Sk-etchbook

This popped up at the top of a search listings the other day.

http://www.google.com/explanation.html

This got me thinking. In a society of free speech and via a medium which is difficult, nigh impossible to moderate what kind of filtering is actually going on in search results? I image specific words are filtered out for the purpose of safe searches but filtering of obnoxious and offensive opinions can not be simple.

Furthermore should it be done? In a developed society surely all are entitled to their opinions. It would be the responsibility of the offender to justify his stance point yet to refrain from persisting to the point of forcing their unwelcome views on others. The offended then should equally respect the offenders view and not take offence. Rather it is the offendeds responsibility to offer their contrasting opinions and justify them. Disagreement is likely but should be respected.

Total comprehension and through understanding of any situation or element requires complete information. Positive, negative, objective and subjective.

There is a limit of course when these views are acted upon where it does become immoral, turns to bullying and can degrade the quality lives however this is not the topic here.

To me, offensive opinions are not offensive. They are mealy the results of the individuals life experiences and the influence of their exterior. A mind ravaged with hate and anger is the worse prison of all. There are no bars, no doors and no windows. You remain trapped for as long as they exist.

Would it not then be the right thing to help these people escape their prisons. Censorship and condemnation has no positive returns.

The manifestation of conciousness at a sentient level is a truly miraculous thing. We all possess the ability to manage, construct and reconstruct our own realities, our personalities and perceptions can be moulded. The only way to overcome the negative aspects of our own psyches to to question our beliefs. Questions which sometimes need to be offered others.

Negative, spiteful opinions towards generalised groups or stereotypes, even ones based on our own experiences or "what we have been told" are nothing more than childhood monsters.

What may initially appear to be a hideous, evil and scary monster lurking in the darkened corner of your room turns out to be nothing more than teddy bear once viewed in the light.

0 Comment

Permalinks are them squiggly wiggly long strings of letters/numbers/characters which point to the informative tit-bit of which you peruse.

Anyway. More often than not they look like nonsense and drivel. Here is a bit more info on how to make Worpress links a tad more easy in the eye:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

0 Comment

I been getting invitations from Google to attend webinars for a while now. Previously I've not really paid much attention to these, however while thinking about marketing I thought I'd look iinto the format and content. There's some great material in some of the ones freely available online. Here's a list of just a few, check them out.

Adsense

Adwords

Web Design & Marketing Strategy

Web Design & Marketing

Wordpress

Trends

SEO

PHP

And 100's of other things

0 Comment

Fist off there are two types available here which shouldn't be confused. The meta tag and the link attribute.

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" (the former) or "Don't follow this specific link" (the latter).

With the rise of social media and web 2.0 the link structure of the internet suddenly changed. As one of the measures of spam or link farming used by robots previously looked at the speed at which a website had gained links to it. The new forms of social media caused a problem as hundreds even thousands of links could appear in a day.

Here is Googles own page about nofollow and what it does.

However there seems to be some resistance towards it's use and it's practicality. Read more...

0 Comment

The question of whether meta tags (specifically keywords) are of any use at all any more all always seems to receive a mumbled response. They used to be important, but for a long while now they have played little to no part in search engine listings. My previous stance was that they have little or none influence on results but description should be used as this is seen in results and keywords are worth adding as they take no time and are good admin. This forum post reflects that: Digital Point

The most important ones you should be sure to use are;
keywords
description
distribution=global or us or uk...
index=follow all or no follow...index all or no index
author=personal name or business name

However I still thought I'd check to see if there was an official bottom line response out there. And here it is:

View the official response from Google's Matt Cutts or view a full post and video on the Google Web Master Blog.

Unfortunately Google is only one of the search engines and making catering to them all is like throwing a barbecue and inviting a vegetarian, a Muslim, a guy with a nut allergy, a woman allergic to fish, wheat and gluten and a man with no mouth. And then attempting to make them all happy.

Google does command between 60 to 80 per cent of market share in various locations across the world so it should be the most influential. However the next largest are Yahoo and Bing.

Here is a good post on Search Engine Land referring to Yahoo's announcement (Oct 09) that it is dropping support for keywords tag, closely followed up by another report contradicting this. This is supported by many other tests reveling that keywords "DO" affect Yahoo still. Assumable they still have a ghost in their machine.

The former article also discusses Bing. Apparently they don't support meta keywords, but they have a big guide on how to use them on their official blog. A great example of how as soon as something can increase search rankings it is manipulated (in this case blogs) and exploited at the expense of quality. Presumably written by outside paid blogger.

And after all this research where am I? Exactly where I was when I started!!!

Keywords have little to no SEO use but ya may as well stick 'em in there. Good for organization and admin purposes.

Time well spent!

0 Comment

I've recently been reading SEO Truth by Philip Midwinter. It's a short Ebook produced by a Leeds based SEO agency.

When discussing the subject of Page Rank he talks about Salton's Vector Space Model. I had not heard of this before. Now the mathematics behind it is a little complicated so I thought best not get obsessed trying to fully comprehend what is going on but apparently this is the basis originally used for information retrieval by Google and many other search engines.

Given the fact that search indexing has come along way in recent years and that Google keep their exact algorithms tight to their chest to outwit them pesky SEO execs this is not a 'holy grail' answer to understanding Page Rank. However it is a good basis. It's like meeting a man who once sold a dog to the man who made the holy grail!

Definitely worth looking into.

More Reading:
Google Directory Papers
www.2002.org
Stanford

0 Comment

Yes, my sentiments exactly!

The formula c=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a sums up the potential factors that influence landing page conversion rates. This include everything from site design to what your potential customers had for lunch.

Developed by MarketingExperiments.com this “formula” is based on their own research encompassing many client web sites. It is not a true mathematical relationship in any formal sense, but it can help you understand which factors affect landing page conversion rates at a practical level.

C= The probability of conversion.

m= Motivation of the user. This is basically how badly they want what you have, and the reason they want it. This is the element you have the least control over.

v= Clarity of value proposition. This is probably the most important element because you do have control over it. I’ll be writing about this next month in detail.

i= Incentive to take action. What are you offering to stimulate a desired action.

f= Friction elements in the conversion process. Anything that impedes the visitor from taking action. Common friction causes are forms with too many fields, or confusing options/choices.

a= Anxiety about entering information. This could be things like testimonials, an award, Better Business Bureau logos, etc.

Sources

Marketing Experiments

Searchengineland

Ezinearticles

0 Comment