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Web Analytics and Innovation

Posted by Eric on October 21, 2008  |   1 Comment »

I just read a great blog post over at Occam’s Razor – the blog by Avinash Kaushik – analytics evangelist for Google.

The post goes on about the three kinds of innovation: incremental, incremental with side effects, and transformational.  

It’s a great read.  Check it out:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/redefining-innovation-incremental-side-effect-transformational.html

SEO and Website Design, take 2

Posted by Eric on October 20, 2008  |   No Comments »

So, as you can see from my earlier post (/web-site-design/seo-and-optimization/) I’ve been trying to play the SEO game recently.

I have had some success: currently I am listed as numbers 2 and 3 on Yahoo, number 4 on MSN (hey I moved up 1 place) and number 17 on Google (that means page 2).  Not really sure why I’m so much farther down on Google than on the other sites.  But, I’m still working on it.

Lately I’ve been trying to pay even more attention to the whole <title> tag deal.  I’m using (along with 80 billion or so other folks), the All-In-One SEO pack plugin to re-write all the titles and all the meta stuff.  I’ve had to tweak and play with it a bit, but I think (emphasis on think), I have struck a good balance between human readable – friendly title and ones that include all my keywords.  

What are my keywords?  Still the same: Fort Wayne Website Design.

I’d like to appear #1 for that term on Yahoo, MSN, and Google.  Then I would feel like I have made some progress…

What is interesting is to look at how my site has started to shift lately.

If you look at the month of September, here is some of the searches I appeared in the Top 20:

fort wayne web deisgn picture 2 300x218 SEO and Website Design, take 2 

Notice that terms like “Fort Wayne Analytics”, “Free Survey” and others were making the top list.

Now look at the first two weeks in October: 

fort wayne web deisgn picture 4 300x214 SEO and Website Design, take 2

Now, I see terms like “eh design” and other variants like that starting to move there way up into the list.  I suppose that is a good thing.  I’m not sure.

It still doesn’t have Fort Wayne Website Design in the list.  But, this could also be a result of just a poorly chosen term.  Nobody is searching for that, perhaps.

More later.  For now, back to work.

SEO and Domain Renewal

Posted by Eric on October 8, 2008  |   No Comments »

I just checked out this site:  http://www.websitegrader.com/.  It talk about the health of your site and things that you should do to improve you Search Engine Ranking.  I found about 3 or 4 things.  Here is what was suggested for my site:

  1. Meta Description too long – my description tag was 230 characters and the recommended is 150.
  2. Meta Keywords – the site said I had a high number of meta keywords.  And, while this is only marginally important to Search Engines, they still suggest reducing the number to just the key few.
  3. Domain Registration – it suggested I renew my domain for several years – as a 1 year domain is often a spam domain. 

So, I’m going to change all three and see what happens.  Right now I am number 22 on Google for “website design fort wayne”.  Will changing any of these help?  We’ll see.