Most of the sites I work on these days are on the small end of the scale, but a few are large news portals. One of them went through a site redesign a few months ago (before I got involved), and they’ve seen a large dropoff in traffic. I’m starting to look into why that happened, and wanted to share some ideas about how to fix the problem.
The fine folks over at SEOmoz provide Pro members with the ability do neat link analysis of web sites and download a CSV of the raw data. Will Critchlow posted over there recently about Advanced Link Analysis Charts to analyze SEOmoz data through their API and a bunch of spiffy Excel graphs. I’m more of a PHP guy, so I put together some very raw beginning code to read in the Linkscape CSV and show pretty pictures using Google Chart.
I’ve been emailing with some new coaches, and thought this info might be helpful for planning. I’ve included last year’s and this year’s budgets, and some ideas for how to get the best sets of equipment the cheapest.
Hey, just checking in with my fellow JrFLL coaches! Our team is starting practice next week, and we have a second 3rd grade team starting at Valley Park Elementary. We’re using WeDo components this year, and planning to move up to NXT and FLL next year.
I’ve got a client with a large number of SVG images of products. The format works really well in a lot of ways, because the images are scalable and look great at any resolution. As usual, Internet Explorer is a thorn in our sides. Today, it’s because IE doesn’t support PNG. Sheesh.
Google announced a new Tab for the AdWords interface entering beta for some U.S. English customers soon. They’re calling it the “Opportunities” tab, but in Google-speak, that means, “Ways you can give Google more money.” Let’s take a look at the available details and ideas that would truly benefit advertisers:
Google has added a series of 6 videos on using the Search Based Keyword Tool (SbKT or SKTool) to their YouTube account. Here’s the first:
Great stuff, though they have to jump through some hoops at the end that my Missing Link tool (part of AdWords Evolved) makes much faster and more powerful.
This is an email I wrote to someone thinking of coaching a new Jr FIRST LEGO League team, and I thought others might find it useful:
Last year was my first, and it wasn’t that hard to run. I’m sure other homeschool folks would be interested, and I think there was a homeschool team at last year’s Kansas City JrFLL competition. Not sure who the coach was, though.
Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring site performance, but all too many sites install it and then never look at the info. We’ve found that automating the reporting and delivering stats via email helps clients stay on top of their site performance. Here’s a section from the book AdWords Evolved about how to do it:
Here’s a quick start to using Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool to find new, high-value, low-competition keywords on your existing site with zero work. To do this, we’ll use Google’s new “search based keyword tool”, SKTool.
Click over to:
Click ‘Sign in’ and sign in to your AdWords account. (Screen shots below show a random site I’m not associated with.)
I've got a new tool & book available for advertisers who want to move from losing money to making money with AdWords. Check it out!
I'm a web developer, SEO and PPC guy in the midwest. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you find some useful info! You can follow me on Twitter @gcrocker.
