List Building Macros

PSpad is my favorite text editor. I use it for html, javascript, css, php, keyword lists and… a whole lot more. Download PSpad, it’s free. It’s got a bunch of tools I use on a daily basis to get my work done quickly.

In the example of list building, I have my F5 and F6 keys set to put quotes and brackets around a line and move to the next. If you’ve downloaded PSpad, open that sucker up and follow along.

1. Type in a list of keywords you’d like to expand.
2. Start at the beginning of the first line
3. press the record macro button or ctrl+f5
4. press quote (”), end, quote (”), down arrow, home
5. repeat step three and give your macro a name.
6. press f5

Step 4 turns keyword into “keyword” and moves the curser to the beginning of the next line. All the other steps are meant to repeat that action in what’s called a Macro. You can make one that will add brackets ( [, end, ], down, home), one for negative keywords (-, down, home).

Using the macro manager you can set up to four hotkeys or use the “play x-times” feature if you’ve got a lot of keywords.

You should be able to expand a list in 20 to 30 seconds and paste it into Google Adwords.

If you’re wondering why, you may be paying an irrelevance tax…

As always I invite/challenge you to share you methods and questions below. Links are followed and all I’m getting is spam… spam, and more spam. I weed through it for you, and you don’t even take advantage.

May 20 2008 | General | No Comments »

Avoiding Irrelevance Taxes

In Google Adwords, an ad group should consist of an ad relevant to a landing page and a list of keywords relevant to the ad. This is to avoid paying an algorithmic “irrelevance” tax (an OK or lower quality score). This generally leads to a more prepared customer whom is more prepared to make a purchase online.

This is not difficult to do, but can (and should) be time-consuming. You should spend as much time converting OK quality scores into nothing less than GREAT.

To achieve this consistently, you should have a specific ad group for each two word phrase you intend to bid on. This phrase is your topic sentence, and any deviation from this topic will cost you money in the way of a lower quality score (”irrelevance” tax).

This phrase should be on your site and in your ad, preferably twice. Both the ad and the landing page should have specific information and easy-to-follow instructions on how to contact/buy from you.

Without management software, the most efficient way I know to do this is to create many ad groups and adjust the bid for the entire ad group.

I used to do one ad group for each phrase, but now I make one ad group for each match type for each phrase. This is so that I can adjust my bid for each match type individually, very quickly, and the data is sorted at a glance as well.

When dealing with broad match, I will trim the list and ad more negatives, and usually write different ads. The broad keyword list then receives a lower bid than the longer lists of phrase and exact match.

If you think this separation would take a long time, try these list building macros. And if you’ve got a better way, please let me know. I’m still learning every day, thank god.

May 20 2008 | Paid Search and Search Marketing and algorithms and google | 1 Comment »

The power of your own personal wiki.

Oh it feels great. I just installed a new wiki, and it is a big relief. Stopped working a few months back, and I’ve been too busy to fix it till now. It has encouraged me to take more notes than I’ve been, and productivity has increased.

I like to imagine my wiki as a stack of papers on which I can take any notes I’d like… but my ink is erasable and the pages have words on them that are like little portals onto the other pages, and all the pages are condensed into something small enough to fit in a gum wrapper. Well that is if you put it on a memory stick, but you still need a computer (the more imaginative and motivated individuals among you will prove me wrong, no doubt!)

I’ll try to write up some info on how to set one up in the near future, but until then if you’re very curious and need help you can always send me an e-mail say…. to wikiworks@justfredworks.com

May 12 2008 | General | No Comments »

The Square Root of a Google

More correctly, the square root of a googol. A googol is the term Google’s trademark is based upon[1]. An unimaginably large number, with no huge significance. It’s just a big number, that is easy to remember and fairly easy to write. A googol can be described as a number 1 followed by one hundred (100) zeros or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Notated as 10^100.

The square root of this number (googol not Google) is a one followed by fifty (50) zeroes or

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The Math

Some of you may ask why? Where did that number come from? If you don’t care about the algebra, look away now. You’ve got your answer.

The formula is the same as the square root of one hundred (ten) or the square root of one thousand (100) or the square root of one million (one thousand). The square root of a googol could be expressed in the notation (10^100)^1/2 (The square root of 10 to the one hundred power). And since

( x^m ) ⁿ = x ^{m n}[2]

then it is 10 ^(100 * 1/2) or 10^50. Meaning a one followed by exactly 50 zeroes. See the table if you’re still confused.

If you were taught when you multiply 10 times 10 you ad the zeroes together you were making use of the same formula. Those of you that are still lost…

Is the square root of a Google one half of Google?

No. But it does have one half the zeroes. And that’s all you need to know.

*googal. Google is not a number, it is a Search Engine.

May 07 2008 | google | No Comments »

Rand Fishkin - Linkbaiting or Misinformed?

Update: Rand has explained the situation here, which quite frankly makes me feel like an asshole for even considering Rand might be linkbaiting.

In this Webmaster Radio show, Keven Ryan of Search Engine Strategies clarifies that Rand Fishkin is not banned from SES, despite the rumors.

Now I don’t know where the rumors started, or anything about the situation at all. Keep in mind I’m a small fish and not very well connected just yet and don’t care who bans whom.
However, I did meet Rand Fishkin, and according to him, SES did ban him. Or at least he said so in the bar at the Hyatt Hotel. It was February 27th, the second day of SMX West and just after the “Google Groove”. I do not recall who he was speaking to, but I do know that he said SES banned him “for being affiliated with SMX”.

I was standing three feet from him, and heard it well. Rand Fishkin said he was banned from SES. It’s not debatable or untrue. There also must have been others who heard this, because I’ve never repeated it.

My question is this: Was Rand misinformed? Confused? Or was he pulling a stunt? I’m not going to give an opinion because I don’t have one, but you’re welcome to leave yours in the comments below. Links are followed, so comments are moderated.

By the way, sorry readers (if you’re still there) for the dry spell, I recently became flooded with work. Hope all is well and have a great month of May!

May 01 2008 | People in Search and SMX | 1 Comment »

What would an SEO do?

Picture it. You’re an SEO. You get off the freeway and pull into a small shopping center near the drive-in theatre, and you discover a nice little business.It’s tucked away next to the sushi place, and offers completely free wireless internet 24/7 and affordable coffee flavored coffee. The people are nice, there’s a newspaper and magazines, outlets next to couches and armchairs, dim lighting, and a feng shui layout. This is what Starbucks used to be, in a way, when it first tipped into stardom, before it became so… Starbucky.

There’s only one shop, and it’s sort of empty. What would you do?

I know what I would do, as an SEO, and that’s grab a business card, check out the site, and contact the owner for the ‘opportunity of his/her life-time’. Take down a reasonable fee, help the local economy, and bring traffic to ensure the livelihood of my new favorite coffee shop.

Love it. Enjoy the new sunshine, folks. And someone send me a friggin’ e-mail. Dying for a question to answer, or a direction to head in. You know that comments are followed (but moderated) and I don’t entirely mind giving a few author accounts, interviews, etc. I need interaction on this blog, and you’ll get a lot more from me. Look forward to Audio soon, as well as some interviews, and I’m hoping to wrap up my long-procrastimicated blog series on my trip to SMX.

March 31 2008 | Buisiness and Coffee and Search Marketing and wireless | 1 Comment »

Numerical Ranking Factors

Can Google Count Thumbs?

A while back I began to wonder if search engines can count numerical data within a web document, within a domain, or perhaps eventually between certain sites related to each other. The data I’m referring to are those Web 2.0 sites that allow users to vote on content, one example being the thumbs up, thumbs down feature at SEOmoz. Around the web, comments get buried for spam, submissions are voted on, and many sites use various metrics to assign relative value to content.

The idea is that content voted up (or down, as was suggested) would be of higher quality than those that are ignored. The question I’d like to answer, is if the search engines are actually collecting and/or using this data.

Google engineers say no.

There are obvious difficulties. At SMX I spoke with a Google Engineer (Matt Cutts) who said it would be a good idea if there were a standard for it, but that it is not currently used by any of Google’s algorithms. Another engineer at SMX said that Google doesn’t have the computing power to run that sort of analysis, the data center is “hot” as it is. I’d have to agree that it would be A) difficult to engineer a reliable comparative algorithm for numeric elements and B) require a great deal of computing power to crawl and apply the algorithm. Not to mention that C) the system, like many other metrics, could and probably would be discovered and gamed.

I can certainly understand why Google has not yet and may never attempt count votes. Until today I had pretty much given up entirely on the testing after not seeing any results and after speaking with Matt. Today, however, I came across a blog post that again tickled this curiosity. Bill Slawski, of SEO by the SEA, reviewed some Google patents by composing a glossary of terms for Local Search technologies. Here is an excerpt from that post:

Additional Scoring Factors - In addition to the scoring factors above for location prominence, it’s possible for other scoring factors to be used also. Examples:

• Numeric scores of the reviews (e.g., how many stars or thumbs up/down),
• Some function (e.g., an average) of all the scores of the reviews,
• Type of document containing the review (e.g., a restaurant blog, Zagat.com, Citysearch, or Michelin),
• Types of language used in the reviews (e.g., noisy, friendly,dirty, best),
• Derived from user logs, such as what businesses users frequently click on to get detailed information and/or for what businesses they obtain driving directions,
• Financial data about the businesses, such as the annual revenue associated with the business and/or how many employees the business has,
• Number of years the business has been around or how long the business has been in the various listings, and;
• Others

The first two items here are interesting. I had a feeling, before it was succinctly removed by Matt, that Google might already be doing this. It seems as though they might be, but not in the way I’d guessed. It seems that Google may be using data from a 5-star ratings system inside of the Google Local Business results.

Surfers want to find a quality business, why not rank results based on customer satisfaction? It makes sense. Obviously I am of the opinion that the data is reliable. You may disagree, which I’d welcome your opinions or information on the subject. I am also of the opinion that this data exists on other sites, and could be used to further improve relevancy in the search results.

I’d like to see a spam standard, in which un-moderated submissions may be marked by the user, and much like no-follow, dampen or remove text from the crawl. I’d like to see a user-driven voting system be utilized by a search engine to compare content within a domain. Or maybe it’s all just way beyond any of this and I’m a blathering idiot

This one I’ve got to leave open. I encourage discussion and welcome information. Thanks for reading,

-Fred

March 25 2008 | Search and google and local buisiness | 2 Comments »

Linked In

just sharing my LinkedIn Profile

are you Linked In?

March 23 2008 | General | 2 Comments »

The First Interview of… as Many as I Can Stomach.

Visiting through a link somewhere on SEOmoz, “Ignite” has become my first registered user on this inaugural blog of mine, and so he’s been awarded with an interview and a very small deal of exposure. He works for Ignite Media, and would otherwise like to remain anonymous. Fair enough, let’s do it!

Hello Ignite, I understand you are in search engine marketing. When did you discover the industry?

I started in this field about 3 years ago when I was hired by a small marketing agency. Since then I’ve been addicted to keeping up with the “trends” and reading about how other SE marketers are gaining results.

That’s good to hear, are there any particular successes you’ve had or that you’ve read about that interested you or motivated you in some way?

I can’t say that there was any one particular success that I have had or read about that motivated me. However on a daily basis I am motivated by the stories I read on various blogs such as seomoz.org, searchengineland.com, and others. Each day there are new people with new success stories, and also stories of problems which help just as much as the successes.

We have that in common. I also love to read blogs and forums, and I also love to listen to podcasts. You’re right, the obstacles in search are worth much more. So could you tell me about some problems you’ve had to overcome in your 3 years in Search?

Yes, as a matter of fact there is one issue that I have come across time and time again and still am not able to come up with a good solution. I have found it particularly difficult to optimize a Cold Fusion, database driven website. I don’t have much of a problem with ASP or PHP but for some reason when it comes to Cold Fusion, it just stumps me. There have been a few sites where I have done almost everything I can, but still no forward movement because of the dynamic nature of the pages and content.

I think I might know a guy that may be able to give you some insight, he’s been doing ColdFusion programming for years. Did you end up getting ranked for really weird terms? I had a database driven site that got some surprisingly odd long-tail rankings. Are you in sort of a similar situation?

I was able to get some results, but nothing too odd and nothing really very visible. There were a few static pages which got most of the rankings, but the session ID is what seemed to throw the search engines off, from what I could tell.

Ah yes… dynamic URLs are difficult to deal with. And how about your own successes? Without naming any clients, of course, would you care to share any particular successes getting sites ranked organically?

Over the years I have had a lot of success with local search phrases which I think people rule out too quickly. Everyday I speak with people who say they find our site by searching for keyword phrase and location. I think as much as the internet gives us access to all corners of the globe, when people are searching they tend to think locally, especially for particular items that they might want to see and touch, and/or services that they will need you to come to their home and perform. I also think, as many SE marketers do, that the long tail is extremely valuable when thinking in terms of search traffic.

What would you say makes Ignite stand out from the rest?

One thing I’d like to mention is that Ignite Media is unique in that we not only perform internet marketing and website design/development services but we also give back. What I mean by that is, we are in the process of setting up our system so that any project over a certain dollar amount (yet to be determined) will have 1% of the cost donated to charity. We want people to know that we can all help even in a small way. The charity will change from time to time and we will even work with our clients to give to the charity of their choice, as we know many people feel strongly about certain charitable organizations.

Very good. My readers and I thank you, Ignite, for your time and information. If anyone else has some questions for our first guest, go ahead and post questions in the comments below. If you think you’re interesting enough for an interview, send your name, a topic, and a point of contact to: interview@justfredworks.com

March 11 2008 | General | No Comments »

Ross

Ross -

March 06 2008 | Animals and General and Photoshop and funny pictures | 2 Comments »

SMX - First 450 Miles and Day One

Well I’m home now, and back to work. First, I’d like to tell you how great the expo turned out. I don’t think I can put it in words how much I enjoyed this past week, so I’ll write about what went down. This is going to be post one of about 4, encompassing the drive up to Santa Clara and the first day (the least eventful day). Day 2 and Day 3, and the parties that ensued after will come in future posts ;).

I tied up all my loose ends, packed, then slept all day Monday and left after the traffic died down. Went to Riverside, kissed my girlfriend, and took off! Reset my trip meter at the 15 and 91 freeway interchange, and cranked my music.

I guess I’ll back up briefly to show you this beautiful ‘83 Toyota pickup, for which I payed nothing but an exchange of services. A bit of web design, and some basic Search Engine consulting, and here she is:

Nice huh? Yeh. No, no, no. Not the Corvette. You kidding? Behind it.

Beautiful eh? SEO’d for this truck and the best thing is the client is a mechanic. Services for services- can’t beat it.

So at about 50 miles on the odometer, I got flat out excited. As a twenty year old, in a new truck, on the start of a 900 mile journey… the L.A. skyline at 10 at night was all I needed to throw a little fit of excitement, perhaps to the wonder of the people in their cars nearby. I stopped and took some pictures that didn’t come out, but here’s a stock photo instead:

To describe the rush of freedom that comes with a sight like this skyline- well I can’t - you just have to do it. Pack up and say good-bye to everyone, leave your schedule behind you, and just drive! It’s a great feeling.

So I leave L.A and I’m on the 5 Freeway. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on route 5 in California, but it’s a straight highway for miles and miles. Thank god for my music or I’d have died. But at the grapevine, theres a point where the highway peeks at about 4,000 feet above see level, and shifts to a 6% downward grade. I’m sharing this because it’s a great place to shift into neutral (later I’ve found that this is a bad idea from a mechanical standpoint- neutral may not be a good idea.) and just coast for the next 10 miles at about 70 mph, with not a touch to the gas pedal.

The rest of the journey was pretty boring, except that the St. Luis Reservoir was amazing at 3 in the morning, with an eerie mist lingering over the lake, and the treacherous road that circled around it- I’ve got some pictures coming up in the last post.

Needless to say, I arrived in Santa Clara, and right off the bat I again became ecstatic with the sight that I saw. It was 4 am, and I was tired, so I slept for a few hours, woke, and went looking for the convention center.

I can proudly say that I was one of the first people to get my badge at 7 am on the 26th. The 26th by the way, was 2 years and 5 months with my lovely Claudia Rayne, whom I almost brought with me. The scene was empty but whom did I meet in line? None other than Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris of Distilled, fellow mozzers! They were there before me, and were sorting out the WiFi so they could busy themselves with work.

This turned out to be the most boring day of the conference, but I got to shake Rand Fishkin’s hand, and met a bunch of people I never knew. Random meetings and boring “what do you do?” conversations. Not boring- just rather… typical. I still had a great time.

Things changed a bit when I met up with Waseem, from Canada. Totally random meeting, but for reasons undisclosed we hit it off. He and I worked on mingling with the couple hundred people that had met up for some event I’d not had access to. My free-to-register “expo only” pass was not going to stop me from getting my money’s worth out of this trip. Here’s the strategy:

When settling into a group of people talking, you’ve just got to know one person from the group and the other 4 people will drop everything to hand you a business card and ask you what you do. This is a PERFECT time to learn people’s names and businesses, so you can nudge yourself into another clique later on. Here are some things to say:

• Hey _____, did you see ______?
• Hey ______, do you have a booth at the Expo tomorrow?
• Hey ______, how’s it going, enjoying the conference?
• the options here are somewhat limitless. Just make the contact and pretend like you own the place. You soon will, and it progressively gets easier. If you’re successful enough people you’ve not met yet will approach you in much the same way. They do the work for you.

And what if you don’t know anyone in the group?

• Catch their badge from far off and now you know there name/business - that should be enough.
• Ask: Excuse me, have you seen where ______ went? (Rand Fishkin or someone they’d know)
• (if you know OF them) Are you ______? Wow, great to meet you. (shake hands, smoothly transition into business.)
• or even, “OMG - I went to high school with you. Small world!” (I went to high school with someone who looked just like this woman- seriously) “oh… no? sorry you look just like her. So what do you do?”
• easy as pie.

And there you have it, you’ve got a whole room of people in your pocket. Just takes a bit of courage and an interesting personality. You have to have something worth talking about and half the time it’s got nothing to do with business.

Another strategy is find people who are outside smoking, and ask them for a light. That’s how I met Tyler (more on him later) and Daren, of Webmaster.FM Radio Show. Later Tyler would tell me how “lucky” I was in running into him, but the truth is that luck had very little to do with it.

Well after all this networking, and a bit more of shaking hands and talk about search, I took off and drove to mountain view to crash at my cousin’s house. Oh yeah… did I mention I didn’t have a hotel room the entire trip? Yeah I’m awesome enough to not need one. Days 2, 3, 4, and 5 blow Day 1 out of the water, so check back soon for the good stuff.

-Fred out. 4 now…

March 04 2008 | People and People in Search and SMX and Travel | 1 Comment »

SEOmoz and SMX Meet ‘n Greet

Mozzers! (read: people who read/participate in SEOmoz) After the Google Dance, before you go for the night and if you feel up to it, we’re meeting together under the escalator behind the registration desk. After that we will be going out for a casual dinner with whomever is up for it.

See you there!

UPDATE: It didn’t happen, due to my ridiculous organizational skills and lack of a powerful blogging influence. It actually sort of DID happen, but not due to any effort of my own, many drunk people funneled in to the bar for a long, fun, late night after the Google Groove, including those Mozzers that were feeling up to hanging out. Oh and man I had a great evening. Sat down with a Google Engineer, Rand Fishkin, a Scottish all around awesome bloke, and some really big names and I just had a ball.

February 27 2008 | News and People in Search and SEOmoz | No Comments »

Holy Shiznit, I’m in Silicon Valley!

Yesterday morning I showed up here in Santa Clara for SMX West. I knew there were a lot of tech-startups and big companies here in the valley, but I wasn’t quite prepared for this! Picture it- you get off the freeway after driving 450 miles, you get lost looking for a convention center, and the first building you see is this one:

A big old fat Yahoo! building, though I’ve heard they have several. So I ask where to find parking, and drive around some more. Maybe twenty seconds pass and here I’m driving past AMD, McAfee, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, and a whole bunch more. Considering the geek I am, I just lit up with glee.

The expo has been amazing, and there are hundreds of people here, every single one of them are just brilliant as hell, and I’ve been having a blast. Of course I’ll write more about the expo when I’m not surrounded by people I’d like to meet, but I’ll leave with some interesting trivia.

Did you know that Google has been so kind as to set up all of Mountain View with free wi-fi? Man… that’s cool.

February 27 2008 | News and People in Search and Search and Search Marketing and technology and wireless | 1 Comment »

New Gifi chip has amazing potential

from http://www.slipperybrick.com/2008/02/gifi-chip/

“The University of Melbourne announced on Friday a new technology they are calling “GiFi”, which promises some serious game-changing wireless transfer speeds for all types of consumer gadgets. The tiny silicon chip invented by professor Stan Skafidas is able to move data through the air as fast as 5 gigabits per second at a distance of just over 30 feet.”

I believe the breakthrough was first reported by The Age

This technology is certainly expected to get faster, and astonish us from time to time. Wireless is very relatively new when compared to other technological advances since the global acceptance of the computer. Just to rattle of some big ones: Printers, Scanners, Fax, Voice-Mail, Laser Mice, E-mail, Databases, Structured Languages, Networking, Cell Phones, Microchips, CDA, MP3, Optical Drives, DVD readers/writers, gaming consoles, PC and console games themselves; the list is endless. One thing they have in common is that none of these technologies started at their maximum potential and to this day none have capped out with zero room for improvement.

So this “Gifi” it’s faster… about twice as fast as before. The distance is not great, but it’s certainly a start. If it can be widely applied to new micro-technology and the current usability of Bluetooth connections, you can connect a small device to another small or large device, and transfer data very quickly. Something you can already do… but now you can send more in the same amount of time, and perhaps more reliably.

The article mentions the distance as 30 feet, which is very comparable to the current operable distance of BlueTooth connections. What I did not find is whether that range drops off progressively or very quickly, nor any reported types of interference/insulators. If it is more like Wi-Fi then BlueTooth, possibly transferring data via Gi-Fi, then the range beyond this 30 foot range still may offer transfers at speeds comparable to the current Wi-Fi networks. Combined with relays, one could blanket an entire area (such as a school, or a shopping mall) with this amazingly fast wireless technology.

Good show, I say. Congratulations to your success Stan Skafidas.

February 23 2008 | News and technology and wireless | No Comments »

SMX is looking more likely by the day.

I’m not entirely sure if it’s going to happen yet or not, but I’m registered for SMX (Search Marketing Expo) in Santa Clara, Ca. Santa Clara, if I understand the geography well enough, is near Stanford University, Mountain View (Google!), and all the rest of Silicon Valley. It’s a 12 hour drive, round trip- I almost aught to just fly. I still may not be able to make it, there are a few unknowns I need to settle before I’m sure.

Anyway the reason I’m sharing this with you all is that I will be looking to meet with all the relevant people at this conference, and if you’ve got a specific question, I’d be happy to ask it for you. Unfortunately, however, unless I gather some funds very quickly- I certainly won’t be able to be present in the presentations this year. There are certainly be plenty of opportunities, regardless, and next year I’ll more than likely be more prepared.

I also mention it because it is my first conference so I’m excited, and because I’d like to hear from you as well if you’re going.  I will let you all know when I make the final decision!

February 21 2008 | News and People in Search and Search and Search Marketing | 2 Comments »