It is mid March and it has been about 10 weeks since the last Google Toolbar PageRank update was released. Some say Google constantly updates your site’s actual PageRank, but the publicly available PageRank shown on the Google Toolbar is only updated about 4-5 times per year, others hold that the PR only works when done as a snapshot in time. Either way the Toolbar updates are the report cards we get delivered so it’s a big nervous deal to us. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Page Rank, Promoting a Website
You will certainly pay for your share of the economic stimulus package over the coming decade but will you collect your share? Fortunes are made in times like this so what kind of net can you cast to collect the maximum amount of stimulus that the government is about to sprinkle all over America?
Go through the various line items and ask yourself “who, what, when, where, and how” will this money be spent. Go Deep. Are there opportunities to get in front of some of this money? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: New Projects
- Scan your own site for keywords, you’ve probably already written a ton of them
- Visit SEOTools.com and play with their tools like Keyword Density, Traffic Checker and others
- Use the Google Keyword Tool and the new Google Search-based Keyword Tool
- Once you have a small set, take the common ones and look for synonyms at Thesaurus.com Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adwords, Search Marketing
There are a lot of articles out there about proper ways to run a paid search campaign targeted to the elite with tips like “use the 80/20 rule” and how to handle “high volume keywords” but the reality is there are tons of us out here who are not ready to throw thousands of dollars into search engine marketing (SEM). Following is a good strategy for the little guy spending as little as $10/week. Read the rest of this entry »
PageRank is the Trademarked name of the Google link analysis algorithm used by the Google Search Engine that assigns a numerical weighting to a hyperlink (from 0 to 10).
In a nutshell a PageRank value results from a total of all links or “votes” among all other pages on the Internet. The more popular you are the more votes or links you most likely have. Additionally some links are weighted more heavily than others based on the voting page’s PageRank. This is a very simple view of what is actually a more complicated secret formula to weed out abuses but in general this is accurate.
Tags: Page Rank, website traffic
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page, i.e. a bounce is a visit where one page was viewed and the visit ended. I’ve often been asked “why does this metric matter, I pay attention to pages/visit”? The answer is it matters greatly for two reasons.
First, compare two equally visited sites, one with average pages/visit of 10 and a bounce rate of 80% versus another site with average pages/visit of 5 with a bounce rate of 20%. If you only look at pages/visit you would think the first site has better quality content but that could not be further from the truth. If 80% of the people hitting the site leave immediately something is terribly wrong. The goal of a website is ultimately to give people some product or service and make money in the process, therefore bounce rate is actually more important than pages/visit. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bounce rate, website traffic
If you look at the human body as a machine we have several input and output devices. Our fastest input devices are our eyes and ears. Our fastest output devices are our fingers (physical movement) and speech. We currently use 3 of these four mediums already when interfacing with machines however our speech remains neglected.
The historical complications for a machine in dealing with slight variations in dialect have made this type of input more difficult than a mouse / keyboard combination and so we build to accommodate that interface but I believe we are selling ourselves short in the long run.
Image a display designed into a 9 square grid where the screen is designed in such a way that Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine for a moment that in order to visit a website you had to first acquire the IP address from either the site owner or someone close to the site owner then save it off in your browser with a meaningful name to you like “Bill Parker Blog number 3”. That would be completely ridicules but for some reason we allow our phone system to work this way, building what is essentially large HOSTS files in our mobile devices with name to number mappings.
How cool would it be to never have to save another number unless you chose to “bookmark” it? Shouldn’t you be able to grab your phone and type a unique address (email, username, etc) and simply have a third party service look it up and dial for you? Phone number changes would only need to be made in one location and dropping your phone in the pool would no longer cause you to lose information about everyone you know. Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine a service where you can type in your zip code and see live which local bars have all the hottest people hanging out at that moment.
I imagine a “Hot or Not” like service where people can use their mobile phones to upload, review and vote on images. Your at a bar and see a hot hostess or girl so you snap a pic and submit it to a web service. That image immediately becomes available for user voting. Based on some point system all bars can then be rated so those with the best looking people rise to the top. This would make great discussion for those hanging out at the pubs; meanwhile the data mining and front end regular website possibilities are endless. Individual bars would certainly pay a premium for placement or attention in order to attract more folks to their establishments. There are a ton of ways to monetize this service. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Free Product Ideas
If you could use a little motivation and some new ideas try the following:
1) Clear your schedule for the night, grab a notebook and head on over to your local book store or library. I prefer to go to my local Borders because they have a coffee shop and all the latest books from Seth Godin and my other favorite authors. Rifle through their books for an hour or two and take notes. Think about how you could implement what you are learning into your business(es). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Motivation, planning and goals