"Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" was a hit song in 1927, and the phrase was used thereafter to describe the logical fallacy known as the Bandwagon Fallacy: the idea that if a lot of people believe something, it must be true.I kind of felt this way about pay per click advertising at search engine results pages. I've never seen a client get better results with PPC than with organic search, but it must be good because lots of people do it.So, when a large company offered me $100 worth of... Read Full Story

Sometimes I write the content first and then the designer builds a design with that content. Sometimes the design comes first and I write content to fit that design. And sometimes both steps are being worked on at once.So it is that I occasionally get an alarmed email from a client saying, perhaps, that "the homepage looks okay, but the inner pages have Italian in them."It's lorem upsum. This is actually a passage from Cicero, sort of messed up by a printer in the 1500s who needed some random... Read Full Story

Rosie and I were admiring a new website I was writing for. The design was particularly beautiful, for a corporate site, with an elegance of line and color that made me want to just gaze at it for a bit.Rosie wasn't so sure. It seemed to her that it would be improved if there were some... flashy stuff. Things that whirled around, maybe, or opportunities to shoot someone.Rosie's a gamer when she's not managing projects or delving into analytics. I've tried to convince her that getting to the ... Read Full Story

I've written before about content management systems, and specifically about whether you want them in your website or not. There are good points on both sides.One of the undoubted benefits to a CMS, however, is the ease with which you can add graphics. Say you want to add a special image to your website for the holidays. You use Blogger or Wordpress, you just push a couple of buttons and your graphic is just where you want it to be. If not, then it's more complex. You have to have skills.Clev... Read Full Story

There's been a lot of talk about PageRank lately. Google has suggested that people are getting too het up over it, and there has been a flood of posts with titles like "Does PageRank Matter Any More?"My PageRank just increased, and I got a bit of a kick out of it. Do I expect it to change my life? No.PageRank is like grades in school. It's one indication of how you're doing. If your PageRank is increasing, that's probably a good thing. If your PageRank hasn't improved recently, that's not a g... Read Full Story

The apples shown here are divided into the #1 rankings ones and the #2 ranking ones. "Not as pretty, " those #2 apples, "but just as tasty."It's a reminder that we don't all get #1 rankings in the search engine results pages for everything. Sometimes we don't deserve that #1 ranking. I, for example, am not the biggest SEO and copywriting firm in the world. If I type in "SEO" at Google, or "copywriting," I'm not going to be #1. This is fine with me. (I'm #1 for "quality copywriting," though. ... Read Full Story

I've been building a website for someone with a template. I don't normally do this (it's a long story) but it gave me an excellent opportunity to learn some basic things to pass on to anyone who's thinking about using a template.Choosing the right template is key. The client originally chose a template (zenlike by node33) with the wood-image background shown above and similar colors -- but a structure that wouldn't fit her content at all. We looked again, trying to see all the templates just ... Read Full Story

This woman (whom I've never met) may not be an introvert at all. It's hard to say what an introvert looks like, or even to say with complete certainty who is and is not an introvert. But we've been looking at research on the subject in the writing class I teach, so it's natural that at some point I began to wonder: are extroverts better at social media than introverts?There's quite a bit of evidence that suggests that extroverts market themselves better in traditional business networking situ... Read Full Story

This week, we've seen how to find your analytics information, how to read the Site Usage information, and how to understand Traffic Sources. While there's lots more to learn about analytics (and I write about it a lot at this blog), it can be overwhelming to try to look at and learn from everything at once.While you're at the Traffic Sources section of your dashboard, though, check out the keywords. Click on that link for a full explanation of how to interpret the information, and learn also ... Read Full Story

We're continuing with our series of posts for people with new websites, or who are generally new to Google Analytics. Yesterday, we saw how to get in to look at the data, and had a look at the Site Usage section of the dashboard. It's good to have a look at that information on a regular basis.The other part of the dashboard that you ought to get familiar with right away is the Traffic Sources section. You can click on the words "Traffic Sources" in the navigation in the upper left of your das... Read Full Story