Analyzing a website for acquisition

1. Revenue – What are they, where do they come from, whats the algorithm for visitors to revenue. Automatic or sales required.
2. Content – How many pages? Dense or small pages. What’s the actual focus of the content? How have they organized it? For instance, a site about cars could be organized by brand, type of car (sports, sedan, van, truck, etc), country, parts of cars (engines, interiors, wheels). This makes a huge difference in terms of site utility. Why does it make sense?
3. SEO – Page construction, what terms have been pursued, source of links, increasing or decreasing position.
4. Site design & navigation – What are the main sections? What is promoted?
5. Site stickiness & appeal
6. Community or newsletter
7. Page design
8. Brand – memorable & appealing?

Did you hear that they cancelled summer school in California?

The webs amazing

I had two little experiences this weekend that reminds me how awesome the web is.

1. I looked up a friend that I hadn’t spoken to in 25 years.  Took minutes.

2. I started looking around at joker collections.  The truth is that I have a world class private joker collection which I’ve started to put up online.

Learning the Vocabulary of SEO

I’ve been working with a new colleague to teach him the language and methods and vocabulary of SEO. I’ve been playing with different educational methods. I created a course on how to blog for his benefit which taught him a new language and vocabulary. We’ve been doing a worked example in which we contrast todays vocabulary flash games with yesteryears vocabulary flash cards.

I’m trying to push the idea that learning today is different than before. 

The vocabulary is new. Here are some new vocabulary topics:
GRE Verbal Tips
Improve Through Active Learning
Analogy Vocabulary
PSAT Vocabulary
Synonym Vocabulary
Connotative and Denotative Vocabulary
ESL Vocabulary
Learning Dolch Words

I only wish that I had a better mastery of the vocabulary of homeschool curriculum so I could teach them the online tricks.

Page Rank – Real vs Visible

Page Rank, named after Larry Page, is a very confusing concept.

First of all there is the REAL page rank which only google knows. Then, there is the publicly viewable page rank on that little green bar (which has no significant privacy issues). It is only a faint distorted shadow of the real page rank. It differs from the REAL page rank since:
- real page rank is continously updated. Visible page rank is updated about 3x annually
- real page rank is a very complex calculation involving the incoming links weighted and adjusted in all sorts of different ways. Visible page rank is a simple count with occassional weird adjustments.

….”This page has been spidered and indexed but not yet ranked, so it makes sense.” Am I right?????
- the visible page rank for this page will someday appear. It will get most of it’s page rank (REAL & visible) from the vocab home page home from which it has a direct link. It will get some of it’s page rank (R & V) from the links that we are adding plus these links will refine for which terms this page ranks.

You are going thru a very similiar process that I went thru 5 years ago when I started T4L. I wish I had blogged about it all the way back. You can read some of it on the early “intermediate SEO” blog. Also, did I ever send you my powerpoint on intro to google?

Think of seo like soccer strategy. There are many basics to master. But then, it’s just an evolving game and much more art and feel than science.

SEO vocabulary

Do you speak SEO? Do you know words like SERP, PR, spam, H1, H2, page title, spider, crawl, and CSS? Many of course are technical acronyms.  You can’t play the game if you don’t the words.

Here’s another game. Speaking English for work, school, or social life. We’re helping people learn with useful Vocabulary Articles. Fro instance, we have writtien on Teaching with Crossword Puzzles, Vocabulary Flash Cards (they’re not obsolete but their leadership as a tool has been usurped by Flash games), how to Expand Your Vocabulary ,Word Power:Developing your Vocabulary , -GRE Verbal Tips , -Improve Through Active Learning .

School home pages

There is a great deal of competition to do well in the search engines for searches by school names.

Frankly, I’m not sure why since it’s not very valuable traffic.    On SpellingCity.com, there are a lot of school pages., mostly, they’re not active. But many are and they have links from the schools. Yet they are not showing up in webmaster tools as page with incoming and outgoing links.
Lets experiment!   :->

 First Presbyterian Church School as of March 3, 2009 now has two links to it’s home page.  The First There are no teachers listed so presumably it’s only one link in. Is this enough for it to show up in webmaster tools.

Spirit will look for this. Oh.  PS.  Schools teach. Tests text. The FCAT vocabulary test is worth preparing for by playing some great word games.

Google testers – What do they do?

I saw this on a resume that I received this week. I thought it was very very interesting. I can’t wait to interview her…

Jobs at Google

§     Google Search Engine Tester

Search Engine Analytical Skills – I would test the search engine for bugs and then figure out what exactly the user is searching for and what’s the best route to get the answer. 

§     Web Results Data Entry

Would receive information on the results user received from search engine and then rate them and enter them into data entry form.  I would rate them if they were useful to the user or not relevant and then apply markings such as “spam” or “malicious” after researching the page.

§     Research

I would receive internet searches and then have to research them (short and long periods of time) to find out more information on them and how I can apply this knowledge to best suit the customer.

How goes Google learn about writing and education?

Google of course is just a big computer which counts and categorizes.  So lets look at how it learns about what is related?  Lets use the example of learning about writing standards, which is an educational question. Lets be more specific and talk about how each state defines it.

Each state has its own educational standards. For each grade, there is specific grade level curriculum standards.  One of these is writing.  How does google understand the concept of teaching writing?  How would google find out what links to a page about teaching writing are relevant and what aren’t? Here’s the principles.

1. Authority sites and word counting. If you are an authority site, Google treats your opinion seriously. They count the words on your site. Lets say you use the words teaching writing alot.  Well, your links out with the words teaching writing will really count a lot.  Lets say you talk about different ways of teaching writing.  Google will understand this if the word count is high. So for instance, on your authority teaching writing site, you talk a lot about six trait writing and four trait writing. Google will consider these to be relevant to each other based on the correlation.  Google does a lot of word counting and correlations.

2. Neighborhoods and links and authority sites.  Google also learns about education and associations by looking at which sites link to what sites.  If there are ten authority sites which link to each other a lot, google considers them a neighborhood and the content is somehow associated.  How does google categorize the association? Again, they rely on keywords.

3. Does google start with any taxonomy of what associations to look for or is it purely statistical?  Traditionally, they relied on DMOZ and the google directory is an exact replication of the dmoz structure and content.  Is this still relevant or has google learned more from their statistics of words and links (and perhaps visits) or do they still rely on the human edited directories for some sort of organization?

I don’t know.  One of the best intermediate seo sites is perhaps worth asking….

Iphone Apps

The questions are easy:

- How to price?
- How much does Apple take?
- How does the marketing work? To Apple? To the public?
- What sort of volumes to expect?  If I’m successful, if I”m not?
- What’s the competition like?
- Any support from Apple?

I went to my local apple store where they knew little to nothing about development or business model or marketing or volumes. They did tell me how to check out existing applications by going to the itunes store (I suspect everyone else but me knew that. I kept going to the iphone application site).

Note iFlipr Flashcards for $.99, spanish anywhere for $9.99,

I’ll start collecting articles…

 

MacResearch article on business model. He mentions: Getting real numbers about the iPhone app market is hard, and I am just relying on the few analyses already out there and on the anecdotal evidence I gathered from iPhone developers (posts on the web and private conversations). Hopefully, the developers of Molecules, Mental Case, PCalc, Grafly, OsiriX, Atom in a Box and the many many other science apps will have more insights in the comments…
A good blog seems to be the Iphone App Entrepreneur which sadly seems to have stopped posting as of Oct 2008.  Specific articles:
Photoshop pieces to demo your iphone concept.
Snippets of sales data from Eliza Block, developer of the crossword puzzle app 2 Across
Rejection risk by apple
Number crunching posts…

TapTapTap shares his sales data. as well as ten iphone user secrets.

Pinch Media Post from summer 08 polemically discussing the pricing focusing on the pressure to be the cheapest.

Compliance Issues for a Small Business

Although I am a small business, there is a moderate but growing amount of paperwork to be compliant.  My process for being compliant.

I periodically ask my accountant, a fancy CPA, what else I should think about?
I periodically ask lawyers (I use several), what else I should think about?
Once I discover an issue, I study it and get compliant and then assign it to my office compliance manager who tracks expirations and renewals etc.

Here’s a quick list of my issues:

S Corp & location  - I’m registered in FL and need to pay up every year. I’m incorporated under a different name so I DBA which requires a ficticious name form. I file Federal income tax, state assets tax, and am licensed to do business in my county and city.

Employment – I pay and track Federal  income tax with-holding, social security, payroll tax, workmans comp, and probably some other payroll things handled thru ADP. Plus we have an array or benefits including HRA, medical insurance, dental insurance, long term disability insurance, death and dismemberment insurance, and a new Simple IRA as of 2009 (thru Fidelity).

Insurance – To get my lease, I signed up for an array of location and other insurances. I refused to get business interruption insurance as too expensive but got all the others. We had to fix my lease for that one.

I’m now adding PCI Compliance to handle credit cards.