Month of July , 2006

Amazon has released their new beta program called Omakase Links. Omakase is the Japanese word for “leave it up to us.” It’s just a fancy way of saying contextual advertising.

I’m always leary of contextual advertising. Adsense does a great job of serving relevant ads, however Yahoo! seems to serve non relevant ads, and the same ads in each ad block. Really tough to make a buck if it’s not relevant.  read more »

Matt Cutts works at Google. I wish I could work for Google. I’d settle for an internship. Well these video’s are as close as I’ll probably ever get. You get it straight from Google’s mouth.

Give the videos a look. I checked em and they were full of some pretty great info. Matt covers:

* Qualities of a good site
* SEO Myths
* Optimizing
* Sitemaps
* Quality Guidelines
* Split testing
* Supplemental Results

He makes good use of Google video. Definately check out Matt Cutts SEO Answers.

Copy Blogger wrote a great article titled 10 Sure-fire Headline Formulas that Work http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/. I love this article. I plan on using all of these ideas in my next posts. Matter of fact I’m using it already in this post!

1. Who Else Wants [blank]?
2. The Secret of [blank]
3. Here is a Method That is Helping [blank] to [blank]
4. Little Known Ways to [blank]
5. What Everybody Ought to Know About [blank]

Go over to Copy Blogger and read 10 Sure-fire Headline Formulas that Work. It’s definately a good read.

Webmaster Radio is great! It’s official. I’m calling it “great.” I love it. I’ve recently been listening to their podcasts. There’s gold in them there podcasts. Excellent stuff.

If you’re looking to be serious about being successful online, you have to talk, read, listen, eat, breath and sleep this stuff. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 times for something to hit my brain before the “a-hah” moment happens.  read more »

Well I’m finally home from Ad Tech in Chicago. It was an interesting trip. Not as many geeks as I had hoped. But I did learn a few things.

The main thing I noticed about Ad Tech was it was a lot of suit and tie guys. A lot of guys who are in advertising. And it seemed like all the booths at the trade shows were looking for advertisers and didn’t really care about us publishers.  read more »

Well, after an eight hour drive from Minneapolis, we arrived at the Sheraton. My father and I came together. We’re splitting everything.

The Sheraton in Chicago is beautiful. I was pretty impressed. But for $260 a night, it better be nice.

We took a walk down to Navy Pier and then went to Blackies for dinner.

Finally when I got back to the room, we decided to geek out a little before bed. I was shocked to find out that the Sheraton’s high speed connection was 12.95 a day! After paying $260 a night, it should be freee. Very lame. Thank god for my Treo.  read more »

I found this great tool today. The SEOmoz Page Strength Tool is really interesting. It will tell you:

* The Relative Importance/Visibility of a Webpage
* The Potential Strength/Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines
* Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web

The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility. Check out SEOmoz Page Strength Tool here http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php.

There are several ways to drive traffic to your blog. Obviously, the best way is good ol fashioned TIME. But there are lots of things you can do to speed up the process.

1. Keyword Rich Content
2. Incoming links
3. Sitemap
4. Related articles plugin
5. Keyword rich permalink structure
6. Meta tags, alt tags and title tags
7. Technorati tags
8. Relevant category titles
9. Only 2 or 3 articles per page
10. 200-400 words per article
11. Bold keywords, break up long articles, bullets
12. Ping list
13. Submit your blog
14. Write often and regularly  read more »

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it’s just a feed of information that people can subscribe to.

By default, WordPress creates an RSS feed for every post and every comment on your blog. Meaning if someone puts a comment on your blog, they can add the feed to their feed reader and they’ll be notified on any activity on their comment.

The great thing about RSS feeds, is that now days email clients are including feed readers, so you can add your favorite RSS feed to your email client and your feeds come in just like email.  read more »

I quit using Outlook and now only use Thunderbird. Just like with all of my other applications, I’m going open source. I’m trying to use as much open software as I can.

Lately, I’ve been a huge fan of Thunderbird. I imported all of my Outlook contacts, setup all of my folders, setup ALL of my email accounts to go into one client. Before I had hotmail,gmail and outlook, I had to check 3 every day. Now I just have them all go to Thunderbird.  read more »

Often times when I’m checking my awstats, I’ll see Yahoo! and MSN showing some high numbers. Until lately, I used to just check to see where my terms were ranking on Google.

But now, I’ve discovered the importance of checking the other search engines. For instance one of my sites won’t come up on Google until around 100, but when I check on MSN, I’m number one!

Several of my sites are doing this, great positioning on MSN and Yahoo!, but twenty pages back on Google. Why is this? All my sites have been optimized for Google. To be real honest, that’s all I thought mattered.  read more »

I used to be an internet explorer guy. But lately I’ve switched over to open source. I’ve been using WordPress, Xoops, osCommerce, Coppermine, phpBB, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Now if I could only get off of windows, perhaps linux is my next step?

Anyway, Firefox has really blown me away. They have a portable version which I run off my pen drive. So no matter where I go, I have all of my favorites, passwords, etc.  read more »