Page Rank – it is debated by SEO's and misunderstood by website owners. At one point in time, Page Rank was the all important feature for determining where you ranked in search results. It was, by all calculations, a measure of the importance of a website.
So what good is Page Rank now?
Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar's Page Rank display to tell you how Google's algorithms assess the importance of the page you are viewing.
Google's explanation of Page Rank on their toolbar feature page
Page Rank is perceived by many to be the yardstick with which to evaluate the importance Google gives to a web page.
An Example
I'll give you an example. We have been working with a client in the insurance industry to bring their website into the top ten results. Following three months of hard work by my search engine promotion
team, we lifted the site from Google obscurity to a first page listing. During our review meeting with our client, they raised a concern: one of their competitors had a higher Page Rank than their newly optimized site.
The fact that our client's site was ranked above their competitors did not seem to matter. It was our client's perception, particularly due to Google's explanation of Page Rank, that their page was not as important.
Being in the search engine promotion industry, we know that the Google Page Rank display is insignificant, but those who are not in the industry do not know this. All they know is what Google tells them.
The Page Rank Display is Not an Importance Indicator
To demonstrate to our client that Page Rank does not measure how good a site is, we ran a test. Taking an unused domain we owned added some nonsense text with links pointing to the same page. We added a couple of inbound links to get site indexed by Google, sat back, and waited.
Within five weeks that site, which was filled with nonsense, was given a Page Rank of 5/10. Many very important websites filled with important content and a lot of links are not given this high of a Page Rank, yet our useless website managed to achieve a high Page Rank.
If the Page Rank display really assesses the page importance, why would our useless website is counted as important? The fact is, the page is not important – despite what Google's Page Rank display may tell us.
What is the Point of the Page Rank Display?
If a searcher is looking to make a purchase online and arrives at a website with the exact item that they are looking for at a favorable price, should they not buy the product if the Page Rank display gives them a low rating?
The only use of the Page Rank display would be for people who want to optimize their website for the search engines. Of course, if the Page Rank display is inaccurate as it was in the example given above, then it is of no use to optimizers as well.
Although Page Rank may still be a factor in how a website ranks in Google, the Page Rank display offers no tangible benefit. So let's put the Page Rank display to bed.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Page Rank Toolbar Let's Put it to Bed
How to Start a Book Club—10 Easy Steps
So you want to start your own book club? Terrific! Book discussion groups are great ways to make new friends, keep in touch with old ones, discover new books, and have meaty conversations. To help you get organized, simply follow these 10 steps and you’ll be on your way!
1. Decide what kind of a club you want to be—do you want to be seriously academic with a heavy emphasis on book discussion and minimal social chat? Or do you enjoy the social bonding aspect of a book club—food, wine, personal sharing—and want to keep discussions shorter, light and fun? Probably, it’s somewhere in between the two.
2. Decide what kind of books you want to read—do you enjoy reading the older classics or contemporary novels? Challenging works or somewhat lighter? Perhaps poetry, plays, or nonfiction—history, biographies, travel stories, current events. What about specific genres—detective/mystery, romance, inspirational, science fiction or fantasy? Perhaps you’re eclectic—you like a variety of genres.
3. Choose three friends who share similar reading tastes and ways of approaching book discussions—that’s important. You all want to be on the same page, so to speak. Each one of the three should ask one or two others, for a total of 7-10 members. It doesn’t matter if you don’t all know each other; in fact, it’s more fun if you don’t. And start small—you can always add new members when you want, though it’s good to stop at 16, a maximum number for most book clubs.
4. Choose when and where to meet. Once you all get together, pick a day and time of the month that works with everyone’s schedule. Some clubs meet in the evenings, after work; others on weekends. Those who are at home with children, or retired, find midmornings or lunchtime best. The most important thing is to establish a schedule and try to stick to it.
Then, of course, decide where you want to meet. Most clubs meet in each others’ homes or restaurants. Others find rooms in local libraries, Y’s, or other more public places. Or you may decide to become a library-sponsored group, in which case you will always have a good source of fresh new members.
5. Decide about food. There will be food, right? Of course. Do you want just appetizers or desserts…or do you want full meals? And who prepares the food—does every member bring a dish…or does each member cook once a during the year? Maybe it’s brown bag lunch or a potluck supper.
Think, too, about having themed food to match your book—feature food from Afghanistan when you read A Thousand Splendid Suns. Look for Book Club Recipes on the web to give you ideas.
6. Decide how to select your books. Most clubs use one of two basic methods—voting or rotation. The voting begins with members making book suggestions, followed by discussion, and then a vote. The process can be as formal or informal as you want. The rotation system means that every member gets a month to choose a book. Both methods have their strong suits…and their drawbacks.
Choose two or three books at a time so members can read at their own pace. Many clubs choose all their books for the year at one meeting, but that ties clubs into a rigid schedule…and it’s unfair to members who had to miss the one meeting.
7. Give yourselves a name. And be creative: some of my favorites are The Happy Bookers…or First, the Food Book Club…or The Brooksville Book Babes.
8. Send out monthly reminders for every meeting. Don’t rely on peoples’ memories. Use email, phone or postcards, so make sure you keep an up-to-date contact list.
9. Keep a journal. It’s a nice way to keep track of all the books you’ve read and what you thought of them. You might include photo highlights of special meetings or trips to hear an author speaker.
10. Give back to the community. Collect dues and donate books to your local library, or sponsor a scholarship for youngster in a literacy program. Schedule reading times for nursing homes patients.
Starting book clubs takes some initial work up front to get them off the ground. But once up and running, you’ll be surprised at how they take on a life of their own. Good luck…and happy reading!
by: MollY Lundquist
Friday, July 31, 2009
6 Reasons to Market Your Website with Social Media
All bloggers and website owners want more traffic, regardless of how much they currently receive. In recent years social media marketing has become a popular and effective practice for many bloggers. Still, even with some getting excellent results from social media marketing (SMM), many others have not adopted SMM as a promotional method of their own.
1. Huge Traffic Potential
The potential for virtually limitless traffic is probably the biggest draw for social media marketing. Sure, there are lots of other ways you can market a website, but there aren’t other ways to get the huge amount of traffic in a short period of time that you can get through effective SMM.
2. Search Engine Optimization
SMM works hand-in hand with SEO. Many social media marketers use SMM to build links to their sites so that their search engine rankings will increase as a result. In-bound links are extremely valuable for SEO, so the two naturally fit together.
If your post does well with social media you will get the links from the social media sites themselves, plus it will likely draw links from other bloggers as a result of the exposure it has received. This is a great low-cost way to build links.
3. Viral Potential
Some of the best social media content will be passed around by thousands of users of various social media sites. You may promote your content in one place, but others may pick it up and pass it around the web without any additional effort on your part.
The viral nature of social media marketing means that there is plenty of potential for leveraging your effort into incredible results. Of course, on the very best content will go viral, but for those who can achieve it, the results will be hard to top.
4. Huge Potential Audience
Social media sites like Digg, Twitter and Facebook continue to grow, and the potential audience for social media marketers keeps growing as well. Just about any site can find a targeted audience of social media users.
Part of marketing a website or blog is getting it in front of a large number of targeted visitors. With social media that audience will not always be extremely targeted, but it can be very large.
5. It’s Free!
Want to market your site on a budget (or no budget at all!)? SMM is a great choice because it gives you plenty of potential and no need to spend money. Yes, you can hire a marketer if you want to, but you can also do it on your own.
If you do want to hire someone to help with SMM, chances are, you will still spend less than you will for other types of marketing, and you’ll get more bang for your buck.
6. Networking Potential
Social media marketing is social – I know that’s a big surprise. With all the attention on traffic and exposure it’s easy to overlook the potential to meet and connect with other bloggers and social media uses. You will likely find that the networking aspect will be equally as beneficial as the traffic that you receive directly from the social media sites.
Tags: blog marketing, internet, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, smm, social media marketing, website marketing, websites
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 12:55 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
7 tips for effective listening: productive listening does not occur naturally. It requires hard work and practice - Back To Basics - effective listeni
TO BE SUCCESSFUL AT THEIR job, internal auditors must be able to write, speak, and listen effectively. Of these three skills, effective listening may be the most crucial because auditors are required to do it so often. Unfortunately, listening also may be the most difficult skill to master.
Effective listening is challenging, in part, because people often are more focused on what they're saying than on what they're hearing in return. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, people think the voice mail they send is more important than the voice mail they receive. Generally, senders think that their message is more helpful and urgent than do the people who receive it.
Additionally, listening is difficult because people don't work as hard at it as they should. Listening seems to occur so naturally that putting a lot of effort into it doesn't seem necessary. However, hard work and effort is exactly what effective listening requires.
Internal auditors must listen to explanations, rationales, and defenses of financial practices and procedures. They are constantly communicating with fellow employees whose backgrounds range from accounting to finance to marketing to information systems. In addition, explanations by fellow employees of any "unusual" practices often pose a significant challenge to an internal auditor's listening skills. Auditors can use the following techniques to improve these skills.
1. CONCENTRATE ON WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING. When listening to someone, do you often find yourself thinking about a job or task that is nearing deadline or an important family matter? In the middle of a conversation, do you sometimes realize that you haven't heard a word the other person has said? Most individuals speak at the rate of 175 to 200 words per minute. However, research suggests that we are very capable of listening and processing words at the rate of 600 to 1,000 words per minute. An internal auditor's job today is very fast and complex, and because the brain does not use all of its capacity when listening, an auditor's mind may drift to thinking of further questions or explanations rather than listening to the message at hand. This unused brainpower can be a barrier to effective listening, causing the auditor to miss or misinterpret what others are saying. It is important for internal auditors to actively concentrate on what others are saying so that effective communication can occur.
2. SEND THE NONVERBAL MESSAGE THAT YOU ARE LISTENING. When someone is talking to you, do you maintain eye contact with that person? Do you show the speaker you are listening by nodding your head? Does your body language transmit the message that you are listening? Are you leaning forward and not using your hands to play with things? Most communication experts agree that nonverbal messages can be three times as powerful as verbal messages. Effective communication becomes difficult anytime you send a nonverbal message that you're not really listening.
3. AVOID EARLY EVALUATIONS. When listening, do you often make immediate judgments about what the speaker is saying? Do you assume or guess what the speaker is going to say next? Do you sometimes discover later that you failed to interpret correctly what the speaker was telling you? Because a listener can listen at a faster rate than most speakers talk, there is a tendency to evaluate too quickly. That tendency is perhaps the greatest barrier to effective listening. It is especially important to avoid early evaluations when listening to a person with whom you disagree. When listeners begin to disagree with a sender's message, they tend to misinterpret the remaining information and distort its intended meaning so that it is consistent with their own beliefs.
4. AVOID GETTING DEFENSIVE. Do you ever take what another person says personally when what her or she is saying is not meant to be personal? Do you ever become angry at what another person says? Careful listening does not mean that you will always agree with the other party's point of view, but it does mean that you will try to listen to what the other person is saying without becoming overly defensive. Too much time spent explaining, elaborating, and defending your decision or position is a sure sign that you are not listening. This is because your role has changed from one of listening to a role of convincing others they are wrong. After listening to a position or suggestion with which you disagree, simply respond with something like, "I understand your point. We just disagree on this one." Effective listeners can listen calmly to another person even when that person is offering unjust criticism.
5. PRACTICE PARAPHRASING. Paraphrasing is the art of putting into your own words what you thought you heard and saying it back to the sender. For example, a subordinate might say: "You have been unfair to rate me so low on my performance appraisal. You have rated me lower than Jim. I can do the job better than him, and I've been here longer." A paraphrased response might be: "I can see that you are upset about your rating. You think it was unfair for me to rate you as I did." Paraphrasing is a great technique for improving your listening and problem-solving skills. First, you have to listen very carefully if you are going to accurately paraphrase what you heard. Second, the paraphrasing response will clarify for the sender that his or her message was correctly received and encourage the sender to expand on what he or she is trying to communicate.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
How Filtering Browsing
As a medium that allows unlimited access, the Internet is not protected from the negative that can harm users. This needs to be addressed and in understanding wisely. Activities including browsing the Internet should be given attention. Supervision and without adequate understanding, someone who he can not quite lost in the wilderness site that is not worth see in , such as pornographic sites and sites that contain violence.
These are by various parties, including the producers of software, one microsoft. Microsoft insert a filter mechanism in the crawl for them to stamp content-specific content. Next steps - steps:
1. Click "Control Panel"> "Internet Options"> "content". Click the "enable", then select "approved site"
2. You can type the site's main site that you want to block in the column under the heading is "allow this website" and press the "never".
Microsoft has this mechanism in such ancient, so if you have children who are smart and we should not
concerned wiliness our children.
This mechanism can be done easily, with the explorers such as the second. In addition there is an opportunity filtering model will stop this activity you are roaming in total, in the queue you can not open all sites at all.
If you want to do content filtering in this serious, you can try some software that really in the allotment for it with the search for the search engine.
Basically, the best filter is a community of parents and children, where parents give the child understanding on matters worse both on the internet, and all the consequences that will be in the face when a child violates the agreement
(gun/m/cbn/2009)
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
what's in a name
"what's in a name"
expression in a drama Shakespeare, Romeo and juliet often people used to say how a name is not important, what about the term in the IT world, it's on you?
Adobe
derived from the word "Dobe Creek" a name taken from the river behind the house founders John Warnock
Apple Computers
The name is created, Steve Jobs has not yet received the name of the company entry staff sari, chance at the same time that he was eating an apple.
Corel
This name comes from the name of the creator Dr. Michael Cowpland. Corel's own abbreviation Cowpland Research Laboratory.
Google
The name is derived from the word farce of much information that can be searched by searchengine, the term is "Googola" which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. creator that Sergey Brin and Larry Page it was to give the achievements of this project to investors, and they successfully get the funds in the form of a check that is addressed to "google"
Yahoo
The name is found by Jonathan Swift and used in a book titled "gulliver's Travels", which means that a person is menjijikan and act like humans
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Optimize the BODY tag
Body tags are very important benefits dal am SEO. For that you need to really consider making this BODY tag.
1. Link: write the link in accordance with what the web page dituju. You may provide a link with long provided that truly represents the web page that dituju. The word "Click HERE" certainly less good than the "Psychology Re ¬ sources" for example, if you want to describe a world of psychology. URL. a beautiful course also more interesting than the URL of the rigid, in WordPress, you can Activate the URL with a beautiful change in the Options.
2. Content: As has been described Previously, create good content, and not do in the wild so that the indexing is considered spam. The text more understandable by search engines so you need to use berimprovisasi ¬ compared to the images.
3. Pictures: If you use images, give the value of the alt = "" URL of image is good, that really describes the picture. This is because search engines only rate based on size. resolution and the value of the alt.
4. Flash: If you do not need too, do not use flash animation because search engines can not index flash. So the links in the flash it is difficult to see by search engines.
