Pleasanton Web Design

I finally took my first step toward Microsoft independance today. I installed Linux Fedora over Windows XP on my Dell Latitude 600 laptop computer.

Step 1: Download linux operating system discs here (for computers with 32 bit processors). If you have a Mac of a 64 bit processor, start with these Linux ISO Images. This is the desktop Fedora project and is free. There are 5 disk images (iso files) plus a resue cd image to download and it takes ALL day.

Once you have the disk images downloaded, burn them to disk using your favorite cd burner software, selecting “burn disk from image” or similar function.

I initially tried to install Linux on it’s own partition on a multi-boot machine I have set up for testing. The disk drive must have been too old, because the installation program wouldn’t recognize it. So, I installed Linux from my brand new Fedora CDs as the sole operating system on an Dell Latitdue 600 laptop I had laying around. It had Windows XP installed, and for some reason I could never get the wireless networking to stabilize on it, so it quickly became useless.

Installation took about an hour and was more automatic than with Windows installations. Once Linux was installed, it took about 10 minutes to figure out how to get my wireless card up and running. Once that was done, my wireless network signal was strong and stable. Nothing like Windows XP on the same machine.

A quick look at the programs that came with the operating system found the office suite, Open Office. The Linux counterparts to Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook work great and the files can be saved in MS Office formats, which is key. Also included are a bunch of games, and Mozilla Firefox.

So, I have a basic, Microsoft-free laptop PC. I’m going to need to explore the availability of Linux productivity applications, but for now, I think this was a good first step.

It seems like my life is all Google, all the time lately. They do seem to be coming up with a lot of cool stuff for us Webmasters. Yesterday I wrote about the new “Links” tab in Webmaster Tools that displays backlinks. Today I somehow discovered Google Co-op.

Google Co-op lets allows you to do 3 things:

1. Create your own search engine
2. Deliver specialized search results
3. Help users refine their searches

Create you own search engine

Name your search engine, enter some keywords in order to “tune” it to the data you want your searchers to see, and specify the URLS you want searched. I created a search engine called “All Troy Search” that just searches my Websites and blogs. You can customize the look and feel as well as have Google host the results, or host them on one of your pages.

The results page will have “Sponsored Results” which you can link to your AdSense acccount.

See my custom “All Troy Search” on my portfolio site.

You can make our own personal Google SERPS look as hideous as you dare.

Deliver Specialized Search Results

Your ever-loyal and trusting visitors can subscribe to results or feeds that you supply with Subscribed Links, and they will show up in their Google SERPS.

And finally…

Help users refine their searches

To do this you have to sign up to contribue to Google Topics. But enough for now. I’m all Googled out.

Until now, the only way to get an inkling of which backlinks to your Website Google knew about was to use the “link:” operator. As I’ve mentioned before, it is utterly useless, especially if your Website dwells in the lower bowels of PR (PageRank). Here’s the backlinks the “link:www.tpdesigns.net” tells me that Google sees.

Nine backlinks? All that work for only nine backlinks? Well I knew I was being had, so Yahoo! to the rescue. Here’s what Yahoo! Site Explorer tells me about my backlinks:

6,228 backlinks? That’s more like it! Without actually counting, I can say that might be most of them.

Today I saw in Matt Cutts blog that Google Webmaster Tools now included backlinks. It had to be an improvement over the totally useless “link:” operator, and it is. I logged in, and after clicking to my Sitemap, I was pleased to see a new tab label “Links.” Here’s what it said:

448 Backlinks. That’s more like it. I noticed the the main difference between the number of backlinks displayed on the “Links” tab in Google Webmaster Tools, and the “Inlinks” displayed in Yahoo! Site Explorer seemed to be that Google was limiting backlinks displayed to a certain number per site, while Yahoo! was displaying most, if not all of them.

Google Webmaster Tools has always had some cool features, not all of which have worked for me. I’ve always felt that I’ve received limited data because my Website was just too small for Google to care about. With the new backlinks feature, Google has given me a reason to log into Webmaster Tools on a regular basis, as well as given me hope that their other tools may be made more useful to us little guys in the near future.

Here is part two in the series recapping a recent Web Guild panel discussion:

Advanced Search Marketing
Silicon Valley Web Guild
12/13/06

Speakers

1. Barbara Coll, Founder & Search Specialist, WebMama
2. Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media
3. Moderator: Massimo Burgio, Search Specialist, Global Search Interactive

I’ve just outlined comments or information that stood out as being useful for someone involved in or trying to understand search engine marketing.

Pay Per Click (PPC) and Web Analytics

Massimo: Analytic tools are important in obtaining necessary metrics to determine ROI for a marketing campaign.

Barbara: Business to business marketers selling products priced between $5000 and $25,000 aren’t worried about PPC costs. What is the most important question to answer? What are you willing to pay to get a customer? What is a customer’s lifetime value to you?

Jessie: Send PPC traffic to the proper landing page. Properly track clicks with a query string in the link, i.e. url?page=2.

Redesign your page layout for the best conversion. You can better track the effect of changes by testing with a PPC campaign. Use split AB testing for this purpose. Feed the data obtained by this testing back into your SEO program.

Keyword Analysis

Massimo: Talk to your sales force. They are most likely using different terminology than you PR department and customers.

Tools:

Trellian.com – Keyword discovery.
Wordtracker.com – Wordtracker keywords. Has a steeper learning curve. You can buy a daily license.
Bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm

Firefox tools for SEO
Extensions:
seobook.com – search “SEO for Firefox”
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Jessie: The average number of words in search queries is increasing all the time. The following are measurements and predictions by John Smart -
2002 – 1.3 words
2006- 2.6 words
Projected:
2010 – 5.2 words
2013 – 10.4 words

The average number of words in a human to human questions is 11.

Question and Answers

Q: What is the most critical piece of information in designing your internet marketing campaign?
A: Barbara: Which action converts.

Points to Take Away from the Q&A:

1. There is better conversion on the long tail.
2. Local.google.com gets most of it’s traffic from Google.com because Google includes links to local results in it’s SERPs when appropriate.
3. Buy a feed on local.google.com. You can also include local results in your adword campaign.

This event was hosted by Silicon Valley Web Builder and was held at Hurricane Electric.

Moderator:

Jeremiah Owyang, Director of Corporate Media Strategy at Podtech.net.

Speakers:

1. Sean Ness, Co-Founder at STIRR.net and Business Development Manager at Institute for the Future
2. Dmitriy Kruglyak, CEO & Community Steward, Trusted.MD (watch out – site has some zany fly-out and roll-over action!)
3. Harry McCracken, Vice President/Editor in Chief at PC WORLD

Each speaker was asked to present on two topics:

1. Top 10 predictions for Web 2.0 in the next year.
2. Top 10 predictions for Web 2.0 in the next five to ten years.

Part One of this series presented speaker, Sean Ness’ predictions.

Next up was Dmitriy Kruglyak. Here’s what he had to say about the future of Web 2.0:

1. Web 2.0 becomes a dirty word.
2. “Cool” makes way for “profitable.”
3. Blurring of the lines between media and business applications.
4. Provides solutions to real industry-specific problems.
5. Web 2.0 meets enterprise sales force and ROI metrics.
6. Search for a model to reward social media contributors.
7. A major Web 2.0 player implodes over trust or privacy issues.
8. Category fragmentation finds it’s limits.
9. Push for interoperability of identities and user profiles (again, OpenID)
10. Most users still won’t care about the underlying technology.

And because he doesn’t believe long range predictions are possible, given the quality and quantity of unknown factors, Dmitriy only offered 5 long range predictions for the state of Web 2.0 (which he prefers to call “social networking”) over the next five to ten years:

1. Mobile devices will be the key.
2. Linux will become a viable choice as a desktop operating system.
3. Limits on long tail business models will be well tested over this period.
4. Social media integrates into the fabric of Fortune 500 businesses.
5. A new platform technology that doesn’t exist today will become ubiquitous.

In the next post I’ll cover the presentation of Harry McCracken, Vice President/Editor in Chief at PC WORLD.

Does Google Adsense Make Sense?

I’ve been “messing around” with Google Adsense for a few months now. I’ve also been on the other end – running Adwords campaigns that included the “Content Network” or, in other words, Adsense ads.

I’m sure there are people getting more clicks and making more money from the program than I am. Somebody blogging on electronics, cell phones or other consumer products are obviously more likely to get those high ticket clicks. Probably the most successful at raking in the Adsense cash are those who’s sole purpose is to capture the searches and direct the visitors to the ads.

The most obvious way to increase clicks is to increase the number of visitors to the page. Another way is to embed the ad in the content, so that the user may accidentally click on it, thinking it is part of the article. Yet another way is to optimize the page for the long tail keywords, and provide no useful content, so that the visitor’s best bet to get at the information they seek is to click on the ads. I would consider this last technique spam, and would never use it. I would also see it as having the best chance at high click-through.

From the Adwords advertiser’s perspective, would you want a lot of clicks coming from spam? Do you want to pay for visitor’s who have accidentally clicked on your ad because it has been embedded in the content? I think there are two sets of answers to those questions, depending who you are:

1. If you are a small business with a limited budget, the first thing I would do would be to unclick the “Content Network” box in you ad campaign. Stop advertising through Adsense for a period, and see if your conversion doesn’t increase. In addition, I’ve found that not only the clicks per page view increase when excluding the Adsense network, but when you do get a click it is more likely to convert to a sale.

2. If you are a larger company with a diverse marketing strategy, internet marketing is probably giving you your highest ROI of all channels, so you probably don’t mind the lower conversion per dollar, if it means higher overall volume.

So, to answer my own question: does Google Adsense make sense? – I’d say, if you are internet marketer who’s raison d’etre is to get those clicks, then yes, or course. For a site like mine, however, that has the ads up incidentally, “because I can,” then no, it doesn’t really make sense. It’s a waste of effort. But it’s still kind of fun.

This event was hosted by Silicon Valley Web Builder and was held at Hurricane Electric.

Moderator:

Jeremiah Owyang, Director of Corporate Media Strategy at Podtech.net.

Speakers:

1. Sean Ness, Co-Founder at STIRR.net and Business Development Manager at Institute for the Future
2. Dmitriy Kruglyak, CEO & Community Steward, Trusted.MD (watch out – site has some zany fly-out and roll-over action!)
3. Harry McCracken, Vice President/Editor in Chief at PC WORLD

Each speaker was asked to present on two topics:

1. Top 10 predictions for Web 2.0 in the next year.
2. Top 10 predictions for Web 2.0 in the next five to ten years.

The first to speak was Sean Ness. He stressed that his predictions were his own personal opinions and weren’t necessarily derived from his work at Institute for the Future.

Here are his Top Ten predictions for Web 2.0 in the next year:

10. Focus on WAP (cellphones) and forget the $100 laptop. The number of people who use lap tops is virtually insignificant to the number of people who use cell phones globally.

9. “Reputation” will grow in importance.

8. OpenID – Web 2.0 or social networking sites all require user names and passwords. The need for a mechanism for logging into all sites with a single username/password will be fulfilled.

7. Twitter and other SMS (Short Message Service) applications used with cell phones will grow in popularity.

6. Mobile “walled gardens” (non-compatibility of cellular systems) persist.

5. Red Herring Magazine dies (it’s too slow). Immediatness of news from the Internets wins out.

4. The internet will crash.

3. Second Life (having a pretend life on the Internet through social networking sites) will die.

2. A scandal will be propelled by Web 2.0.

1. Apple iPhone will flop.

And now Sean Ness’ predictions for Web 2.o over the next 5 to 10 years.

10. The end of cyberspace. It will just meld into everyday life as another layer.

9. Looking for a career? Data mining will be the growth industry, so study math and physics so you can write the algorithms of the future. Learning some Mandarin wouldn’t hurt either.

8. RFID (radio frequency identification) will make tracking physical objects so much easier.

7. Ambient displays will be everywhere.

6. Broadband will be everywhere, like water and electricity are now.

5. Microsensors will be everywhere.

4. Rise of proactive and context-aware computing.

3. Sense-making (making sense of data) replaces sensing of data.

2. Open mobile ecosystems. No more worrying about cell phone signal unless you are in a cave.

1. Simulation literacy replaces computer literacy. Example: Dayjet.

Tomorrow: Dmitriy Kruglyak, CEO & Community Steward, Trusted.MD