Category: Internet

Search engine optimization is the practice of using keywords and keyword phrases in web content.  These terms tell search engines what the article, blog post, or other online content is about and match the webpage to user searches.

Properly optimized content ranks higher in organic searches.  Use these tips to find popular keywords and keyword phrases that are not saturated with content from other websites.

How to Use Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool to Find Popular Keywords

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool was designed for companies buying online advertising space; however, is it a great tool for online writers and web content creators, as well.

Type several words relevant to the article or webpage topic in the Keyword Tool search box.  Click on “Get Keyword Ideas” to begin searching for information on the keywords.  The tool will also suggest popular keywords related to the search terms, so a list of five keywords could generate fifty results or more.

Understanding Keyword Search Results

The default search tool settings show the following information about suggested keywords:

• Advertiser Competition
• Local Search Results for the previous month
• Global Monthly Search Volume

A drop-down box above the results list allows you to access additional columns of information, including the average cost per click, volume trends, and estimated ad position.

Advertiser competition is not important unless you are trying to write content designed to attract high cost per click ads to generate AdSense revenue.  In that case, an empty advertiser competition box indicates a lack of advertiser interest in the topic.

Global monthly search volume is the most important criteria in keyword research for search engine optimization.

Comparing Search Volume and Results Volume

Click the title of the global monthly search volume column to sort the list so the most searched terms are at the top.  Working down the list, search each keyword and phrase in a regular Google search.

Look at the volume of results for each keyword or phrase.  A term that generates millions of results is highly competitive and it is unlikely that new content will rank near the top of the list.

Consider the quality of results, as well.  The goal is to find keywords and phrases that might propel the web content to the front page, or top ten, in a Google search.  Are the other top ten results from credible news sources, government or professional organizations, or large corporations?  There is little chance of ranking on the front page with this type of competition.

How to Choose the Right Keywords and Phrases

People have different criteria for keyword selection and look for a specific ratio of acceptable search volume vs. search results.

To develop a workable formula takes time and testing.  Start by finding a keyword or phrase with over 1,000 monthly searches and less than one million results.  Optimize the article by using the primary keyword phrase in the URL, if possible, and in the article headline, introductory paragraph, bolded subheadings, and throughout the body text.

Use four to six complementary keywords in the subtitle, introductory paragraph, bolded subheadings, and throughout the body text.  Do not simply repeat any one phrase throughout the article; it must read naturally to the reader.  Using a variety of related terms helps you write fluidly and indicates the webpage’s relevance on the topic to search engines.

Testing and Developing a Keyword Strategy

A number of variables affect how well a webpage ranks in organic searches and no one knows the exact formula used by popular search engines like Google.

A blog post on a blog hosted on a free platform such as Blogger, for example, may not rank as high as an article published on a popular online magazine’s website, for example, even if the blog post is better optimized.

Track the performance of several pieces based on keywords chosen for their search volume to search engine results ratio to find the winning formula for your blog posts, articles, or website content.

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Wade Roush wrote:

Invitation-only discount clothing site Rue La La, a part of Boston-based Retail Convergence Incorporated (RCI), has closed its online boutiques until Saturday morning and is asking shoppers to donate instead to relief efforts in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there. At the Rue La La website, a statement from Rue La La CEO Ben Fischman says, “Out of respect for those who have lost loved ones, their shelter, and life’s basic necessities in this tragedy, we cannot stand by while relief efforts are underway without taking action. We are halting our Boutiques from now until Saturday at 8 AM ET. We ask that instead you take this time—as we are—to make a donation to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Effort.” RCI’s other e-commerce property, SmartBargains, does not appear to be closed today, although the site prominently displays a link to the American Red Cross’s Haitian relief donation page.

1. Don’t follow a gazillion people

Especially not if you don’t have alot of people following you back.
First of all, there is a thing called “information overload”, which will happen if you follow too many people, and you don’t manage them well in lists.
Second, your follow/following ratio is a major factor for Google to rate your authority on Twitter. Do you want to improve your blog’s rankings using Twitter? Then make sure your ratios are ok, and your tweets (with links to your blog), and your profile (with link to your blog) will be indexed better and ranked higher.

2 Don’t forward unsollicited links via DM

If you need to send someone a quick link for something that you were or will be discussing, no problem, but don’t go around sending links to all your followers via DM. It’s a pain, don’t do it. You’re cluttering up people’s Tweet-inbox, and if they have the mail option set, their mailbox too. If you want to broadcast your url to your followers, do it in the main timeline. It’s easily ignored, and doesn’t clutter things up.

3 Don’t send an automated thank you message.

The thing is a bit the same as the one above. My Twitter inbox is filled with “Thanks for following, looking forward to tweeting with you!”. No, you’re not. You just set up an auto-follow-message, and you will most probably never even look at tweets, let alone reply to any of them. If you don’t have the time to send every new follower you have a personalized DM, then it is better not to send them a DM at all.

4 Don’t make your tweets too long

One of the powers of Twitter is to retweet what others have tweeted that you found interesting. However, if your tweet is too long, near the 140 characters, there is no place to put the RT and username in front of the tweet. If you have to start puzzling which characters or words to leave out to stay within 140 characters, without breaking the message the original tweeter waanted to convey, you mostly just leave the tweet be, and forget about retweeting.
A good rule of thumb to use? Take your own twittername’s amount of characters, ad 5, and make sure you leave that much space in your tweets to facilitate retweeting.

5 Don’t overdo retweeting of contests and giveaways

Unless you want to use your twitteraccount to gather all these contests and giveaways and retweet them so others can see them all in one place, don’t overdo it!
Everybody wants to join a contest, or wants some free stuff, but no one likes their whole timeline to be filled with “retweet to participate in our free cookie contest” messages.

6 Behave as if you’re on a coctailparty

Treat Twitter as a coctailparty, and behave the same way. Do you want to be the popular person on the party? Then behave social, happy, talkative, but don’t overdo it. Don’t scare people. Don’t talk bad about people. Don’t gossip. Don’t yell at people because they stopped following you.
Bottom line: Be Nice!

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We once worried about kids finding the wrong places to surf on the Internet and of being contacted by unsavory people.

Now it’s their iPhones, iPods,  iTouch, Blackberry and Internet access on their ordinary cell phones we must be concerned about.

I discovered that my granddaughter can access the Internet with a new gadget she received for Christmas (and paid for mostly herself).  Nearly 19 and away at college, she makes most of her own decisions.  However, she seems, fortunately, to follow guidelines she learned from her family.  Until she showed me her new iPod Touch, I hadn’t realized she could access the Internet any place available with her laptop.

So…if your youngsters are younger, and have one of these electronic gadgets…as so many kids do nowadays…do you set controls in this area, as well as the computer?

Here’s an article, How to Set Parental Controls on the iPhone, that explains some methods of control you may not be aware of.  You also can block music you don’t want them to download and YouTube applications you don’t want them to access.

Post from: Blisstree

Do You set Controls on Your Kids’ iPhone?

Tim Rowe wrote:

Today at 4:30 at the Media Lab’s Bartos Theatre, the FCC will hold a public workshop to discuss net neutrality policy. What is the importance of net neutrality to the innovation community?

We can learn a great deal about this by examining the stories of the seven pipes going into most American homes. Most homes are connected to pipes that carry water, electricity, telephony, cable TV, sewer, gas and Internet. (You can think of the Internet as a separate pipe, anyway, even though it usually comes in over the cable or telephone line.) Yet only one of these pipes has historically offered everyone the chance to innovate on top of it. We should be able to learn something about the importance of open innovation by examining the “innovation histories” of these seven pipes.

Lets start with water, gas, and sewer. Perhaps Xconomy readers can point out some innovation in the last couple of decades in these areas. There sure aren’t many.

How about electricity, telephony and cable TV? These sectors often sport a degree of competition, usually with two to three players offering alternatives in each geographic market. But competition is not the same as open innovation. Electric utilities, for example, have struggled for years to broadly adopt a single modest innovation: the ability to pour power back into the grid. Telephony saw some minor innovations about 20 years ago—things like caller ID and *69—but nothing since. Cable TV saw the addition of a few more channels, and a few more pixels, but nothing that fundamentally expands what it does for us.

And then there is the Internet. Open competition on the Internet “pipe” has spawned so much innovation that industries are being turned upside down. Ask folks in the music, news, broadcast media, and telephony industries, to name a few. Have you been to a travel agency recently? How often do you physically walk into a bank? Many people believe the Internet changed the course of the most recent Presidential election. Oh, and it has placed the greater part of all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Enough said.

Some might say this comparison is unfair—that the other pipes could never have had this kind of impact. Of course, we’ll never know. But if you think that this level of innovation could have been achieved if the Internet were, like the other pipes, managed by a single large, benevolent service provider, one need look no farther than AOL to see what that really did look like.

In the early days, AOL was the Internet, except that it was under the aegis of a single, large, benevolent service provider. And AOL was great. We all remember chat rooms. But there is no comparison between the innovation AOL spawned and what the “open Internet” would later bring.

Companies providing Internet service would like to be able to control what flows on our Internet pipes, giving preference to their own services, and squelching others’ offerings. That would be a recipe for turning the Internet back into AOL. Recently, the FCC has started to put in place policies to prevent that. Let’s support this move. We don’t want a future in which the Internet pipe works like the other pipes.

In case you haven’t heard, Google has delivered a big “screw you” to the Chinese government by refusing to censor their search results. It appears that some citizens are already in mourning—even before the hammer comes down.

[ziboy]

Kevein Kelly is one of the people to answer this years Edge question, which asked “How has the internet changed the way you think?” – The 2-Billion-Eyed Intermedia. He actually wrote a response, as opposed to just searching Google and linking to something that sounded cool…

To a first approximation the Internet is words on a screen — Google, papers, blogs. But this first glance ignores the vastly larger underbelly of the Internet — moving images on a screen. People (and not just young kids) no longer go to books and text first. If people have a question they (myself included) head first for YouTube. For fun we go to online massive games, or catch streaming movies, including factual videos (documentaries are in a renaissance). New visual media are stampeding onto the Nets. This is where the Internet’s center of attention lies, not in text alone. Because of online fans, and streaming on demand, and rewinding at will, and all the other liquid abilities of the Internet, directors started creating movies that were more than 100 hours long.

These vast epics like Lost and The Wire had multiple interweaving plot lines, multiple protagonists, an incredible depth of characters and demanded sustained attention that was not only beyond previous TV and 90-minute movies, but would have shocked Dickens and other novelists of yore. They would marvel: “You mean they could follow all that, and then want more? Over how many years?” I would never have believed myself capable of enjoying such complicated stories, or caring about them to put in the time. My attention has grown. In a similar way the depth, complexity and demands of games can equal these marathon movies, or any great book.

But the most important way the Internet has changed the direction of my attention, and thus my thinking, is that it has become one thing. It may look like I am spending endless nano-seconds on a series of tweets, and endless microseconds surfing between Web pages, or wandering between channels, and hovering only mere minutes on one book snippet after another; but in reality I am spending 10 hours a day paying attention to the Internet. I return to it after a few minutes, day after day, with essentially my full-time attention. As do you.

We are developing an intense, sustained conversation with this large thing. The fact that it is made up of a million loosely connected pieces is distracting us. The producers of Websites, and the hordes of commenters online, and the movie moguls reluctantly letting us stream their movies, don’t believe they are mere pixels in a big global show, but they are. It is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it.

Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think.

Wade Roush wrote:

Art Technology Group (NASDAQ: ARTG), the Cambridge, MA-based provider of e-commerce software and services, announced today that it has acquired Seattle-based InstantService, which offers SaaS-based live chat services, for $17 million in cash. ATG said the acquisition will make it easier for its clients to offer live text-based chat with customer service agents as an option for e-commerce site visitors.

In an effort to have the Internet go green, the Bell Labs has announced its refurbishment and that of other communication networks. This will help make the Internet 1000 times more energy efficient and clean. Around 300 million tons of green house gases are given out every year due to the use of these communication networks. The “Green Touch” association if successful in changing the mindset of these companies to suitably change their use of technology, the Internet will be more energy efficient, using the same amount of energy in three years that is currently used in a day! Sounds amazing right? Well to make this dream come true, the Green Touch association that includes communication giants like AT&T, China Mobile, Samsung etc will need to come up with a few more innovations and funds. The last time such an effort was put forward, 90% of the phone features we use today were invented and implemented. This will also help reduce the carbon footprint reducing greenhouse gas emission. So let’s hope that this plan works out, changing the way we communicate in future.

[SolveClimate]