Whatever's tugging at my brain handles
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Stupid Thoughts, Techno Thoughts on Apr 14th, 2008
So, I've launched a new site called Rough Equivalents. Every day or two I'm posting some odd facts I generated by comparing the characteristics of things that aren't normally compared... like a state and a roll of toilet paper.
It's sort of hard to explain, so perhaps demonstrating a few of its facts [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Success on Feb 21st, 2008
A work friend who is also an editor pointed me at a recent post by Seth Godin where he issues some platitudes on the responsibility of a communicator for failures in communication.
"What's helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you communicate. You can design your products to be easy to [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Society on Dec 26th, 2007
Earlier this month, my wife ordered some books from Barnes and Noble (via their bn.com site) as Christmas gifts for her grandmother. Everything seemed to go well, the order was delivered on the 20th, everyone was happy. Or so I thought.
On December 23rd, we got an e-mail from Barnes and Noble stating:
Your order [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Dec 2nd, 2007
I have Google alerts running to spot when my last name (since it is uncommon) comes up in a newly indexed web page. Usually, the mention is about me, but sometimes it's one of my distant cousins. Anyhow, there was a link to the Dallas Morning News that came in today, but my [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Sep 20th, 2007
So, this guy contacts me the other day. Wants to pay me $200 to put up a couple of paragraphs of text (with links in them) on this site.
Now, before we get to how screwed up his offer was, read what Google says about paid links. Google blogger Matt Cutts has opined in [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jul 19th, 2007
One of the great things marketers have been promising since the dawn of the commercial Internet is personalized advertising; ads targeted to what you really want. Really? Right now ads that could be targeted with trivial effort... aren't. Where's the great future of targeted advertising?
Highly targeted advertising is supposed to be the [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on May 8th, 2007
I read an interesting article today about a couple who tried to use Google to help pick a baby name.
The odd thing about it was that they didn't Google for baby names. They Googled specific baby names to try to find one that formed a unique combination with their last name so it would [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on May 2nd, 2007
What is "link cloaking", you ask? It's when you use an alternative URL to represent the actual URL you're linking to. For example, if you were linking to http://www.fakeurl.jib/blog/post.php?postname=why_the_heck_is_this_url_so_long, you might instead cloak it and link to http://www.mysite.jib/linkout.php?link=89.
The arguments for link cloaking include:
Easier link/click tracking
Making links short enough to fit in [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Apr 30th, 2007
Back in March, I did an experiment on whether Google indexes content inserted into your page with JavaScript. Weeks later, the results are conclusive... no. The words inserted into the test page via JavaScript were never indexed. Lots of pages talking about the odd words I used come up in searches for [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Apr 16th, 2007
Watch your Google page rank numbers over the next few weeks. An update is due!
If you talk to a lot of SEO people, they'll tell you that the Google Page Rank is pretty much meaningless and is not something you should pay attention to. Still, people pay attention to page rank.
For some, page [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 29th, 2007
You've all seen the URL that looks like this... http://www.somesite.com/article.php?articleid=598&refloc=hp. You've also seen URLs that look like this... http://www.somesite.com/article/598/hp/. The interesting thing is that it only takes about 4 more lines of computer code for the shorter URL to do the exact same thing as the longer one.
Although it's not so much of [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Mar 28th, 2007
While Google Webmaster Tools are a great way to see what your top ranking and top performing keywords are on Google, finding out what's really performing overall requires site analytics. And Google provides a great tool for that too.
First, I don't know if "fat" is a term used to describe keywords in the broader [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Success on Mar 22nd, 2007
Today I added an AdSense-enhanced Google search to my drawing and clip art site, and within an hour of it going live I'd made 23 cents from it. Woo hoo!
Now you may say "23 cents, big fat hairy deal. What can you buy with 23 cents?" That's the wrong way to think [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Mar 22nd, 2007
As part of my "Search Engine Optimization" for the clip art library on my art site, I've been exploring using a sitemap to help ensure that all my pages got indexed.
My main stumbling block is that I have a lot of pages generated from different databases, plus a number of static pages. I thought [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Mar 16th, 2007
I recently signed up for a subscription to a newsletter, produced by ientry.com. It was a very big mistake.
While the content of the newsletter is pretty good, only about 1/3 of the e-mails they send are the newsletter. The other 2/3 are third party ads with subject lines indistinguishable from their newsletter mailings. [...]
Posted in Dangerous Thoughts, Online Marketing And SEO, Politics & Religion on Mar 11th, 2007
Interested in the Obama presidential campaign I signed up for a membership on the web site. But when I started getting e-mails from them, I was shocked at how lacking in net-savvy their communications team is.
My e-mail client shows the e-mail address of the sender only when there's no name associated with it. [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 11th, 2007
I've been reading different articles about what elements of a page Google indexes with an eye toward whether they index content that's added to the page via the JavaScript document.write() method. Not getting a conclusive answer, I decided to do my own test.
Why was I interested? Well, with all the "Web 2.0" technologies [...]
Posted in Jokes, Online Marketing And SEO, Stupid Thoughts, Techno Thoughts on Feb 26th, 2007
Every once in a while, in an odd mood, I'll just start looking up odd domain names to see what's available. There's no rhyme or reason to the list, just a rambling train of thought I follow. All of the domains below were available for registration as of February 26th, 2007 (i.e. you [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Feb 10th, 2007
So, I'm considering using Google Checkout to accept payments for a web site I'm dreaming up.
Since I'd like to give customers immediate access to services they buy, I was considering the Level 2 API integration. That requires you have an SSL secured server.
So, I did a search to see if they accepted self-signed SSL [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Jan 24th, 2007
I have some friends who obsess on being the #1 result for specific search terms on Google. Recently, I acquired some number one positions and found that having the number one spot on Google has a somewhat variable value.
Using the Google webmaster tools, you can find out recent search queries that your site ranked [...]