Learning SEO & Online Marketing - Intermediate

Free Business Advice for Facebook

2009-10-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Facebook,

I read the business advice given to you recently by Time magazine and Wired. Don't be dumb, don't listen to them, listen to me.

My guidance is good, my insights profound, and I'm a sage business advisor. Here we go. A corporate strategy for your success in a few hundred words. Here's the summary:

1. Give me multiple Faces and categories for friends and contacts.
2. Provide me for a fee a digital archive or vault service. I'd happily pay.
3. Allow me to use Facebook as my single place for discussions, groups, clubs, and forums. Right now, I use way too many phpbbs, yahoo groups, ning groups, and so on and so forth, It's only because your groups and discussions are so weak.

Facebook's great two challenges are:

1. Lock in your users. Otherwise, you risk being a Myspace or Friendster. You need something more than just being the best place to be. We've seen that people are willing to abandon years of building their sites and links and friends for a better "scene". Don't be complacent. It's not enough. Imagine the horror of other really good entries into the social networking space which are really well combined with other popular areas such as music and games or mobile computing. I can imagine some Apple initiatives where they combine the Iphone, their music business, a partnership with say Electronic Arts, and a social media system which would be a very major threat to you. I can scare you with other scenarios. Your apps are good but you need to keep making Facebook indispensible to us.

2. Business model. Recurring cost-effective revenue. Ongoing growth in revenue per user. These are your challenges. Right now, your business model....is... nascent...a hope and prayer....in development. In short, you don't have one and you take some comfort from the fact that Google figured one out before they got to a real crisis. Of course, others sites (think YouTube and Twitter and MySpace) have not.

Here's the good news. The solution is not difficult. You can complete your emergence as a company by offering a few more features and services that resolve these two challenges. It's easy to implement, no real tough technology. Here's what you should do. As a package, it's coherent and will work. It still allows you to a lot of other things.

Facebook Strategic Plan

1. Allow individuals to have multiple Faces and categories of friends/contacts. One set of my friends might be my family. Another might be my old college friends. A third could be friends from karate. And another big set of contacts could be my business contacts. For each of them, I have a slightly different Face. So family gets to see lots of pictures of my kids but they don't have to suffer through my posting of information about my business. So each time I post a picture or post, I'll need to check which Face it shows on. This allows Facebook to become really useful for business and avoid some of the awkwardness that currently impinges its use.

2. Archiving my digital assets. Right now, all computer users seem to have the same problem of managing our digital assets. We have lots of pictures and contacts and files. We're getting use to the fact that we have home computers, office computers, a portable in the trunk of our car for when we have time to stop at Starbucks, and our Iphone with all of it's pictures. The storing and archiving of all of this digital stuff is a problem. The best solution that I've found is Carbonite.com but there are others. Essentially, it's a centralized archive place where you can store stuff for some small amount. Why not allow us 10 MB of free storage forever with each Facebook account? That way, we have our pictures and videos in Facebook and it's easier to check which ones are public (and for which Face) and which ones are private. And, if we need more storage, we just pay a simple $4 for 100 MB per month. I'd probably trust Facebook to keep it safe and would like the convenience of having a single storage place. I'd like to have a direct link between Facebook and the original. And I'd like that my Iphone and camera already deal with Facebook so I could imagine it would be easy to get my photos automatically archived there. Would I pay $4 a month? In fact, being a packrat, I'd probably be paying $8 or $12 month and since it takes several days to get everything uploaded the first time, I'd probably stay forever. Soon, I'm paying maybe $12/month, $144 per year to Facebook and it's the center of my digital assets world. And I'm happy for the convenience.

3. Make groups and subgroups and clubs work. Right now, if I want to start a community, I use Ning. You should fix your discussions and groups and fan pages so that there's no need for others to create specialized communities with endless different identities and logins and passwords.

This post sponsored by:

Time4Learning.com - Online learning for homeschool, afterschool, and summer study, PreK-8th grade.

Time4Writing.com - Eight Week Online Writing Tutorials to Build Writing Skills & Confidence

SpellingCity.com - The fastest-growing educational website.

del.icio.us

SEO Tools - My Education Continues

2009-08-24T00:07:00.000-07:00

There are so many different types of SEO tools and learning about them is an endless exercise. Mostly I don't use tools but when I look at them, my head spins. Here's a quick glance at them, organized by what they do.

Find out my site's position by keyword - Google webmaster tools (very limited)

Find out my site's incoming links - Google webmaster tools

Find out my sites incoming traffic my keyword - Google analytics

Find out other sites' position by keyword - none

Find out other site's incoming links - there's many. For instance: http://www.seo-forensics.com/

Find out other sites' incoming traffic - http://searchanalytics.compete.com/site_referrals/ And this is the point of this post. This is an interesting tool that I'd never seen before. I learned from it that someone else is doing well on math assessment and educational software blog and phonemic awareness lesson, both being terms that I'd like to dominate.

del.icio.us

Fanning and Tweeting and Friending, oh my!

2009-08-18T21:57:00.000-07:00

I do some online marketing which use to be pretty simple stuff. I asked all my friends to link to my website and I wrote page titles and urls that made some sense. ba da bing and heh, look at me, I'm atop the search engine for my little phrases.

But now, these durn social media things. I"m tweeting to twitter and posting to facebook. I'm retweeting my friends and following many more. I'm friending many people and inviting them to fan our fan page.

Should I be forming facebook groups or are they lame? Should I have identical posts and tweets or handcraft each one? Why do I have 500 fans on Facebook but only 150 followers on Twitter. Do I tweet to much? Not enough? Do I not tweet so well?

Does all this social stuff mean I can drop those confusing technorati , digg, and delicious tags that someone made appear on each post of this blog? Can I forget everything that I learned in that old blogwritingcourse and ignore the parent chat forums? Do emailed newsletters still get read or do tweets only matter?

del.icio.us

Writing Tips

2009-08-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

I thought this ways hysterical. I was looking for some ideas for some great content to summarize teaching writing and found this. It's a little subtle for our audience. Would the homeschoolers online get it? Some are subtle and funny, some are literal and very earnest. I wonder if I could write such a thing for the SEO community.

A Handy Checklist for Writers

In his book Brain Train: Studying for Success (London: E & FN Spon, 1996), 164, Richard Palmer offers great insights on how to study... and enjoy it. One example of the information he delivers is this memorable list of Rules of Grammar for Report Writing:

Remember to never split an infinitive.
The passive voice should never be used.
Punctuate run-on sentences properly they are hard to read otherwise.
Don't use no double negatives.
Use the semi-colon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.
Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.
Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
No sentence fragments.
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a lot of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
Give slang the elbow.
Conversely, it is incumbent upon us to avoid archaisms.
Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 onwards or more, to their antecedents.
Hyphenate between sy-llables; avoid un-necessary hyphens.
Write all adverbial forms correct.
Writing carefully: dangling participles must be avoided.
Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
Take the bull by the hand: always pick on the correct idiom and avoid mixed metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Don't string together too many prepositional phrases unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
""Avoid overuse of quotation marks.""""
For Christ's sake don't offend your readers' sensibilities.
Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

del.icio.us

Chrome - Second time is amazing

2009-08-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

About six months ago, I tried Google's Chrome and after a few weeks, discontinued use of it. Didn't feel good, had stability issues, and there was no compelling reason to use it.

I use three different computers in the course of a week. My home office, my office office, and a portable that I use when I'm out and about. On each, I have different browsers. Over the last six months, I have used Safari on the PC (pretty good), a few versions of Firefox, and IE 6, 7, & 8. Frankly, I hate IE, it just keeps crashing no matter how many times I reinstall and update.

Firefox is nice but it annoys me that I can't seem to find how to set it up so it launches right into my preferred homepage (igoogle). It must be there somewhere (for new tabs and new browsers) but I can't find it.

I've reinstalled and been using Chrome for the last few days. What a dream. Slick and fast and easy to configure. Makes using a computer fun again.

I'm also a big user of Google docs but I routinely curse their clumbsiness and I tend to stick to MS stuff for their ease-of-use and features. Of course, on my little laptop, I've gotten cheap and have not yet ante'd up for the microsoft tools so I'm really hoping that Google gets the tools upgraded soon.

What do I really want? I want someone to come up with a simple central storage place for all my stuff for all time. It would be great if it was google or facebook. I'm willing to pay ($10-$20 month) so long as it's efficient, big, secure, and permanent.

del.icio.us

The directories are a waste of time and other insights

2009-07-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

I just read a great pair of articles, by Jill Whalen Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? and then a commentary on it by Eric Ward: Betting On The Link Building Boondoggle Bonanza.

They seem to be focusing on the enormous amount of nonsense and expense that SEO firms spout and cost when they drag their clients through all sorts of ineffective exercises.

I agree with a lot of the article, particularly that people are spending endless time and money on techniques that are old fashioned and mostly ineffective: listing in directories and posting press releases. These are tired old techniques that google knows for what they are. Thin attempts to get links rather than natural attempts.

I disagree where they start listing techniques that have no value when in fact, the jury is still out on them. How much can link sculpting let you concentrate juice in some place? Can switching to user-friendly URLs make a big difference (I'm betting it can)?

What I like best is that he encourages the use of common sense and testing. And admits how much BS there is in the SEO industry. I've heard way too many of the people in the industry defend their approach as "Industry-standard best practices" which is a clever way of saying, everyone else does it, so it must be right.

Education and Parenting Domains

2009-07-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

What do you think of:
http://www.parentingbible.com
http://www.mathcity.com
http://www.parentaltech.com
http://www.vocabulary.co.il
http://www.vocabularycity.com
http://www.analogycity.com
http://www.grammarcity.com
www.homeschoolcurriculumcity.wordpress.com

Are they good domains? Should I look at them?

del.icio.us

Duplicate Content

2009-07-08T17:25:00.001-07:00

Most people usually think of duplicate content as either articles that are republished or pages that appear with only the slightest variation on a website.

I'm sure Google discounts or ignores these pages. If content is widely copied throughout the web, I would suspect that Google awards the original source with some special points since everyone appears to be copying and citing the original source.

To illustrate what I believe, assume:
- an article first appears on site A
- the article then appears all over with the web with same outgoing links in it to site B, but also with links back to the original site A
Then, Google will:
- highly count all the links back to site A since it appears to be content that is widely cited evidenced both by the links back and the copying of content
- will not heavily count the links to site B since it's basically the same link all over the place
- will neither reward or punish all the copycat sites

I started thinking about duplicate content since there is a major article on sphinn which deals with detecting duplicate content within a website. And it mostly seems concerned with duplicated page titles and meta descriptions. This is a sloppy error that I'm sure my sites have a lot of. sigh sigh sigh. The article is by Shimon Sandler: Finding Duplicate Content with Free Tools

del.icio.us

Top Five SEO Mistakes

2009-07-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

What are the top five mistakes that I see? Here's what my education online has taught me.

1. Trying to optimize a site that doesn't stand a chance since it's got the wrong name, wrong structure, wrong content. If it's not going to do well in the search engines, don't bother playing with links. Start again. Maybe keep the old AND start with a fresh domain that feeds traffic to the old one.

2. Paying attention to what matters. The domain name matters A LOT. Learn this. Don't jsut be catchy, pick a name with the keywords that matter. You'll learn that your url gets mentioned a lot, including on your pages and incoming link anchor text.

3. Paying attention to what matters. The page title matters a lot. The other meta data, the content, the H tags, title tags, and alt tags also matter but don't screw them up weird just to impress the search engines. Present them as they are.

4. Content should be findable. Simple text. Not buried deep in code. Build with CSS. The content on each page should focus on a few concepts which relate to a few related keywords. The search engines understand and reward focus on a page.

5. Site structure. Build sections that relate to each other. Interlink among those sections. Put them in a common folder. The search engines like tidy and organized.

PS - did you notice that I know the difference know between A LOT (Correct) and alot (incorrect)? Thanks to the vocabulary lessons online.

del.icio.us

Forums

2009-06-06T17:59:00.001-07:00

For those of who don't know, there are several distinct reasons to use online forums:

- Get help
- Give back help
- Find contacts
- Marketing (thru discrete signature references)

And there are forums on every topics:
Parenting, coding, marketing, etc etc

del.icio.us

California Cancelled Summer School

2009-06-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

California Cancelled Summer School!

Gov. Schwarzenegger told a joint session of the state legislature Tuesday that if the $24 billion budget deficit isn't closed, the state won't have enough money to pay its bills next month. Because the budget has to be cut more, L.A. Unified School District has canceled most of summer school.

del.icio.us

'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Dies

2009-06-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Died today. I heard a long discussion of it on NPR. It touched me since I had LOVED that show. I also wondered how I could play in the SEO game of breaking news. Obviously, I am half a day late to participate in that game but I've put it up on my martial arts blog. And here I'm building links to the article about the Kung Fu hero dying. I wonder if I'll get hits and traffic?

Actually, I care a lot more about links but that's another question.

del.icio.us

kaboodle unsubscribe

2009-05-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

I think the can-spam law is great. I should be able to easily tell me to stop mailing me. I'd like it if there were real penalties and more standards.

I tried to get off a list this morning which reminded me how important good implementation is if you are NOT going to anger potential customers.

For instance, what about email lists that you can get off only if you remember your password? Of course, you can always ask them to send you your password and then unsubscribe. Still, it's a pain. Is that compliant?

What about lists where there is no UNSUBSCRIBE ALL option? I mention this since I just had to check 30 boxes to completely unsubscribe from a Hearst publication called kaboodle. What a pain! That'll definitely keep me from giving up my email to another hearst publication for awhile.

del.icio.us

Alabama Education Homeschooling

2009-05-07T18:32:00.001-07:00

If you wanted some info on Alabama education, here's some choices. You can get Alabama homeschooling info from Joann. You can participate in an Alabama homeschooling discussion with Joann. There's also all the spelling lists that have been saved by schools in Alabama.

Homeschooling in Alabama

Hi, my name is JoAnn, and I am the Alabama state representative for Time4Learning!

I am 46 years old and I am married to Perry and we have 3 children and 1 grandchild. I homeschool our youngest while Perry's work takes him away from home throughout the week. I keep a busy schedule and never have a dull moment!

How We Homeschool in Alabama

We belong to North Alabama Christian School out of Valley Head. We meet once a week for PE, weather permitting. We also schedule several field trips throughout the year. As far as an average homeschool day for us, I don't have a strict schedule that I go by. I incorporate everything as a learning skill or experience. Breakfast by 9:00 and reading is always after. With dyslexia, reading is our most difficult subject, so I get it done early. We generally do Bible study next, along with music. By 2:00, my son is ready for Time 4 Learning, where we do more reading and language arts, math, science and social studies. By 4:00 we are done and usually out the door to the park!

del.icio.us

Whats a real blog?

2009-04-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting post that took a new spin on a question that I've discussed at some length in our How to Blog Course. What is a blog?

We were interested initially (the course has evolved) as teaching blogging as a type of creative writing. For us, it was related to the diary, journal, or confessional but had an episodic or serial structure and most importantly, the writing included elements of audience participation, promotion, and an involvement in the world around us. Our approach to explaining blogs was to create categories saying that there are personal blogs; there are hybrids of personal blogs with either business, advocacy, or non-profit purposes; and there are sites which use blog software as a CMS (content management system) but which aren't blogs at all.

Edward De Leau has a post in his blog Why the whole world is wrong about weblogs in which he makes the distinction between weblogs as a media format and weblogs as the technology or CMS behind a website. He belabors it at some length but his definitions are tight and his cartoons are nice.

del.icio.us

Vocabulary

2009-04-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Learning Vocabulary Fun is the number two site on Google for "vocabulary". How to broaden it's appeal while focusing on keywords of real value to customers and advertisers. Watch this!

Vocabulary Flash Cards -
Vocabulary flash cards have traditionally been a key vocabulary teaching tool. Today, vocabulary flash games online are preferred vocabulary teaching tools to traditional vocabulary flash cards. Note that vocabulary went from nowhere on the search engines to number 13 last week by adding this discussion of flash cards versus flash games!

Expand Your Vocabulary

Word Power:-Developing your Vocabulary
GRE Verbal Tips
Improve Through Active Learning

del.icio.us

Craigs List - Bad Writing by a College Student

2009-04-25T05:28:00.001-07:00

My company now posts all of our job offers on Craigs List and we do our hiring there. This response made me laugh.

Hello im a college student and have great communication skills computer skills.. i would love for this position.. if you can please contact me nicole (sic).

Pretty nice demonstration of her great communication skills, huh?

PS

Watch me direct google towards a certain image of John Edelson. from this post about john edelson.

SpellingCity.com

2009-04-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

SpellingCity.com is my favorite website these days for fun spelling time. Check out these awards:

Parents' Choice Award
The Parents' Choice Foundation, the nation's leading experts on quality childrens' media and toys, recently selected the SpellingCity.com website as a Parents’ Choice Recommended Award.

Golden Lamp Awards Finalist
The Golden Lamp Awards are one of educational publishing's longest-running and most prestigious traditions. SpellingCity has been recognized as one of the four finalists in the Technology Innovations category.

Homeschool.com - Top 100 site
Homeschool.com is the number one site for homeschooling. In January, Homeschool.com announced their top 100 websites for homeschooling in 2009. Eleven websites were selected in the language arts area among them, SpellingCity.com!

Larry Ferlazzo - Top 5 Choice for Best Online Learning Games
Larry Ferlazzo picks SpellingCity as one of the Best Online Learning Games on the web. Larry Ferlazzo is a well-known language teacher and blogger about language arts and ESL websites. He provides two rankings of the best sites: one he ranks sites himself and the other ranking is based on his readers votes. On both rankings, SpellingCity.com was selected as the second most useful learning games website on the web!

ThePioneerWoman
"My recent find is SpellingCity.com. I love straightforward sites like this. The site is focused; it does one thing - and it does it VERY well. I did not have to join to use this FREE site, but I chose to create an account so SpellingCity would save my word lists, making it easier and faster to use the site for daily visits or weekly/monthly reviews. The site has various Spelling uses, like testing or teaching words; it also offers 8 Spelling and Vocabulary games."

del.icio.us

Florida in Education

2009-04-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

Florida education online is a weird online marketing theme. But oddly, it's one that I now have several lines in the water on. Florida is a big fishing state so that'll be my metaphor for today.

People need information on homeschooling in Florida. Time4Learning has a page of information to help.

People need to study to pass the vocabulary portion of the FCAT. The vocabulary education site has that need nailed.

For all your spelling needs, there is a page to help you find Florida schools on SpellingCity. Is this a page that Google will be able to use?

And while there is not yet a discussion about Florida, there is a great discussion forum for homeschooling parents.

del.icio.us

Monetizing Content - The future of media

2009-04-06T11:40:00.001-07:00

Newspapers are going out of businesses. Top bloggers are abandoning their industry-leading blogs as not worth the effort financially. Information wants to be free. The outlook for content and journalism is pretty bleak, if the media reports are to be believed.

I think the future is ours to make. Here's my two cents for the media people to think about.

1. Education is a very very profitable industry.
2. Journalism as supported by advertising and subscriptions is failing.
Think about it.
I'll add a third point of departure for my suggestion.
3. The classic concept of education, running from K-12 followed often by college, sometimes by advanced degrees, is pretty out-dated. There's huge opportunities for new models of education.

Rather than proceed with a macro-industry meta-discipline analysis, I'll switch to the mode of some personal advice.

If you are a journalist or blogger with a good following but a shakey business model, pay me $700 and in a three hour one-on-one seminar, I'll teach you how to keep doing what you love (assuming that's journalism or blogging), build your following, and make it into a solidly renumerative business with control in your own hands.

Sound impossible, keep reading.

Actually, I'm kidding about the $700 and the seminar. I'm too busy to do that. Although, now that I've opened up the question, it might make a good business. Here's what I'd teach you in that seminar.

1. You have an audience that admires you. They listen to you and they read from you. They think you know more than they do about something of interest to them. They read you not because they want to click on ads, they read you because of your expertise and writing skills.

2. In your fans eyes and hearts, you are a celebrity.

3. If they had a chance to learn directly from you, to take a course, many of them would like to. Not all would but many would.

4. My point is that while your routine blogging and journalism might not make enough for you to live on, you can supplement it by selling your expertise in courses to your following. This will deepen your relationship with your audience and allow you to repurpose your expertise as courseware. Frankly, writing and teaching are very closely related. Not identical but they are close.

5. Todays tools for pulling together courses using public domain or cheap learning management system and online community sessions makes the creation of these mini courses practically available to anyone. It's not quite as simple as blogging yet but within maybe 12 months, with a little effort from the right groups, it could be made that easy.

6. Depending on your following and their level of involvement with you, you should structure an online or in-person course in which you charge them a significant amount of money and they get to interact directly with you. How about:

A three week $199 course for groups of twenty with two one hour sessions each week each plus email etc. This could gross $4K each time it runs and could run 12 times per year. That's $48K of revenue. Or, how about charging $499 per student? Or $999? Selling courses at these prices in the abstract sounds very hard. But, if you have a following who already admires, respects, and follows you, I think that it's likely that there is a significant demand from your audience for more than just your regular writing.

A friend of mine (kenny) had asked me a few days ago to write up something about how journalists should get into training. I had intended to write this but then forgot until I looked at my email today. From a group who "gets it", the search engine marketing group, I got an invite to have them train people at their next show. Are they expecting people to pay up? Check out these rates: Workshops $1,345/$745 Cost 8:00-5:00pm. If I had more time, I'd write up about the seminars and conventions that the NYT and Economist seem to run sometimes. And how colleges are beginning to wonder if the future of education is not so much a four year involvement but a lifetime opportunity to sell education to someone.

Journalists and bloggers should think of their writing efforts as the media and rather than accept lots of other advertisers selling things that your audience doesn't care about, sell them what they want. More from you. Cut out the middleman. Journalists should be educators with education being the profit center.

just a thought.....john

del.icio.us

USA Geography

2009-04-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

If this isn't one cool implementation and tour de force of seo and marketing prowess, I don't know what is. It's from a Geographic US & World Search Function.

Alabama,
Alaska,Arizona,Arkansas,California,Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas

Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina

North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota state Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin
» United States Military
Armed Forces Americas (AA)
Armed Forces Europe (AE)
Armed Forces Pacific (AP)
» United States Overseas
American Samoa
Guam
Northern Mariana Islands
Palau
Puerto Rico
Virgin Islands
» Other Countries
Canada
Australia
United Kingdom
New Zealand
Other Countries

del.icio.us

Dental Games

2009-04-02T12:54:00.001-07:00

Yes, we have created a new genre. Games with Teeth!!!!

I'm not kidding. A few people in my office worked on a project when I wasn't paying attention and now we have a page of dental games. Go figure.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to market such a thing?

Actually, i just checked google and found:
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,200,000 for dental games. (0.21 seconds)

Heat Maps - Google is not the be-all and end-all

2009-03-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

Google analytics has a nifty feature that it'll tell you what links people are clicking on. But, it's not the be-all and end-all. It falls short in that it:
- groups all the links that go to the same page from a page. So you have no idea if they clicked on the "more info" link at the top or bottom
- it only tracks clicks onto links. Not confused clicks onto things that look like links.

Does anyone track such things? Apparently they do;
Crazy Egg & Click Density.

del.icio.us

School pages into the search engines - ?

2009-03-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

According to webmaster tools, the SpellingCity page on First Presbyterian Church School is not listed. I'll do a google search to see whether this school can be found on SpellingCity.com: First Presbyterian Church School site:SpellingCity.com. The answer is that while some other school pages are found which have links to that page, First P's home page is not yet in the Google index.

Why isn't First Presbyterian Church School's home page on SpellingCity.com in the index?

This is weird in that:

There are at least two schools that I found that link to this home page which have links to them from their schools (Tinsley Elementary School & Greenville Elementary School). Of course, the links at the bottom of these pages in which the local schools link to each other should ideally have well-less than 100 links on the page. Unfortunately, these pages seem to have about 260 other schools listed which could account for the links not being counted.
There are two blog posts from twenty days ago which have direct links to this First Presbyterian Church School. School pages not appearing and School home pages.
I have been hoping that this page would appear in the index and mostly, my dreams do come true.

Any ideas? Since we have 125K school homepages that we're hoping will begin to get listed, this is a question of some importance. I could imagine that Google is reluctant to include these pages since they are short on content and links. Still, over 5K of these schools have links directly from the schools to them so it's hard to imagine why they don't get listed. Maybe, too many of these links are images?

http://learnseowithme.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/school-home-pages/

Public School Review

2009-03-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.publicschoolreview.com is a partner site of Boarding School Review, the leading online resource for evaluating private secondary boarding schools, and Private School Review, a unique resource for researching private day schools across the USA. They have pages competing for each school in the country and try to make money through partners in a variety of ways:

Their find a classmate link goes directly to classmates.com.
They have google adsense on the website.
Mostly, the partner sites are not filled in: http://www.publicschoolreview.com/site-partners.php they are "under construction". Maybe the site has a good business model but needs a goosing.

del.icio.us