'd pick a term and analyse the top results in Google. I'm interested in the quality and nature of the results, who is competing effectively, what their business model is, and other questions that emerge.

1. www.internet4classrooms.com/skills_2nd.htm - They are a free directory site with pages on most grade levels. The links cover learning games and resources for each major subject. Compiled by two teachers in TennCopyright (Susan Brooks and Bill Byles). they link to other sites games & resources. Very minor banner advertising. The ad network might change with each refesh. I noticed afy and doubleclick in the URLs. It appears to be tightly maintained with a note on each page that the links were verified 3/18 (11 dyas ago) and that it is protected from scraping by copyscape. They direct link to other sites flash files. They have a major commentary about HotChalk on the front page so they might be related.
2. www.aaaknow.com/grade2.htm - This site also has a page on each grade level, it's run by John Banfill of New Mexico, he has google ads throughout the site. The content is all on the site. It's very simple examples of a very large number of math lessons. The main business focus seems to be selling the math CD.
3. http://school.familyeducation.com/second-grade/elementary-school/36065.html This ia very slick corporate site with a range of newsletters, resources, cross promotional and revenue related ads in content management system. I quote: Family Education Network is built on a strong foundation of assets from the international media company, Pearson plc (NYSE:PSO). Their are menu items for every interest (parents, teachers, kids) and every subject and every age range.
4. http://www.geocities.com/ljacoby_2000/window.html This is a teacher's great website. Resources and resources and whatnot, obviously accumulated over the years. She's done a great job, it's a totally organic site. Note that it's a geocities (ie free) site that has gotten to the top from a long history and lots of links and quality. Nothing SEOish about it. Congratulations to: Ms. Jacoby's Second Grade at Peirce School ~ Arlington, Massachusetts. There is no revenue model, it's just a school classroom site done with a geocities template. Note that the title tag is "Window on our World".
5. http://www.genevaschools.org/austinbg/class/gray/ This is another teacher's great website hosted on the school systems site. The title is Mrs Gray's Second Grade Class. It's got great resources and a clean design. Congratulations to Mrs Gray.
6. http://www.cape.k12.mo.us/blanchard/hicks/index.html Mrs Hicks second grade class. She's hosted on the school systems ".US" domain. This is another home-grown template driven sweet teacher's site that has great personality and resources. Title tag: Mrs Hicks Second Grade Classroom
7. http://www.ed.gov/pubs/CompactforReading/table2.html A federal government archived site with 100 PDFs of some use to teachers. The title tag reads: "Archived: archived: School-Home Links Reading Kit: Second Grade Reading Activities Table of Content"
8. http://www.learnnc.org/students/2/ A collection of select resources, just 20, collected by LearnNC. LEARN NC, a program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education, finds the most innovative and successful practices in K–12 education and makes them available to teachers and students . At first, the site appears to be only linking to non-commercial sites (Read Write Think) but it also goes to regular sites such as LearningBox.com (cool site)
9. http://www.time4learning.com/education/second_grade.shtml A site describing the curriculum of Time4Learning - home education - for second graders. Nicely done.

Note - NONE of the teacher or resource sites listed SpellingCity.com - This needs to be remedied.

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Why isn't BBat50 taking class?

I'll spare you a photo of my foot but basically, I'm no longer symmetrical. One foot, the one that has been sore for half a year, is now much smaller than my newly injured right foot. It has swollen. And there's also a broken toenail.

Gout? No, just a sprain. The good doctor (Dr Fingado by name. He also trains with us) supervised the xrays and review. His prognosis is:

Recently injured right foot. No real problem. A month of not pushing off my toes or any other movement in the foot should fix it. Stay off it. And then don't hurt it again.

Nagging soreness in the left foot. More serious. Arthritis in all three joints in my foot. Arthritis is (per Wikipedia) a joint disease as a result of trauma to the joint, infection of the joint, or age. The good doctor explained it to me that the cartilage, which lines the bones inside the joints and allows them to move against each other without friction, is worn away and now the porous bones will start to have friction. Ouch! Arthritis. Probably a result of many decades of intense soccer playing and repeated injury to the left foot and ankle.


So now I'm like the other parents, driving two kids two and from, watching from the sidelines. Hoping to get wireless installed so I can use the time efficiently. durnnabit. grrrr.

All in all, I've had a good run. Injuries are part of the game. I've been very lucky and should be back fully speed in late April



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Vocabulary GRE - finally making $$$s

I have messed around and experimented with affiliate programs for years. I've never made any money. Specifically, I've never broken a $100. There were several that paid me $25 or $50 at the start but they all either stopped paying or converting. I fear that they are still getting referrals from me, I really need to go clean up my sites.

But now success, a vocabulary product is making me $$$s. I'm thru the $100 and $300 mark. There are a few versions of this vocabulary product but the best one for me is about GRE vocabulary games. Check it out.



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V7N SEO suggestion comment

John Scott of V7N hosting has a great post on his own forum about SEO. At one point he says:

Ask your customers, politely, for a link. It doesn’t have to be web related, either. Even if you sell lumber, you can ask your contractor/customers to link back to your website from theirs.

I've had great success with a modified version. I do it slightly differently. I send some of my vendors a great comment about themselves and suggest that they put it up on their site as a web testimonial.

As part of that, I suggest it would be more effective for them if they included a link back to me to make it look more credible. I also say that I would appreciate it since I like the recognition. Sometimes, I have to answer emails from people who want the details of my experiences with a vendor. But it's worked well and been worth it for my site about homeschooling curriculum.




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SpellingCity.com & Warriors Collide

Why not get an A on every spelling test?
Check out SpellingCity.com.
This is more than spelling help, it makes the weekly spelling test too easy.

And while I'm busy promoting my sites, I'd like to mention an article that I just wrote about Warriors Collide, Ft Lauderdale. This is a little bit like news. Last time I blogged about news (the little Margo Foster article), I moved from dozens to about a hundred visitors a day for a week or so. Maybe this weeks Warriors Collide fight night in Ft Lauderdale will do the same.

A third topic, related in the sense that I'm doing tests to see what makes sites and blogs do well in the search engines, is my collection of resources on Vocabulary Learning Fun.

Vocabulary Resources :
Ultimate Vocabulary - A software package designed to vocabulary
Expand Vocabulary - This will teach you how to expand your vocab.
GRE Vocabulary - This will teach you how to expand your vocab.
Improve Vocabulary - A series of cheesy educationally-invalid ways
Increase Vocabulary - How does your vocabulary tell everyone about your personality problems?
Power Words - For people with little minds. Use big words to compensate and highlight your lack of brainpower.
Vocabulary Builder - This approach is interesting: it focuses on word roots et al.
Vocabulary Software - To feed the hungry machine, we need to keep pushing software.
Ultimate Vocabulary Review - This stuff is great. Very popular
Word Smart Review - A review of Word Smart.

Lastly, the most popular article and post that I've written in awhile:
Why do I blog?



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A Writing course on blogging

I just took a course on writing blogs. Unlike most of the literature on the web, this did not focus on how to make money. The course taught how to define your persona, find your voice, write an interesting blog,get it up on the web, and to begin to attract and interact with an audience. it also covered other beginner topics like netiquette and safety.

The feedback from the people in the course was "it was awesome". As one woman (it was seven women and me in the course) said: "Thanks for course about the blog. I was definitely a reluctant "blogger" from the get-go, but the class has got me plum excited about the whole idea. ".

The class was entirely online. It's not expensive ($99). I made a set of friends (virtual friends). I got personalized feedback from the teacher and lots of feedback from classmates. And it's probably the best course that I've ever taken as an adult. Logistically, there were online class meetings once-a-week which I missed a lot of but really would have liked to attend. The assignments and feedback was all online. Technically, not difficult. The woman who taught was great and was fun to deal with.

I'm recommending the class. Try it: Best Blog Writing Class.

I'm also signing my Mom (age 75) up for the class since I think she'll like it and it makes a great present.

I think it's amazing how many really great blogs emerged from the class. Here they are:
Family in Shape
Everyday BBW
The Daily Grind -
She-Parent
Topsy-Techie
The Renovators
Black Belt at 50



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