Monthly Archives: March 2009

Of Interest

Egosurfing or Reminiscing?

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (11 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

Occasionally, I get this wild hair and throw my name into Google.  And I have a couple of names, Drew Hannush, Andrew Hannush, Drew McLain (my old radio name)…its enough to keep a guy busy in his office for hours (now my wife knows why I’m behind the computer so much!)

But I digress.

I looked up in Google to see what they mainly called this curious occupation.  Leave it to Wikipedia to bring me my answer.  Egosurfing (wow, appropriate) or also known as, vanity searching, egosearching (not an appropriate name since your ego is right in the room with you), egogoogling, autogoogling, self-googling or just googling yourself.

What every you call it.  I, from time to time, catch the disease.

But I find it so fascinating.  Have you ever tried it?  I guess it works better for someone like me who has been in the web industry for over 10 years.  But I even find my Dad and Mom in searches from time to time.

Tonight, I was reading a post I had written in a LotusNotes forum way back in 2000.  Can’t you just hear the newbie shake in my post?  Its like reading a history book on myself.

It just doesn’t cease to amaze me how much of our lives gets indexed and stored for what seems eternity on the web.

Many times I have fun just going back into the Way Back Machine and looking at some of the scary sites I once created (www.omnimoo.com).  Look at that use of the <blink> tag!  My HTML 4 book would clobber me if it only knew. And those horrible Microsoft FrontPage templates!  Made every website look like a bathroom with torn toilet paper for a menu.

Is it ego, or is it just fun?

Go ahead…it is the history of your life…you may think its a bit egocentric…but writing a Twitter about a bowel movement isn’t?

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Of Interest

Ultimate Character Map and Webdings

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (11 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

As someone who is not a logo designer or someone with the skill to even draw good stickmen, I am one of the few who takes a spin through the Webdings on my computer from time to time to find some shapes that can help me in my design.

While the scope of these are limited, there are a few favorites in there.

One day, while chatting with one of our part time programmers, I said, I wonder how many ASCII Characters we could pull up through code.  After all, if you know that ASCII code, you can create the image in HTML.

I was amazed to find that even if I put the code (for instance &#8710;) into Google, it would do a search on that character (this may not display properly for those who are struggling through Mac ownership) ∆

So I decided to have my programmer write out a script that would produce all of the Webdings and ASCII characters available on my computer.  And it came up with this page:

http://www.hannush.com/characterlist.php

Remember, all computers will see a different amount of these images actually displaying.  These characters have to be available on the computer or it has no way of showing it.  So this experiment will be limited on a Mac and may be limited on some really old PC’s.  Even on Vista, I am missing quite a few.  But its facinating to see what you can produce on a computer screen from a web page.

Try not to use these symbols in Internet websites.  Your success will be limited only to the audience who has these fonts installed.  But it’s very cool to try these out and maybe find a few universal images  you might be able to use.

Happy hunting.

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Of Interest

List of 500 Best Cities for an AdWords Campaign

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (10 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

Okay, so its not quite 500, but it is close.

While putting together an AdWords Campaign for our new Evolve Your Search Internet marketing site, I started to realize how difficult it was going to be competiting on a national level with a newly launched website under keywords like “SEO,” “Internet Marketing,” or “Search Engine Optimization.”  The battle for these words nationally is insane.

So it got me to thinking, why not attack this problem city by city?  Many times I type in searches like “Greenville Web Design” or “Asheville Online Marketing” to see someone who provides the service in my area (or in my case to check out the competition) and by my site stats, so do others.

But how to come up with a list of 500 cities?

Well, that was difficult.  I thought about doing it by population (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago…) or by popular city names (Greenville, Jackson, Fond Du Lac…okay just seeing if you were paying attention).  In the end, I merged a couple of theories including best up and coming cities, removed their state names and commenced to separating the ones I thought best and the rest of the list.

So, for your viewing, and AdWords pleasure…here is part one of my list of the 500 best cities / city names for an AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign (feel free to copy and paste…use Excel to parse the commas for convenience):

New York     ,
Los Angeles     ,
Chicago     ,
Houston     ,
Phoenix     ,
Philadelphia     ,
San Antonio ,
San Diego     ,
Dallas     ,
Detroit     ,
San Jose     ,
Indianapolis     ,
Jacksonville     ,
San Francisco     ,
Hempstead ,
Columbus     ,
Austin     ,
Memphis ,
Baltimore     ,
Charlotte     ,
Ft Worth     ,
Milwaukee     ,
Boston ,
El Paso ,
Washington     ,
Atlanta     ,
St Louis     ,
Cincinnati     ,
Denver     ,
Miami     ,
Salt Lake City     ,
Seattle     ,
Aberdeen     ,
Adrian     ,
Akron     ,
Albany     ,
Troy     ,
Albemarle     ,
Albert Lea     ,
Albuquerque     ,
Alexandria     ,
Allegan     ,
Allentown     ,
Alma     ,
Alpena     ,
Ames     ,
Anchorage     ,
Anderson     ,
Marietta     ,
Angola     ,
Ann Arbor     ,
Appleton     ,
Asheville     ,
Ashland     ,
Ashtabula     ,
Astoria     ,
Atchison     ,
Atlantic City     ,
Auburn     ,
Niagara Falls     ,
Augusta     ,
Round Rock     ,
Baraboo     ,
Barnstable Town     ,
Barre     ,
Batavia     ,
Battle Creek     ,
Bay City     ,
Beatrice     ,
Beaver Dam     ,
Bedford     ,
Bellefontaine     ,
Bellingham     ,
Bemidji     ,
Bend     ,
Bennington     ,
Benton Harbor     ,
Big Rapids     ,
Billings     ,
Binghamton     ,
Bismarck     ,
Blackfoot     ,
Bloomington-Normal     ,
Bloomsburg     ,
Boise City     ,
Boone     ,
Cambridge     ,
Boulder     ,
Bozeman     ,
Bradford     ,
Brainerd     ,
Branson     ,
Bremerton-Silverdale     ,
Brevard     ,
Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk     ,
Brigham City     ,
Brookings     ,
Bucyrus     ,
Buffalo     ,
Burlington     ,
Cadillac     ,
Canon City     ,
Canton     ,
Cape Girardeau     ,
Carson City     ,
Casper     ,
Cedar Rapids     ,
Celina     ,
Centralia     ,
Chambersburg     ,
Champaign     ,
Charleston     ,
Charlottesville     ,
Cheyenne     ,
Chillicothe     ,
Claremont     ,
Cleveland     ,
Clinton     ,
Coeur d’Alene     ,
Coldwater     ,
Colorado Springs     ,
Columbia     ,
Arlington     ,
Concord     ,
Connersville     ,
Corning     ,
Corvallis     ,
Coshocton     ,
Crawfordsville     ,
Daphne     ,
Davenport     ,
Dayton     ,
Daytona Beach     ,
Decatur     ,
Livonia     ,
Defiance     ,
Des Moines     ,
Dickinson     ,
Dixon     ,
Dodge City     ,
Dover     ,
DuBois     ,
Dubuque     ,
Duluth     ,
Durango     ,
Durham     ,
East Liverpool     ,
East Stroudsburg     ,
Easton     ,
Eau Claire     ,
Edwards     ,
Effingham     ,
Elizabethtown     ,
Elkhart     ,
Elko     ,
Elmira     ,
Erie     ,
Escanaba     ,
Eugene     ,
Evanston     ,
Evansville     ,
Fairbanks     ,
Fairmont     ,
Fallon     ,
Fargo     ,
Faribault     ,
Fergus Falls     ,
Findlay     ,
Flint     ,
Fond du Lac     ,
Fort Collins     ,
Fort Dodge     ,
Fort Myers     ,
Fort Pierce     ,
Fort Walton Beach     ,
Fort Wayne     ,
Frankfort     ,
Freeport     ,
Fremont     ,
Gainesville     ,
Galesburg     ,
Garden City     ,
Gardnerville     ,
Georgetown     ,
Gettysburg     ,
Gillette     ,
Glens Falls     ,
Granbury     ,
Grand Forks     ,
Grand Island     ,
Grand Junction     ,
Grand Rapids     ,
Great Bend     ,
Greeley     ,
Green Bay     ,
Greensboro     ,
Greensburg     ,
Greenville     ,
Hagerstown     ,
Hannibal     ,
Harrisburg     ,
Harrisonburg     ,
Hartford     ,
Hastings     ,
Hays     ,
Heber     ,
Helena     ,
Hickory     ,
Hilo     ,
Hilton Head     ,
Holland     ,
Homosassa Springs     ,
Honolulu     ,
Hood River     ,
Hudson     ,
Huntingdon     ,
Huntington     ,
Huntsville     ,
Hutchinson     ,
Idaho Falls     ,
Iowa City     ,
Iron Mountain     ,
Ithaca     ,
Jackson     ,
St Petersburg     ,
Jamestown     ,
Oakland     ,
Janesville     ,
Jasper     ,
Jefferson City     ,
Joplin     ,
Juneau

Second half of the list coming tomorrow…(always love a cliffhanger don’t you?)

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SEO Tips

How Many Links in a Page Are Considered Spam?

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (10 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

Its funny how the universe works.  The other day I was working on some Google AdWord concepts and one of the tips I wanted to give out was what cities were best to use in an Adwords campaign on a city level instead of a national level.  The thought was, I would post a list of the 25 most popular cities and then 400 or more of the next level towns.

This would be quite a list.  And then it got me to thinking about whether Google would consider my post to be a spamming attempt, when really it wasn’t…it was just meant to be good useful information.

Well, the universe came around and handed me the answer as soon as I started reading through some of the popular blogs I like to frequent.  There was one from Matt Capps of Google who was suggesting How Many Links Per Page? were within Google’s limit before they considered you spam.  Surprisingly, he said there really wasn’t a limit and that they wouldn’t consider more than 100 to be spam.

I was quite surprised.  But logically, as he suggested, having that many links in a page would make for a less than desirable user experience and with so many links in a page, it would lessen the power of the PageRank (an interesting clue into how the PageRank system also looks at the pollution of links on a page as well as its relevance and power).

So I am going to run ahead with my post in a little while.  Yes, it will be full of city names and wouldn’t be a very interesting read, but then, its not for reading, its for copying and pasting for a good purpose.

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SEO Tips

Sure Its a Home Page But Don’t Call It That

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (6 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

While reviewing a bunch of websites this week, I noticed many of them in their title tags use the word “Home” or “Welcome” as the name of their home page.  What does this accomplish?

Back when the web was new and people didn’t know what to call anything on the web, we started seeing a practice of putting “Home Page” as the title tag and page title for the initial page of a web site (a title tag, for those wondering, is what appears at the very top of your browser and thus also shows up as the title of your link in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN…they are identifiers of the content on the page).

Do you know what a home page is?  Does your neighbor?  So I’m guessing your customer does too.

A title tag is one of the most powerful keyword providers on your website.  The limited space it provides on each page is precious.  So why do people put “Company Name > Home Page” there?

When your potential customer is doing a Google search, do they know your company name already?  What if they don’t…then you just threw away your title tag power to tell them something they don’t know yet…and you told them “home page,” what does that say about your company?  And who does a search on the words “home page?”  Someone who probably just came out from a cave and is wondering what this glowing box on the desk and humming box on the floor does.

Don’t waste this valuable space.  Your home page is one of your most valued commodities.  Don’t waste its power by telling people something they already know and wasting the opportunity to place juicy keywords in a goldmine area.

If we can solve that…then maybe we can next tackle the annoying “Click Here” command.

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SEO Tips

HITS equals How Idiots Track Success

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (4 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

No, not my words…the words of Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik.

Alright, that may be downright rude, but apparently that is what the folks pushing analytics believe.  In fact, they have come up with all kinds of acronyms for the concepts we in the web world have slowly either embraced or moved away from.

But a larger point can be pulled from the nose thumbing insults at our expense.  We learned long ago that “hits” in server stats mean nothing.  You could have 300 images on your home page and get 301 “hits” with a single page load.  So we then track “clicks” in AdWords campaigns and we track “unique visitors” and “pageviews.”  The thing is, we can get someone to the page, but if the page is no good, no one is going to investigate your product or service.  The stat that most closely tells the result of this information…”bounce rate.”

A bounce rate is when someone comes to your site and leaves before page two is ever investigated.

Now, sometimes there are sites that are prone to bounce rates because of a purposeful design, such as a news site that posts all of its headlines on the home page.  In this case, unique visitors should be lower and daily pageviews should be high.  Each case is different and that is why sometimes having some human interpretation of the analytics numbers can help. In the end, mostly you want people to linger on your site and to be curious enough to go to page 2.  If they bounce after page one, you have probably lost them for good.

So the point is, all the clicks in the world won’t help you if no one likes what they see on your site.

Feedback on the items that could potentially turn clients away from your site is just one of the many things we track in our evolveyoursearch.com Web/Search report.  This report along with a Google Analytics report gives  invaluable feedback on the very things that Avinash Kaushik of Google is talking about.  Its all about customer interest and satisfaction.

Check out the Media Post’s article “Clicks Don’t Equal Success, Bounce- Rate Does” that covers Kaushik’s remarks.

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SEO Tips

One Month to Page One (Briefly)

Drew Hannush by Drew Hannush (4 Mar 2009)  |  Leave a comment

Today we finally achieved Google success…in a month.  Yes, its true our site hannush.com has been around for almost 7 years. But in those 7 years we have never given full attention to the Greenville market in terms of search results.  As with many companies, we found tough competition from multiple local “big boys” and so we were happy with success in our former hometown market Hendersonville.

But challenges must be overcome and especially when you launch a new service like evolveyoursearch.com, where you are trying to help clients improve their search results under tougher, more competitive keywords.  You have to prove you understand the search engines enough to bring them success.

Thus, we took on the keywords “Greenville Web Design” at the beginning of February.  Our mission was to move from page 10 to page 2 or 1 if possible in Google.  With the amount of competition we were going up against, we were planning on a long trek to number one.

One month later, I did my daily check…we had moved up to page 2 yesterday (#11) after many days on page 3.  We had moved into this position within 2 weeks of first launching the campaign.  Today, success!  We were #4 on page 1 at my last check this afternoon.  But tonight, we had slipped again to page 2 at #12.

So our win was brief…but with any search engine campaign, you have to assume that at any time your position can be compromised.  It takes determination and patience to make lasting changes in a search engine like Google…especially when they change their algorythmns.

We will keep an eye on it, but our hope is now to stick to page 1.

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