Sign of the Times - Another first

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Forums continue to boom! These online discussion forums seem to be alive and well for indepth discussion, it's the quick chatter that seems to have moved to big time social media.

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 parents discussing online homeschool 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 or forum software 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.

There's also a high school homeschool student discussion forum but it's only available to Time4Learning members (BTW, this comment is new added in 2016). It looks, btw, much like Facebook but uses some proprietary software.

The key to many of these forums is skilled attentive moderation to stimulation that discussion, encourage the newbies, manage the personalities and inevitable rifts, and keep the forum discussions jolly and moving.

Another key to forums is technology and keeping them updated with single sign on using the social media logins and adding features like maps to locate other members and easy posting of pictures and videos.

Blog Disclosures

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!

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

del.icio.us

Link Building - Hit on your vendors!

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?

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

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

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.

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

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....