Search Me

As I stated earlier, this year I am going to show a renewed effort to increasing income. That includes trying to make a successful blog. I mentioned that I would share with you my efforts in these regards and so I shall. Just as I have profited from the lessons of others, perhaps you can profit from the experiences I have gone through. By sharing these with each other we all benefit. I do not subscribe to the ideal of knowledge being power only when one person has it and withholds it from another. Knowledge only has power when it is put into motion. Pass it on, pay it forward. That is how we all have been benefited and enjoy what we have today.

So in reviewing the blog results over the last year as I have shared with you on the anniversary entry, I notice that I haven’t reached that ‘viral’ stage that so many have had to hit to see real results. Do I expect to become a household name with global recognition? Sure, doesn’t everyone? Reality of course deems that real readership will fall somewhere between one (me) and the worldwide population. I’m comfortable with that.

After all, not everyone will find these rantings amusing or even interesting. Some will. I hope you are one of them. I don’t have to please everyone. Not only is that difficult, it is impossible. ‘You can’t please everyone so you’ve got to please yourself’ is a wonderful lyric as well as a hint of wisdom.

As you might have noticed, I have made some slight changes to the layout of the web site. Call it experimentation. I am trying to fine tune it and will continually try to make it better. In the process I somehow lost Google Analytics tracking ability. Google Analytics is a tracking program you load on the web page that counts how many time a page has been viewed and how many times it was viewed uniquely. It tries to see how people found your page and if they looked at another of your pages or went on to other parts of the web. It does not identify anyone specifically or in detail, just an aggregate summation of the blogs usage. If I were making specific marketing campaigns and trying to drive sales, I could use analytics too help quantify the effectiveness of different advertising approaches. As this page is about anything and everything and not about marketing any products other than the blog itself, analytics is not being used the way other sites would use it.

Anyway, in the process of moving some items around and changing the Google ads display sizes and ability to display images, I managed to lose the analytics tool. It took me a lot of searching to finally come up with the fact that I needed to reload the code. I then had to track down the right code and my id code that goes with it. The simple 5 minute copy and paste operation lasted two hours. I have checked and it looks like it is working again.

That is the thing about new technology; it comes with a new language. And like any language it takes time to learn. When computers were first introduced I remember seeing stories on the news about the changes the dictionaries had to make to add all the new words that were being created to describe the workings of computers. This explosion of lexicon was amplified by the increase of personal computers and the internet. The word blog itself is an example of this as abbreviations such as web log created first slang then standard verbiage.

As I have entered the world of online ads and marketing and blogs I have been introduced to a whole new world of language. Some I have easily adopted from previous exposure to the computer world and some that is totally foreign. Some of the terms and their meaning are easier to decipher than others. For some there doesn’t seem to be any easy reference points to quickly gain their meaning other than slogging through and hoping that repetition and context will provide a clue. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t.

Repetition and context have taken me a long way though. I can read some HTML when looking at it better than I could before. With ads there are terms like e-CPM or effective cost-per-thousand, and bounce rate and absolute unique visitors. Some make sense right away while some take time to see in action to fully comprehend.

Now to go back a little, I said that my analytics tool quit working. How did I know this? Google Adsense comes with its own tracking software code that is loaded on the web page. Whereas the Analytics tool is an option you add, the Adsense reports come automatically as a result of signing up an account to display Google Ads. Google Adsense reports are much, much simpler showing basically number of page impressions and number of clicks on ads with amount earned for those clicks and it only breaks it down into today, yesterday, week, month, last month, and all time categories. It doesn’t even tell you which pages were looked at or which ads were clicked.

Honestly I don’t even know what ads are placed on the site and that is why I added the disclaimer to the pages about the ads sponsoring me and not the other way around. I figure that if this site gets bigger and really popular, say like a Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, then I will start to dictate the ads and sell them direct. Until that time, you partner with someone that knows the business and can take care of that my knowledge and background isn’t large enough to handle. Google knows this part of the business and that is why I am here and using them.

So Adsense was the tipoff that Analytics was not working since one report showed visitors on these given days and the other didn’t. See, it is good to get information and facts from more than one source. Problem identified, problem fixed.

Or is it? I still seem to have the problem of not getting enough traffic driven to my blog. I know from experience that part of the problem is that the search engines do not see me. Analytics has shown me that the majority of traffic coming to my sight from search engines came from Google. I am glad that Google sees me but that is too be expected since this blog is hosted on a Google site and uses Google ads but what about the hundreds of other search engines out there?

I know Yahoo saw me at one time but it doesn’t seem to be able to find me now. IWON that uses the Ask search engine had never been able to find me. I have used that fact to gain points for searches as you can see on my IWON hint pages but it is discouraging. I have tried any number of different combinations or words and topics and even spelling out the web address with no matches found. This is the same result on a dozen other web sites.

As I have been searching for a solution to this problem, I ran across the idea that you had to submit a web site so that the spiders or web crawlers would go take a look. I have done this a few times and I think that is why I got a few hits from Yahoo and MSN but they only looked once and they only looked at a few pages. Google is the only one that has many pages listed.

Even finding the method to submit your web page is difficult for many of the search engines. Some you run across by accident, others from a link, but many don’t seem to want to publish this information at all. This seems strange since a search engines business is to search the web and provide all the information out there to its users. You would think that whichever service did this the best would be the winner in the search engine competition but I find a lot of them lacking.

I have stated this before about most searches now just pointing you to the commercial sites and missing all the great individual informative small sites all together. Those were the fun days of the web, when you could actually connect to people and not just businesses. It was back when businesses didn’t know what the web was or what to do with it. There must be a balance in there somewhere.

If you search for ‘search engines’ or ‘submit a site’ on most search engines you will get all kinds of things, not many of which are useful. I have found that there are a lot of services out there that will mega submit your site for a fee. Some will do it for ‘free’ only to find that free also has a cost of adding their software to your site, or submitting to a constant barrage of e-mail. Jayde Online is one such company that I have signed up for and though I haven’t seen any results from the supposed submission I have seen a large influx of e-mail. They do say I can unsubscribe at any time, but I will try their newsletter for a little while and see if there is any value. So far it looks like it is directed at full on business sites.

I have learned two things about search engines and their web crawlers. First, web crawlers will look at your site if it is referred to by another site that they have crawled. The more sites referencing your site, the more chances that your site will be looked at. Therefore, if someone is surfing and comes upon this site and decides to add mention of it on their site and it is one that gets crawled there is a chance that my site would be added to the list of sites to get crawled. That is why there are many people selling cross listing services or doing the “I’ll list your site if you list mine”.

Once the web crawler as decided to take a look at your site it must have permission to look and this is granted in a file called ‘robot.txt’. The robot.txt tells web crawler what they can and cannot look at. As I found this out I decided to take a look at mine and see if it is blocking sites. I kind of think that it might be but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change it back to a simple basic open door policy. As near as I can tell this is a Google BlogSpot hosting rule. They help you set it up initially and block things if you so desire, but it is a set it and forget it notion. I have always had the intention of having this blog shared with all so I tried to leave the setting open. I thought I had anyway. I cannot find a way to directly access the file as it is on the BlogSpot server and after hours of searching I finally came across the setup menu for the robot.txt file, redid what I thought I needed to do but it looks exactly as it did before. This may be something I just have to learn to live with.

The other mentioned items for the web crawlers is a site map of which I am not sure how to develop, again because of BlogSpot’s lock on things, and Meta Tags. I think I am using Meta tags as the topic links that I include with each entry but I am not sure if it is the same thing as what the web crawlers are looking for. These are a couple more examples of this new language I was talking about. For those that already know what these things are, do not laugh. Just reflect on the first time you heard some of these terms and remember how you just went along with it rather than admit you didn’t know. It happens to everyone, and it happens all the time.

In order to get the address out there and see if this referencing thing has any merit I am going to be surfing the web a little more and dropping the web site address if possible in comment boxes and wherever suitable and see if it makes any difference. I am not going to do this in a spamming manner. The name dropping will only be done with true contributions and comments of relevance or not at all. I still want to maintain the better side of the web where people interact with people in a positive light. I would rather shed light on the sleazy characters and scare them back into their cockroach dens than promote their way of doing things. I know I won’t always measure up to the highest standards but at least I will be trying, as I hope you do too.

This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.