Site Stats for Blogger

Site statistics for my blogger blog have been a sore spot for me for a long time.

Today, problem solved!!!! :-> !!!!

I hooked up the site stats for blogger from feedburner (recently acquired by Google) and wow, I now know where the people are coming from.

Oddly, although this blog is brilliantly written, it gets little to no traffic - :-<
So I will now experiment by changing the name a little bit to see if that improves traffic. I just focused the name on the concept of learning online marketing, learning seo, and intermediate level seo. I'll see if that helps. I de-emphased online Q&A.....

SEO Abbreviations Glossary

404 - page not found. Most sites redirect the user to a standard page when the requested page does not exist
504 - aredirect from one page to another (when the first page is obsoleted)
B2B - business to business
B2C - business to consumers
BOT - short for robot (an automated self-running process)
BLOG - short for weblog, also suggests a Better Listing On Google (Joke)
BTF - below the fold
CPA - cost per action
CPC - cost per click, or, cost per customer (a source of ongoing confusion)
CPM - cost per thousand views, a rate used for advertising and banner sales
CTR - click thru rate
CSV - common separated values, a data format often used for transport between systems
FAQs - frequently asked questions
FFA - free for all meaning anyone can add a link.
DMOZ - Directory MOZilla, the open directory project, a human edited directory that was a big deal in the 90s
DNS - domain naming service, the lookup system of table coorelating names (such as www.spellingcity.com with numerical IP addresses
GUI - graphical user interface
HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol, meaning the info to come is in HTML
HTTPS - secure/encrypted HTTP
HTML - the code used to write web pages - hypertext markup language
IBL - inbound links
IM - instant messaging
IP - Internet Protocol, usually used as short for "IP Address", each computer and router on the net has a unique numerical address such as 192.117.80
IT - information technology meaning computers and such
JPEG - an image format, joint photographers expert group
LTV - liftetime value of a customer
OBL - outbound links
PFI - pay for inclusion
PPC - pay per click
PR - Google PageRank (named for Larry Page punning on his name)
ROI - return on investment
SEM - search engine marketing
SE - search engine
SEO - search engine optimization
SERP - search engine results page
SQL - standard query language, an architecture/protocol common to modern databases
UI - user interface
URL - web address
WWW - world wide web, a great moniker to help people understand the internet. I wonder who coined the expression?
XML - eXtensible Markup Language, a new language augmenting HTML for better organizing data and meaning

Darnell Clayton: Video: Buffolo To Simba: I Own You!

Darnell Clayton: Video: Buffolo To Simba: I Own You!

Social Bookmarking - State of the Art Today

In the last year or so, a Mysterious List of Words & Logos have appeared on the web: Digg, Del.icio.us, PopURLs, Reddit, Fark, Blue Dot, StumbleUpon, tags, Ikeepbookmarks, and so-on.


This latest set of techniques is known as social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking can affect search engine position and provides an alternative approach for viewers to navigate the web.

Are all these services worth participating in and are they all the same? NO, some are specialized in some area, some are small, and some are old fashioned (can you believe it? There are already some old fashioned sites in this latest and greatest trends. ex Ikeepbookmarks).

Which are the ones to select? Well, here are today's leaders and how they are different....

StumbleUpon.com provides a new way to go around the net following links established by people who have recommended sites by category and popularity.

Digg.com is all about articles. People vote.

del.icio.us is more of a bookmarking tool. Your favorite are listed and connected with others. BTW, for a great explanation and howto on del.icio.ous, try this social bookmarketing video

technorati - A multimedia listing by tag of blogs, music, pictures.

Furl - A listing by tag of websites.

Reddit - Articles get tagged and voted upon with the votes weighted by the taggers karma. This is the least corporate (albeit owned by conde nast) of the services.

Now some people (such as gino) categorize social bookmarking sites as subset of social media sites and include the bookmarking sites above with the likes of:

MySpace: social networking site
Facebook: social networking site
YouTube: video sharing community
Flickr: photo sharing site
LinkedIn: professional networking
Wikipedia: web-based community-created encyclopaedia
Yahoo! Answers: community answer site
MyBlogLog: blog networking community
FIQL & Netlister - sharing playlists.


Time4Learning's parent forum has started using social bookmarking

Permently Banned

I tried to login into the seochat forum this morning to comment on a thread and was greeted by this message:

You do not have permission to access forums, because you are permanently banned.

OUCH! What's odd is that I have no memory of having done anything that's not kosher or of being warned or reprimanded. What's also odd is that this "permanently banning from a forum" actually has an emotional sting to it. Weird.

It did cause me to take stock of my online behavior to see if it's spammy in any sense. Here's a quick list of my forum participations.....

1. Lotsa chat. I picked a forum recently and spent some time on it a few times / week to get my rating up above 50 posts so that my signature links would become active. While fun, the quality of the forum is mixed and I think the links are probably of very marginal value. As I look thru my posts, I think mine are often the most thoughtful and original and show the most research. Others (of mine), particularly in the forums that are "other" or "greeting" new members, my posts are pretty sloppy often missing words in the sentence.

2. Tech support. In our new site, SpellingCity.com, there's a serious Firefox bug which we have been trying to understand and resolve. To pursue help, I have posted into several tech forums with similar comments. Is this spammy?

Best discussion: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289873
Others:

http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1891#1891

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3012474#3012474

http://firefox.8ez.com/showthread.php?tid=2085

http://www.techsupportforum.com/alternative-computing/mozilla-firefox-browsers/172507-solved-lost-sound-firefox.html

3. And of course, we run our own parents forum which helps parents discuss common areas of interest and get feedback from members (not just us as a vendor). We permit links to competitive and personal sites although there have been a very extreme examples where we had to remove them. We've never banned a real member although there are plenty of extreme spammers that we ban (although since they switch sites constantly) I'm not sure that it does any good.

Top Ten Factors Affecting Your Search Engine Position

Here are the top ten ways to improve your position in the search engines.
They are in order of Most Important to Least Important! (in my opinion)

1. Quality inbound links from relevant pages with relevant anchor text to relevant pages.
2. Quality Inbound Relevent Links
3. Original content with each page built around a few targetted keyphrases with correct use of page title and URL.
4. Keyphrase-based domain name
5. Quality Directory Listings
6. Large Websites
7. Quality Relevent Outbound links
8. Site map
9. Correct use of H1, H2, Meta, and Alt tags
10. Correct use of keyword density & metatags (important to Yahoo & MSN)

Insignificant:
Quality HTML with no errors
No broken internal links
Having friends at Google.

What will hurt you:
All and any blackhat techniques
Spam
Lots of non-original content
Links to spam & trash sites

Online Revenue Development

Time4Learning has a fantastic online learning service for afterschool or homeschooling which we provide to users for a monthly fee. So the heart of our business is a subscription service.

However, with over 400,000 visitors per month, we have often considered trying to build revenues though either advertising or affiliate programs.

To be clear, we are NOT talking about advertising to our students or members. We don't do that. We are thinking about our main and tertiary sites where we get lots of traffic but most of which does not convert into members. In fact, 99% of our visitors don't sign up so it seems reasonable to try to make some money on them as they surf out of our site.

Adsense - We have had a variety of different experiences with adsense, some of which we cannot explain. At one point, we made alot of money on it but then, some clever consultants, convinced me to take it down.

Since then, I've run adsense on sidebars of some pages of the site and at best, I can around a 5% clickthru on the ads. With an average of $.10 / click, this means that I make a dime on one out of every twenty visitors or, a half penny per visitor. Here's a question: anybody out there want to share similiar metrics with me? Are there industry norms of what one ought to be able to make per visitor?

I've also experimented with a variety of affiliate programs including commission junction, linkshare, affiliate fuel, amazon, and others. None of them have done much for me. Or, I've not figured out how to do much with them?

If any of you have experience helping to optimize pages for these efforts and wants to help, I'd be pleased for advice or even some consulting help.

Acquiring Websites - due diligence

I just bought my second website. The first one was a simple domain acquisition with no content. This website acquisition was much more complicated and expensive since I acquired:

1. A domain
2. Applications on the domain

My reasons for acquiring (not in any order):

1. I wanted the applications to deploy onto one of my educational websites
2. I wanted the highly rated site (in several search engines) to drive traffic and send "google juice" to my other educational sites
3. I'm trying to learn to make money from advertisements & affiliates (ie, not subscriptions) and this seemed like a good way to learn it.

It was not cheap but the the seller, whom I contacted initially to buy the technology that I had seen on the site, would only sell the website in its entirely, not just the technology. So I bought the website, pretty much at his asking price.

I went through, what I think of, as an appropriate amount of "due diligence". "Due diligence" means the process through which a potential acquirer evaluates a target company and its assets to ensure that the price is fair and that the buyer understands the assets appropriately. It is a legal term for publicly-held companies (and others with fiduciary legal obligations) that the management must go thru to not be reckless with the funds entrusted to them.

Actually, here's (simplified) what I've done.
1. Had initial discussions with the buyer. I approached him as interested in buying the technology on the site. He responded by saying that he was trying to sell the whole site. I asked "why" and "how much?"  He answered.

2. I considered his answers to why and how much to make a go/no go decision on the purchase:
- I wanted to pursue it at that level of asking price
- To think about whether he was "for real" or a dishonest or flakey person. If I felt that either of the latter were likely, I would not pursue it at all. I have decided to not deal professionally with people that are lunatics or lying (to me or themselves). I checked up on the info that he provided, reviewed his sites and their links to get an overall picture of his online activities and decided that he was a "good egg" and someone that I wanted to go thru the acquisition process with.

I cannot overemphasize how important making this decision is. The ONE time that I decided to buy with someone who seemed "too-amazing", I wasted a huge amount of my and my colleagues time and money on an acquisition that did not close since as we got into the details of due diligence, it turned out he was not just exaggerating, he was totally lying. I knew at the beginning that there was something wrong with his story and I wish I had, based on simple intuition, walked away.

3. I gathered all the independent stats that I could to evaluate it.
- many independent lists of incoming links such as those provided by www.webuildpages.com
- alexa etc

4. Check hosting status (including blacklisting) using http://www.dnsstuff.com/

5.  I asked them to supply to me:
- traffic by month for the last year with explanations of traffic trends
- data on referrals by country and domain
- disclosure on relationships for sites with links and sites providing traffic
- I had thought about the possibility of fraud here before when I looked at SEO due diligence.

6. Looked at other similar sites that might be for sale and followed some discussions to go from being a novice to an expert. I looked at www.sedo.com but preferred: www.sitepoint.com . In fact, they had a great free guide to Buying Websites.

7. I found a lawyer that I like, trust, is experienced with small acquisitions, and that I had good access to. This is nearly impossible. I was incredibly lucky.
8. Put in critical data in the purchase agreement in the "reps and warranties". This means that they, as part of the contract, represent that they've disclosed the truth about the data that they've supplied me (which I made part of the contract as an attachment).5. Staged acquisition with payment tied to deliverables.

BTW - if there is much interest in this, I could write more extensively. I think this is a huge new business growth area for me (acquisitions) and generally, there will be lots of growth thru deals on the web.

Focusing Page Rank by limiting content?

Analytically - Can new pages hurt?

This is a question that's puzzled me for awhile and which I thought I would put to a forum that I'm now active on: John Scott's V7N webmasters forum.

Before I get to the question about content and whether too much defocuses googlejuice, let's talk about his forum. He has some good quality content (his seo intro is fabulous). The forum has a policy of not only ranking contributors by number of posts (junior, senior, emeritus etc) which is addictive but he provides some perks along the way. The most visible one is that at 50 posts, you can have live links in your signature. Of course, there are oodles of people posting silly short comments to get their post count up....

I added this math seo puzzler on the back of this discussion: "Does adding new content without adding new links hurt your search engine position....."

My post.....I'd like to take this question towards the mathematical and away from the simplistic "go get some links".....

Assume that I have a 5 page site on widgets. Each page talks about different widgets. Say A Widgets, B widgets... right up to the 5th letter. But all my links come into my home page which is the A widget page.

If I add a sixth page but without adding any links, does that hurt my positioning on google for B Widgets?

Or, does adding new pages, while keeping the link count constant, mathematically reduce the PageRank (in the truest sense of the word) of my existing pages?

I've read extensively on this point and have learned about dampeners and matrices and such but nobody seems to deal with this question directly.The math suggests that the page rank from the total links in cannot be used over and over again for any given number of (even relevant) keywords. But then, why doesn't anyone discuss how to optimize from this question of having the optimal amount of content for the incoming links?

In my case, this is an academic but puzzling case since I am busy adding content (quality) and links as fast as I can to: Time4Learning.com. Still, I wonder if rather than going for learning games, Educational Games , and teaching games, I should make more choices....

Common SEO Myths

Many people believe, but it is not true:

1. You should not have any outgoing links because they dissipate your SEO power. Just like water pressure or electricity, any outgoing link will function as a "leak" and release the pressure. This is a completely false understanding of how the search engines work yet many people totally believe that they are "wasting power" by having outgoing links on their site.

2. You should have as few pages as possible on your site. Again, many believe that just like electricity or water power, the bigger the area covered, the less pressure or power is concentrated on the key spots. So your best pages will do better if you don't divide your SEO power across many pages. While largely untrue, there is some truth (I believe) that sites cannot just keep getting larger without diminishing the power of some key pages)

3. The google PageRank that we see on the google toolbar is an important measure of a page's power and the value of an outgoing link. In fact, the visible pagerank is a highly distorted cartoon which can be wildly inaccurate. I believe (and would welcome comments) that this is inaccurate in that:
- it is reflecting the number of incoming links but NOT the quality or relevance which is at least as important as the number of links
- the value of an outgoing link from a page is a reflection of it's relevance to the target page, quality, and the number of outgoing links on a page. If all else were equal, the links on a page with 10 outgoing links is ten times more valuable than a link on a page with one outgoing link. I have seen hundreds of people pay for links from the same page which means that the relative of power of those links is the original power of the page, minus some dampening effect, and then divided by the total number of links on the page.
- it is always several months out of date

PS - While not a myth since the pun is good, most people don't know that when the concept of pagerank was being developed, Larry Page decided to name the concept after himself. I've often wondered if Sergei Brin wanted it to be called BrinRank.

The Long Tail of Search

This is amazing. Time4Learning lives off the long tail so it was exciting to find an article on it:

Chasing The Long Tail.......How big is this phenomena? At Google's Universal Search announcement, Udi Manber put up a slide that stated that 20% to 25% of the search queries Google sees every day are search queries it has never seen before. Let that sink in for a moment. To me, that number was startlingly large.

While this is an amazing fact, it is this next one which I think is understated and of more business significance....

The sum of the searches on all the low volume terms = the sum of the traffic on all the high volume terms.

Comments:
1. This depends on definitions.
2. All the same, most people believe that the volume is in the big search terms, nto the small ones. So this is big news to them.
3. I believe that: the volume in small search terms > the volume in big search terms.
4. I have successfully figured out how to take advantage of this in natural search, but not in paid search. (more on my recent trials and frustrations in paid search later). Basically, even with broad matching, if you build enough terms, you can bid on relevant keyphrases at a much lower rate. I had figured this out when I was very active in PPC a few years ago. I'm now on my second consultant to try and resucsitate my PPC campaign and so far, he has not shown substantial progress. BTW - remember my seo joke?

There are basically two ways to pursue the long tail:
Write in depth articles. This provides you access to long tail terms simply through the natural combination of words that the search engine will extract from your article. The scope of this is somewhat limited, of course, as there are so many word combinations that can be extracted from one article.
Implement lots of pages all targeted at different terms. The trick with this approach is to make the pages unique and different from each other, so they are not seen as spammy duplicate content.

Posted by Eric Enge on May. 21, 2007 on Clickz as Chasing The Long Tail

PS - Note to self. It is way past time for me to figure out how to do trackbacks and other social bookmarking or referencing systems so that I can participate in the discussions properly.

LMS - learning management systems

I'm looking at LMS for some new content that we are creating. For one site, I've picked Joomla. That is really a content mgt and community system.

My more ambitious projects require my own cms. I'm reviewing them at http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=lms

Leading contenders:
- create my own
- joomla or jooml with lms
- druple
- moodle

I have a few sets of requirements. Quickly evolving....

1. Course mgt. I want the students to see the upcoming activities in a visual way. They should be able repeat what they've done .....

2. Student record keeping

3. Roles for admin, course creators, course teachers, parents, students. In fact, I want to be able to create new roles based on whether I want to give them access to:
- create accounts & grant permissions - globally
- create content
- create students
- look at records
- be a student
- ohmygodthisisgoingto be a long list...

ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS/LMS), designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Interoperable content for creating and reusing learning objects. Easily customizable. Put your courses online.

Google Page Rank, Personalized Search, DataCenters

For the last few months, I have been high fiving myself that for my key term, homeschool curriculum, I am almost always number one on Google.

Today, I wondered if that is only true for my search, since there are personalized searches giving different results to different people, and to different data centers. I tend to use the cool seo tool and it always shows me number one to. But it too might have become personalized since I use it alot!

So I tried a different free seo tool and found the following:

Google Datacenter - 66.249.93.104 - #1
Google Datacenter - 64.233.179.104 #1
Google Datacenter - 216.239.51.104 #1
Google Datacenter - 66.102.9.99
Google Datacenter - 66.102.9.147
Google Datacenter - 66.102.9.104
Google Datacenter - 66.102.7.99
Google Datacenter - 66.102.7.147
Google Datacenter - 66.102.7.104
Google Datacenter - 66.102.11.99
Google Datacenter - 64.233.189.104

Woa, I'm number one in every case. What have I learned?

Is it possible that my personal login was somehow communicated thru that search so that they knew what I was looking for? Not likely, so I'm number one in every case. I guess I'll keep high fiving myself.

Or, I could check out homeschooling curriculum.

Google Datacenter - 66.249.93.104 - #6
Google Datacenter - 64.233.179.104 #6
Google Datacenter - 216.239.51.104 #6
Google Datacenter - 66.102.9.99 #6
Google Datacenter - 66.102.9.147 #6
Google Datacenter - 66.102.9.104 etc
Google Datacenter - 66.102.7.99
Google Datacenter - 66.102.7.147
Google Datacenter - 66.102.7.104
Google Datacenter - 66.102.11.99
Google Datacenter - 64.233.189.104 #6

Homeschool Education - Googles rankings

Homeschool Curriculum #1
Homeschooling curriculum #8
homeschool #7
home school #17
homeschooling #18

home education - not in top 100 (overture reports 6057 terms)...interesting. My poor position here is interesting since this is part of the title of my home page, the most linked to page on my site and a PR 6. I wonder if this one link will make a difference?

Help Wanted - Blog SEO

I would like someone to show us (and to do it) how to set up a blog perfectly for SEO purposes and with a few google ads.

I am hiring three writers who will post once a week on a given topic on this group blog. They need to be instructed:
- are link swaps actually useful in 2007? Are a few good but not more than 20?
- is posting as comments on other blogs useful?
- forums?
- are pingomatic submissions useful?
- which software (wordpress or typepress i think) is best?

I would like the pages to be set up for the best seo. And I'd like all the extras worked in. For instance, what is digg & delicious and how are they used to help blogs? What is all this stuff that I see...

subscribe via rss, yahoo, google, newsgator, rssvibest?

This is how much work and $$$ from the right person?