ATILUS - Web Design | Internet Marketing

One Laptop Per Child

Thanks to Seth Godin and his post titled “This changes everything” I stumbled upon the following:

http://www.xogiving.org/

This is the official laptop per child (OLPC) donation page for people who would like to donate a laptop. For those of you unfamiliar the One Laptop Per Child project has been going on for sometime. According to the OLPC website:

The OLPC Foundation’s mission is to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries.

As Seth Godin put it, a lot of interesting things will begin to happen when children discover this new technology. As someone ingrained in the technology industry it is some times easy to forget that not everyone has access to this world (of techonlogy). I do remember moving from Central New Jersey to Minneapolis during middle school and being struck by the difference in computer equipment. My Middle school in New Jersey had great, top-of-the-line equipment, while my new school was stuck with old Apple II’s. This is a small difference when compared with someone who might have never even seen a laptop before.

links for 2007-10-05

• Micro Persuasion: Ten Blogging Hacks
  10 Great Blogging hacks and SEO tips by Micro Persuasion
  (tags: blog hacks seo)

How blogging is helpful.

Perhaps you have been approached by someone telling you that you need to blog, then again maybe you haven’t. Though blogging has been around for almost 10 years, it hit the mainstream about 5 years ago. Either way, you are probably wondering; How can blogging help me? or Why do I need to blog? There are many reasons why you may want to blog even if you don’t feel the need or if you don’t like writing.

So why should you blog?

The Short Version:
Blogging gets more visitors to your website.

The Long Version:
Blogging really gets more visitors to your website.

If you would like a more in depth explanation on how blogging is helpful please

Getting more visitors.

So you would like to know how blogging is helpful? Well my friend you have come to the right place. Let me explain: Blogging by definition is writing in a web log. A web log is “A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings”^[1]. That is great Jermaine but how does blogging help get more visitors to my site?

Well, to get more visitors you need to be in more places. Blogging helps you do that by getting more pages into search engines, like Google™ and Yahoo®. Blogs are normally written using CSS and Web Standards. In other words, blogs decrease the amount of visible code and helps make your content more prominent. This is important because search engines thrive on content, especially relevant content (content is relevant when it is written well and when searchers find what they are looking for). Therefore blogs, by nature, are search engine friendly.

The more relevant content, the better.

We at the company suggest that our clients blog 2 to 3 times per week, but at the very least once per week. Now take the search engine friendly relevant content from one post and multiple it 2 to 3 times per week and you have 104 to 156 entries per year. That is approximately 156 search engine optimized, friendly pages that are able to be submitted into content friendly search engines. If you look around your current website, if you have one, chances are you currently do not have 156 pages and if you do they may not all be search engine optimized friendly pages.

This probably brings up more questions like: Is it guaranteed that the search engines will pickup my blog posts? How soon will my blog posts reach the search engines? What is the quality of visitors that will come to my post? and perhaps there are others. These questions and more will be answered in detail in upcoming posts, but I will leave you with this example.

The example.

On July 19th of this year I wrote a post answering the question What is a Client Representative?. I wrote this post primarily for our current clients to introduce the newly made position. I was not expecting any search engine traffic because the post was to be used internally.
Much to my surprise I noticed that not only was the post indexed in Google™ for the keyword Client Representative (at the time of this post it ranked #10) but people actually clicked on the link that took them to the post.

How blogging has been helpful to me.

Since that post was written there have been 29 unique pageviews and 26 of them coming from keywords searched on search engines. Visitors have searched for words like, Client Representative, client rep defined, client representative definition (#1 in Google™ see screen shot), service client representative position, what is a client services representative, and many others. You may say whoopee 26 pageviews, you are not going to break any records there. Well no, 26 pageviews is not going to break any records, but I was not trying to attract traffic to the post. I was simply displaying information for our clients. What if I posted 20 blogs that each brought in 26 pageviews or what if I actually tried to post a blog to gain traffic and attract visitors? Well, I hope now you are getting the picture of how helpful blogging can be. If you have read this far you may have some comments or questions, I welcome you to use our contact form and drop me a line.

Ugly Celebrity Custody Battles

What do K-Fed and Britney have to do with Search Engine Optimization…

How can Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin help us rank well in the search engines?

Honestly, I don’t follow celeb gossip, or custody battles, but there is something to be gained here… honestly.

Ugly Celebrity Custody Battles are Good For SEO

Thanks to a quick tip by the fellows at SEOMoz, it was revealed that Yahoo (in an attempt to possibly inflate their search numbers) has started to put links on their home page to popular stories. These links at first glance would appear to go to a content page, but instead are actually search queries.

For example take a look at their homepage:

And it brings you to this page:

Direct Link

By quickly creating content centered around these popular search links and queries you can get tons of traffic to your website.

Read the Conclusion: “The Search for Britney Spears…”