Free Marketing Course
If you have been working as an online marketer for any period of time, you have probably heard of Jeremy Shoemaker (Shoemoney). Shoemeney is offering a free, 12 week, Internet marketing course that should rival many of the paid courses and e-books that are promoted like mad.
Sign up for the free Shoemoney marketing course
Bing.com doing some things nicely
I must say that I rolled my eyes at the Bing announcement. However, there is a feature that is pretty useful. If you are ever in search of a video, you will find that their video preview is pretty nice. My son watches a lot of Nerf videos on Youtube.com. By going to bing.com he can watch everything in one place with the mouseover preview. Good job MSFT!
Take a look at the video results: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=nerf+gun&go=&form=QBVR
Parents, don’t let your kids do this unsupervised and please turn up the ’safe search’ settings.
I also have to say that the Bird’s Eye view maps have been a must visit site for me when searching for real estate. The birds eye is a much nicer view than the satellite view from the other providers and provides a great overview of a neighborhood.
Keep it up Microsoft. You are certainly chasing the leader right now, but innovation will outweigh online loyalty every day.
Wolfram|Alpha a Big Change
If you haven’t been to Wolfram Alpha yet, you need to give it a try. For all that Google is, Wolfram Alpha has a place on the web. This “engine” is likely the biggest change we have seen since the rise of Wikipedia. Wolfram Alpha will take hold in a way that Cuill.com wished it could have. Remember Cuill?? Big PR, with an also ran product! Wolfram Alpha should spread like wildfire with word of mouth like you are reading here.
Wolfram Alpha Information Engine
Mix Answers with Google with WikiPedia with Google Sets and you have some sense of what Wolfram Alpha brings.
As an investor, I am often querying for stock prices at points in time. WolframAlpha.com does that wonderfully. Simply search GLW 2/1/2002 and you will see what I mean.
I anticipate this being a very popular site. Perhaps not the next Google, but certainly a player in the “search” space. We are often querying for specific information. WolframAlpha brings that to us and offers up additional data sets to add flavor to what I am after.
Give me a Wolfram Alpha iPhone App and I will be a walking information station!
Page Ranking Factors
There are many folks that will ask questions of search marketers. One of the common ones is what affects how a page is ranked. Well a great list was compiled by SEOMoz. SEOMoz created the first and second comprehensive search ranking factors document.
Thanks to HuoMah.com, we have a revised document that is spot on and more concise. Take a look at HuoMah.com.
Here is the list without details on each topic. Keep in mind that these things are not just black and white. Some matter more than others and the relevance of each factor will vary based upon the site.
- PageRank (or relative nodal link valuation)
- Link text (internal and external)
- Link relevance (global and page)
- Also see Temporal, Personalized PageRank and Phrase factors.
- Page TITLE tag
- Meta-description tag
- Document inception/age data
- Link velocity
- Link age
- Viral/Current news (QDF)
- Time of year (niche trends)
- Content update rate
- Domain history
- Inbound links (global)
- Outbound links
- Named entities (products, brand, author)
- Contact information (also important for geographic signals)
- Location of client device
- Location of webpage hosting
- Contact / location information
- Inbound/outbound link geo-factors
- Linguistic indicators (language and nuances)
- Heading (H1-5)
- Bold
- Italic
- Lists
- Font attributes (size, color)
- Related phrase ratios
- Categorization of content (clusters)
- Occurrences (probabilistic)
- Duplication dampening (filters)
- Personalization (phrase based)
- Link analysis (inbound)
- Global site relevance
- Term proximity (for multi-term queries)
- Image tagging (in content segment/related terms)
- Search History
- Web history (pages/sites we visit)
- Query revision (and analysis)
- Search intent (informational, navigational)
- Explicit data (favourites, reader,wiki)
- Interaction with advertising
- Surfing frequency/ time of day
- Personalized PageRank (yahoo and google)
- SERP and document interactions
- Duplicate issues (structural/content)
- Link devaluations (segmentation, link text, recips)
- Poor architecture/coding
- Reviewer penalties
- Redundant meta-data (such as meta-descriptions)
- Canonical / URL issues
- Server reliability (can be de-indexed)
- Phrase based detection
- Cloaking
- Boilerplate
- Domain history
- Query analysis
- Network proxy detection
- Link based (link spam and excessive recips)
- Client type (browser, mobile)
- Toolbars and browser (Google Suggest, web history)
- Application focus (email, instant messenger, RSS etc..)
The Google PC
It is getting closer and closer. A Google PC. Competition is good!
Android gains fans. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is considering whether to use Google’s (GOOG) Android operating software for some of its computers. The software, which is free and open-source, could be a viable platform for netbooks, posing a direct challenge to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows system. Although no PC maker has yet publicly committed to using Android, many in the industry, including Microsoft, consider an Android-run laptop just a matter of time.
This is the most direct move into the space yet. Gears followed by Chrome went a long way, but a light (and free) OS is a giant leap.
Retrieve Last Record Inserted - Coldfusion
If you are a developer, there is no doubt that you have the need to retrieve the last record of a database insert without requiring another input from the end user. You want your user experience to appear as fluid as possible and an unnecessary multiple page submit does not accomplish that.
If you have a record that you will be inserting and need the ID of that just inserted record, your code will depend upon the database that you use. I will cover two of the most common DB’s used, MSSQL and MySQL.
Retrieve last record inserted (ID) if using Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL):
I won’t go deep into the how and why, what I am looking to do is provide a basis for you to get over this little stumbling block. When using MSSQL, you can accomplish the task within your record insert query. I am assuming that you know the basics about inserting data using CF Query. I am also using <cfqueryparam> to protect my queries from hacks and to require particular datatypes. This has nothing to do with the key retrieval, it is just good practice.
Google Shutting down Radio Ads
Google jumped into the radio ad market with a small amount of fanfare back in 2006. If you were someone who gave their radio ads a shot, I would bet that you might have had the same experience. Terrible audience. Well, the radio ad experiment is shutting down.
Radio advertising is like real estate. Location, location, location. If you aren’t tapping into the heart of a market, you aren’t going to provide a good product to the end user. In my market (Buffalo NY) the station mix was very poor. Fringe stations to say the least. Some test campaigns were virtually useless. Advertisers can continue using Google Audio Ads until May 31st.
Google is getting back to its roots and focusing on what comes from that. They are retreating certain fronts (selling radio ads and selling newspaper ads) and continuing to build on search and Adwords and the audience that it brings.
They need to focus on their core for the coming battle in the OS/desktop space.
Eyetracking Studies and Page Design
When consulting on site layouts and page layouts there is often a balancing act with regard to what a site owner wants to see and what will give the opportunity for the highest level of success. Users of the web have become conditioned on where to focus and what to expect. If you don’t deliver what they expect within a short period of time, your user will become detached and bounce.
There are many site owners/designers who will use a beautiful looking layout from one of the many template sites (boxedart.com, templatemonster.com, etc.). Though many of these designs are beautiful, many are designed to be visually appealing and don’t take usability into account. There are many template designs with tall header graphics that don’t allow much more than a couple of inches at the bottom of the screen for your valuable content and or navigation.
There are also factors to consider such as ad blindness. If you design your page in a way that your call to action(s) resemble advertising, your message will be lost. Combine that with a huge header garphic and your visitor is gone before considering your message, service, or product.
The Gateway website (below) is a great example of ad blindness. Take a look at the hot spots in this heat map (the hot spots are the focus points of the users’ eyes). The red arrow demonstrates the lack of focus that was paid toward the ‘featured item’. The designer may have felt that this would become a focus, however, the exact opposite took place. Ad blindness kept this feature from gaining any attention.
When designing a site/page, be sure to take usability into account. Don’t let your featured items be misconstrued as advertising and subject to blindness. Consider writing styles that will provide users with snippets of information. There is a particular method for writing on the web. Short paragraphs, bulleted lists, interjected images, etc. You need to provide your message to your user in short order or your user will be gone. All of the marketing efforts to deliver that visitor are lost if your page cannot convert.
Let the Traffic Shaping Battles Begin!
Traffic shaping is the practice of a broadband provider determining what data packets, if any, deserve priority. This is at the core of the battle with net neutrality. If providers are allowed to shape, then they will be able to put a throttle on traffic of their competition.
Let’s say that you have a Vonage VOIP service. What if Cox Communications decides that those packets deserve the lowest priority. What do you think would deserve a higher priority? Packets for the Cox VOIP product? Packets for the VOIP product who is paying Cox for the “fast lane” on their network? You bet and of course.
The first public volley was lobbed today (not sure why). Cox announced that they were going to experiment with aggressive traffic shaping. I have assumed that there has been experimentation with less “aggressive” traffic shaping for quite some time now.
This was followed hours later by a release that Google is going to provide tools, in partnership with Measurement lab, to let you check if your broadband connection is being ’shaped’. This could get interesting. In my opinion, the politicians would love to throw this one to the cable and phone companies who line their pockets. However, the outcry from the public, and the market should be loud enough to slow this practice.
Why do these battles generally mean bad news for consumers?
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