Thanks for the link Free Traffic Tips! I’m sorry I didn’t come across this sooner.
Free Traffic Tips - the blog: Blog of the Day :: SageRock Web Marketing Weblog
I’m going to try my hand at teaching. I’m putting on a 4 course class all on optimization. We are going to optimize an actual site in the class.
It will be this fall. You can find all of the specifics here:
Cleveland State University || Continuing Education
I’ve pulled the course description out here:
Search Engine Optimization for Fun and Profit
It will be Tuesday nights in October:
October 4-25
Tuesdays, 6:00 pm-9:00 pm
Downtown, Cole Center
CPTR 518601 1500
CEUs: 1.2 $299
It should be pretty interesting. I feel fairly confident that I can teach a motivated person pretty much everything they would need to know to get started down a career path of search engine optimization. We’ll see this fall.
I’ve been spending some time working with this Google Sitemap Generator.
I’ve examined this subject in the past here:
Google Sitemaps - The Simpler Way
And here:
Google Blog: Webmaster-friendly
The procedure Google recommends, utilizing a Python script with the need of Shell access to your server, is out of reach for many.
“Google Sitemaps - The Simpler Way” is definitely simple. You simply download Xenu, a free sitemap program, enter the results into a handly form that is available on their site and viola, you have a sitemap.xml file. The down side to this is that it doesn’t enable you to tell how often Google should come back to each page or how important each page is.
Well, I’m happy to report that the free tools continue to get easier and better.
This tool:
Google Sitemap Generator and Editor is actually simpler and more feature-rich than any other automated system I’ve used so far.
It’s very simple. These are the instructions found on the home page:
Enter the base URL of your site and click Create Map . The page will refresh (after a while) with a list of the pages from your site. Any pages that could not be loaded will be flagged. (Uncheck these entries) Uncheck pages you do not want to include. Edit LastModified, ChangeFrequency and Priority for individual pages, or increment-decrementfor all by clicking arrows.
Click XML SiteMap to display the map. You can toggle between XML Sitemap view and Edit Map view to edit the sitemap.
When it’s correct, click anywhere in the Map view, right click and copy. Paste into notepad, save as sitemap.xml, upload to your server and submit the sitemap to Google.Click HTML SiteMap to create a HTML map of your site. You can save and put this in the root of your site and link to it from your pages to make it easier for Google to follow the links, and provide a general Sitemap for your visitors. Click Gogglize to display a page with unique words from the Title and Description tags from all the pages on your site. Select an action from the radiobutton list and click the word to go to Google Search, Google Images, Google Definitions, Google Adwords or Overture suggestions for the word.
It has a “Show Filters and Setting” dropdown menu that allows you to tell the program what kind of files to index, where to start the crawling and filtering out links containing certain things.
I quickly created two sitemaps in a matter of a couple minutes. Now I’ll upload the file to my server and go over here:
Google Sitemaps and let Google know about them.
Happy sitemap creating!
We’re seeing more and more pay per call services. That is excellent news for the advertiser. If you are testing these things, check out this article:
A report released in July 2004 by The National Partnership for Women & Families found that pregnancy discrimination complaints have increased 39% from 1992 to 2003, even though the nation’s birthrate has dropped by nine percent.
Whether the suits have merit or not, clearly pregnant women are “feeling” discriminated against and, in my opinion, that’s enough to make it a business issue worth addressing. As a recently pregnant business owner (I had to keep the blog title manageable ? he’s 9 months old), I empathize both with Google and with Christina.
The Google Suit
Google has an image of caring about their workers with a foosball tolerant, dog-loving culture and a focus on helping workers balance life and work with great maternity and paternity benefits. That is why the news of Christina Elwell’s pregnancy bias suit against Google is so hard to believe. Not Google, right? They love workers and babies and worker’s babies!
The suit, which you can read here, claims that after Elwell broke the news of being pregnant with quadruplets, her job was eliminated and then she was demoted, fired, rehired, and then demoted again after medical leave. Google says the lawsuit “is without merit and we will defend vigorously against it.” I kind of suspect “defend vigorously” will shake out into “settle quickly.”
My Take on This Issue
If the allegations of the case are true, it sounds like the employee-centered culture was not being embraced by middle management. Her manager is quoted as allegedly calling her or her situation “an HR nightmare.” But, I empathize because, let’s face it — he’s right. And I suspect that comment, while insensitive, came from her manager’s feelings of bitterness and betrayal. Here is this top performing sales executive, at the top of her game, recently made sales director. Google loves her and she loves Google. And then one day she tells her boss that she loves her career so much that she has chosen to implant (I am speculating) not one but four embryos into her uterus, and it’s not going well. She’s going to miss a lot of work these next nine months. And after that? Don’t ask — it’s illegal.
As a manager, even if you have the caring heart of a saint, this news makes you want to throw up. Of course she’s not going to consult you about the decisions she makes with her family and her uterus; you know that logically. But you cannot help but feel betrayed. All the time invested into her career, all the training, and she has chosen to do IVF right now. Let’s face it; it seems like she doesn’t value her job. Or certainly, she values it second to a family. And now she’s heading for a family of four instantly. Does her career honestly stand a chance? What do you say now as she sits across from you?
Now here’s the flip side. If your employee-centered culture has really permeated middle management, your manager will be able to sincerely say (without 5 minutes of hesitation or further questioning), “Congratulations!! This is so exciting!” That’s because he or she will not see a revenue stream sitting in the chair across from them, but a person. I have to believe Christina’s manager made the mistake of seeing her as a revenue stream. Before the pregnancy, a beautiful flowing incoming stream with lots of future flow potential. Then suddenly that flow was not only dammed up but was backwashing out through HR in “nightmare” fashion with short term disability, maternity leave, and a potentially vacant job held open in vain for a woman with 4 kids.
But when you realize that this pregnant revenue stream is really a person, you can also realize that like all humans she struggled to make this decision. And she is most likely open to being influenced by her environment. Not only is her future uncertain, but probably very flexible.
Keep these things in mind when an employee tells you she is pregnant:
* If my iVillage pregnancy discussion board participation has taught me anything, it is that there is a high likelihood she has not made up her mind about returning to work.
* If she’s come far and succeeded in her career (read into also as fairly compensated), there is a higher likelihood she wants to keep the job, if at all possible.
* What makes balancing a child and a career possible? The company does. If this experience is met with unconditional support, there is a higher likelihood she’ll make efforts to balance her career with family. That’s speculation, but pretty common sense, don’t you think? And by support I mean emotional and logistical.
* Her husband might be the one staying home. Really.
* As a business owner, if you create (or claim to have) an employee-centered culture, do it because you actually care about the people in your organization, not because some business book told you it will help with retention. Because if the culture is real, then your management staff will believe in it — for themselves and for their employees. And that means they will say things like, “Having four babies must be scary. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help along the way.” As opposed to, “Wow. This situation is an HR nightmare.”
As it turned out, Christina had one child. I imagine she could have been back at work full force as a high contributor to Google after a few months. Instead she’s gone from HR nightmare to PR nightmare. Regardless of the merit of Elwell’s case, Google failed on this one. That’s my ruling anyway.
Here’s a great interview with Jason Calacanis, who says he is on track to make $1 million this year with Google AdSense.
I don’t doubt his story in the least. AdSense is truly this good. I’m telling you, you owe to yourself to check this out. Google AdSense is changing the way commerce is being done. It is a true “disruptive technology.”
If you have a hobby or a personal interest that you would like to share with people, I would highly suggest considering turning it into a blog and then placing some Google AdSense ads on it. You won’t be sorry.
Here’s a snippet of advice Jason gives in the article:
“What is the best piece of advice you have for a publisher brand new to AdSense? What would you have done differently when you started with AdSense, knowing what you do now.
I would have run four ads per page, taken off the borders, and made the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would have also made channels for each position and blog so I could track things better.”
Now get going over here and read the rest of it:
Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis - JenSense.com
Google has put together a very interesting image showing where people look most often on a web page. Different areas are colored for their “hotness”. A dark orange area represents most hot - strongest performance, to light yellow representing least hot - weakest performance.
It’s interesting to see how people are most likely viewing your web pages. I recommend checking it out:
Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
In Part 1:
SageRock Web Marketing Weblog: Should I try Google AdSense? Part 1
We discussed all of the advantages of Google AdSense.
But the question now is: Is it right for your business web site?
My initial response is probably not. For Google AdSense to be successful, people must click out of your site probably going to your competitor’s site. You very well might have cut off your nose to spite your face. You may have made a $1 but lost thousands.
On the other hand, say you have a lot of content. Maybe you write a blog such as something like the SageRock Web Marketing Weblog. Are the people who are reading your blog in the active buying cycle? Are they ready to buy from you now? If you have good content, might they come back to your site on a regular basis to see what you are writing? Is it possible that an AdSense ad displayed in your content might not be in direct competition to you? In our case, could an AdSense ad be about web marketing but maybe not be something that we offer as a service. Possibly what the person who came to our site needed was provided by a Google AdSense ad. But we would not be able to help them.
I remember watching a special on the porn industry online. Pornography is always doing cutting edge things. The person being interviewed said that he often put competitors’ ads on his site. His feeling was that if he didn’t have anything to offer a visitor it was better to get a little money by selling his visitor to a competitor than getting no money at all.
I personally would like to put some AdSense ads on this blog. But so far I’ve been voted down. I completely understand why. It might be a bad move. But maybe some people on our team will read this post and be pursuaded.
In conclusion, if you decide to test some AdSense ads on your business web site, you should be very aware of what you are doing. You are intentionally trying to pursuade people to leave your site for someone else’s site. If this doesn’t fit in with your overall web marketing strategy I wouldn’t suggest it. However, if you are aware of what you are doing, it may be a very savvy marketing strategy. Your decision lies within where you are on the cutting edge of marketing.
Best Wishes.
If you aren’t aware of the program yet, Google AdSense is a system put out by Google that allows you to display Google AdWords ads on your site. Google then pays you a percentage of every click you send to these AdWords advertisers.
In the world of content-rich web sites, it is becoming a regular invasion. People writing content on a topic of their choice put a line of code in their template. And then Google serves up a series of ads that they feel represents the topic discussed.
It’s super easy for the publisher. And it is a great avenue of exposing ads on a tremendous number of web sites.
These ads can come in endless colors and layouts. All of these ads are quickly placed in your site by telling Google AdSense the size and color you need. Then the code is generated and then you just copy & paste to code into your site where ever you would like it displayed.
It’s easy and a great source of revenue. As a outsourced web marketing solution for companies we did very little work in the Google AdSense arena. We did, however, do a lot with Google AdWords for our clients. We saw how much traffic this program was producing for them. So we wanted to experiment with the other side: Google AdSense.
This is what I can tell you from our experience.
We have several small, niche-oriented sites that we have tested this on. We have a local Akron Ohio site, and several personal blogs. We have placed Google AdSense ads on all of these sites in their templates.
We are now in our third month of testing. In the first two months we made about a total of $200. Now, in the first 4 days of August we have made $50. Our short experience has been that our daily spend tends to go down as the month goes on. We think this is probably because people’s monthly budget runs out towards the end of the month. Then it is refilled at the beginning of the month. So we are on track to probably making $300 this month.
The great thing is that general interest content tends to generate continual traffic. As an example, I have posts on Wal-mart history and 1 Corinthians 13. These particular posts are just generating endless traffic. I suspect those topics won’t lessen in the near future. So, I’m finding that the content just continues to compound on itself. And the funny thing is that I was going to write this content anyway. So now I’m developing a long-term revenue stream from this content.
The next topic I want to discuss is whether or not AdSense is right for your business web site.
SageRock Web Marketing Weblog: Should I try Google AdSense? Part 2
This is an interesting article which lists some of the more common penalties of Google, MSN and Yahoo.
They’re pretty interesting and you might be surprised at some:
Search Engine Penalties at Yahoo & MSN