phrase « Christopher Ross

Posts Tagged ‘phrase’

29
Sep
2009

Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up

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I received an email this week from a friend of mine who’s been looking for a medical alert device for his grandmother which cracked me up. Not because old people falling is funny (it really isn’t) but it reminded me of a commercial when I was a kid for this old lady who’d fallen and couldn’t get up. Again, the commercial itself wasn’t terribly funny but the branding the phrase “help I’ve fallen and can’t get up” was brilliant.

See that’s the funny thing about marketing. It doesn’t matter that old ladies getting hurt is traumatic, without intending to do it the marketing professionals behind the medical alert device created a national pop culture movement that spread from late night TV to Saturday Night Live and had references on most popular culture shows of the time, that’s the aim of any budget marketer … the move the cost of advertising away from their own client and into the main stream media where brand recognition (even as the butt of a joke) is free.

In recent years, we’ve seen the same thing accomplished with Wendy’s “where’s the beef” and of course the infamous “wazzzzzzzzz up” campaign where simple, clever lines delivered effectively made the shift from marketing to pop culture without much effort.

Tags: Brand Recognition, butt, Clever Lines, Cost Of Advertising, Culture Movement, email, funny thing, Grandmother, joke, Late Night Tv, Main Stream, Marketer, Old Ladies, Old Lady, phrase, Pop Culture, popular culture, Saturday Night Live, Stream Media, Wendy
Posted in Marketing Advice

31
Aug
2009

Four Quick SEO Tips

4 Comments

I received a great question this week via my Model Mayhem account (it’s like Facebook for models and photographers) from a website owner named Bella Valentine, here’s her email and what I had to say about it, I’m sharing this (with her permission) because I believe Bella’s questions are the same questions many people have about Search Engine Optimization and online marketing.

Hey,

Saw your post in the forums and I was hoping you could help me out with a few questions that I have…

How do you find related blogs?

Do you write your site’s link as the signature when posting a comment on such blogs? (I’ve been looking for blogs that have the slot for your website’s url but have come only across one that was set up that way)

Wouldn’t that be considered spamming?

Should I try to stay away from sites that have a worst ranking then mine on Alexa or do all links back help?

Thanks,
Bella

Hi Bella, thanks for asking!

You can find related blogs using Google’s blog search function, it’s found under the “More” tab on Google or at http://blogsearch.google.com/. If for example you’re hoping to improve your ranking with Denver models, search Google for that phrase and you’ll see 92,000+ blogs appear but you’ll want to play with the keywords until you find the right combination to return the best results for you.

Many of these blogs will have a comment form at the bottom of the page and on these forms you will see a space for your name, email, website and comment. Now you have to be careful, some web masters such as myself frown on “keyword spam” which is when you replace your name with keywords such as “Denver Model”, so instead I always suggest people using their name in addition to the keywords they’d like to leave. For example, I will always delete people using “Denver Model” but look the other way for “Bella, the Denver Model” or “Bella a model from Denver”. I appreciate self promotion is part of the game, but not at the cost of my site’s reputation.

On that point, I will also point out that 75% of people surveyed prefer the Ben & Jerry’s brand vs. Häagen-Dazs yet … 75% of people surveyed prefer Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Why? Because as people, we like people … so website owners and other surfers are far more likely to “connect” to you if you’re a person rather than a keyword.

There is a fine line between blog spam and self promotion. I tend to think of it as the same line men often cross in a bar, keep it genuine and nobody gets hurt but when your comments are fake, false or generic … web site owners will reject you. Instead of leaving generic comments which will get flags as SPAM, only leave comments which add to the texture of the article or benefit the website owner. You’ll be surprised how quickly your comments get you traffic when you’re helping others in a positive way.

Commenting on websites with a lower PageRank value will not hurt your website, in fact each successful link regardless of where it comes from is either positive or neutral, but never negative. This is because Google knows that you can not control who links to you, so they don’t punish you for poor incoming links.

That said … the higher the PageRank of a link coming to you the better.

For example, if you can get a link from Model Mayhem (5) to your website it’s better than a PR 1, but a link from Apple (9) is better still. There’s a complex math formula that is used … way to complex for me to explain or even understand but basically, in the simplest terms possible assume that every PR point is worth double the value before it so … a link from a PR1 is worth 1 point while a PR2 is 2, a PR3 is 4, PR4 is 8, PR5 is 16, PR6 is 32, PR7 is 64, PR8 is 128, PR9 is 256 … OK, so that scale is completely made up but it holds some analytical water and more to the point, it reinforced that incoming links from high ranking sites is better but lower ranking sites are not worse.

Chris

If you have a question about SEO, why not ask me? I’m always happy to answer your questions and look forward to hearing from people!

Want to learn more about Bella’s website? Visit her at http://www.BellaValentine.com.

Tags: alexa, blog, Denver Model, email, Facebook, google, Model Mayhem, Models, photographers, phrase, reputation, Right Combination, Search Engine Optimization, Search Function, self promotion, Signature, spam, Valentine, web masters, Website Owner
Posted in Questions and Answers, Search Engine Optimization

30
May
2009

What’s the biggest mistake you’re making on your website?

3 Comments

We all make mistakes but when it comes to our online web businesses, it’s important that we fix our mistakes before they become crippling.

Keywords

A keyword (or Tag in WordPress lingo) is a word or phrase intended to help support the content that you’re reading on a specific page, not the entire website. People often overload pages with keywords which have no relevancy to the page they’re designing with the hopes that Google will fall for the trick. Google will not fall for it. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show that Google will punish you for using unrelated keywords, which is mistake #1 on most websites.

Boring Content

Content matters, it’s a silly reality but you have to stop thinking about your visitors as a funny little line in an analytics program and begin caring about them as people. Every person who comes to your website should feel they are better off after reading your content. If they don’t you’re wasting their time and they will not come back, so write better content and watch your website traffic increase dramatically.

Failing to Reach Your Market

The old days of building a website and assuming people will find it are over (if they ever existed at all), website owners need to tell people about their website and promote it everywhere. Make sure your site address is on your business cards, marketing materials, the side of your building, company vehicles, all of your online profiles and in prominent newsletters, magazines etc. Remember, if you don’t tell people about your website they won’t know it’s there.

Poor Titles

Writing for websites is easy, make sure you have a catchy title that will help people determine if they want to read your piece and then make sure it’s been properly placed in your HTML code. A great title needs to be in two places on a website, first it has to be in the <title></title> tags of your page but it should also be reflected in your <h1></h1> tags in the body of your content. This helps search engines know that your page is about your title by labeling the document but also by placing the title in an easy to read and powerful tag within your text.

Poor Structure

Web pages are a lot like books, they need structure for people to be able to read them. In this case, you want computer software such as FireFox, Safari and IE to read your pages as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo right? Well then, you’d better make sure your page is coded to their standards! Luckily, the W3C has a wonderful tool to help you ensure your page can be properly read.

Stale Content

If you’ve follow my advice, you know that your visitors are people not mindless data points on a graph so you have to respect that they simple won’t come back to your website if you don’t take the time to post anything new there. Work out a schedule that you can keep and write a blog posting at least once each week (more if you can) to provide your audience with fresh content.

Be Organic

While it’s acceptable and even encouraged to buy ads on services such as Google be careful that you’re building your client base through organic methods, not paid advertising. Google looks very poorly on paid link placement and has a reputation for punishing people excessively for buying links. If you really want to build your websites online reputation, do it honestly and take a little more time, in the end it’ll get you where you need to be.

Be Original

The web is a very big place and people have a lot of choice when it comes to content, so try to be original and write content people want to read. Ask yourself why you read specific websites and learn to improve your content to ensure people have a reason to come back. Once you have unique, original content others will start linking to your content because you’re an authority.

SEO is Irrelevant

Would you rather optimize your store for the local newspaper or for your customer? Stop looking to optimize your content for search engines, they’re irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong you have to make sure your content can be read by them and that your website is compatible with Google but stop treating your website content like it needs to be written to appeal to the big search engines and instead, write your content to appeal to people like your mother, your father, your kids and your neighbors. After all, they’re the ones who are reading your content … not a robot.

Learn to be co-operative

The biggest mistake people make? Failing to ask other website owners to link to them. Search engines rankings work on a system called PageRank, the way PageRank works is by counting the number of links from other websites to your website, the more links you have coming into your website … the higher you rank on Google. If you want to be successful on the web, ask your friends and family as well as other related businesses to link to you.

Tags: Biggest Mistake, Boring Content, building a website, business cards, business marketing, Catchy Title, Company Vehicles, google, h1, Lingo, lt, Magazines, Marketing Materials, Online Businesses, People, phrase, Profiles, Relevancy, Traffic Increase, Web Businesses, Website Traffic
Posted in Search Engine Optimization

11
May
2009

How do I remove specific ads from my AdSense ads?

4 Comments

If you’re anything like me, running ads on your website isn’t just an option it’s a great way to make money but sometimes there are ads that I simply don’t want on my website so I need to tell Google to block them but how? Actually it’s really very simple, it’s called the Competitive Ad Filter from Google and it’s part of the AdSense tool.

To block an advertisement, you simply need to place the destination URL (where the ad is linked to) into the Competitive Ad Filter dialog box and within a few hours, Google AdSense will stop serving ads to that domain. Pretty easy right? Well there is one problem … how do you know where the ad is linking to?

Finding the desination URL of an AdSense Ad

First off, do not click your own ads.

Wait … let me repeat that again … do not click the ads. If you click ads on your own website, you’ll earn money from the program and violate your Terms of Service. Google will figure it out (they’re pretty clever) so just don’t do it.

Instead, you’re going to have to do a little bit of detective work but it’s super easy.

View the source code of your webpage. To do this, right click or look under the View or Edit menus for an option
Search for the phrase googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick which is how every Google ad looks.
After you’ve found the correct ad, look in the code and you’ll see a value titled &adurl= along with a domain name address. For example &adurl=http://www.thisismyurl.com so the domain name that you’d like to stop serving ads for is www.thisismyurl.com.

Now that you know the domain you’d like to cancel ads for, simply visit the Competitive Ad Filter and add the link.

Tags: Adclick, Ads, Advertisement, amp, Destination Url, Detective Work, Domain Address, domain name, Earn Money, Exa, Filter Dialog, google, little bit, Menus, Mple, Name Address, Option Search, Own Website, Pagead, phrase, Remove Ads, Search Phrase, source code, Tool, Way To Make Money
Posted in Questions and Answers

06
May
2009

Make money online with Google AdSense

18 Comments

A few days back I wrote a piece called What are the most expensive search terms? and talked a bit about the Google Keyword Tools which allows you to see how much keywords are worth. It’s designed to allow marketing professionals gauge the value of an ad campaign by allowing them to see which words are valuable and the volume of traffic which searches for a given keyword or key phrase but it can also be used by online publishers to make money online by understanding how to traffic shape our blogs for better keyword performance.

How does it work?

The tool allows you to select a number of factors when reviewing the value of a website or keyword pattern, first you may select the specific countries or language of traffic, this allows you to focus on a particular market when posting ads to potential blogs but that’s not what we want … after all as a blog owner I don’t mind if I make money from people surfing in Australia or Austria right? So the first thing you’ll want to do when setting your sights on new keywords is change the default settings from United States to All Countries and Territories. This will allow you to see the whole world’s value.

Next, as you can see from the graphic above you’ll want to review your existing website content for keywords. Specific descriptive words and phrases are great for people who want to sell something but as a blog publisher, you to understand what Google currently thinks your website is about so that you can assess how to steer your blog in the future.

For example, when I search for keywords on thisismyurl.com, I receive a list of keywords that Google believes I am blogging about. They are: make money on the (7), how to make money (6), way to make money (6), make money online (6), work at home (7), work from home (5), make money (30), to make (5), how to (8), at home (7), money making (18), from home (6), data entry (9), earn money (7), money (19), online (8), blog (10), business (6), website (7), Miscellaneous keywords (23)

Ironically, if you’d asked me what my website was about I’d have told you that it was about organic marketing, wordpress or even SEO before I’d have told you it was about making money online, so it just goes to show how cool this tool really is.

Making money with the data

The next part of the puzzle is to look at the Estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) for keywords on the site but there’s a trick here, by default it’s not shown! Once you have the Estimated CPC column showing, you’re almost done. The next key to truly understanding the value of your keywords is to switch the Match Type to Exact (you can just see it in the graphic here). That will make sure the data you’re looking at is for exactly what you think you’re looking at.

The resulting list will provide you with a breakdown of both the estimated value per click and the number of times that keyword appears in Google’s search results for a given time period. For example, the phrase how to make money on the internet is worth $4.01 and is searched for 9,900 times globally in a given month. Sounds pretty good right? Well it is, except coming soon (which I just put up a free template for) is worth $1.30 and is searched for 201,000 times. Which is worth more? Luckily I’m pretty good with basic business math so here’s a comparison:

$4.01 x 9,900 = $39,699
$1.30 x 201,000 = 261,300

So using basic high school math, it’s easy to determine that a website would be much better off focusing it’s content on lower value keywords with a higher search percentage unless the total accumulated value of a keyword family outweigh the value of an isolated phrase. Let me explain. while an isolated keyword comparison would imply that coming soon is a superior subject to blog about (and earn money from) the phrase appears only once in the hundred phrases Google analyzed vs. dozens of variations of the phrase how to make money on the internet which while independently do not add up to much, combined far exceed an isolated phrase.

Looking at how to make money in Numbers

To compare the real value of key phrases and the true potential for making money on the Internet it’s important to look at numbers outside the Keyword Tools, for that I export the data into Apple Numbers, a spread sheet tool which allows me to group key phrases and do rapid data modeling to determine the most profitable avenue for an online site. In the case of my own blog, the top ten keyword patterns shape up to look like this:

While the above graph doesn’t group keywords and phrases into select groups it does provide an immediate and staggering visual tool to truly comprehend the value of some keywords over others. While combining keyword phrases would lower the impact, the keyword AdSense is clearly the most substantial value at nearly $10 million per month in AdWord placements.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this rather basic breakdown of my own website and I hope it gives you some insight into how to make money online with Google AdSense yourself. As always, I’m rather shameless in my self promotion and would love to remind you that I’m available for onsite consultation anywhere in the world assuming the temperature there is between 82° and 96°.

Tags: Ad Campaign, adsense, Australia, blogs, Data Entry, Default Settings, Descriptive Words, Earn Money, Few Days, google, google adsense, how to make money, Keyw, keyword, Marketing Advice, Money Online, Money Work, Online Money, Online Publishers, Online Test, phrase, phrases, Publishers, Search Terms, Traffic Shape, United States, Way To Make Money, Website Content
Posted in Make Money Online

23
Apr
2009

How to center a header in HTML without using the center tag

5 Comments

The HTML <center> tag is one of those funny little tags left over from the early days of websites when designers often mixed the publishing of web content with design. These days, it’s much easier to separate content and design by using effective style sheets.

To center any text in HTML and CSS, we can simply add a couple of lines of code to our stylesheet file as follows:

[source lang="css"].center {
text-align:center;
}[/source]
This little code snippet will center the content within a block tag (such as a <p> or <h1>) but only if it already knows the width of the object you’re centering too! To get around this, we can simply add the display:block tag to our CSS:

[source lang="css"].center {
text-align:center;
display: block;
}[/source]
Now our code knows to center text.

To apply it to our HTML code, you need to simply apply the code to an object as a class. For example let’s turn a heading into a centered heading by applying the new class like so:

[source lang="html"]
<h1 class=’center’>This is my header.</h1>
[/source]

It is of course also possible to simply align all <h1> tags to the center by using the code:

[source lang="css"]h1 {
text-align:center;
display: block;
}[/source]

What about converting existing pages?

Luckily if you already have a bunch of documents which use <center> tags there’s fairly simple fix for you to clean up those files. Using a tool like Adobe Dreamweaver you can do bulk search and replace functions across multiple files.

The replace is a two step process. (please backup your site before doing this)

First, let’s replace the phrase </center> with </div> across the entire site. This will change the closing tag (remember all tags come in pairs right?) to be a normal div tag.

Now, let’s replace the phrase <center> with <div class=’center’> to turn the opening tag into a div tag with the center class assigned.

You can now add the .center details to your CSS file and presto, your website is now using the proper center formating!

Tags: adobe, center tag, Code Source, Couple Of Lines, css file, designers, Div Class, Div Tag, Funny, h1, Heading, Html Code, Html Css, Html Tag, lt, Multiple Files, Pairs, phrase, Style Sheets, Text Html, Tool, Web Content, web design
Posted in HTML Programming

12
Feb
2009

What does Google think about you?

12 Comments

Google is the most powerful player in the online game but what does it see when it looks at you? There’s a really easy way to know for sure and it’s called the Google Keyword Tool. This simple tool will not only tell you what Google thinks your website is about but will also show you comparative keywords, how many people search for those keywords and how intense the competition is for your selected industry.

All you need to do is target your own website with the tool and Google will scan it for keywords and phrases which are designed to help you select the best keywords to promote your website. The secondary effect however is that Google’s data can be used by web masters to gain a deeper understanding of the content on their own websites and alter the content over time to increase popularity.

So what’s Google think about thisismyurl.com?

The true power of the Google Keyword Tool is that unlike Analytics which allows you to do some great data mining on your website, the Keyword Tool is designed for one purpose only, to help you make money. By using the data present from the tool I can see that while my website is highly focussed on making money online, I’m in a highly competitive market place (no surprise) with the exception of the key phrase “how to make a wordpress theme” but that phrase only accounted for 46 searches in January, hardly worth focussing on but a great idea for a future article.

Using the Google Keyword Tool, along with Analytics and Web Master Tools is a sure fire way to help you build a better understanding of not only how you see your website but how Google sees it.

Tags: analytics, competitive market, data mining, deeper understanding, focussing, google, online game, phrase, popularity, true power, web master tools, web masters
Posted in Marketing Advice

06
Oct
2008

My Favorite WordPress plugins

No Comments

Without a doubt, this is one of those topics that WordPress developers love to share, but for me it’s about more than simply spouting out a list of popular WordPress plugins, I really do love using these plugins because they make my life easier.

Akismet

This goes without saying, Matt Mullenweg did a brilliant job on this plugin and it’s become a staple that every WordPress blog should use. Link to Akismet

Frame Buster

This is a great plugin by Denis de Bernardy which basically stops sites like about.com from loading your content into their frames and keeping their banner at the top. Link to Frame Buster

Lightbox

A simple plugin both to install and to use, the Lightbox plugin by Peppe Argento uses Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar to display image zooms on your site. Light Box

WordPress Mobile Edition

Alex King did a great job on this little plugin that makes your website more compatible with mobile devices. Mobile Edition

Thumbnail For Excerpts

For years I struggled with how to quickly add images to my excerpts but Radu Capan introduced a fantastic plugin that searches your posts and finds the first image. Thumbnails for Excerpts

Text Replace

Last but not least, I can’t say enough great things about Scott Reilly’s text replace plugin for WordPress. It searches your posts and replaces text with strings, so each time a specific phrase appears (such as WordPress) it automatically creates the hyperlinks for me. Text Replace

Tags: Alex King, Argento, Bernardy, Brilliant Job, Denis, Dhakar, Doubt, Excerpts, First Image, Frame Buster, hyperlinks, Image Thumbnails, Js, mobile devices, Mobile Edition, phrase, Plugins, Radu, Staple, Thumbnail, WordPress, WordPress Plugins
Posted in Web Site Advice