Find out which 6 degrees rank highest in terms of employment.
By Chris Kyle
Come graduation time, the English major, history buff, computer whiz, and business student all look alike in their caps and gowns.
Their job prospects, on the other hand, look very different.
Corporate consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas polled 100 human resource professionals in 2010 to find out which degrees have the best odds of helping students find employment.
If you're contemplating a return to school and deciding what you want to study, read on for the six degrees that rank highest in terms of employment.
1) health care degree...
graduate with recession-proof degrees in health care could find....
& more degrees that employers want...
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Degrees That Employers Want
Thursday, 14 April 2011
SEO: Homepage Optimization
This is one of the important factors when you're starting to make your web page. It is very important to have a good homepage optimization because it will help you increase your home page traffic. Ranking your home page between top 20 searches is really important. You will probably find it so hard to find your site on the result page when it is not in the first 20 hits.
This is how you can optimize your web page. Correct titling of your page is one of the most important actions. You should know that web search engines put a lot of importance in every page title in sorting hits on SERPs. The title must be a short description of your web page and should be structured with your keywords. The keywords shouldn't be repeated in the title for search engines will consider it as a spam which will lead you to a penalty points when ranking the results.
Another important thing in optimizing your web page is choosing the right keywords. You must do a proper research for you to help find the right keywords for your site. There are lots of useful tools in the web that you can use like Google AdWords keyword tool and a lot more. Try not to stuff your page too much with you keywords. Use synonyms, this will help to make your content sound natural.
Metatags are also important in optimizing you page. Meta description is a short description of your web page. You can use ten to twelve keywords which should not be repeated, as what I said search engines will treat multi keywords as a spam.
Actual page content, you shouldn't forget about this part for this is the most important thing in creating a web page. Keywords must be found in your page content; this will help the search engines to know what the topic is. But not to use it too frequently because spamming will result your page into a ban.
This is the least important factor in making a home page optimization, the page url. Basically, this is the name of your of your webpage which appears in a web browser's address bar. Search engines used this as an identifier for you web page and they also store the URL in their index as one of the ways they know the subject matter of a web site.
Doing a good Home page optimization will now then, help you attract more traffic for your website. Optimizing your home page is not just about search engine optimization, but it is also about optimizing your most vital landing pages for conversions.
Alyssa is an SEO specialist and have had remarkable success upon giving her clients a quality SEO services.
PPC and SEO Working Together
Most companies are often faced with the dilemma of determining how to maximize limited online marketing budgets. Are you looking for high performance, but need to be conscious of costs? So what tactics should be used, PPC or SEO? The answer is both. PPC and SEO are often viewed as two very different online marketing strategies, with each side having their own supporters as to why their respective online marketing effort is the most effective. SEO can generate great results, but it often requires patience to achieve higher rankings and is seen as a long term strategy. PPC has more control, but can be very costly depending on the industry.
If your PPC and SEO campaigns aren’t talking to each other, you’re wasting a lot of time and money. Whether the work is being done in house, at a single agency or by multiple agencies, it’s important to share insights learned in each area to avoid duplicated efforts and missed opportunities.
Here are a few things to consider:
Campaign Structure:
Your sites architecture and your Ad Words campaigns should not be that different. In fact, both should have a natural flow from high level content to very specific topics and subcategories. Those subcategories can be considered ad groups or pages on the site with the keywords appearing as text on the pages and in the ad groups.
Keyword Strategy:
It’s important to establish how your keyword mix will intercept your audience and how PPC and SEO will fit in. Broad terms tend to be hyper competitive and the most expensive, while long tail terms tend to be less competitive, but they drive higher qualified traffic. Depending on campaign goals it might make sense to optimize longer tailed terms while utilizing PPC to catch the broader search terms as ad copy, landing pages, ect can be quickly controlled. The key is to know when to emphasize one over the other, or when to use one to support the other.
Another cross tactic approach is to take advantage of PPC search query data. Analyzing PPC search query data might uncover terms that are driving a lot of paid traffic, but don’t perform well in organic search. Those keywords become an opportunity for the SEO team to create optimized content around which will increase your traffic volume without increasing your PPC budget. This type of cross tactic sharing should be happening regularly as your target audience will not remain in the status quo with their search habits.
Landing Pages:
Assuming the necessary tracking is in place on all pages and keywords, you can take valuable learning’s from the actual landing pages. If you notice that certain pages created for organic keywords perform well from a conversion stand point, why not re-purpose those pages as PPC landing pages? This allows you to create offers and calls to action for those specific keywords.
Google Docs Adds Pagination
Every time I get writer’s block, I head somewhere else to write. I don’t just mean grabbing my laptop and going to a coffee shop, either (though I do that too). I mean going to a library or a friend’s house and using their computer. I’m able to do this because so much of the world of productivity has moved onto the web – including cloud document creation through services like Google Docs.
However, Google Docs, is nonetheless limited in a number of ways, making certain tasks impossible, and the constant development struggle for the Docs steam is implementing all the necessary features from the established world of offline document creation. Over the last year Google has implemented a wide array of these features, but one of the most crucial was added today (on April 12th): pagination.
Pagination, or the visual display of actual page breaks – demonstrating how words will actually look on a page, how changes in margin/spacing will change page flow, etc. – has been a standard for offline word processing since the 90s. Having it available in Google Docs is both important in matching the standard and in adding a number of other vital features. This includes putting headers/footers on each page, putting footnotes on the bottom of corresponding pages, and in-browser printing (in now, a feature restricted to Chrome). However, pagination may also lead to other in-demand features such as page numbering.
Users who prefer the unpaginated approach can switch to the classic format by going to View > Document View > Compact. If you’re eager to use paginated documents and haven’t seen the update yet, be patient: the feature will be released to all Docs users by the end of the day.
Google’s Algorithm Officially Integrates User Feedback
Everywhere you look in search engine optimization sites, the word of the day seems to be “Panda.” Or, if you prefer, “Farmer” – since the two monikers both describe the major Google algorithm that was implemented to fight off spam. While everyone is eager to figure out how to avoid being flagged as a spam site, another major element of SEO has just been made official: user feedback is a recognized signal in Google’s search algorithm.
This isn’t exactly unexpected. After all, Google representatives have been saying for several months that user feedback, including on social networks, would be examined for its potential uses in search. Additionally, the Google “+1″ button released serves an almost identical function by allowing users to state, clearly and simply, which sites they like. Even further, Google’s “block site” feature allows users to point out pages that seem to be spam.
Each of these services had an ambiguous impact on SEO. The +1 or promoted social search features, for example, certainly did impact the results your connected friends saw – but did it impact the site’s rank overall? Would it with enough +1s or other promotions? Similarly, while the “block site” feature didn’t originally impact search directly, how would that data be used?
That’s all been cleared up with a simple statement in the global rollout of Panda: “We’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results.” Of course, exactly how much will be impacted by these signals, how quickly shady optimizers will start trying to game this feedback, and what precautions Google is taking against false positives in feedback are all unknown.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
What if my competitor is cheating at SEO?
It's a question that comes up all the time, but there hasn't been a good answer to it. There are painstaking ways that you can analyze your competitor's Web site for signs of elementary cheating, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, and other simple forms of search spam, but don't bother. The search engines do a reasonably good job of sniffing those out themselves nowadays. But what about the big time search spammer? What about someone who has set up an elaborate network of linking sites all designed to rank his site higher and your site lower? How can you catch someone like that in the act of cheating at SEO? If it is your competitor engaging in such tricks, it is a burning question.
My friend Ted Ulle pointed me to an announcement last month that might help answer that question, where a partnership was announced between search tool vendor BrightEdge and the search engine blekko to combat search spam.
no spam!
Image via Wikipedia
Not many details emerged from that press release, so we'll have to wait and see if this is real progress, but it is a start. I can think of several things that such a tool might be able to do:
* Identify link farms. If blekko can use link analysis techniques to spot unusual link patterns coming from sites that don't make sense, they can alert you as to what your competitor is doing. They might not be able to algorithmically detect a sure spamming incident, but they might be able to identify something for you to analyze on your own.
* Identify paid link manipulation. Just as with link farms, competitors who buy links masquerading as free links violate the search engines' rules and are benefiting from higher rankings if undiscovered. If blekko can clue you in to suspicious patterns, you might find that where there is smoke, there is fire.
* Uncovering negative SEO. You might be guessing that the search engines themselves work very hard to uncover the first two abuses, which leads to an even more insidious trick. What if your competitor is setting up these spammy techniques, but pointing them at your site to get you penalized? It happens, and blekko might be able to uncover suspicious patterns to alert you.
If you're thinking to yourself, don't Google and Bing try to catch all of these things? Yes, they do. But they are doing it with algorithms only—the cases that are most egregious are the only ones that get spit out for human analysts to review. They can't look at everything and the algorithms are not foolproof. If blekko's algorithms are any good, the human analysis of these possible spam problems can be "outsourced" to people willing to do it for free.
It is yet to be seen exactly what BrightEdge has implemented here and just how magical the blekko algorithms are at uncovering search shenanigans. And it isn't clear how Google and Bing will respond when provided reports on bad behavior. It's possible that they will take them seriously and investigate, but it's equally likely that so many bogus reports could be generated by people using such a tool that they will be largely ignored. You can imagine a situation where anyone runs a check and then send whatever is spit out to Google, rather than using that as a jumping off point for real investigation.
If we marketers use these tools to cry wolf, don't be surprised if Google and Bing quickly ignore our cries. That would be a real shame, to me, because I think this is a great idea. It's the social approach to spam. Give people the tools to police their competitors and there is a more level playing field for everyone.
Regardless, I will be quite interested in what is delivered here. I'd love it if those who start using the tool would post their experiences here. And if anyone has deeper information than the intriguing press release, please post that, too. I can't help but think that this is a new front in the war on spam that Google and Bing overlooked: crowdsourcing. We'll see if it works.
Dear Client: I Love You, But Will You PLEASE Stop Obsessing Over Your Search Engine Rankings?
Dear Client:
I love you. I really do! But please, for the love of all that is good and holy, will you stop obsessing over search engine rankings?
I get it, you hired me to perform Search Engine Optimization on your website. Why do we optimize for search engines? For rankings, right? Well, no, not anymore. It's been almost a decade since the SEO industry began it's turn toward a fuller website marking experience, looking beyond search engine rankings as a metric of success, and instead looking at business growth, conversion rates, and return on investment.
Rankings are a traffic delivery mechanism. Traffic can be hit or miss. Not all traffic is targeted. We see it all the time, clients like you are looking for rankings for your industry terms. But, quite often the time and effort needed to rank these favorite phrases holds no value compared to the conversions it delivers. That means, the ROI just isn't there.
Instead of focusing on these "pet" terms, and potentially wasting thousands of dollars in the process, I could be focused on building exposure through some other relevant terms that have a better conversion rate and give you a much higher return on investment.
I understand where you're coming from: You need rankings to get traffic, and you need traffic to get conversions. But, would you be happy if I could help you get more traffic and conversions, even if your favorite keywords were not ranking? Would you trust me if I told you that not all the keywords you care about are valuable?
I hope you hear what I'm saying. I totally understand that you need exposure on the search engines to get the traffic and the conversions you need. But, rankings for certain high-traffic, low value keywords isn't going to give you both. Oh, you'll get traffic, but you'll see your conversion rates plummet.
My question to you is, who will you blame when you see conversion rates go down? Is it the design team, the usability team, the marketing team, the SEO team? It may not be anybody's fault, except that you're ranking well for very poor converting keywords.
Finding Keywords that Deliver
In an ideal world, EVERY industry related keyword would bring you quality, converting traffic. But, a few minutes looking at the keyword research data will tell you otherwise. Every industry has thousands of terms that are not relevant for any particular site within that very industry. It's true for your competitors, just as it's true for you.
Good optimization is all about finding the right keywords. Not just industry terms, but terms which match the searcher's intent for the product, service, or information you offer. Sometimes the searcher's intent is clear in the search phrase. Many times, it's not. If the intent isn't clear, you can do two things: Guess or test.
Guessing at the intent means you either assume it is a valuable keyword or it isn't. In SEO, this can be a huge gamble. Guess wrong, either way, and you are either potentially wasting a ton of time, or you're losing out on a lot of potential conversions.
The better option is to test. The best way to do that is via PPC. Throw up some ads using your testing keywords, and see what happens. If the keyword converts at a rate comparable to other keywords, then you have yourself a winner. If not, you just saved yourself from wasting a bunch of resources on optimizing a loser.
Rankings Don't Always Matter
If you know all your keywords are winners, you still have to be careful about measuring rankings over results. There is a lot more to a good conversion than ranking for your best terms.
Did you know that in some circumstances you can actually get more traffic by ranking lower in the results? It happens all the time. Why? Because your title and description tag are written to drive the click and conversion more so than to get rankings.
You can tweak your title to improve clicks and conversions, and that may cost yourself some ranking positions. But, if you tweak it for rankings, you may lose both clicks and conversions. It's not always win/lose, sometimes you can win-win, but the better wi
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