The procedure I use to track these down works like this:

1. Spider the site to capture all files, ignoring images:
   wget --recursive --random-wait -w 1 --force-html -R gif -R png -R jpg -R pdf -R css -R js -R mov http://www.yoursite.com/
2. Look for pages that DON’T have Analytics, again ignoring image files, css, etc.:
   find . -type f -print | xargs grep -c UA-12341234 | grep -v png | grep -v gif | grep -v jpg | grep -v images | grep -v pdf | grep -v css | grep -v robots.txt | grep -v '\.js' | grep :0

Works like a champ to ferret out weird pages. You can of course use the same approach to grep for other strings that need to be on all site pages.

Remember when considering search engine optimization to focus first on goals, then traffic, then phrases, then rank. Ranking for irrelevant phrases won’t get you more or better leads.

Early on, be sure to set up goal/conversion tracking in Analytics. Most sites have several goals:

Here’s a related post if you’re having trouble setting goal values.

Once you have goals and conversions info you can track that back to phrases and find out which ones work best for you. This is a bit of a rosy outlook in that many sites won’t have enough high-value conversions to be statistically significant, which is why I emphasize soft goals like time-on-site and visit-depth.

Folks who spend a lot of time on your site or look at lots of your pages are pretty likely to subscribe to your newsletter or submit your contact form later on, so look at the phrases driving that kind of traffic and put your SEO time and money into those.

The problem was the smaller belt. I’d bought it about a year ago after losing 30 pounds, and was happy to have a 34″ instead of a 36″ belt. In my new “skinny” waist size, the end of the belt tucked nicely into the belt loop to the left of the buckle and all was well.

Then I started eating like in the old days. And before I knew it, some pants seemed to require me to use the next “larger” (i.e. “fatter”) belt hole. This caused the end of the belt to no longer quite reach the belt loop, so it flapped around like a constant reminder that Fried Food Makes You Fat. The straw that broke this camel’s back was when my scale had a highly offensive number on it one morning after eating way too much the night before.

Then we started going to the pool. Last year, I proudly yanked my shirt off and hopped in the the kids, showing off my skinny belly. This year, uh, not so much. Maybe I’ll just read for a while and let you kids play in the pool. Sure, that water is chilly sometimes, but being up a few pounds wasn’t helping my interest level.

We go to Colorado the first week of August most years, and I like to hike there. Being skinny made hiking a breeze the past couple of years, and I was clearly not on a trajectory for such ease this year.

Soon I will look like this guy. ©iStockphoto.com/philipdyer

So I started dieting. Here’s how:

1. Set a goal. I want to lose 10 pounds by Colorado.
2. Change behavior. I’m cutting way down on calories.
3. Set a reward. Mmmm, reward.
4. Track performance. Bleh, tracking.
5. Tell people. Yuck, accountability.

My goal was pretty straightforward. I’ve been as low as 15 pounds lower recently, so getting down 10 would be good. Getting down 15 would be great, but we’ll see how it goes. Getting down 20+ would be as amazing as my father-in-law, and is pretty damned unlikely.

Behavior-wise I’m doing a few things:

1. When eating out, set aside half of the meal up front. Even if it’s a small salad, go ahead and ask for a takeout box, cut that sucker in half, and put it in the box for lunch the next day. There is no way a normal human needs to eat the vast volume of food most suburban Kansas restaurants feel compelled to put on a plate.
2. I learned this from awesome nutritionist Cheryl Sindell: If food is not pleasing, toss it. Apple too soft? Toss it. Banana all nasty and brown? Toss it. Yes, I feel a pang of guilt when I do this, but life’s too short and calories too precious to waste on bad food.
3. Cut out alcohol. I loves me some wine. And some rum. And some margaritas. And some whatever else. But that’s a lot of calories I can do without.
4. Don’t count calories. Seriously. If it is fried, it is bad for you. If it is bigger than your head, it is bad for you. If it is half bread, it is bad for you. If it is smothered in cheese, it is bad for you. There is no great mystery to this. There are no hidden calories waiting to fatten you up in a salad, even if it has goat cheese, pecans, and tasty dressing. They are fine. Just don’t eat a volume of them equivalent to a movie theater popcorn container and You Will Lose Weight.

Dieting is in many ways its own reward, but there are a few specific ones I’m interested in:

• Friends telling you “Damn, you are a skinny bastard.”
• Moving back to the “skinny” belt hole
• I really want a reprap 3d Printer, so I’m setting aside my wine money to put into one of those. Unfortunately, if I lose weight too fast I won’t have enough $, but that’s just a risk I’ll have to take!
• Hiking easier in Colorado.
• Being a bit more willing to shuck my shirt off and swim with my kids at the community pool.

To track performance I set up a Google Spreadsheet with columns for: Date, weight, whether I avoided wine and get my 3d printer $ for that day, and comments (“Party at Bough’s”, “Sangria at Spin“, etc.). I can update the spreadsheet on my iPhone after I weigh myself in the morning, so it’s easy.

Telling others always helps when you’re trying to accomplish something, because there’s a tiny bit of accountability once others know what you’re trying to accomplish. So I told my wife and kids, and wrote this post.

Combining the above two ideas, I decided I really should embed some view of the Google Spreadsheet here, so here’s my weight loss chart:

Glenn's Weight Loss

God, I love Google Spreadsheets.

So, guys, just follow the above and you can lose some weight. My wife tells me that none of this works for women and all that works for women is to stop eating anything and go running twice a day. I’m sure that’s true, because my wife told me.

Cousin Dave warned us we might run into weather.

Ben (10) and Elizabeth (7) were sitting in the back of the ol’ minivan, headed home from Granny’s house in Oklahoma. They were occupied with tormenting each other, playing Minecraft, reading books, all that stuff. As we drove along I-44 into Missouri, it was clear we’d have some serious rain ahead, so I took a peek on the i-Phone. Indeed it was quite a storm system.

We continued on our path around Baxter Springs and up into the southeast corner of Kansas, and started getting tons of rain. A few minutes later, the wind really started to pick up, so I checked AM radio. It was full of tornado warnings in counties I’d never heard of but was probably driving through.

I told Ben: “Stop playing your game and start watching for tornadoes.” He’s never followed instructions faster! I called my lovely wife who was safe at home and told her “I’m 20 miles south of Pittsburg, KS and need you to check for tornadoes.” She says there are several in the area, and that we probably need to get to shelter.

So I’m looking for a place to stop, and there’s a great place. Cinderblock building, no windows, open for business. And three big X’s out front.

It was a rural porn shop. I’d rather die in a  tornado than explain any of that to my kids, so we kept driving a little further.

We spotted a Doppler radar tower and adjacent building, and figured we could stop there. Surely the people who tell you to “seek cover” have to let you in! The doors were locked, and the doorbell broken, so we hung around outside under an awning until one of the weather staff arrived at work (all hands on deck). He looked a little unsure about letting us in to the building, but a crying 7 year old with a blankie is pretty convincing, so in we went.

It turned out the building wasn’t just the radar location, it was also the TV studio. So we watched the weather on their breakroom TV, and then the nice-looking weatherman from TV would go off air and then walk through the hall outside where we were sitting. It was odd.

The staff were completely busy getting updates from social media, phone, and their insane amount of weather gear. But every time there was a break, they would head to the windows and look out to see what it was really like. They’d come through the break room every now & then and say Hi, then head back to work.

We heard that there had been a tornado in Baxter Springs, which we’d driven just a couple of miles around. But the big damage was in Joplin, about 10 miles southeast of the station. I’m guessing that most of the folks who work there live in Joplin, and odds are that 3/4 of them had houses that were being destroyed while they were at work getting the word out. They were amazing.

An hour and a half later, the meteorologist came through, asked which way we were heading, and said it would probably be fine. So we headed out, and two minutes later we were past the “dry line” and in the sunshine.

So yay, all’s well and the kids (and I) have an interesting story for a Monday morning. I hope your Sunday was as interesting and safe as ours. Please keep the folks of Joplin in your thoughts!

Step 1: Identify your Keyword

First up, figure out what keyword you want to improve your page’s rank for. For this test, I’m using the phrase “basketball drills”. I just chose this at random and hoped I’d be able to find a good example site in it. See how that worked out below!

Step 2: Identify the Competition

Chances are you already know who this is, but doing a search for your keyword on Google and using the top results is a good start.

Step 3: Find Your Missing Keywords

At this point you should have a good feel for how your page stacks up against the competition.  Now let’s see what words they have that you don’t have, and what words they have in greater frequency than you have.

For the example keyword basketball drills, let’s say that our site is www.basketballteacher.com, which has LDA of roughly 61% and ranks #17 on Google for the phrase. Here’s where we’ll use this new LDA Optimizer tool.

This tool takes your phrase, your URL, and up to 9 competitors’ URLs. It then finds words they use that you don’t, and words that they use more on average than you do, and provides a word cloud showing your opportunities. It can take a couple of minutes to run, so be patient!

To exclude words specific to just a handful of sites, you can specify “Show Keywords Seen on at Least” at the bottom of the form. I used a setting of “4 sites” for my test but got similar results with as many as 8 sites. I recommend playing with this until you’re happy with the results, seeing lots of good words to add but not a lot of extraneous noise.

Step 5: Reviewing Missing/Insufficient Keyword Use

For the sample site, we get this word cloud (on the Wordle link, their clouds are prettier than mine!) for missing words:

So this page related to basketball training is missing words like “rebounding”, “dribble”, “jump”, etc. Lots of opportunities to improve LDA score.  (Note that singular vs. plural isn’t handled well here so some of these words (drill) might exist on the page in other forms that Google would find identical.)

Here are the words the page doesn’t have “enough” of relative to competing sites:

A bit more emphasis on these words might help the site show that it is more topically related to the search phrase.

Step 6 Optimize your LDA Score

The LDA Optimizer tool then provides a suggested set of words and densities to improve the page’s LDA score. Just taking these and pasting them in to your page is unlikely to help, but you should now have some guidance in terms of how many instances of the various words to shoot for as you revise copy.

Adding the suggested words to the site’s existing set moves its LDA from 61% to 86%. So we’ve at least helped our LDA score with a change along these lines. Whether that improves search rank is up to you to test!

Step 7 Check for Higher Google Ranking

Hopefully making changes along these lines will improve your page’s Google ranking, but that’s relatively uncharted territory with regard to LDA today. I’d love to hear your results!

Here’s the optimizer tool.

If you have a page about “basketball drills”, shouldn’t it include these words?

What if it didn’t?  How would you find that out quickly?

SEOmoz recently announced (and then corrected the stats for) a new tool in their labs called the “LDA Tool“.  The tool basically takes a search phrase and a page and tells you how much they relate topically.

Unfortunately, it’s not very clear from that report what topics it identifies or what you can do to improve your page’s score. In this post I’ll show you how to just that, and and give you a new LDA Optimization Tool I wrote to make it easy.

Step 1: Identify your Keyword

First up, figure out what keyword you want to improve your page’s rank for. For this test, I’m using the phrase “basketball drills”. I just chose this at random and hoped I’d be able to find a good example site in it. See how that worked out below!

Step 2: Identify the Competition

A quick way (thanks, Rand!) to do this is with the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool, but you can just do a search and make a spreadsheet too.  To the right you can see what I got for the test phrase:

Exporting this to a CSV and using it as your starting point for LDA analysis speeds things up. You can get the raw CSV here.

I uploaded the CSV to Google Apps as a spreadsheet, and you can see a read-only version of it here (note that this spreadsheet contains my final data as well).

Add your page to the spreadsheet if you’re not (yet) in the top rankings.

Step 3: Gather LDA Scores and Competitor Words

Add columns to your spreadsheet for LDA %, and for site keywords (a really wide column!).  Head to the LDA Tool and type in your test phrase and first site URL, then gather the % and keywords for each of the sites.

Repeat this process for each of the sites. Here’s how my spreadsheet ended up.

Step 4: Find Your Missing Keywords

At this point you should have a good feel for how your page stacks up against the competition.  Now let’s see what words they have that you don’t have, and what words they have in greater frequency than you have.

For the example keyword basketball drills, let’s say that our site is www.basketballteacher.com, which has LDA of roughly 61% and ranks #17 on Google for the phrase. Here’s where we’ll use this new LDA Optimizer tool.

This tool takes your words and up to 9 competitors’ words. It then finds words they use that you don’t, and words that they use more on average than you do, and provides a word cloud showing your opportunities.

To exclude words specific to just a handful of sites, you can specify “Show Keywords Seen on at Least” at the bottom of the form. I used a setting of “4 sites” for my test but got similar results with as many as 8 sites. I recommend playing with this until you’re happy with the results, seeing lots of good words to add but not a lot of extraneous noise.

Step 5: Reviewing Missing/Insufficient Keyword Use

For the sample site, we get this word cloud (on the Wordle link, their clouds are prettier than mine!) for missing words:

So this page related to basketball training is missing words like “rebounding”, “dribble”, “jump”, etc. Lots of opportunities to improve LDA score.  (Note that singular vs. plural isn’t handled well here so some of these words (drill) might exist on the page in other forms that Google would find identical.)

Here are the words the page doesn’t have “enough” of relative to competing sites:

A bit more emphasis on these words might help the site show that it is more topically related to the search phrase.

Step 6 Optimize your LDA Score

The LDA Optimizer tool then provides a suggested set of words and densities to improve the page’s LDA score. Just taking these and pasting them in to your page is unlikely to help, but you should now have some guidance in terms of how many instances of the various words to shoot for as you revise copy.

Adding the suggested words to the site’s existing set moves its LDA from 61% to 86%. So we’ve at least helped our LDA score with a change along these lines. Whether that improves search rank is up to you to test!

Step 7 Check for Higher Google Ranking

Hopefully making changes along these lines will improve your page’s Google ranking, but that’s relatively uncharted territory with regard to LDA today. I’d love to hear your results!

1. These guys track their top search phrases, and they haven’t dropped much in rank for any of those.
2. The total number of searches per month Google reports for those phrases have increased moderately.
3. But traffic from search engines is down for this site.

There are a bunch of things that can imply, but to me, this says that they’re probably getting fewer “long tail” searchers in to the site.  Looking at the number of visits you’re getting from long tail searchers is a little tricky, but Analytics gives us a way.  Click to ‘Traffic Sources’, then ‘Search Engines’, then the one you’re interested in.  Select the right date range, and click the leftmost column to show ‘Landing Page’.  Scroll to the bottom and see how many Landing Pages are listed in the “1-10 of 12,345” to the right.

For the site I’m working on, # of unique Landing Pages is down about 30% for December 2009 vs. December 2008.  We also see it in that there are about half as many unique search phrases in Dec. 2009 as in Dec. 2008.  (Select ‘Keyword’ in the leftmost column of Analytics and scroll down to get this info.)

So we have a pretty clear indexation problem.  Many fewer landing pages, many fewer unique phrases.  There are a lot of potential causes, but one interesting idea came up in a quick site review.

Google spiders tend to “follow a link IN to the site, click around a bit, and leave.”  So to increase indexation, we want lateral linking to a diverse but relevant set of pages from deep landing pages.

Right now on the site, we’re linking to “related articles”, and it works by looking at category overlap and article freshness.  That’s a great start, but has some unintended side-effects.  This causes us to weight newer articles more heavily and link to them from many of our top landing pages.  For example, an old article from 2008 links to 5 articles from today and yesterday.  So whatever pages were linked to from that page back in 2008 aren’t getting any link respect now, and that’s lowering their odds of being in the index.

What if instead, we looked at category overlap and weighted articles with similar dates?  So old articles might have lateral links to other older articles.  That might be too extreme, and might starve our newer content of link respect.  So a middle ground where we factor both in, or add a new “Other Archive Articles” box for similarly-old content might help.

This will be an ongoing process of making sure lateral links are done right, but this isn’t the first site I’ve worked on with this kind of category+date lateral linkage, so I thought the above might be useful for others fighting with indexation problems.

Getting the data smoothed was one of the hardest things, and I’m still very much not happy with the results.

To use this, upload the following PHP to a web server, put a linkscape.csv file in the same folder, and run the PHP.  You should see two charts like these:

Links per DmT, rounded to whole DmT values

Links per DmT, rounded to one decimal

Here’s the PHP code.  If you add to it, email me a copy at glenn@netmud.com and I’ll post an update.  I know the code is awful, it’s just a quick hack to play with CSVs and Google Charts.

For our first year, our budget looked like this:

$32.17    Shirts & Iron-Ons
$38.90    Markers, paper, folders
$70.81    LEGO Crazy Action Contraptions
$49.00    Activity Pack (new version)
$102.60    JrFLL Base Kit (roughly this)
$25.00    Team Registration

The Activity Pack is now $89 and there’s a second one for $49.  Highly recommended, and if you want to look at my copy of last year’s, you’re welcome to.

Our 2009-2010 budget is:

$25.00    Team Registration
$111.96    WeDo kit (either the JrFLL recommended one or the Homeschool WeDo set, which I think ends up cheaper)
$129.95    WeDo Activity Pack
$49.95    Advancing with Simple & Motorized Mechanisms (Note: the activities are kinda lame.  It also really wants to go with the W779686 set, which is new this year and has the build instructions needed for the “Advancing…” pack.  So, not a good fit for the JrFLL set from LAST year at all.  The CD does come with the build instructions, but I’ll have to print them out.)
$14.99    15″x15″ Base Plate
$19.13    Shipping
$50.00    Tackle Boxes for storage (Plano 1364, 1374?. Smaller soft-sided tackle box was annoying & not big enough.)
$25.00    LEGO Crazy Action Contraptions
$35.00    Team Shirts

So the main things we’re adding are WeDo and the Activity Pack for it.  Our kids are 8 and 9 now, so I think that’s going to be a really good fit.  For a younger team, the JrFLL Base Kit and the Activity Pack might be an easier start.

Who’s coaching again this year?

Any new teams around?

I’m hoping we can get another JrFLL event/competition to happen in the spring.

I see on this page http://www.kcfirst.org/FLL-Ages_9-14.html that there are a few FLL Rumbles and meets:

• December 5, 2009 FLL Rumble
  Summit Lakes Middle School
  1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
• January ?, 2010 FLL Rumble
  TBD
• February 27, 2010 FLL Tournament – Kansas and Western Missouri
  Summit Lakes Middle School
  8:00 am to 4:30 pm
• March 5&6, 2010 FLL Exhibition at FRC
  Hale Arena
  9:00 am to Noon
• March 20, 2010 Team Share
  TBD

I’ll try to get my team to a couple of these, and make sure they know about the events in case they want to attend on their own.

I haven’t seen it yet, but the show “Gearing Up” looks pretty cool:
http://www.gearingupproject.org/
Kansas City KCPTDT2 11/4/2009 2:00 PM CT
Kansas City KCPTDT2 11/4/2009 8:00 PM CT
Kansas City KCPTDT2 11/4/2009 9:00 AM CT
Kansas City KCPTDT2 11/5/2009 2:00 AM CT

The Cow Town Throw Down practice competition is this weekend: http://cttd-robotics.com/

I see the following teams so far:

• Trailwood Turbines (Overland Park)
• Rogue Squadron (Overland Park)
• Cyclones (my team, Valley Park Elementary, Overland Park)
• St. Agnes Jr. Rams (St. Agnes, Roeland Park)
• Mindstorm Masters Secret Agents (Kansas City)
• Astromechs (Parkville)