SEO: The Future Is Bright, The Future Is Linkless

I've heard, since I first learned about SEO about a decade ago, about the imminent change to some other basis for search engine ranking.

But, all the updates that I've observed over the last decade have actually just been improved implementations of the basic principles that I learned a decade ago.

With Penguin 2.0, Google understands that Elton John is a singer

Even the addition of social media links was consistent with the original concept of link-counting and weighting. However, this new concept of co-articulation and co-citation is the first fundamental change that I've heard about. Fascinating.  If I can understand it, the basic changes are that:

1.  Google tracks citations about things and enters them in the algorithm even if there is no link.

2.  Semantics and intelligence. This has been an area of real progress for Google with several stages.

In the old days when I started, Google was a dumb word counting system. When I started, Google produced very different results when you searched for "1st grade" vs "first grade". By about five years ago, Google seemed to understand that these were exact synonyms and produced identical results.

Google also tried to infuse its results with appropriate information for the search.  Search on "apple pie" and you would get recipes with the ingredients summarized right in the search engine.  Search for a specific model of a piece of consumer electronics and the price was highlighted in the search engine. These were early implementations of Google's use of schema to provide more info right at the point of search.  This has been enhanced with rich snippets.

Today, it sounds like Google's intelligence is jumping up another few notches as it develops an understanding of different sorts of entities and associations.  I've got some research and thinking to do to try to understand how this might affect us.

Posting - Good Vocabulary and Expression

I would like it if both the people and the spiders understood my posts. Check out this nifty little banner:

Making Word Study FUN!

Word Find  Spelling Test Unscramble WhichWord?

Note how it both has a nice image for the people and some nice text food for the spiders!

On another note, I think I've discovered a new term, SSO or single sign on!

 How can a school make it easy for 702 elementary and middle school students to access a great online learning tool like VocabularySpellingCity on laptops, net books, and iPads?

With Google ID, all students have a single sign-on for all of the applications they use every day.

The Sloan Consortium's Style - Gotta Love it!

Among the other delights in this morning's email inbox, I received an email from (sic): "type="text/css"> body p { font-family: A@sloanconsortium.org The Sloan Consortium  style>" .

That is pretty much verbatim* what it said. I had other emails from Steve, Nancy, Carmen, The Learning Center and so on but this one has a "from" and a "reply to" space filled in with (here it comes again!):  "type="text/css"> body p { font-family: A@sloanconsortium.org The Sloan Consortium  style>"

 The email is actually from a pretty reputable group. The body starts with:

Leadership Development through the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL)

FREE INFORMATIONAL WEBINAR: February 13, 2013 - 1:00pm - 2:00pm ET
Is your institution prepared with the necessary leadership to navigate the new higher education landscape? A wide range of internal and external forces are causing great excitement and disruption to business-as-usual in higher education. Market forces, federal and state regulation policies, new and emerging technologies, and the demands of today’s learners for convenience and flexibility are impacting the operational and strategic direction of many institutions. Join this free webinar to learn how IELOL, the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL), a blended-learning leadership development program sponsored by Penn State and the Sloan Consortium, is serving to prepare the next generation of institutional leaders in online learning.

This amuses me on the back of the last few week's fiasco with the deliciously ironic disaster of the Coursera MOOC on the Fundamentals of Online Education.  Audrey's write-up is pretty good.

Here's the exact code for you geeks out there!

from:		"type="text/css"> body p { font-family: A@sloanconsortium.org The Sloan Consortium  style>
reply-to:		"type=\"text/css\"> body p { font-family: A@sloanconsortium.org The Sloan Consortium"  style"
to:		john ...
date:		Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 1:32 PM
subject:		Leadership Development through the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL)

And, for nostalgia, how about some images from education past. 
* It is not verbatim since, unless I changed the code, it truncated the blog post! 

The PInterest Icon

I would like to replace the Google Plus icon that I have on some of my websites with  Pinterest icon. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right? Wrong.

First question, should the Pinterest icon make them "Follow" my pinterest page or should it pin an image onto their Pinterest page? Are these real possibilities?  It's a little like the Facebook share vs like question.  Or the Twitter follow vs Tweet question.

If you want to do a "Follow me" on Pinterest, here's a simple tutorial on pinterest following me.

del.icio.us

Advertising & Captchas

It had to happen. I love it. I wish I had predicted it. I was just joining a forum and was at the stupid "human verification" phase when I try to decipher some weird letters and prove that I'm smarter than a spam bot.

What did I see? An advertising-based captcha!!!!

Advertising on a Captcha - How cool is that!

Advertising Expeirts Wanted?

I'm not looking for someone to place ads, I'm looking for the opposite type of expertise.  I run a few websites that show some ads. Our volumes are huge, literally many tens of millions of page views per month. We ran ads from a few different networks. I'm looking for someone with expertise in helping us set up and run our advertising networks.

Background.
Our biggest site is SpellingCity.com. We run sites on the inside pages.  The site's data is available on Quantcast.

Networks that we use:

Google Adwords - PPC
Intergi - CPM
Burst - CPM
ValueClick - CPM
Adify Ligit - CPM
ereflect - PPA
Brightserve - management service. Not being used anymore.
CPM Booster
AOL’s Advertising.com
Criteo - retargetting technology

Youtube Video Transcripts New!

I was just looking at a cool series of embedded videos with a homeschool Question of the week.  I embedded it below, it ran originally on the Lets Homeschool Highschool Community site.

Then I was checking out the YouTube stats on it (views, where embedded etc) and I saw something new. An Interactive transcript. Is this a transcript that the user uploads or is the a YoutTube Technology Feature?

.Of course, what I'm really investigating is why, with such cool videos and content, there are still only 7 views this late in the week (Wednesday).  We should help them promote to the hundreds of views weekly, 5K is a reasonable goal.

The Transcript is New

Social Media Distinctions

Tumblr vs Facebook

I'm just beginning to understand some of this social media stuff.

I'd like to thank whoever sent me this  social media infographic!

It helps that they now refer to icons as icons instead of chiclets.


Here's a little effort to add some seo to bbat50. More info on:  KC Lavallee, KO Andrello,  and Team X-Treme Martial Arts Academy.

Social Media Metrics and Today's Symmetry

VocabSpellingCity is my favorite site (yes, I'm the mayor).

Social Media Metrics

 Social media-wise, I just noticed some symmetry: we have 25K FB fans, 2.6K Twitter followers, and 256 on Google Plus.  We have about 250K active email subscribers. 

Is this pattern common?

 Are the numbers moving in sync or is this unusual? 

Stay tuned....

Infographics - Clever Clever Marketing

Several times teach week I get an email that reads like this:
Hey John,

I recently developed another infographic that could be a good fit for your site. I just wanted to reach out and share.  It highlights and illustrates how harsh the job market and soaring tuition cost is making it hard for college students upon graduation

You can check it out here:

Title: Graduated and Living at Home
Graphic/Video: 
Let me know what you think,  I would love for you to publish it if you find it suitable for your site.

Basically, under the guise of a clever infographic, these spammers marketers send out thousands or tens of thousands or maybe millions of personal sounding letters to site owners trying to get some tiny percentage of them to put up their infographic which is, 0f course, marketing for their products and sites. It seem sto work pretty well. I think I'll create my own!.

For instance, would you be interested in posting on your site an infographic that'll help your site visitors understand the process of learning to read. Here's an infographic on learning to read.

 . del.icio.us

Blogging SEO Question

On this blog, there are two widgets that get users to see old articles.

One is the archives-based widget which first takes them to  a URL that involves the term "archive".  For instance:
http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html. Then, by clicking on the article title, you get to the article with a URL that starts with the date:
http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/2008/12/marketing-plans-for-2009.html .  This is I believe that cannonical url for the content on that page.

Another way of getting to that content is through the tags or categories widget.  So if I click on social bookmarking (4), i get a page titled 'http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/search/label/social%20bookmarking" which has links through titles to http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-many-and-which-social-media-icons.html.

Here's my question: Is one widget any better for SEO than the other? Does having both help or hurt.
Secondly, the URLs all have the date added to them. Is that good or bad? Do I have control over it?

Mobile App Advertising Metrics

Mobile App Advertising Metrics

I'm looking for some basic metrics and info on how advertising revenue works for mobile apps.  

- How much does one make by having a company's app listed in my app with a link to the app store? Do people pay for the placement? The Views? The clicks? The purchases?

- What about other types of ads inside apps?

For instance, on the web, I'm familiar with placing ads on my webpages that earn based on:

- total page loads.  So everytime the page loads, or every thousand times is the usual metric, we might earn $2.50. This is called $2.50 CPM. Of course, some ad placements and websites earn a lot more, others earn less. Big vendors are Valueclick and Tribal Fusion.

- pay per click.  On these ads (usually Adsense), we get $0.15 (or whatever) everytime someone clicks on the ad. Over thousands of users and page impressions, this averages out and produces a eCPM (equivalent of a CPM). 

- pay per action. These are the affiliate programs where they pay if the user registers or signs up.  I've stopped using them since I've only found one that out performs (on a eCPM basis) CPM or PPC advertising and generally, I've wasted lots of time trying them.  The one that I use pays $25 per sale on a $49.99 product.

- preroll videos - These videos are embedded at the start of a game or video (or in the middle) and pay on a CPM basis.  Some pay if they just start to roll, others pay only if they are totally viewed. They tend to get really high CPMs.  Say $25

Can anyone summarize how this works, who the vendors are,  and what the numbers might be for childrens' educational mobile apps?

Inapp promotion but not inapp purchases

In app app promotion

I've noticed on TempleRun that they have an in app promotion of their and other people's apps.

I wonder how this business relationship works?

 Doeducational apps have such things?

Messaging on Google Plus

This turns out to be really difficult to figure out. I've found a description of DM on G+.

Google+ does not have a Direct or Private Message feature built in, but there is a slightly less obvious way to send a message that only one other person can receive and read. To send a direct or private message on Google+, just start typing an update in your Stream on Google+ like usual. However, you’ll choose to share that update with only that one person whom you wish to receive your private message. Then, right after you send it, click the triangle in the upper right hand corner of the post you just sent to reveal options for the post, and select Disable reshare. This will prevent the recipient from sharing the private message with anyone else, which would make it not private.

Additionally, Google+ users have the option to include a feature to allow others to email them right from their Google+ profile. Users who enable this function will have a Send an Email button underneath their profile picture. This button can be limited to the user’s circles, extended circles, custom defined users, or anyone on the Web. As a result, you may only have limited ability to send an email to other Google+ users as a way of sending a private or direct message. If you want to enable this function for yourself so others can send you an email via Google+, just visit your own profile and click the blue Edit Profile button, and then click the email button under your photo.

Read more at http://www.lockergnome.com/social/2011/07/11/how-to-send-a-direct-or-private-message-on-google/#uFaBzzCuIdY6B78Z.99

you click someone's name to open the profile and just below the profile photo , there's a "Send an email", which constitutes a DM since you have to have a gmail account to have a g+ profile, and as everything is integrated...NO THERE IS NOT A SEND AN EMAIL LINK UNDER THE PROFILE PICTURE!!!!

My Online Identity

I haven't yet read a good article that helps me understand my many different online identities.  Here's a quick list.

Facebook. I can login to a lot of sites with my Facebook credentials. I'm not sure if this means that my Facebook identity for others to see includes these places that I join? When I join and comment there with Facebook, does it show up on my Facebook wall?

Twitter.  There's very little that I understand about this.

Disqus - I've seen this around for awhile and never really understood it. I just clicked on one of my comments on a blog done through Disqus and found out that all my previous comments, done with the same email, are immediately available. Worse, I sound like a broken record usually making the same point, despite the topic. Embarrassing.

Google - I use to have a gmail account, a blogger account, and a Youtube account. They seem to have somehow merged. So far, they still seem separate from my Google Plus identity but I'm frankly, pretty confused by all of this. These accounts also have control of my Adsense, Adwords, and Analytics accounts.

Wordpress - Some of my wordpress accounts, not sure if they are the hosted or wordpress.com ones, seem to be useful as an identity when I want to comment on blogs.

Other identities such as digg and de.lic.ous and stumble upon and of course, AOL and yahoo, all seem to have disappeared.