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Google is changing. I am not!

homeschool10x — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:54:16 +0000

I read about the various Google releases and how the companies that rely on the search engines rush around to adjust. I’m always a little baffled since I rely entirely on Google but I almost never make any changes. Here’s why. I build my approach to search engines around the question of what I would do if I were Google. How would I pick the best content for different searches.

This keeps me away from doing anything tricky to exploit a momentary glitch or weakness in their system. When the SEO nerds point out that google really likes some crazy technique, I return to my question of whether that is reflection of what google really wnats or is it just an artifact of how the algorithms are currently implemented. And I behave accordingly assuming that the fixes to the algorithms come so fast and furious that its useless to try to work the angles.

Some changes do hit me as likely to have long term influence. For instance, I think Google is slowly moving from purely link counting to including social media recommendations as a type of link and even, visitor retention. So we strive to keep our visitors mentioning us and liking us on their social media and hopefully, even staying on our site for long periods of time. Radical huh?

Here’s some crazy numbers.

Vocabulary Website has average visitor staying on site for 10 page views! A bounce rate of 10 percent. And 18K Facebook likes!

Help Google Find the Best Word Game

homeschool10x — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:48:50 +0000

I just checked on Google and although she is admittedly smarter than me, I think she goofed on this one. I’ve been looking at the word games that google ranks at the top of the charts and I think she has it wrong. Here are my choice for the best educational word games. Google, please check these out and see if you should be paying more attention to them!

Phonics can help a person recognize more words, improve spelling, increase reading speed and comprehension, improve written communication, help with pronunciation, and improve vocabulary. While a learner may still have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of some words, he or she will be able to sound out many, many more on his/her own. Those learning phonics should begin by learning the vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. They should work on the short vowel sounds before moving on to the long vowel sounds. These sounds are foundational for learning to read English words. Then students can move on to consonants and consonant blends. Learning to read can boost one’s self-confidence and help a learner to feel more comfortable when asked to read aloud. And phonics is not just for Kindergarten and first grade students! American students and ESL (English as a Second Language) students, both young and old, can benefit from learning phonics. Flash games are a great way for one to get started learning phonics!

Facebooks New Icon:Send

homeschool10x — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:33:52 +0000

Historically, Facebook has given us two icons to use: one shares, the other likes. Of course, there’s history.

At first we friended, then we joined (briefly)< then we like.

The share icon might now be in the process of being obsoleted in favor of SEND. WOOPS, I just read the Facebook official line and it turns out that SEND is more of an evolution of like than share. And I quote from http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/send/:

Send Button

Core Concepts › Social Plugins › Send Button

The Send Button allows your users to easily send your content to their friends. People will have the option to send your URL in an inbox message to their Facebook friends, to the group wall of any Facebook group they are a member of, and as an email to any email address. While the Like Button allows users to share your content with all of their friends, the Send Button allows them to send a private message to just a few friends.

The message will include a link to the URL specified in the send button, along with a title, image, and short description of the link. You can specify what is shown for the title, image, and description by using Open Graph meta tags.

Get a combined Like and Send button

You can implement the send button on its own, but if you also want a Like button on your site, you can simply addsend=true as an attribute to the Like button. This will render the Like button and Send button next to each other. Find the documentation on the Like button page.

Twitter tinyurl links, does google count them?

homeschool10x — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:15:55 +0000

I wonder whether once twitter has reduced my link to a tiny.cc type link, does any “google juice” actually get transmitted by these tweets? I’ve looked at google webmaster tools to see if they are listed as incoming links. Nope. Yes all these twitter experts say that they are.

Thoughts?

Social Media Question: To like or share, to tweet or to follow?

homeschool10x — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 13:02:35 +0000

I read on the intermediate SEO blog:

To like or to share, to tweet or to follow?

I’ve put together a reasonable social media strategy across my range of sites. I’m now interested in optimizing it.

In places where I put up Facebook icons, I’ve had to decide whether to ask them to:- like our facebook account- like our web page- share it to their Facebook account
On Twitter, I have to choose between an icon that:- tweets a suggested message- follows our tweets
Does anyone have any insight or methodology or case studies on how to compare the benefits or optimize at this level?

It’s funny that with so many so called social media experts that whenever I ask this question, I get an absolute blank stare. After a while, they work up to: “You need to figure out some way to test it and what your priorities are. Gee, thanks. But surely somebody else has already worked through this problem a few times and has a few suggested guidelines or a case study to work from.

Google Instant Search

homeschool10x — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 10:01:45 +0000

In the last month or so, Google made a most dramatic change, they introduced google instant search. For most users, the experience changed so slightly as to be unremarkable but to the online world, revolution!

It works like this, as I type into a Google search box, it suggests terms to me based on the letters typed so far. So if I type in h, it starts suggesting terms like hulu, hotmail, and homedepot.

These are presumably the most popular terms that start with the letter h, for my area!

A few notes to pursue.

I believe it’s regional in that the letter F produces FCAT pretty high on the list.
It’s not personalized.
Google serves up search results, both free and sponsored, pretty quick.
I’ve heard that that after 3 seconds, they count the PPC ads as having an impression and if they don’t get a click, it’ll figure in their CTR.

This is a huge f*ing deal….

May Day Release

homeschool10x — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:01:33 +0000

I’ve been educating myself, homeschooling myself if you will, about the release last spring by Google of some new algorithms that affect the rankings of different sites i the search engines. As best I can tell the purpose is to restrict sites from placing well for too many terms. They want more specialized sites to appear higher in the ranks and sites which cover thousands or tens of thousands of terms to only place well for their main focus.

To my eye, it was an admission that having about, wikipedia, suite 101, and all the other mega sites appear on the first page was making a google search predictable, boring, and not so useful.

I first read about this from the intermediate seo blog by Mr. John. ouse!

SEO Issues and Numbers of Educational Links

homeschool10x — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:23:08 +0000

Do you think that social media educational sites where you can set up blogs and pages and such can effectively transmit google juice to other sites?

Homeschooling Materials Online

Homeschooling today offers a superior education because of the ability for parents to customize an education using the amazing online resources. This homeschool materials lens will show users what resources are easily available, usually at very low cost or free.

Learning Analogies
Analogies (as in: A is to B as 1 is to 2) are a ubiquitous staple of standardized tests, begging the question, “Why are they so important to learn?” Quite simply, analogies play a significant role not only in problem solving and decision making, but also in perception and memory as well as communication and reasoning. In fact, even creativity and emotion are closely related to and affected by one’s ability to analogize. Analogies can be categorized into many types, including synonym analogies (parody is to satire as rogue is to scoundrel) and part-whole analogies (Eiffel Tower is to France as Great Pyramid is to Egypt). A great way to practice working with analogies is through fun online games.

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Todays Learners - Education has changed forever.

Forget the idea that you can send your kids off worry-free to the neighborhood school
Forget trusting the school to teach your children
Forget all your ideas of students being empty eager vessels to fill full of knowledge….

Why? Because things have changed. Technology, the school systems, the students and the companies that hire them have all changed. Lets start with the students…

I’m talking about the youth of today and also the work force in today’s competitive companies. Online education is now mainstream with teachers now choosing between careers in schools, tutoring, or teaching online.Online teaching is hot! Our people are now, as Marc Prensky calls them, “Digital Natives” with skills and a mindset suited to todays technical realities. Learning styles have evolved as have our diagnostic tools and categories of learnig styles and dysfunctions. The skills are different too with keyboarding & web researching moving into mainstream skills. And while public schools still dominate the educational system, homeschooling and virtual schools are the two hottest growth areas in education. They’re cost effective and they work!

How different is todays technology- Well, remember that just ten years ago, twenty volume sets of encyclopedias were being sold as a primary information resource. How quaint it seems today.

The amazing internet has started its information revolution and has totally changed the nature of information access and retrieval. And today’s companies and schools are different. Entire layers of middle managers are now gone from America ’s corporations.

Today, entry level employees receive, and respond, to emails and calls directly from company executives, a level and type of communication that would have been infeasible and unthinkable, just a decade or so ago. Telecommuting has gone from fringe to mainstream. Email, once exotic and unreliable, is increasingly the main internal form of communication. Video conferencing too is shifting into the mainstream. Todays-Learners.com reports on the successful paradigms for today’s learners.

Social Media Icons

homeschool10x — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:30:42 +0000

I’ve been reading several social media posts on the issues around facebook icons. The Facebook Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site.

The Facebook share or Add or bookmark icon is for pages that are not on facebook?

Facebook Icons on non-Facebook pages.

I’m still not satisfied that I fully understand the issues of putting Facebook icons on a NON-Facebook page. I see two possibilities:

1- Like (previously friend) – makes the visitor a fan of OUR Facebook page. Can this only be used if the webpage has an associated Facebook page. It’s done with an iframe. I was just reading a post about discussing its awesomeness from the aspect of making the likes visible.

2 – Share (previously bookmark) - creates a link to the webpage on the user’s profile page. Perhaps preferable for SEO. http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?…

Once I get this sorted out, I’ll try figuring out the difference in icons between tweeting and retweeting….I got started on pondering this from this confused post on social media icons.

homeschool10x — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:49:47 +0000

I’m still reading about this website with online information for Small Businesses on Credit Card Merchant Accounts, Third Party Processors, Shopping Cart Software, PCI et al

It’s not a sales site, it’s the reflections of a small business type (maybe $3M in revenue) as he tries to run and sell online in the educational area.

Here’s the latest post: