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....

Education: Learning to Write Links that Count!

Learning to blog has been a fantastic educational experience for me. As a modern form of literature or writing, the blog is a popular media and motivating topic for students learning to write. Public self expression is a very motivating writing prompt that has kicked many students into caring about what they say. Reluctant writers are not born—they’re made. Instead of assuming your child doesn’t like to write, try a little motivation in the form of a good writing prompt. An interesting question that is much discussed is whether writers can be made or not.  My answer is that anyone can be taught the mechanics of good writing. It starts with a language rich environment no later than the preschool educational years.  The preschool curriculum should primarily be a life style, it's too early for formal education but still, you should make an effort to speak with real sentences and rich vocabulary.  Books should be a constant companion.

The preschool years are educationally the most important years of children’s lives. Research demonstrates that in the first three years of life, participating in a lively language-rich environment with plenty of adult interaction and attention are vital to building foundation skills. From ages three to five, the stimulation should start to include some activities focused on building specific skills in language, math and fine muscle control. These are the primary areas where an online preschool program can contribute to children’s development.  

The homeschool community is beginning to think more about literature in terms of how they are portrayed. The first directory of homeschool literature has now appeared on the web.

-----------------
This post builds on the materials convered in link mechanics.

 

 

 

The above is an example of a very nice SEO effort.

 

 

 

1. Each link is to a different website. This avoids the decreasing value of each link. When placing ads or writing articles, avoid wasting links by multiple links to the same website. If you must link several times to the same website:
1. Put the most important link first
2. link to different pages each time.
2. The paragraph includes many keyphrases important to the sites that are linked to. Even the page title (article title) works in terms such as education, learning, and to write which build the perceived relevance of this post to the target sites.
3. Deep linking. A number of the posts link to content deep in the site. The anchor text is relevant to the targetted page.
4. Try to quote a bit from the page that you are targetting. This saves a lot of writing time and it appears to be a more natural citation.
5. Title tags could be added to each of these links.
6. Efficiency, speed, and effectiveness are important. This lesson both teaches and, at the same time, I squeeze a little juice out of it. This is the standard of effectiveness that we strive towards. Getting the most impact for the least effort.

 

How many and which social media icons?

Here's a collection of what others are doing:

Squidoo.com- Notice that there is both a fb share and friend. 

V7N.com/ forum - Notice that their share list is kept to a small list.  The obscure ones are left hidden behind the More button.  This way, real users, can find the icons they want without getting discouraged.






T4L Plan - The top level list is good. Arguably, it should also have FB-like but maybe that would interrupt the flow of someone across the site.  The More (plus) button takes users to an unrefined list which needs to be refined.  The next step in design is to review what it tweets or shares as a message. Is it the same for every page? Does it take the page title? How does it work?

To like or to share, that is the question!

y big question, can you have a combined facebook/bookmark and facebook/like icon? Are they distinct?   As I researched this question, I found this row of icons on a forum....

{Grrr. it's not cutnpasting...take a look:}
http://www.v7n.com/forums/social-network-marketing/196383-facebook-like-vs-bookmark.html#post1425406

 Background.  Like many, I have littered my sites with little icons or widgets such as the following:
del.icio.us

But, my other sites have other icons related to bookmarking such as:
     


Another site has a single icon which has everything in like this:



Some others focus on RSS subscriptions:
 Subscribe in a reader


Or, we ask you to subscribe as either an email or RSS reader:

 Subscribe in a reader

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

In addition to bookmarking and subscribing, you can friend (now like/facebook) or follow (twitter) or visit (facebook).

You can write your own code or, if you google "facebook twitter icons", you'll get oodles of sites that will provide you icons and generate your code for you.  I wonder if their code will on Facebook, both create a link and an icon.
Widgetbox will give you icons and generate the code.

Link Mechanics

Here's a quick summary of  the link quality portion of an internal seminar that we had on SEO. 
1.  If I put two links from one page to another page, does the second link help at all?  NO. NOT AT ALL! The second anchor text and link are totally ignored.
2.  Are links from images or links from text more valuable from a SEO perspective?  Text links are preferable.
3.  Are text links within the body content more valuable then links elsewhere on the page?  Links from within the body of a paragraph are considered more likely to be organic references and hence, count more.
4.  How many links per paragraph is considered too many?  A very rough rule of thumb is that one link per hundred words is optimal.
5.  Is a sidebar link superior to a content link?  This is really a repeat of question 3 above.  In content links are considered the best.
6. Is it better to use a shotgun or a rifle?  Of course, what I mean, is it better to target a page by using the exact same anchor text over and over again or to vary it slightly?   Slight variations are more natural. So if you are targetting "delicious hot dogs", you might try variations such as "hot dogs","hot delicious dogs","tasty hot dogs","delicious dogs","delicious  sausages","yummy frankfurthers". The idea is for it to be natural, not highly organized.  I'm betting that Google will start figuring out synonyms soon (ie latent semantics in the jargon of search).
7.  Are run of site links valuable? It's hard to tell, they certainly aren't very valuable. On one hand, Google might consider them to be bought and worthless like so many footers. Or, like so many blogs, they might be considered truly natural endorsements. 
8.  How important is the relevance of one site to another, of one page to another, in terms of the value of the link.  VERY Valuable.  If you are on a site called homeschool freaks and you link to another page using homeschool freaks as the anchor text and that page is titled homeschool freaks,Google takes that endorsement very seriously.
9.  How much more important is a good site from a great site, a PR of 6 over a PR of 3?  This is a great mystery but I would guess that each PR (all else being equal) is one order of magnitude more important than the previous level.  So, ten links from sites with NO page rank equal the value of a PR of 1.  A link from a PR of 5 is ten times more valuable than a link from a PR of 4.  Note that I say; "all else being equal" which means relevance, number of outgoing links etc. Also note that I have not seen anybody else even attempt to quantify this which means that they are all wimps.
10.  Does a site's organization matter in terms of link quality? Yes, Google likes content sites organized into content areas that it understands.  This is a confusing and ambiguous area. Is Google looking at internal link structure or to folders? One one hand, I hear that they discount pages that are far from the root directory by every folder so I try to keep everything close to the root. On the other hand, this simplistic rule makes no sense to me so I don't want to take it too seriously.
11. How can you tell how credible a site is to Google? Easy, search a bunch of relevant terms and see how high in the search engines it is?
12. Is there a simpler way to see how credible a site is? Maybe, try using a link counter and then evaluate the quality and relevance of the links. Also, check out how old it is. And see if the links come from .govs or .edus which probably count more. There are tools for this.
13.  Do title tags on text links and alt tags on image links help?  What about adding a title tag on an image link? All the tags help, the title tag on the image is a little extreme but maybe worthwhile.
14.  What's the best links to focus on?  This is really a rehash of much of the above especially the rifle vs shotgun and run of site vs natural questions.  The best thing is to have a natural looking mix of links which grow steadily.  Growing by 10% in a day or a week is, for established sites, an upward limit. More is weird an merits being looked at.  Just keep tryign to get more links of many different types on an ongoing basis focusing on mixing it up and mixing it up.  This is the natural pattern of the messy world and shows that the links are natural. LOL!

Tools
majesticseo
yahoo website explorer
Google's wonder wheel
seomoz.org
raven-seo-tools.com

Terms

Trust
edgerank
title tag
alt tag
halo link

Statistics and Online Marketing

This being my personal blog to ponder the mysteries of online marketing, I'll take it in a different direction. I am testing the market so if you have a reaction, would you please leave a comment? I wrote this email today which reminded me of a set of articles, book, or even online course that I'd like to create. It would be about online marketing and statistics. Here's the excerpt from the email...It was in response to one of my colleagues commenting that she's giving up on predicting what will work in terms of online marketing efforts.

Here's my experience,

I generally feel that for every three or four things that we try, one works.

Then we take the thing that works and try to improve on it or at least do a lot more of it.

And we study the ones that didn't and see what we can learn from them

Then of course, usually whatever worked the first time stops working.  

The things that didn't work get tried again and work the second time.

Is it random?  Maybe,

My personal theory if that the logic is in the numbers.  We are usually working with small numbers so that the statistics are misleading. It's only when we have tens of thousands of examples that patterns become clearer but we're often trying to interpret results based on dozens or hundreds of examples. Which is too small.

BTW, if I ever get to do my own math curriculum, interpreting data and statistics will move from a peripheral  issue to a mainstream one. It horrifies me how many people can take differentials (ie do calculus), calculate sines and cotangents (geometry 2), and solve differential and quadratic equations (algebra 1 & 2) but can't answer the basic questions of, "we need a 25% response rate for this effort to be cost-effective, we've sent out a hundred random  emails. Ten people responded.  Should we keep testing or is it decided?"  (BTW, I too am not sure that I know how to answer it).