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Google Plus vs. Facebook: Who Will Win In the Battle of Social Networking Sites?

Surely Facebook felt very little guilt when all of Myspace’s fans began ignoring their accounts and started networking by the thousands through Facebook instead, but I wonder how they will feel now that the tides have turned.  Pretty soon Google may know exactly what it feels like when Google + takes the world by storm in the very near future.  It should not come by surprise that Google is trying to hop on the social networking bandwagon again as they have tried in the past with platforms like Google Buzz and Google Friend Connect.  But the new Google attempt at social networking has got a lot of features that it didn’t have before, and a lot of features that Facebook only wishes it could have.

Chatting On Facebook vs. Hanging Out On Google Plus

Why chat with your friends when you can hang out with them right?  Well, we never had the option otherwise before Google + but now we have no excuses.  Facebook’s cheesy chat area will likely be getting little attention when users discover that Google Plus allows users to video chat with multiple friends at once.  What makes the feature super cool though is that you never know who might stop by to “hang out” with you and your friends, so its like being out while having the luxury of staying in.  Staying home on a Friday night may just get a little less boring thanks to Google Plus.  Sorry Facebook but I think Google won this round…

Facebook Status Updates vs. Google Plus Circle Updates

It’s great being able to update everyone on what is going on in your life but somethings are meant for some to hear and not others.  Facebook’s status update section is better than Myspace’s was but the Google Plus Circles updates are going to be a major Facebook update competitor.  With Google’s new feature you can update different circles of friends and family with different information.  So your friends don’t have to know that your mom made you lunch on any given day and your mom doesn’t have to know that your going to a strip joint that night.  Facebook will be hard pressed to compete with a feature like that, and probably wouldn’t even try since “privacy” is an ambigous word to them to begin with.  

Facebook Photo Sharing vs. Google Plus Instant Upload

Sharing photos through Facebook is a great way to share your experiences with friends and family but you could send them pictures in the mail by the time you get them uploaded to FB.  Google Plus is making it easier by doing all the work for you.  With Google + pictures are uploaded instantly so you can post them instantly.  Seems like Google + is winning this round too but I guess we will really just have to wait and see.

The preliminary evaluation puts Google + in the lead but until more people are”invited” to try it out we won’t know who the winner is going to be.  One thing we can be sure of though is that Google + has already got features that we have been waiting to see.

Written by Leonard, a freelance writer who writes about different web applications, os x antivirus, seo, technology, registry cleaner, hardware and software.

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Woohoo, Google fiber is coming to KC. And I had a chance to go to the event.

Free websites for everyone, if you are dumb enough to sign a contract for a free domain that includes a whole 3 webpages and a domain for free for a year. Professional templates? I thought using templates was the sign of being unprofessional, i.e. my site looks exactly like his. Free Google Places listing? Wasn’t it already?

A free website that is about worth “free”. What can you do with 3 web pages? Oh that’s right. Adwords. You can pay for traffic after your free credit runs out.

Google decided to provide their high speed internet to Kansas City. And it will be good for the city.

You might be able to dupe some KC residents into believing they are getting any value, but some of us know better.

I love nothing better than  seeing a recent college graduate talk about the industry I have been working in for over a decade. Gives me that god damn warm fuzzy feeling.

Yes, I know. I tweeted the event. Then I saw it.

Good choice, Google. At first, I thought it will help Kansas City and I still think it will. But I do have a little bit of mistrust of Google and Intuit duping newbies into thinking they are getting a deal when all they are getting are 3 web pages. That will eventually cost them $5 a month to host and $2 a month for the domain. Not really much but since when did domains come with a monthly rate and cost $24 a year. I get mine for about $10 a year. And really, a limit on pages. Since when did we move back in time to the 90′s when hosting nickled and dimed you to death.

I work 3 blocks away and checked out the Google event on my lunch break. End result: “waste of time”.

But Google and Intuit sure got the Kansas City residents in a heat to get there. There was not a parking spot for a 4 block radius.

So, Google, thanks for coming here but no thanks for your favoritism in choosing who will reap the rewards. There are free websites wherever you turn and a lot of developers here in KC that could do real “professional” websites.

“Evil” is now how Google defines in. Google it.

There is no Gutenberg today freeing information for all. Google doles it out. So this is a little test to see if giving Google a hard time will cause this post to drop out of the results.

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Whining is not a bad thing. In fact, I have a theory that although necessity may be the mother of invention, whining is in the mix somewhere. In this theory, exists four types of people. People who whine and don’t fix things. People who whine and pay other people to fix things for them. People who don’t whine. And people who whine and take care of their own shit. There are only two people who get things done in the group and they are agents of change.

How Bitching Can Change the World

There is no such thing as perfection. I think of this as I drive my car over the roads in Missouri and the roads in Arizona were better, but they weren’t perfect. But there is one thing you can be sure of, the roads we have now are better than brick roads. And if there wasn’t evolution in the paving industry, it would tak a lot of bricks these days to build an interstate. And this would not be possible if it weren’t for bitching.

I fix problems or suggest the right tools to people in need. That seems to be the biggest part of my day. Problems are the result of imperfection and if it people thought things could never be changed, they wouldn’t bitch. They wouldn’t tear open the case of something to see if there was a better way of making it work.

So I am thankful for the people who bitch. I bitch a lot myself. It got me into the job I do now. I never meant to write the software I do. I just had to. I was tired of bitching about the software I was using and took things in my own hands.

The Gamble of Early Adoption

I have been the early adopter of many technologies. It has always been a wager of time and sometimes even a wager of money. I have tried to adopt things by popularity but it just doesn’t seem to work for me. I have an aversion to the main stream. I will be there when I have to but when Podunk news channels tell you to like them on Facebook with every chance they get, I am usually out of there.

But newness can also be a drug, an escape from the daily grind and you may or may not being getting any value out of the time. But I do think of all the sites and technologies that have come and gone. They were the newest things in their time, but they only had a short time. Angel investors had hope but there was just something missing in the whole plan.

Working alone, you don’t have angel investors but you do have time. But you may not have much and that may be all you have to spend. So early adoption of a technology or technique that may not pan out in the long run is the same type of dilemma.

An Inventor Is Not Necessarily a User

A lot of the tools you use for your current job have been invented by an outsider. I don’t care what job you work in. An outsider has no sense of the priorities of doing your job. Sometimes this outsider is an engineer who has no sense of utility. Or it may be an efficiency expert looking over your shoulder but never stepping foot in your shoes. Tool designers sometimes just don’t have the necessary insight into the job their tool was made for.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in software. I hat my tv remote and my microwave and few other things I can name. Who wrote the software for that crap. When I worked in part stores, I had a computer but hadn’t done any programming in years. I did use a lot of software though as started to pick up the design aesthetic of good, useable software. And the parts store software just sucked. I walked into the same store the other day and they use their website. I am not sure what point that proves. But after looking at the software a billion dollar company ran their whole chain of stores on, I realized I could do better.

I mentioned software because that is what I know best, but I know whatever job you do, you have probably invented or dreamed of some new tool, technology or way of doing things that just works better. And what I am saying is there is probably an army of you’s out there just waiting for you yourself to take the first step.

You Don’t Have to Be Satisfied With What You Have

Authority was created to keep things from changing. Well, I don’t know if that is true of not, but it sure sounds right. Authority told us for the longest time that women didn’t have the right to vote, that black people could be kept as slaves and that the earth was flat. On a long enough timeline, authority does not have that great of a track record. It is always being proved wrong and a new authority put in its place.

Yeah, history was real. It’s not just a comic book. And people thought some stupid things in the past. And today is the past of the future. From school all the way through our working years we are taught to respect authority. It is hard to break out of that mold for some. For others, it is all they can do to pretend they fit in it until they can find a way out. And that way out is in not be satisfied with your lot in life or even validating the phrase “lot in life”. Your life is what you make of it.

I am writing the same coding and doing the same job that requires a degree to do some places, but I did not take no for an answer. I did my own thing and started making money doing it and other people saw it. It took a while, but it was interesting. There were ups and downs, but at least in my work realm, I am my authority and I can change things.

Creation is Destruction

I remember fighting with another developer in the beginning days of CSS about the future of CSS. I had used tables and I had used CSS. I give everything a shot. My opinion was, after using both, CSS was the way to go. I just was. It made for better looking sites that could be tweaked from a file that didn’t affect anything else about the page or the code running the page. The other guide took the side of tables.

Creation of new technologies destroys others. This argument I had was not a “Beta-Max vs. VHS” argument. Two technologies were not fighting over which would win. This was a change in standards. A change in the way a site was designed. The new technology that every browser understood was the obvious choice. Creation of one thing means the destruction of others. Without renewal, we live in the past.

Whine On

So go ahead and whine. Whine until the solution seems obvious and the problem silly. Because sometimes it is and your idea on fixing things may just be the right one. Everyone who looked at the problem in the past may have said, “It’s just the way it’s done.”, have been fighting a mountain of corporate bureaucracy or have been just too stupid to bitch in the first place.

Yeah, I said it. Sheep just go with the flow.

Tear the problem apart and putting back together, because if you are running your own business, you may be the only one to oil that squeaky wheel. And that problem will bother you until you do. But if you whine and do nothing, you are just wasting air.

And I am proud to say I am a whiner. If I don’t like the way things are, I change them. But don’t go picking around too much, because I have built a look of things as a result of my whining and sometimes I can only focus on one squeaky wheel at a time. It’s a slow process and Ozymandias be damned, as long as I see the result, it really doesn’t matter what you see.

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The main reason for Google to introduce the Panda Update is that the users across the globe is to enhance their experience by promoting meaningful and original content. Likewise it helps to penalize and narrow down that content which do not consist of real and useful text, text which proves to be beneficial for users. With this update, the sites which are not successful enough in providing users with enough knowledge are restricted.

A major thing which is missed by almost all of the article dealers is the community factor on most of the websites. In most of the networks for article individuals can interact with each other through the help of forums, comments, as well as areas where they can ask questions and anyone can answer them according to his/her knowledge which help them in enhancing their knowledge and the quality of content they write.

Now let’s give a succinct introduction to the purpose of Panda Update. The modifications are applied in order to remove the content which is of low quality, or the spam content through which most of the websites try to come before the other in search engines. Now Google is also trying to eliminate such results which are irrelevant or are not related to the query the visitors search for as well as the update in Panda is also affecting these sites.

Most of the websites which are affected by Panda Update are the articles of Ezine and Wisegeek etc. Whereas, the most stunning news is that Ezine is also affected as they do look over the internet and edit their articles. Now as per their statement they will take strict measures in accepting the articles.

Publication of content just to grab traffic on the website is not a respectable idea. This is the only reason due to which we get to know Panda Update. As many websites just for the sake of generating traffic, publish such contents with a motive behind to generate revenue when the visitors click on Ads on their website. We have to get realistic on the fact that people always want informative and useful contents. This is only possible when the articles are authentic and informative.

First of all find the individuals concerned in your industry by the help of queries area, forums and through examining the related topic written by various authors. Communicate with them, compare their articles within the network and rate them, it is sure that they will return your favor.

Traffic doesn’t only depend on search engines. However, the other sources of generating traffic to your content are Blog commenting, Community media, and forums but they should be used correctly to promote them. Your main focus here should be to just figure out the targeted fans, communities and blogs, in order to communicate with and share your content which will help you in improving your content.

It might take some time for Panda Update to start affecting these sites, traffic data, but this was, which is known to us so far. Apart from the update of panda we should always try to use such material in our article which is relevant, descriptive and helpful for the one who reads it.

Viewers can make any accusation they want, but Google has never come out and admit that favors big brands. Use the company claims that it is serious about cleaning trash and cunning, and not surprisingly, seems to be related to the story. Since it was found the positive feedback, because Panda roll out, we should not expect things to change anytime soon. To cope with this update, the smaller brands will have to adapt accordingly.

Written by a Frank, seo writer and indie music lover who knows a lot about online marketing and registry repair

Image by Hobo! via Flickr

Blogging and SEO are inseparable. The blog is perhaps the defining website content, and blogs cover every imaginable subject on Earth. The trouble is that low grade SEO, or non-existent SEO in many cases, is an own goal for blogs. If people can’t find your blog, how do you expect to get read? SEO is a logical approach to a basic online issue, and it’s more of a science than anything else these days.

There are a lot of businesses around the world which are literally built on SEO. These are often online businesses, but many of them are “bricks and mortar” businesses, too. SEO is how their clients find them. This is the new Yellow Pages, more efficient and easier to carry around. For bloggers, it’s best practice to make absolutely sure that your blog is easily searchable using keyword phrases, the sort of terms people normally use to search.

Checking your own SEO as it is

There’s an easy way of checking your current SEO situation:

Try searching your own blog, using two or three key phrases from your text related to your subject matter.

How did you go? Did you:

• Find your blog instantly?
• Not find it at all?
• Find it down on Page 50 of the search results?

You’ll have noticed that some phrases are much better than others. You’ll also have seen that you got a lot of other sites on the top rankings. That’s SEO at work, and it’s what SEO is all about. The SEO keywords are the core issues when searching.

For bloggers, there are two major SEO issues:

• Blog content and subject matter
• The fact that many articles vary considerably and keywords may need some adjustment to make the individual blogs easier to find.

If you use WordPress, you’ll know their tagging options. WordPress uses tags as a default process for SEO purposes. Tagging is built in to WordPress specifically because the SEO process is so crucial to blogs. Convincing argument, isn’t it?

The other big issue is content. Search engines look for useful information, links and additional values. It’s like saying an encyclopaedia entry is more valuable to searchers than a Post-It note full of scrawl. SEO uses articles to provide high value relevant materials to improve search rankings. As a matter of policy, Google also uses content as a value indicator for its basic search algorithms.

Improving your SEO

There are various ways of improving your search engine optimization:

Content quality: This is a major issue for search engines, and relevance to search subjects is highly important.

Accurate, useful keyword phrases: This is basic, and you’ll need to put some thought into each blog piece for good tags.

Focusing your blog on critical core subjects: Some blogs cover far too many subjects for a search engine to consider the blog subject-specific. You may need to create another blog to help organize the subject matter, keeping your original blog for its basic subject matter.

Get help if you’re not sure what to do with your blog. It’s easy enough to get some professional assistance with your SEO. This also acts as training, explaining how specific SEO issues relate to your blog.

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Logos have long been a part of the business world; however, now that more professionals are joining the mass pool of information known as the internet, it is important for websites to have logos as well. But why is this so? Why should a website need a logo, of all things?

Why It Is Necessary

A logo has the ability to show a potential visitor and customer base that the website is serious. Making a logo gives off the idea that the business or individual is willing to take that extra step, and that they truly care about what they are doing. This automatically gives them an advantage over people that choose not to have a logo on their site, and that fact alone can make the investment worthwhile. It should be noted, however, that depending on the quality of the logo, it can actually hurt what they are trying to do.

Successful websites are not just about using the right web hosting or having an easy to remember domain name. A logo can also make a site more memorable. This is because the logo will be prominent, and people will remember a site with a logo over one that is simple and does not have anything. Because the internet is vast and brand new websites pop up every day, standing out can be near impossible, especially depending on the website’s subject. As stated, a logo can help in the process of making it more memorable to visitors, prompting them to come back at a later time.

How to Design a Logo

Logos should be simple in their design. They should not take more than a few seconds to look at in order to take in every detail; this is because complicated logos will overwhelm people and cause them to have difficulty remembering them.

A suitable amount of time should be dedicated to coming up with the logo. Something that was thought up in five minutes will not work, as the logo will appear unfinished and sloppy. This can make a website look unstable, unprofessional and undesirable to any potential visitors or customers.

Colors used for the logo should not be overwhelming. No matter how much the webmaster might love neon colors, this would not work for a logo. Looking at the logo should not be painful or near impossible, and this is especially true if the target group is of the older age set. No matter how many good hosting companies the webmaster has checked out, it will not make a difference where their site is being hosted if they cannot get people to visit, and revisit.

Ellee Parker hails from the west coast, loves anime and the eastern
culture in general. She could sit for hours surfing the net and provides
hosting reviews and guides. You can follow her at @elleeparker.

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Perfect Math

Tonight I watched Proof. Before I got a computer I watched movies all day long while reading books. Now a chance to watch a movie comes few and far between. And because it does and it is one of my favorite things to do is veg out for hours and watch a movie, it gives my mind a chance to look at my work from a little perspective. The work I had been looking at with a microscope for weeks at time. If I can get far enough away for a little while, the answer will come.

I thought about math. I never really liked mathematics until I played poker for the first time. But I was always good at it. I remember doing Algebra, Geometry, Calculus and Advanced Math and running out of places to go in mathematics where I could be challenged, so I started programming in my last year of high school, games mostly, when one person could do that and screens had 32 colors. I was home schooled so subjects came and went fast and I could pick what I learned for the most part.

And now I couldn’t tell you one thing about Calculus. It’s the way my mind works. Fast to learn, quick to discharge when it’s done with it. None of the books that taught me math taught me how to apply it, so I lost it all. I do remember physics and some descriptive geometry because I could apply it. And I love catapults in physics. I could finally write the pattern of that arc I always noticed down in a language. I already could visualize it in every rock I threw as a kid.

And with poker, I learned statistics and probabalities or what I like to call prediction and it ran directly into the part of mathematics I could have loved 7 years out of school. But I soon learned that poker was not all math and I was not a people person and moved on.

And math sort of followed me everywhere. I picked up a book on design and it was there. No wonder a conch shell is amazing. I could draw one and come close. But now I could build one out of numbers.

Math is pattern recognition in a language. It is turned into the language so that pieces of different patterns can be manipulated and merged and then pulled out again and put back into concrete ideas. Take object, turn into number. Take another object, turn into number. Shake them around a bit in their number world. Pull them back out again as newborn baby predictions of what will happen or of something you don’t know yet.

If you have one apple and bob give you two, you will then have three. This face has a 99% chance of being Bob Jones’. An eye-witness would make it a 100% chance in a court of law. So math is an attempt to put down on paper the way the world works as we interpret it. What natural law says that people can recognize faces in the first place? And if everything I saw visually as orange, you saw as green, how would you know? You would call it green and I would agree, but my lawn would look totally different to me than you.

So math could never be said to 100% describe the world we live in because some part of it is still a justification of the patterns we see in the outside world as filtered through our senses and finally our psyche and that last one can be a doozy.

I throw rock, hit target. You throw rock, hit target. We not insane. Ok, throw rock this hard, hit target. Go get Bob, have him throw rock too, just in case. Then we’ll be sure. Then we’ll go sacrifice this goat to thank the gods for this inspiration.

If mathematic were always 100% accurate this were not so, we would not be in the financial fiasco we are currently in. Mathematics made the risk seem less than it was, sometimes by removing the risk from the equation before it is written. Garbage in, garbage out and garbage algorithm.

More money could be lent on the hopes of more money to be made when it was paid back. But the formula did not work. It was wishful thinking or maybe meant to only look good in the short-term like our perfect calendar that has to correct itself every four years. An economy cycle diet meant to shift the numbers to a steeper slope.

Which makes me wonder if the ultimate model of economy is mother nature herself and it just doesn’t know it yet or at least the rest of the world doesn’t. And mother nature is really a bitch on the person to person level with the whole survival of the fittest thing. Mother nature is not fair. The damn whales people try to save suck down thousands of shrimp in a mouthful. A you freakin Vegans, plants have a conscious too, so you better find a new diet of rocks, water and air. There is no way to live with out killing a lot of other things in the process and just to survive.

And SEO Chasing It’s Tail or The BeeWatcher Watcher

And by now, I myself am wondering when I am going to get to SEO. All those paragraphs were just meant to lead in and I got carried away. But during the movie, I started thinking about mathematics, search engines and SEO. Some people who use math change the way we look at the world. And some use it mundanely.

I started thinking about what a great discovery in SEO would be. It would be discovering the algorithm that someone else wrote to recognize a pattern in language and use it to rank documents. These documents themselves are ideas encoded in one written language or another. The goal of these documents is to transmit these ideas to another person who wants them.

An SEO works in the gap between the algorithm and what people see. This is not even a science, more of a meta-science, if there is such a thing.

I starting writing this post months ago and dropped it, because I could quite get to what I wanted to say. But for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around a lot with the my6sense android app, which I now prefer to any social media app because it pulls my Google Reader feeds in also. I do like reading more than random brain farts.  And what did I see, the same stories over and over. And in my area of the internet, the Google Farmer Update, which to me just seemed like Google’s rules, which have been there for years. were finally being put to use.

In all this, the thought never crosses most people’s minds that Google in its current state is not the end of information retrieval. Stop being librarians with the Dewey Decimal System. The Dewey Decimal System was great for paper cataloging, because location in the library and topic indexes could be one in the same thing. One number was all you needed. And it worked at any library you walked into. It is about the best you can do for physical books, because the contents of each book aren’t indexed.

The printing press was invented in 1436, 440 years before the Dewey Decimal System was invented in 1876 and has been updated 22 times since then. I know technology moves quicker now, be we are no way near the end of search engine evolution. All search engine algorithms are just that, algorithms, mathematical constructs that are never 100% accurate and only infinitely get closer to accuracy through change.

Google’s system ultimately will become a system of providing commerce above information. It has stock and shareholders and no real rules governing how to organize or order its content. A corporation’s core interest is the bottom line. And the bottom line means, sell as much as ads as you can in the space you have. When does this core interest interfere with “Do No Evil”. When does it interfere with “most relevant content” and who is this content relevant to. Network TV jammed as many ads in as it could and someone came up with cable and then cable did this and another ingenious bastard invented the dvr.

Google is big. Which means they move slow. Oh, yes, Google has done a lot in the last year or so. So much so they look like a combination of Yahoo, Facebook and Bing. But much of this technology and features were already being done by competitors. They have become a “do that too” company, which means they partially do something another company has put all their effort into. Some of these swipes are more apparent. I didn’t realize the extent of copying until I started looking through some semantic search engines and found the origin of many of Google recent “innovations”.

And I thought Google’s homepage was the way it was for a reason, with a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo to explain why minimal was better. Or maybe I’m the idiot and the history police have already rewritten that part and I didn’t get the memo.

So I think Google has become sloppy with change on the heels of Facebook’s popularity, Twitter’s ability to serve information happening now instantly and Bing’s increase in search market share.

But this has nothing to do with the Farmer/Panda or whatever the fuck it is update. That needed to be done. It knocked out some crap content.

And if the Internet Was Forever

And, we as SEO’s just follow Google around like a God with a lot more commandments. What we have to realize in this is that Google is following around everyone else, trying to figure out what they like, so they can serve it up. Which makes us as SEO’s, the beewatcher watcher (Dr. Suess reference).  Let me explain.

Let’s say you bookmark your site at one site and it is dofollow and you submit an article at another site but your link is not dofollow. The use of a dofollow or nofollow tag is a bandaid to prevent spam link building but it is a hindrance to ranking content. Back to the link submissions. If the article site or guest blog post gets 100 the clickthrough times the traffic of the bookmarked link, and that article link in nofollow and therefore gives you no link juice by Google’s algorithm, then by all logic, Google’s algorithm is wrong.

And if Google algorithm stays wrong and flaws are not fixed, another search engine will find a way in. Read a college paper on knowledge theory or information retrieval every once and a while and you will realize that the Google algorithm is a toddler when it comes to finding relevant information, while the company itself is getting older. Not a good combination in my book.

And if the internet was forever, who gives a crap. But then again, what is forever on the internet. About the time between the launch of AltaVista and the launch of Google and it probably decreases as time goes on.

I am not saying or want anyone to take away that I think Google will be going down any time soon or in the future.

What I am saying is this. If you start thinking about your websites as a house you own in the city. Repaint it (tables to css to html5) every now and then and keep it occupied with good content and it can only go up in value. Your house is there forever if you want it, past search engine algorithm changes, before and after social media, however long this internet protocol lasts. I have never sold a domain and don’t really plan to. I want to pass them down to my kids if they want them. I want them worth money and I treat them that way.

No More BeeWatcher Watching and Meeting Google at the Pass

This got me thinking. Google is not God. Google is a fixture and now must filter new search technology and roll it out slowly. The key is not to know Google, but to be there before Google is. Google follows the internet. Google follow internet technology. Google follows what people do. Google can’t do it too quickly or it will freak people out. A few search engines were years ahead of Google with LSI and Semantic search. Google can’t do it too slowly or Google will not be where it is supposed to be and someone else will be there and quick, YouTube. And Google just can’t get some things right, maybe too many PHD’s and not enough hard knocks. My nickname for Google +1 is Google Me (Windows reference to go along with the current antitrust issues).

Google is trying to figure out the way we rank content and SEO’s are trying to figure out what Google is trying to figure out. Why not cut out the middleman?

Backrub (Google 0.0) used academic papers as it’s model for ranking content. Before this, every search engine mainly used keyword concentration for a rank indicator.  The internet was bigger than any mountain of data a computer had ever climbed and indexed correctly before. But it was in HTML and HTML had various indicators of content importance similar to acedemic papers. 6 levels of heading tags from H1 to H6 could indicate rank. A link to another paper could indicate importance. Count those links and you have a scale. And on and on.

But the truth is, Backrub was reinventing the wheel in code. The heading tags were already an indicator of rank when reading a document and you knew when you hit a list, to take notes.

But the wheel now is code and content. The sonnet was invented. The novel was invented. Twitter invented a new content type. What about videos? Social networks invent new content types every day. Algorithms still have to be built to process all of this stuff and those must adjust with time. Everything is in flux and social is here to stay, smart phones guaranteed that for a while.

Google can write it’s algorithm but social networks gave people a voice against Google which Google must eventually adjust to or perish if it is to provide “relevant content”.

Google can refuse to index a technology or content type correctly for a while but when enough people start using it, they must change or perish.

Know Your Media and Your Audience – Zen and the Art of SEO

I have actually become bored writing about SEO because most of the concepts are pretty simple.

• People search with keywords
• Research words that people would use to find what you have to sell
• Write content with these keywords
• Write better or more controversial content with these keywords (linkbait)
• Build links to this content
• Get social buzz for your linkbait
• Build different iterations of this very flexible erector set

But really isn’t this just:

• Do research on topic
• Write cool shit on topic
• Find people who like this kind of shit
• Tell people about cool shit

There is not really much to it for someone with an analytical mind and creativity. Pick a new social site, bookmark site, article site, etc.,  figure out it’s dynamic, and work a little magic with it to get links in to your site. There are and were new social sites every week. Simple concepts with an almost endless work schedule if you wanted until you had the site where you wanted it. I guess you could write about each and every site, but then spammers would read your stuff quicker and start manual spamming and then write software to do it.

Every social network has a dynamic. You can consider blogs a disconnected social network, a huge one. I consider forums in the social network realm. Any site that you can add content to, that you do not own, I consider a social network. Most likely, the links you get from here and beyond will come from social networks.

Think of link directories, for example. We all know they are worthless. DMOZ and Yahoo may have some value. Small niche directories that have other content may have value. Directory sites with voting and comments (LOL: review sites) may have some value. But the cookie cutter sites? Would you go there? Would someone else?

I had to add the “Would someone else?” because I am 36 now and there are some places I would go 16 years ago I wouldn’t now. But it still is fucking simple. And Google finally said enough. Ditto on the other random crap sites too. And that is the end of the audience section.

But you still have to know your media, not that I do (shoemaker’s children), for those who want to throw stones at glass houses. Google did make some other “Duh” changes, like ranking more speedy content. After all, it is their damn search engine and if you want to drive your broke ass model T site down it, they are going to force you into the slow lane. This post is already almost 3000 words. But there are ways to make your site faster and they are many and varied. I have played around with most of them to know that they won’t fit here.

Make your HTML current, look good or at least presentable, easy to navigate and organized logically. Again, broke ass Model T’s.

Your media is also your content. Write right, for fuck sake (I guess I do earn a few stones for that one, but really don’t give a crap here).

But also keep track of what is happening. New web technologies and ideas sprout up all the time. If you see an in and have the time, jump in. Google will be there soon or someone else will get there first. Microformats were out a while before Google recognized them. If a social network becomes popular, Google will be there. Google is only a diplomat. The internet is king.

And if you are deeper into SEO, read papers and check out new search engines. Something will hit you that is new, that Google missed for a second and you may have a jump on.

The Mantra

If you are doing your own SEO, Google’s changes may have freaked you out.

Evil God Google Smash Site.

But if you are in it for the long haul, then it is just time to rebuild. Upgrade your site design. Speed it up. Make sure your content is unique and fits your visitors. Maintenance would have fixed most of this.

When you get too wrapped in SEO, remember this.

Google is trying to find the people you are trying to find. You just have to be there.

I guess if you work as an SEO, it’s a bit different. You already know this stuff.

Related articles

• 30+ Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners (seoptimise.com)
• Rock-Solid SEO is Simple. Really. (copyblogger.com)
• Android book-scan app tames untidy tomes (go.theregister.com)
• How to Optimize for Google 2011 – Part 2 of 3 (stepforth.com)
• How Google’s Panda / Farmer Algorithm Could Affect Email Marketing (searchenginejournal.com)
• What SEO Experts Advise For Those Penalized By Google’s Farmer Update (reelseo.com)

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

Development in Magento

I would have to say that I chose Magento in the first place because it would have a lot of the features we would need available without writing or editing code.
It turns out, that wasn’t so. There will never be a platform you don’t want to tweak, and Magento code may be some of the most complicated PHP code you have seen. It was when I first dug into it.
There were no books at that time and I depended on forum posts to get my answers and I made many mistakes long the way.
I love cookbooks. Telling me how to write the code, documentation or giving me a toy example may help a bit. But a cookbook with real code is something that gives me ideas. And that’s just what the Magento Development Cookbook is.

Finally A Magento Cookbook

Yes, with Magento, you do need at least a VPS. The Magento Development Cookbook starts by walking you from setting up your VPS, setting up Subversion (another important tool), setting up a Magento development project in Netbeans (a great free IDE) to Magento coding conventions and style. The EAV pattern is not a widely known pattern and can leave you at a loss when you are looking for the location of data in the Magento database.

After the first chapter, the first half of the book covers some intermediate level modifications to your Magento store. Not the normal pages of screenshots to fill space. The book goes straight to the meat like a code cookbook should. In 100 pages, the Magento Development Cookbook covers:

Chapter 2: CMS and Design
Introduction
Adding a home link to the menu bar
Changing any page title in Magento
Customizing a Magento error page
Adding AdWords tracking code to order confirmation page in Magento
Adding a custom CMS layout template
Adding an RSS feed (last five tweets!)
Placing the trusty old contact form in CMS
Integrating JW Image Rotator 3.17 in Magento

Chapter 3: Adding Extra Functionalities
Introduction
Integrating WordPress in Magento
Creating a new page
Adding jQuery support
Adding Lightbox2 in Magento
Adding an accepted payment banner at the footer

Chapter 4: Customizing a Store
Introduction
Creating a custom “Twitter handle” field in a registration form
Deleting orders in Magento
Using Google Website Optimizer
Creating a custom variable and using its own e-mail templates
Using Google analytics for Magento
Creating Catalog and Shopping Cart Price Rules
Creating a featured product and showing it in the home page
Creating a custom admin theme

Chapter 5: Playing with Products
Introduction
Setting up the Catalog defaults
Adding a Facebook ‘Like’ button in product page
Setting up Table Rates shipping
Adding a product to the cart through Querystring
Creating a configurable product
Embedding a YouTube video in product details

Chapter 6: Adding a Professional Touch to Your Site
Introduction
Installing Magento 1.4 in PHP 5.3.2 (without mcrypt)
Optimizing Magento store for search engines
Implementing PayPal Website Payments
Pro and Express Checkout into Magento
Preventing a CSRF attack in Magento

Then the next 6 chapters get into the code intensive part of working with Magento. This is where I got stuck for a few months. I had just moved from osCommerce and had just got used to its weird idiosyncrasies and Magento was complexity squared.

Remember I said I chose Magento because I thought there would be less development time because of the extendability. Well, when I was done with Magento, I knew more about code then I eve did before…because I had to. After Magento, I went on to learn a bit of C#, Flash and Python in a few months time because I was no longer scared of any type of code except maybe Java. I guess things work out in weird ways.

And this book will save months of hunting down answers. It covers:

Chapter 7: Database Design
Introduction
Resources and database connections
Magento database replication using Master Slave setup
Using the Magento’s Singleton method
Repairing the Magento database
Working with Magento’s EAV design

Chapter 8: Creating a Module
Introduction
Creating an empty module with a Module Creator
Creating the required directories
Activating a module
Creating a controller for the module
Creating a configuration XML file for the module
Creating a helper for the News module
Creating models for the module
Setting up SQL for the News module
Designing a template for the News module
Adding required blocks for the News module

Chapter 9: Creating a Shipping Module
Introduction
Initializing module configuration
Writing an adapter model
Adding a module in backend
Adding a module in frontend

Chapter 10: Writing a Social Widget
Introduction
Creating an empty module and an enabler file
Creating a config file and declaring the widgets
Writing the default module helper Data.php
Creating a source model for services multi select in widget configuration
Creating frontend block for our widget
Creating templates

Chapter 11: Performance Optimization
Introduction
Measuring/benchmarking your Magento with Siege, ab, Magento profiler,
YSlow, Page Speed, GTmetrix, and WebPagetest
Optimizing Magento database and MySQL configuration
Optimizing Apache web server configuration
Tuning Magento configurations
Using APC/Memcached as the cache backend
Accelerating PHP: php.ini configuration
Applying YSlow and Page Speed rules

Chapter 12: Debugging and Unit Testing
Introduction
Installing and configuring Xdebug
Using FirePHP with Zend Wildfire plugin
Installing PHPUnit and necessary PHP CLI binaries
Writing your first Magento test case

This book will save you a lot of time if your chosen ecommerce platform is Magento. And I don’t blame you. If you have the server power and know how to tweak Magento, it will perform well and look good doing it.

But if you are an average PHP developer or are coming from osCommerce, WordPress or Drupal, your first reaction to Magento might be “who the hell put Java in my PHP” or “did a JAR file explode on my site”. There are thousands of PHP files in a Magento installation. And this book will help with that.

Image via CrunchBase

This is a guest post by Nupur Birla

Most of you PPC Analysts would spend your time in evaluating and optimizing your clients’ accounts periodically for 2 simple and important reasons – Lower Costs & Better ROI! Of course every advertiser has a different goal and hence the optimization techniques involved would differ. It can involve ad copy enhancement, additional keywords to be targeted, more organized campaign structure, strategic changes to bids, etc.

While doing so have you ever been in a total state of confusion on identifying your first step to begin with? Here is a ready checklist to make your in-depth performance analysis faster & simpler.

• Historical Account Performance

You basically run an Account performance report for different durations to ascertain how the account has been performing over the past few years/quarters/months/weeks. It helps you understand if there had been a sudden spike in Conversions/CPA or any other metrics during a given period. Then you could be looking out for all possible reasons for that change. It could be seasonal or due to certain changes in the Adwords campaign like geo-targeting, budget, landing page, incentives, etc

• Campaign Performance

Normally an account is divided into several smaller campaigns. A campaign summary report would help you judge the strong/weak performing campaigns in the account. Have a look at the daily spends of these campaigns to check if any of them meet their daily budget on a regular basis and if there is scope for overall budget reallocation to further boost the number of sales for the account. Dig a little deeper into the ad groups/keywords for these campaigns to see if there are specific set of ad groups or keywords that are responsible for the overall damage/progress of that campaign.

If these are top ticket items, they should be structured in a campaign that can have an uncapped budget.

• Search v/s content

It’s essential to know which network for the account spends the most and is profitable. An account performs differently on both Search and Content network and hence the plan of action would get altered accordingly. The first and foremost step would be to split the Search and Content campaigns for the very basic reason that both the networks function differently. Search is more intent oriented where a user types what he/she is looking for whereas Content is more theme based i.e. your ads get placed against the most relevant content on the sites which are Google’s properties.

The keyword themes need to be tighter and more specific in a Display network campaign compared to Search-based for Google to comprehend your keywords and showcase ads accordingly on the most relevant partner sites.

More competitive & popular are your keywords, higher would be the CPC’s on Search. Similarly, more well-known or niche are the partner sites, the bidding strategy would vary to get ads placed on such websites. Also, bids can be altered at keyword level in Search campaigns whereas in Display campaigns (keyword contextual targeting) the bids are adjusted at ad group level

• Bidding Strategy & Match Types

A recent keyword performance report will help you check the latest positions and competitive bid pricing for all your keywords. It will also help you filter the high/low performing keywords/themes across all your campaigns.

Once the best/worst performing keywords have been filtered out, it’s time to take action against them. You could either pause the worst performing one’s or drastically lower their bids as the first preventive step to bring your CPA under control! Push bids for the stronger one’s gradually (this is one of the very effective techniques to improve the quality score of your keywords!) Make sure that your high converting keywords are active in Exact match type so that you are spending efficiently on more targeted and relevant traffic.

• Placement Performance

Like a keyword performance report, a placement report would assist you in identifying the kind of placements/sites where your ads were displayed. Of course not all these placements would be of relevance to the product you sell or the service you offer. Eliminate the one’s which are of no importance and build out a strategy on integrating the one’s which have significance. A simple solution would be go through the pages of such sites, study the content on these pages and put the URL in the Google Keyword Tool. This will help you discover some completely new keyword themes to target!

• Negatives

Ensure that the campaign has a healthy list of negatives to weed out irrelevant clicks. It’s very simple; run a search query report to identify the kind of searches that triggered ads for the campaign and then keep adding relevant negatives (preferable single word in broad match unless they prevent relevant clicks!) Similarly, negative placements/sites can be deployed after running placement reports.

• Reach of the campaign

The keyword structuring within a campaign can be classified into different categories

• Keywords targeting all products/services (for e.g. wedding shoes, debt settlement, etc)

• Keywords related to your Brand & Competitors (for e.g. wedding4you.com, www wedding4u, etc)

There are various tools to help you identify newer keyword themes. The best one would be the search queries, for a simple reason; they tell you what your potential customers are typing to find you!

• Ad copies

Compare the ads across all relevant ad groups and decide which one had the best CTR’s. Analyze the various elements in your copy that would have driven the CTR’s up and try incorporating those in your new set of ads.

• Landing Pages

Firstly, check if there were multiple landing pages used. If yes, identify the best performing landing pages by comparing their respective conversion rates. You could also attempt to find the best ad copy/landing page combination and try maintaining that arrangement. Perform a brief audit for the pages which seemed to have had a lower conversion rate to discover areas that could be worked upon from the usability perspective.

There are definitely a lot of areas which would have to be looked in detail based on the type of business you advertise for, the way your account has been structured, the history associated to your campaigns/keywords, etc. I hope all of these above pointers would give some direction in executing your thought process in action.

Author Bio:

Nupur Birla is a professional writer and blogger, associated with Offshore Ally – A premier virtual assistant and link building company. She has contributed many posts on PPC and other related topics.