Linked Profiles offline

Linked in profiles were down 6/11/08 due to denial of narcissism attack

site:linkedin.com/in/

Take your choice!

Google health launches, Epic starts construction on new Building

Anybody remember that the Sears tower was completed the same year (1972) that Walmart went public. hmm.

www.google.com/health

Microsoft’s new tools a big improvement

Microsoft has recently added a number of Keyword research tools that are free. I imagine all the data comes from their own search engine which only has a market share of 10-12 percent.  I like that they incorporate some French tools.  I particularly like the confidence interval in the Seasonal forecast tool, it appeals to the stats geek in all of us.
http://adlab.msn.com/KeywordContent.aspx

Lynx dines on Wordpress and is sated

There’s an excellent video showing how SEO friendly wordpress is. Using the lynx text only browser the author shows the wordpress admin screen in lynx. Lynx can show you what the spiders see when they crawl your site. It’s good to know that you could admin your wordpress site using lynx if you had to. I wonder how the other blog engines would render with their fancy Ajaxian tools.

http://wordpresstraining.com/tutorials/wordpress-blogging-with-lynx/

Now Boarding:Natural Search Cluetrain

I just finished readying “the Cluetrain manifesto” which is a must read for people in the business of building online brands. It really hits the nail on the head about the importance of avoiding business-speak in your marketing communications and how important it is to use a human voice and treat your customers like individuals rather than like a target market demographic.

This relates to your SEO efforts as well. When people are searching for goods and services they aren’t likely to use the term your marketing department came up with but rather a term you would use in a conversation. For example no one types in “aglets” into a seach engine but rather describes them as “things on the end of a shoe lace”. If your in the aglet business your probably not getting branded or category search results because no one knows that what they want is called an aglet. By using the voice and terms your customers use you can bring in unbranded search traffic or Natural search traffic. The low cost alternative to PPC advertising. Lower cost means higher profits and no monthly bills that help to inflate Google’s stock price.

Whitehouse comes up #1 in SERPs

Some of you my remember the “miserable failure” Google bomb from last year that was recently fixed. Now the new whitehouse SERP oddity is the following expression:

“robots.txt” “Disallow:” filetype:txt

Could it be that we all beleive the Whitehouse will put some super secret url that’s publicly broadcasting For-your-eyes-only info such as

/vice-president/Dick/Cheney/location.kmz?

(.kmz = google earth location file)

Happy Holidays everyone!

Success! Passing the GAAP exam

only to find out that the monthly adspend must surpass $1000 in order to complete the certification. Time to get my clients to up their spend.

Google analytics course

I just learned that ROI Revolution is offering a $100 discount High Rankings discount by simply typing “highrankings” into the discount code field when you register. Its live and on demand. It covers

Module #1: Basic Implementation
Module #2: Advanced Implementation
Module #3: Troubleshooting
Module #4: The General Google Analytics Interface
Module #5: Visitor Information and Ecommerce Data
Module #6: Marketing Resources and Techniques

My only criticism would be that there were a few instances where they zipped
through some things fairly quickly, which left me feeling a bit perplexed;
however, I understand that is to be expected since they were trying to cover
so much in a 6-week course. Since I could get my questions answered during
the live chat or Q&A session, it never was really a problem.

I recently received ROI Revolution’s newsletter that highlighted a new tool they’ve been working on to track Google Analytics ROI. However be warned that it’s just for e-commerce.

If you have a lead generation site, How can you calculate your revenue once your lead is acquired? Its effectiveness is limited here.

If you currently use Google Analytics for PPC, tracking or site optimization then this is well worth having a look at. Included are the steps to setup a non-AdWords ROI Calculation based off of Google Analytics data. Both the Excel 1997-2003 and 2007 are available for download and are well worth it. Enjoy!

Penalized By Google?

The Official Google PageRank Update has just happened yesterday. Many websites have been penalized for selling text adds.

If you see a different PR on different datacenter as well, you probably are being penalized by Google for selling Text Link Ads. If you would like to get your PageRank back, you can go to Google Webmaster Tools and request a reconsideration by clicking on “Request reconsideration” after removing your Text Link Ads and stop selling them from now on.

It seems Page Rank is a little on the fritz for the time being.

The best open source CMS?

I always prefer Wordpress, is nice, friendly and have a lot, a lot of extensions…And for the clients is very easy to understand. The only thing that Wordpress lacks is a good forum plugin. Wordpress.. yes, it seems too much popular but isn’t it just for blogs?
For clients that desire greater customization and more powerful functionality I recommend Joomla, but i guess it might be little bit tough for a beginner. Joomla! is extremely customizable, and with a lot of work it can even be SEO and WAI compliant. An excellent resource is http://www.opensourcecms.com/

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