october 2007

This post is from from my other blog here

Hopefully the misspellings in my title caught “yer” eye!

As a webmaster, you probably rely on people searching for your products or services to find your site. Yahoo reports that 10% to 15% of search terms they receive are misspelled, and MSN recently began offering search results with correctly spelled search terms if they think the original search term was misspelled. Until search engines are smart enough to search based on voice commands (…is this possible yet?), people must manually type a term into a search engine. So, how can you leverage the fact that people are often terrible spellers?

Sometimes I visit the Dogpile SearchSpy to “eavesdrop” on what people are searching for in real time. Dogpile compiles searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask. A recent unscientific sampleing (whoops!) sampling of the misspellings in the unfiltered search list indicated that about one in 25 searches were misspelled. I went on a search myself, looking for up-to-date, total numbers of how many searches were performed on a daily basis. This information is hard to come by, but I did find an April 2006 article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch that calculated the number of searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask as 192 million per day, which works out to 2,222 per second [(192,000,000/24)/(60*60)].

At 4 misspelled searches per 100, and 2,222 total searches per second, that’s 22 hundreds per second and 4 per hundred, which is 88 misspelled searches per second. Times 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, times 24 hours in a day…that’s a staggering 7,603,200 misspelled searches per day!

While lurking on Dogpile I saw misspellings for ‘freee,’ ’satalite,’ ‘annaul’ (annual), ‘prision’ (prison), and this one: ‘wich us presadent made thanksgiving a national holaday.’ Now, should that count as one misspelling or three?

To put this into a real-world, ecommerce context, I turned to my trusty Digital Point keyword suggestion tool and looked up ’socer’ rather than ’soccer.’ I found 120 searches for various terms related to ’socer’ using the Wordtracker information.

I’ll avoid making a joke about the intelligence of athletes here ;), and just go on to say that if I sold soccer related items, I’d be capitalizing on that by using this common misspelling in my page titles, keywords tags and possibly some Description meta tags if I could work some misspellings into the text that I wouldn’t mind appearing in the text box on the results page.

You definitely don’t want to pepper your site with gross misspellings in an effort to gather that traffic; you’ll lose credibility and look as silly as those Flat Earth people and no one will want to buy anything from you! But there is room for optimization of one or two commonly misspelled terms if they relate directly to a product you sell.

Respected Googler Matt Cutts has gone on-the-record to say that misspellings are bad SEO practice. Most of the time I don’t doubt Matt’s sage advice, but this time, I’m disinclined ...

This post is from from my other blog here

Hopefully the misspellings in my title caught “yer” eye!

As a webmaster, you probably rely on people searching for your products or services to find your site. Yahoo reports that 10% to 15% of search terms they receive are misspelled, and MSN recently began offering search results with correctly spelled search terms if they think the original search term was misspelled. Until search engines are smart enough to search based on voice commands (…is this possible yet?), people must manually type a term into a search engine. So, how can you leverage the fact that people are often terrible spellers?

Sometimes I visit the Dogpile SearchSpy to “eavesdrop” on what people are searching for in real time. Dogpile compiles searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask. A recent unscientific sampleing (whoops!) sampling of the misspellings in the unfiltered search list indicated that about one in 25 searches were misspelled. I went on a search myself, looking for up-to-date, total numbers of how many searches were performed on a daily basis. This information is hard to come by, but I did find an April 2006 article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch that calculated the number of searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask as 192 million per day, which works out to 2,222 per second [(192,000,000/24)/(60*60)].

At 4 misspelled searches per 100, and 2,222 total searches per second, that’s 22 hundreds per second and 4 per hundred, which is 88 misspelled searches per second. Times 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, times 24 hours in a day…that’s a staggering 7,603,200 misspelled searches per day!

While lurking on Dogpile I saw misspellings for ‘freee,’ ’satalite,’ ‘annaul’ (annual), ‘prision’ (prison), and this one: ‘wich us presadent made thanksgiving a national holaday.’ Now, should that count as one misspelling or three?

To put this into a real-world, ecommerce context, I turned to my trusty Digital Point keyword suggestion tool and looked up ’socer’ rather than ’soccer.’ I found 120 searches for various terms related to ’socer’ using the Wordtracker information.

I’ll avoid making a joke about the intelligence of athletes here ;), and just go on to say that if I sold soccer related items, I’d be capitalizing on that by using this common misspelling in my page titles, keywords tags and possibly some Description meta tags if I could work some misspellings into the text that I wouldn’t mind appearing in the text box on the results page.

You definitely don’t want to pepper your site with gross misspellings in an effort to gather that traffic; you’ll lose credibility and look as silly as those Flat Earth people and no one will want to buy anything from you! But there is room for optimization of one or two commonly misspelled terms if they relate directly to a product you sell.

Respected Googler Matt Cutts has gone on-the-record to say that misspellings are bad SEO practice. Most of the time I don’t doubt Matt’s sage advice, but this time, I’m disinclined ...

This post is from from my other blog here

This is embarrassing to admit, but before I found Co.mments.com, I would either bookmark the websites of conversation threads I wanted to follow or copy the URL into a word document. I would then revisit these conversations every couple of days to see if anyone had responded to my comments or posted new, interesting comments.

This was bulky and time consuming. Luckily, for any web activity you can imagine, someone has come up with a better way to do it! When signing up for a new Co.mments.com account, you are asked to drag the Co.mments bookmarklet into your Firefox toolbar. From that point on, whenever you are on a forum, blog post, or other site where a discussion is taking place, bookmark it using your Co.mments bookmarklet, and the conversation is tracked for you. You don’t have to make a comment to use Co.mment.com, it works just the same whether you are actively commenting or just want to read what other people are saying.

You can receive updates in your feed reader or by email whenever new comments are added to the conversations you are tracking. Your conversations are tracked on one page, and it’s easy to remove conversations when you no longer wish to track them.

Co.mments.com launched sometime in early 2006, so it did take me a while to discover this service, but I’m sure glad I did. It’s simple and unobtrusive, and if the service is down you lose only the ability to track comments, unlike its competitor CoComments which also loses the ability to place comments.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Can anyone confirm that they have received a personalized be my friend message? All of mine have said "I want to be your friend." I can't believe that with so many free-thinkers and innovators here on Gooruze that's the best you guys can come up with! (Wink) Also, I have sent a couple of personalized emails and haven't gotten any responses. Maybe no one wants to talk to me because of my dismal rank (double wink) but I'm just curious about this. Thanks for distracting me from another hour of work guys!

This post is from from my other blog here

A recent Webmaster World forum thread discusses tips on using AdSense. There was a lot of information in this thread and if you missed it, I urge you to check it out.

Here is some of what I gathered as usable advice from this discussion:

Place all clickable ads above the fold. Avoid placing ads in headers; mixed in with content seems to perform best.  Modulate the number of ads you are running so that you don’t appear spammy. The 300×250 block size is most popular. Once you find something that works, leave it alone. And finally, don’t spend all day and night stressing about AdSense!

These tips might be no-news for those of you who have been using AdSense for a while and have found the winning combination, but for those just getting involved, the many different theories on using AdSense can make for a scary proposition.

Case in point: The initiator of this particular thread said he eventually wanted to be able to “think like the AdSense bot” to maximize his investment. That idea was shot down later by someone who said to avoid thinking like the AdSense bot. Someone else suggested removing all but the highest earning pages, others said that was nonsense. In fact, many of the ideas set forth were later disputed as unimportant or unwise. Where do you weigh in on these contradictory ideas?

This post is from from my other blog here

Philosophical question: If a mistyped url falls in a forest of web pages, can anyone see it? We’ve all seen ‘em, the boring old “the page you requested does not exist” messages when we mistyped a url or file name.

The problem with the standard HTTP Error page is that it can be scary to the, shall we say, technically challenged customers that might happen across something like this:

Most people don’t know what the codes mean, may not know what a URL is, and wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to contact the server’s administration, assuming they cared enough to try again to find what they were looking for.

A recent Craigslist experience caused me to seek creative examples of the “404 page not available” messages.

Here’s a screen shot of the Craigslist 404 that sent me on this quest:

This one’s pretty good; it’s better than the standard old government issue 404 error page, but not as good as some I’ve come across. It seems I’m not alone in this endeavor, as 365Questions.org has compiled a few examples of funny messages, from the philosophical to the vintage inspired.

I would love to see your own creative ways you handled 404 pages, or good examples you’ve seen. Care to share?

This post is from from my other blog here

There is no shortage of social sites, as we all know. While most of the well-known social networking sites serve niche segments of the population, they do overlap. Sk*rt gears itself to professional women, and Sphinn appeals to Internet and search marketing professionals, for example. So when I happened across Gooruze.com, I was a little skeptical that we needed yet another social site for online marketing professionals. But when I discovered that some of the founding Gooruze were people whose blogs I read regularly, such as Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, Matt McGee at Small Business SEM, and frequent contributor to TechCrunch Duncan Riley, how could I resist? I signed up.

Gooruze isn’t just for online marketers. Anyone who engages in online marketing, like yourself, can benefit from it. A Q&A section allows you to ask questions of members or share your knowledge with others. You can receive updates on the activity of your favorite members or join or create groups that interest you and receive RSS updates of new activity within those groups: Mine are web design and usability; search engine marketing; email marketing; blogging, podcasts and vlogs; tips; and the help group.

Check out Gooruze, and while you’re there, friend me!

                                                               

This post is from from my other blog here

What is a family-friendly website? According to FamilyFriendlySites.com, a site displaying the Family-Friendly Sites Emblem displays content and links that support “physical, mental, and emotional development in a healthy way.” Their many categories of family-friendly websites include Arts & Culture, Health & Wellness, Hobbies & Collections, Science & Nature, Education & Learning, and Shopping & Auctions.

If you think that your website would fit into one of their categories, and you abide by their guidelines of displaying family-friendly material, you can request to be included in their directory. You will receive notification by email that you have been approved, and you will receive a free listing in their directory and a Family Friendly Sites emblem to display on your website.

Parents will know that you’re a safe site for their kids to explore, you’ll get a high-quality incoming link, and more exposure. Sound good?

This post is from from my other blog here

The title of a web page is what shows up in the browser when you go to that page. The words in the title, or title tag, are what appear in the link to that site on the search engine results page (SERP), and they are a very important part of Google’s page indexing algorithm. In fact, title tags are one of the most important factors.

You have only three to nine words–60 to 80 characters–in which to make the most use of your title tags. There is some debate as to whether company or brand names belong in the title tags. My feeling is that for an established brand name, yes, you want it in the title. To build your brand, you may want it in the title. For a non-brand, probably not, or at least not at the beginning of the tag. If you can use that valuable title tag real estate more effectively by placing another keyword in there, leave it out.

Look at some examples. Search Google for “soccer ball sales,” and take a note of which sites turn up on the first page. Now try searching for sites that have that term in the title using the shortcut “allintitle:soccer ball sales.” Many of the sites that appear organically for this search phrase also have it in the title.

Are your page titles working for you or against you?

This post is from from my other blog here

My local newspaper runs a column called “Figuratively Speaking.” It appears on the daily puzzle page and features factoids about society along with some related percentages. A recent example: In 2005, only 12 percent of retail e-marketers provided email opt-out links that allowed recipients to make changes to their subscription preferences. Today, 32 percent do so.*

To what can we attribute the increase in including email opt-outs? Hopefully, more people are looking to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act), which establishes requirements for sending commercial email and spells out penalties for violations.

The law, under the jurisdiction of The Federal Trade Commission, became effective January 1, 2004, and we have it to thank for clarifying many email communication best practices. Among other things, the law states that senders have 10 business days to remove an email address from their send-to list once an opt-out request has been received from that address. It’s also illegal for commercial email senders to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who have opted-out.

These best practices exist to allow the consumer experience to be as positive as possible. There is a philosophy that email marketers can retain subscribers by making the opt-out process difficult. It is possible to be CAN-SPAM compliant and erect barriers to the opt-out process, such as making people who wish to unsubscribe opt-out twice, or requiring an exit survey or requesting some type of personal information. Sure, you may keep people on your list this way, but you’re certainly not engendering any lovely feelings for your brand by doing so.

An easy opt-out process is just one of the facets to managing a successful email marketing campaign. As increasing numbers of online marketers turn to email as a cost-effective and efficient way of reaching out to consumers, it is ever more important that your email 1) not end up in the spam folder, and 2) not aggravate the good humors of your recipients. MightyMerchant’s article, “Successful Email Marketing,” is loaded with tips on getting started using addresses you might already have from your existing customers, email composition, and managing your list.

*Source: Silverpop Email Marketing Services

This post is from from my other blog here

Do you ever feel adrift in a ‘C’ of acronyms? PPC, CPC, CPM   . . . Some are more well-known, like PPC and SEO, but authors and speakers frequently throw many of these terms out with no explanation of the cryptic letters. I’ve gathered and defined the most common Internet marketing and search acronyms that I’ve come across, and offer them here as a mini-glossary. If you stumble across other acronyms, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

CPM - Cost Per Thousand Impressions Literally, “cost per mille,” which in Latin means thousand. Sometimes, CPI and CPM are used interchangeably, as when an ad campaign is sold on the basis of 1000 impressions. One thousand impressions at a $10 CPI results in a $10,000 CPM ad campaign.

eCPM - Effective Cost Per Mille Measures what a publisher would receive if their advertising inventory was sold on a CPM basis as opposed to a CPA, CPC, or CPT basis (see below for these definitions).

CPI - Cost Per Impression This is the cost paid each time an online advertisement, such as a banner ad, is displayed.

CPT - Cost Per Transaction Similar to CPA, in that advertisers pay whenever a visitor who clicked on their advertisement completes a transaction.

CPA - Cost Per Action, or Cost Per Acquisition In the PPA advertising model, the CPA is the actual cost paid when the action is completed.

CTR - Click Through Ratio A ratio of the number of times an ad was clicked on by the viewer and the number of times the ad was displayed. For a banner that was clicked 100 times and displayed 1000 times, the CTR is 100:1000 or 1:10. This can be changed to a percentage value by multiplying by 100: 1/10 * 100 = 10%, meaning 10% of the impressions have led to clicks on the banner.

CPC - Cost Per Click The amount an advertiser pays each time an ad is clicked. Sometimes this is set through a bidding process, other times the cost is determined by calculating the CPI/%CTR

PPC - Pay Per Click An advertising model where advertisers pay only when a user clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.

PPA - Pay Per Action Advertisers pay only when pre-specified actions are completed by a user on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, fills out a form, or downloads a free trial.

CPS - Cost Per Sale The cost an advertiser pays only for those click-throughs on an ad that result in a purchase.

EPC - Earnings Per Click The commission you pay to a publisher or affiliate advertiser for each click (visitor) they send to you. If you pay $20 after receiving 100 visitors, $20/100 = 0.20 and the EPC is 20 cents per click.

CPL - Cost Per Lead A payment arrangement where an advertiser pays a publisher for a lead, which is a verified potential customer. For example, the publisher may run an ad for a free trial. A user that clicks on the free trial link is a lead that ...

This post is from from my other blog here

Ages ago, I ordered something from a catalog, knowing that I would regret it. I paid $11.95 to ship a $4.95 item and said to myself, ‘Just this once, and I’ll never order from them again.’ After that, the catalog onslaught began. Now I receive a catalog from this company about every two weeks.

When the catalogs first began arriving I recycled them, as if a mere peek at the shiny, plastic junk inside would instantly lead to madness. Eventually though, that mountain of mail did exactly what they hoped it would, and I started looking at them again. I found other irresistible reasons to pay exorbitant shipping costs. Every time I opened up my mailbox and found that catalog, I knew I needed to call them and cancel it. I wanted them to know enough was enough, that I wasn’t gonna take it anymore and to save a tree and stop already. But I never called them, and now I don’t have to! Catalog Choice will take care of that for me.

Launched today, Catalog Choice allows you to set up an account with your email address, enter in your primary mailing address, find the catalogs you receive and decline them. They will contact the senders and, poof! No more unsolicited catalogs in your mailbox. You can decline all of your unwanted catalogs at once, and let them do the dirty work of talking to the distributors. Save time, save trees, and prevent junk mail all at once.

This post is from from my other blog here

Judge Marilyn Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has approved a class action lawsuit against Target Corporation for not using HTML alt tags on their website images. About a year ago, a blind student in California sued Target.com, asserting that the retail giant’s website is inaccessible to the blind. That suit is now an approved class action lawsuit according to Judge Patel’s ruling, filed October 2.

The claim is that Target.com violates federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled due to their lack of alt tags or text on images and the necessity of using a mouse to browse the page.

Who’s doing Target.com’s SEO? Image alt tags are a fundamental part of site optimization, because search engines can only read text. As an e-tailer, your site no doubt consists of text and images. Adding alt tags to those images allows them to be “read” by search engines.

Image tags are “attribute tags.” They tell the browser what attributes the image has, such as dimensional information, which allow your browser to keep a properly sized area open for the image, so faster loading text is formatted around the picture while the slower loading image downloads. When dimensional attributes are missing, the browser doesn’t know how much space to allocate for the image. Attribute tags also let visitors know an image is being formatted before it is displayed, so the image can be anticipated.

Additional attributes are “alt tags,” which provide “alternate text.” This text is displayed if the image can’t or doesn’t load properly. These alt tags are (should be!) descriptive of the image and relevant to the content surrounding the image.

Visitors to your site may use a browser with no image capability, such as a text-based browser on a Unix or Linux system, or they may have images turned off in their browser preferences so sites load faster, particularly if they are using a dial-up connection. Or they may be visually impaired. You can probably surmise how these tags help sight-impaired visitors. Blind people use text readers that can read them the image’s text description. Without these tags, or with a tag such as “pic1.gif” these tags are useless and meaningless to your sites’ blind visitors, which is the dilemma Target.com found themselves in, leading to this suit.

Presumably, Target.com will be forced to implement alt tags for their images. You can learn from Target’s stumble in this area by taking a look at your own site and formatting your images appropriately. Sure, it might take some extra effort, but the result will not only be an enhanced experience for all of your site’s visitors–which should really be the goal–but also an increased search engine relevancy. It’s worth the time.

This post is from from my other blog here

My husband works in a supervisory capacity in a manufacturing shop. Most of their day-to-day production tracking requires spreadsheets and other computerized reporting tools. He was never issued a password and neither was his boss, so for years both used the passwords of other employees. It didn’t take long before both men realized that the passwords for almost every machine operator, engineer and office worker in the whole shop had passwords that were simply their first names.

My husband is not malicious, but if he had been, he could have logged in anywhere using almost anyone’s password, and changed, deleted or otherwise mangled any report he wanted to. His shop has since changed their reporting procedures, and now require universal access. This situation seems worse: All the shop workers have one access code, while all the supervisors have another, and they are so simple and obvious it would take no effort to guess what they were.

You’ve likely spent years building your business, and secure access is at the frontline of your defenses against hackers or begrudged employees who might want to be destructive. Choosing effective passwords takes a little creativity. It does make them a bit harder to remember, but if creating a unique password helps stop someone from breaking into your accounts, you’ll be ever so glad you made the effort.

• When creating a good password, don’t use words that can be found in a dictionary. Password-guessing programs can simply run through common letter combinations automatically.
• Make each password unique. Hackers know people re-use passwords, so if someone is able to guess a low-level password, they will use it to try to gain access elsewhere. Don’t use your Facebook password for your online banking and PayPal accounts.
• Longer is better. Use at least eight characters.
• Avoid keyboard patterns (qwerty) or sequential numbers (4567), and don’t repeat (1122).
• Strengthen passwords by mixing capital and lowercase letters, using numbers and punctuation marks, and using substitutions, like the number zero for the letter ‘O’.
• Acronyms are good, but don’t use anything obvious like the initials of your name. Create one from something you personally enjoy, for instance, “i love home made cinnamon rolls!” would become “ilhmcr!“. (That is simply an example. I don’t really love home made cinnamon rolls that much.)
• Avoid obvious things like your birthday, phone number, or pet’s name.
• Fun ways to make passwords easier to remember: Pick a phrase and eliminate the vowels, such as “sit on the porch” would become “stnthprch.” Combine words, such as “tooth pick” morphing into “tpoioctkh“. Pick a word, then use the letter to the left of each letter in the alphabet: “shiver” = “rghudq”

Once passwords are created, keep ‘em safe.

• Never tell another employee your password. If you must share occasionally, reset your password later.
• Never write down your password, sticky-note it on your computer, or slip it in your desk drawer.
• Log off when your computer is not in use, or lock your computer at night.

Many companies offer password storage, so if you don’t have a mind of steel and the number of ...

This post is from from my other blog here

My local paper reported on Internet security threats today, describing the creative new ways hackers are spreading malicious code. The article, “Hackers find new ways to spread spam, viruses,” describes the threat of malicious code embedded in online video players, according to a report released today by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center as it holds its annual summit this week.

The summit gathers more than 800 scholars and security experts as they discuss emerging threats and their possible countermeasures. Naturally, as we see an evolution toward more sophisticated anti-spam techniques, spammers attack with evermore sneaky techniques of their own to deliver malicious messages. Among some of the clever ways hackers hide their codes are embedding them in images or disguising them as PDF files.

The article says there have been “a few” cases of video-related hacking so far, including a worm that launches a corrupt website after a user opens a media file in a player, and another that silently installs spyware when a video file is opened. Spreading fake video links that contain worms and viruses have been attempted using YouTube.

The article goes on to say that hackers are exploiting social networking sites, which by their very nature rely on “viral” spread via users who want to share information.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t provide any advice on protecting yourself, but we outlined some safe-surfing tips in a previous MightyMerchant blog post. Another good anti-spam resource is The Spamhaus Project.

This post is from from my other blog here

 

It’s been said that ignorance is bliss. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially when your online reputation is at stake. Celebrities, rock stars, and businesses have one thing in common…they often obtain professional reputation managers. These consultants ensure that no one has soiled their clients’ good name through daily tracking of search engines and news results. Every day they google their clients’ name, looking for copyright infringement on a trademarked name or image, and attempt to manage any negative press they might find.

You could do the same yourself, if you had all day, every day to search for your company name. Fortunately, there is a better way. These free tools allow you to go about your day with the knowledge that if your company name pops up on a blog, comment, or discussion board, you’ll be (almost) the first to know. That really is bliss.

Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts You could enter search terms into Google News or Google Blog Search, but Google Alerts does the searching for you and sends you email updates of results that are relevant to your choice of topic. Enter in your own name, company name, product name, or whatever you want to track and get the most current results instantly.

Technorati http:/www.technorati.com Technorati tracks blog posts and tagged social media on the web, with searchable and real time results. Setting up an account is free. Once you do, “Your Watchlist” allows you to enter subjects or website URLs you are interested in monitoring. Technorati will email you when your search terms appear.

Co.mments.com http://co.mments.com What if you do find a conversation taking place about your company or products? Co.mments.com is a bookmarklet that you drag and drop into your browser bookmarks/favorites folder. When you find a conversation you want to follow, bookmark it, and get automatic updates when something new is added.

Blogpulse’s “Conversation Tracker” http://www.blogpulse.com/tools.html Conversation Tracker tracks the threads of posts and links that emanate from blogs when people comment on or link to posts. Enter in a search term, a link to a post, a specific URL, or a link to a news article and Conservation Tracker returns all the conversations related to that specific original or “seed” item. You have to do this search yourself, but all of the results are in one place for you to see.

Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us ...