Self-sorting (sorta) bin (via Dinosaurs and Robots)
Posted by randfish
Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There's a natural conflict that creates the issue - the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.
To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:
When you answer the first question, you'll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).
NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL's data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.
For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you're deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I've taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:
NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer's Backlink Analysis
If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It's also likely that you'll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don't have that singular, pinpoint focus.
I wrote another post on a similar topic highlighting how to format titles, meta descriptions and keyword usage on pages that aim for multi-keyword targeting that may also be of help.
Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.
A month after Seattle's Tableau Software launched a free online tool for creating and sharing dynamic data visualization charts, Google Labs has announced a free online tool for creating and sharing dynamic data visualization charts.
Like Tableau Public, Google's "Public Data Explorer" comes as the federal government is posting huge buckets of data online through its Data.gov transparency project, stoking demand for tools to analyze and present the information.
But there are a few big differences in what's being offered to end users.
Google's experiment is relatively closed and seems aimed at building partnerships with public agencies as much as providing free Web tools. At this point its tools can only be used to analyze a handful of datasets that Google's procured from public sources. Google's asking agencies to suggest additional data that it can upload and publish on its platform.
Tableau already has partnerships with agencies using its commercial visualization tools in-house. The free public version released last month is more open than Google's and can be used on any data. Users of the free version also have to share the underlying data via the visualization, while Google's tool doesn't yet allow the data to be downloaded directly.
Here's an example of a visualization created with Google's new tool:
Here's a Tableau Public visualization blending unemployment with venture capital and housing data:
2009 Housing Prices 
Last fall Virgin Mobile unveiled "Broadband2Go," a prepaid wireless broadband option that operates over Sprint's EVDO network (Sprint now owns Virgin Mobile). The service initially offered users the option of buying pay-as-you-go cards in 100MB ($10), 250MB ($20), 500MB ($40) and 1GB ($60) increments. That pricing didn't impress many people, given users looking for no-contract wireless broadband could nab truly unlimited prepaid, non-contract EvDO on Sprint via companies like Millenicom -- for $70 per month. Many users write in to note that Virgin Mobile has revamped their packages.
It looks like they've lifted the 250 MB limit on their $20 package to 300 MB, raised the 500 MB limit on their $40 package to 1 GB, and raised the 1 GB limit on their $60 package to 5 GB. Note that all of the buckets expire within thirty days of purchase whether you use them all or not -- except the cheapest $10 offer, which expires in ten days.
The service requires users to buy a $100 Novatel Ovation MC760 USB modem. Are those of you who were underwhelmed with the service at launch any more interested with the higher caps?
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Simply put, advertising is a matching problem.
It is a puzzle of people and needs, demand and awareness, creativity and messaging, and most of importantly, timing and context. It works best when the shape of the consumer fits perfectly with the shape of the advertiser. While conceptually this idea is not new - advertisers have long been armed with reams of information on all these data points - matching in the legacy of advertising was at best a fishing excursion and at worst a waste of buckets of cash.
The web changed everything. All of a sudden we had the other piece of the puzzle. As the first medium that was actually controlled by the people consuming it, that very control became available to advertisers to match against. People were raising their hands and announcing what they were interested in doing and discovering. This of course made the matching pretty easy. Search grew the tool sets to take advantage of this. Amazingly, publishers with their loads of site analytic data did not.
The inevitable result when all media is accountable and the puzzle pieces fit together is that all the wasted dollars dwindle and the dollars not being wasted end up on a matching platform. And if the platform is free, real disruption occurs.
By 2003 with Craigslist available in 32 US cities publishers were feeling the first effects of easier matching. Classifieds are the original matching advertisements so in hindsight it was logical that they would be the first revenue to get disintermediated by better digital matching systems. In this era of realtime it sometimes gets forgotten that it was not only the immediacy of digital publishing caused old media’s demise. More than anything else the ability to efficiently facilitate consumer-to-advertiser matching killed old media.
Fast-forward and now it is display advertising that is old media.
The first thing to remember is that display was born as old media/old advertising’s solution. The idea was started by a print magazine and embraced as an easy way to lure ad dollars into an emergent channel. Not much has changed with display since that time. That’s because the way its technology has been built makes it incredibly difficult to match consumers with relevant ads. There are some verticals where appending data may be helpful but as mentioned earlier, timing and context are critical in shaping a match.
This gets to the root of display’s matching problem. The temporal value of data is fleeting and context is frequently not discernable. If we look to Search for matching guidance context is exactly what Google’s algos are trying to understand. It’s why they take in-session query history into account. It’s why they look at temporal factors from time-on-page to time-to-click. It’s why they take landing page bounce rates and copy into account. It’s why they’ve added social factors to SERPs. It’s why 25% of all SERPs (and growing) are being personalized. Context, the weaving together of interrelated conditions that brings meaning to why a person is doing something, is the key to delivering relevance.
Amazingly context is a word I rarely hear anymore in display. In fact I’ve read quite a few people dismiss its value. That’s bullshit. I understand, display was not built to deliver context but I’m afraid I see far too few people working on solving this problem – a problem that fundamentally addresses the value of the media. The rise of audience buying is exacerbating this problem. It’s a red herring to get media dollars into the channel because no one is clicking the ads. Why, because they are not relevant. There is poor matching.
The lessons to be learned from the rise of Search extend far beyond the way media is priced, bought and sold. Without new methods and technology to deliver relevance all those buying & bidding platforms and exchanges will be short lived. Sure, there might be some nice exits as there has been in the past, but display ads will still suck, real value will not have been added to the medium and Search will only become more dominant.
This may be the final bell. As with the rise of Craigslist & Google the real losers in this matching game will not be the advertisers. The real losers with display’s matching problem will be publishers. The only thing of true value in a user-controlled medium is relevance. Time is running out to deliver it and all media is becoming searchable.
Previous Related Posts:
Lessons in Digital Content Creation & Technology from Search Advertising
Ads as Content – Content as Ads
Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go prepaid 3G data service made a splash last summer by offering no-contract plans that came close to competing with two-year offerings from the likes of Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. The major drawback was that the top plan, at $60, only allowed for 1GB of data usage, whereas you’d get 5GB on a contract plan.
Filed under: Geneva Motor Show, Crossover, Mini
Continue reading Geneva 2010: Mini Countryman breaks cover
Geneva 2010: Mini Countryman breaks cover originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | CommentsA few months ago my article Seven Useful Plugins for Your Wordpress Blog described the plugins I had found useful for my website. Since then I have been exploring what is possible with the Wordpress software and finding ways to squeeze more functionality from it.
For each of the ideas I came up with I found numerous solutions at the wordpress.org plugin site. The seven plugins described below are all used on my website, but I still feel my blog is only just beginning to reach its potential. With Wordpress plugins we are just a few clicks away from some very useful features.
Your Wordpress blog archives can be set to display in a sidebar widget in monthly buckets. So, for each month that you post to your blog there will be a new line in the sidebar.
This is fine for the first few months, but after only two years that list will be 24 lines long and growing. Wouldn’t it be much better to show the current year’s posts in monthly buckets and those for previous years in yearly buckets.
With the Collapsing Archives plugin by Robert Felty you can do just that. The plugin is fully configurable and can be styled to your own tastes. Post counts can be displayed against years and months and individual post titles can also be shown.
Once you have built up a readership for your blog you may like to provide a way for your readers to contact you. Comments can be left against each post but sometimes your readers may want to send you a private message.
It is never a good idea to display your email address on your blog for this purpose, so this is where the Contact Form 7 plugin by Takayuki Miyoshi is useful. You can set up multiple forms and generate a large number of fields to be populated, some of which you can mark as required. Once configured, just copy a short code into a page and your new contact form will be displayed.
As your readership grows you will notice that not all the comments left against your posts are genuine. Spam affects blog comments as well as email. To combat this, a spam filter is a very useful tool.
The Akismet plugin by Matt Mullenweg is included with the Wordpress core download. You will need to register for a wordpress.com API key, but once activated the plugin will filter comment spam into a spam folder and leave just your genuine comments on your posts. Akismet spam statistics are monitored and can be viewed from your dashboard.
So you have created a new post on your blog and want to tell the world it’s there. How do you do this? Twitter, of course. So you create a shortened URL to link back to the post, log on to your Twitter account, type in your 140 characters including the link and the job is complete.
But with the WordTwit plugin by Dale Mugford and Duane Storey all this can be done automatically. Just enter your Twitter account details into the settings, configure how you would like the tweet to look and, as each post is published, it is instantly tweeted.
Once you have your Twitter feed updated automatically, another useful feature would be a link from your blog pointing to that feed. Text in your links widget would serve this purpose but a big blue button that remains on the screen even when you scroll down the page would be even better.
The FollowMe plugin by WPBurn.com provides this button (as shown below). Place the URL of your Twitter page into the settings and any reader who clicks on the button will be taken to your tweets. The colours and icons can be configured to your tastes.
There are many ways to access the internet but not all of these have the benefit of a large screen. In order to cater for your readers using mobile devices you need to display your blog to them using a different theme.
The WordPress Mobile Edition plugin by Crowd Favorite recognises the major mobile and touch screen browsers and comes with a clear, mobile-friendly Carrington theme. Any browser accessing your blog with a user agent matching those in the settings will be served with the mobile theme.
Statistics are always useful when presented in a clear way. Details about the source of your website traffic, search terms and page views can help you tailor your blog to the right audience.
The WordPress.com Stats plugin by Andy Skelton provides this information in a clear and friendly way, graphically and in tables. As with the Akismet plugin, WordPress.com Stats requires a wordpress.com API key.
Seven Useful Plugins for Your Wordpress Blog
Do you have original articles, stories, poems, pictures or videos that you would like to share with the world? Join Triond and earn an income from your work.
By: Christian Arno
The ‘look and feel‘ of a website is the cornerstone of any successful online venture. But the very nature of the internet means that the instant you upload your carefully constructed pages onto the World Wide Web, you’re global.
Image: via YukoTVXQ
Indeed, regardless of whether you intend to make buckets of cash from your website or simply build a strong international following online, there are numerous aspects of your site’s design you should consider from the start, to ensure it’s flexible and adaptable to international requirements. If you want to build a number of foreign-language equivalents of your main site, they need to be properly localized before you launch and the process can be made much less painful if you plan from the start.
Image: via subgrafik
For those more inclined towards the front-end design aspect of websites than the ‘behind the scenes’ system-related aspects, consider this technical truism: computers deal with numbers, not letters.
Indeed, letters and other characters are displayed by having a number designated to each one through a system of encoding. Traditionally, there were lots of encoding systems covering different languages, but Unicode changed all that.
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, regardless of platform, program or language. It has been adopted by industry leaders such as Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and many others. Importantly, it is supported in most of the common operating systems and browsers. The development of Unicode is one of the most significant global software technology trends in recent years.
Most of the popular web design applications such as Dreamweaver and, for real beginners, Microsoft Front Page, facilitate the development of Unicode web pages.
Unicode can currently be used for over 90 scripts, and has a repertoire of over 100,000 characters. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode that is familiar to most programmers. It is the best option when creating websites for international markets, as it allows you to use characters from many different languages. For example, German uses the ‘Eszett’ symbol (ß) in place of ’ss’, whilst three German vowels use the Umlaut (ä, ö and ü).
In short, you’re best using Unicode if you’re planning on adapting your website for other languages.
Image: via djFargo
Color is an important facet of any website. Your choice of colors will depend on whatever product or service you’re selling. If you’re an environmental company from the west, you may have a lot of green on your site…if you run a water sports business, there may be a lot of blue.
However, your choice of colors should also reflect your target audience. For example, red can denote ‘danger’, ‘love’ or ‘passion’ in Western cultures; whilst it signifies ‘purity’ in India and ‘good luck‘ or ‘celebration’ in China.
Orange has religious connotations for Protestants in Northern Ireland, whilst it also represents ‘autumn’ (‘fall’), ‘Halloween’ or ‘creativity’ in many Westerns cultures too.
Green represents ’spring’, ‘nature’ and the environment in many cultures, but if you’re ever thinking of depicting a green hat on your site, it’s worth knowing that this signifies that a man’s wife is cheating on him in China. It can also represent an exorcism.
Other examples are Purple: ‘royalty’ (Western) or ‘mourning’ (Thailand). Interestingly, black denotes ‘funerals’ or ‘death’ in Western cultures, but in many Eastern cultures white is used to denote this.
To avoid having to overhaul your website when targeting a new market, carefully consider your color scheme from the start.
Image: via leekrya
Nobody will visit your website for the design alone. The online marketing mantra ‘content is king‘ certainly rings true for most websites – you have to offer genuinely useful content for your domestic and international visitors.
Adapting your content for international markets requires a two-step process: localization and optimization.
The localization aspect simply requires a professionally qualified native-speaking translator for each of your target markets. If you’re serious about making money from your international websites, then you have to consider dialects too.
For example, many words mean different things in French (France), Canadian French and Swiss/Belgian French. ‘Lunch’ is déjeuner in France, but dîner in Switzerland and Belgium. And in France, dîner is the word for ‘evening meal’. Coche in Spain is the word for a ‘car’, whilst in many South American countries, it means a baby-stroller. Indeed, a baby-stroller will be unfamiliar to UK readers, who’ll be more likely to use a ‘pushchair’ or ‘buggy’.
So you get the point. If you’re serious about your global endeavors, you have to treat each of your target markets as separate entities.
The translation of your website is made a lot easier if you use minimal Flash content on your site, as it’s difficult to edit, copy and carry out word counts, processes that are crucial to the translation process. Moreover, words are the food of search engines, and given that the likes of Google can’t detect words embedded in Flash files, these kinds of sites aren’t very SEO friendly.
In terms of optimizing your website for international markets, you shouldn’t translate your keywords and phrases directly from your English language website. People may use abbreviations, acronyms or synonyms to search for a product locally, so you have to research what terms consumers actually use to search for items in each of your markets.
These phrases should then be incorporated into your professionally translated website, preferably on a dedicated ‘in-country’ domain (see below).
Image: via Heberger Site
It may be cheaper and more convenient to have a single domain for all your target countries, but from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, there’s an argument that says it’s best to have a dedicated top-level domain (TLD) for each of your target countries, (e.g. ‘co.uk’ for the UK or ‘.ch’ for Switzerland etc). Search engines use the top-level domain to help establish the ‘location‘ of the website (‘geo-targeting’), which will affect your position on country-specific search engines (Google.co.uk, Google.fr, etc)
Similarly, it’s best to check that each of your domains is hosted on a server in your target country too, as search engines use this information to determine your website’s location.
The website address of the domain you purchase is important too as Google reads the words in the URL. So if your company produces software, for example, you may want to have the word ’software’ in the URL, though this should be translated into the language of your target country.
Developing websites to support multiple languages is a challenging endeavor; if you choose to have one domain to host several multi-language versions of your site, ensure you create a different sub-domain for each language. So if, for example, your TLD is: http://www.mycompany.com, then the sub-domain for its German language version would be http://de.mycompany.com. Conversely, the in-country domain would be: http://www.mycompany.de.
Image: via Little Miss. Sunshine
Navigation is a crucial aspect of the web design process. Consistency and ‘landmarking’ help web users find their way around your site and. Navigation should be intuitive.
If you have a vertical menu bar on the left of your English-language website, it’s worth considering switching this to the right for languages that read ‘right to left’ (RTL), such as Arabic. This isn’t essential, as you can have menus on the opposite side of the page, but it all depends how you want your website to appear to your visitors. Alternatively, use a horizontal menu bar to eliminate the need to make any amendments at all.
You might also want to consider creating an ‘entrance page‘ to your site, where users choose the navigation language of the site. Or, you can use English as the default language, and have clearly labeled options for switching to other languages.
Some businesses use IP2Country services that automatically detect the country of the visitor based on their IP address. Some simple, dynamic code on your web pages will enable this – however, this method isn’t always 100% reliable, so it’s perhaps best leaving the language selection process to the user.
And there you have it. These are just some of the basic issues to consider when building a multilingual friendly website. Good luck conquering the world!
About author: Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, a multi-million dollar international translation and localization company with more than a hundred employees in over 60 countries. Learn more about multilingual web design.
No day is complete without new apps, and yesterday was well on its way to being a complete day. If that makes no sense (I tend to ramble, you should know that by now), them know this: there are new apps in the App Catalog. From lyrics searches to 3D Deer Hunter to apps for developers, yesterday’s app drop ran the gamut of application types. And, of course, there were several buckets full of updates to apps that we hold near and dear to our hearts. Interested? Don’t lie, you know you are. The lists is waiting for you, patiently, after the break.
Social media measurement platform Trendrr has just released a new real-time dashboard — targeted toward TV networks and brands — that tracks online conversations by gender, location, sentiment, influence, reach and volume.
The Trendrr real-time dashboard — now available to all Trendrr Pro users — may sound like yet another social media monitoring product, but this is all about presentation, and on that front it delivers. You can get a better idea of data presentation from the screenshot of the Winter Olympics dashboard below.
The dashboard is configured to look at Twitter conversations in compartmental buckets that provide a comprehensive picture of all the online chatter pertaining to a brand or entertainment entity. So Trendrr Pro users now have an alternative way to view their data; it’s less about charts and graphs, although those are included, and more about providing a lens to better consume the data powering the reports.
At the top of the dashboard you get a real-time glimpse at keywords (which you can select to further filter the dashboard view) that are trending around the topic of interest, a count of real-time results since you started, and a number that projects total reach.
Below there’s two line graphs that chart mentions per hour and minute, a section that segments conversations by top location, a chart that looks at positive, neutral and negative sentiment, and a section that breaks down mentions by gender. If you continue to scroll down you can look at top hashtags, top links shared (with counts), real-time tweets, and Twitter users who are top influencers on the topic.
What’s more interesting than the dashboard itself is the audience: the entertainment industry. The dashboard was developed with networks, studios and their agencies in mind. The tool points to the growing trend of social media’s impact on the entertainment industry, and the industry’s emerging need to better understand the online conversations happening around their entertainment properties in real-time.
Now that social media factors into the success and ratings of movies, award shows, and major television events (think the Tiger Woods press conference), tools like Trendrr’s real-time dashboard will become paramount when identifying the actual impact of these online conversations.
Tags: entertainment industry, Film, MARKETING, media, social media, social media monitoring, Trendrr, tv, twitter
Just search for the term “wordpress backups” in the official WordPress plug-ins directory and you’ll be surprised to know that there exist over 100 plug-ins just to help you easily backup your WordPress database and other associated files.
There are so many choices but most backup plug-ins often work the same – they’ll take a full dump of your MySQL database and will then save the zipped file into the same server that is hosting your WordPress blog. Some plug-ins can even send you backup file as email attachments.
If you are on Amazon S3, I highly recommend that you use the WordPress plug-in from Dan Coulter to automatically backup your blog to the S3 cloud. Here’s why:
Reason #0. There’s absolutely no configuration required – just add your Amazon S3 access keys and the plugin will do the rest. It will even create S3 buckets for you where the WordPress files will get saved.
Reason #1. The plug-in won’t just backup your WordPress databases but it will save a copy of your WordPress themes, plug-ins and other important configuration files (like .htaccess, wp-config.php, etc) to Amazon S3.
Reason #2. Amazon S3 charges you for every byte of data storage so you can set the plug-in to automatically delete backups that are older than a month.
Reason #3. You can either run scheduled backups (once per day, or per month) or take snapshots manually. The backup happens in the background and you don’t have to wait in the browser for the process to complete.
The Automatic WordPress Backup plugin is available on wordpress.org but before you hit the download button, here’s a word of caution.
The plug-in, once installed, will automatically add links to the author’s site in your WordPress blog without even asking you. That however should not prevent you from using this extremely useful plugin as the links can be easily removed from the options pages (see the second screenshot).
Backup your WordPress Blog to the S3 Cloud
Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.
A while back, I was standing at the sink at Alpha Sigma Phi, squeezing water from blanched spinach. The squeeze-a-thon made my forearms ache. It felt as if I had just done 50 pushups, but it also gave me an inspiration.
The Kitchen Workout!
Forget pilates. Deep-six the kick-boxing class. Drop the gym membership. You wanna shape and sculpt and burn mega-calories? The Kitchen Workout's just the ticket.
Veteran cooks will tell you, working a shift is like sprinting in place. There might be something like a million little steps each night between the line and your mise en place (and the alley where you might run to for a smoke break or to call the gal pal/boyfriend to explain why you're gonna be late again: "Aww, honey, it's just one or two or three beers after work.")
But, hey, that's just the aerobic portion of this workout. There's the lifting of scalding stockpots, the constant reaching, twisting and bending. The wrestling of whole beasts as you break them down into parts. There's the hoisting of your secret ingredients into the secret spot in the walk-in. And, oh, the wretched cleaning: wriggling into tight spaces to wipe away the greasy, grimy splatters while trying not to inhale bleach fumes. Squats were never this challenging.
All that standing and multi-tasking in the kitchen is a perfect way to strengthen your core. Come on! Focus! Suck it in. Now breath. Repeat one thousand times a day. You'll have washboard abs in no time. And let's do some curls with those 10-pound cans. How about bench-pressing some buckets of grease? Those biceps are looking ripped!
Not into the macho stuff? While you're prepping and chop, chop, chopping, why not strike a modified tree pose? Om. So meditative.
These "workouts" may sound silly, but there's nothing funny about the physically punishing drill the pros go through day and night so you can sit on your fanny and enjoy a gorgeous plate of food. (Think about it next time you whine because they forgot the collard greens that were supposed to snuggle up to your chicken and waffles.) You've got to be strong to be a cook—the professional kitchen is not for the weak. It's all about survival of the fittest. Is that lower lip quivering? Drop and give me 20! Wait. First, let me sweep up the debris from a slam-bam dinner service.
I can't believe culinary schools don't mention the physical stamina needed when they try to entice wannabe cooks to enroll. Maybe they could offer extra credit for flexing your creative muscle and carving out some buns of steel. It seems so obvious.
Speaking of obvious, I can't believe Rachael Ray hasn't put out a Kitchen Workout DVD. But she did do a "Kitchen Workout" segment on her daytime talk show.
About the author: Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer restaurant critic Leslie Kelly has been apprenticing in professional kitchens since the newspaper folded in March 2009 and chronicling her culinary journey from pen to pan for Serious Eats. She also blogs at LeslieKellyWhiningandDining.blogspot.com and is working on a story-telling project for Northstar Winery following one wine from the vine to the table.
He deserves a penny for every beat! [ Ed Note : Yeah, well, if I could afford a broken air conditioner and four buckets, maybe I could learn to drum like that too.]
