OK today’s Byte is different. It’s an invitation to free webinars sponsored by the Blandin Foundation. In the spirit of full disclosure, I work with them but I thought that the webinars might be of interest to some readers. I am hoping to attend all 3.
Blandin Broadband Pre-Conference Webinars
http://www.blandinfoundation.org/BBConf07/webinars.html
Join us for one or all three of these “FREE” webinars sponsored by the Blandin Foundation! This series is perfect for economic development commissioners or elected officials to learn more about telecommunications and its impact on economic development.
Confirm your registration by sending a note to dpfeifer@minnesotaruralpartners.org
“Get up to speed on Internet technologies and their impact on local economic development before attending the Blandin Broadband Conference in November. Participating in a webinar is both easy and convenient so do not be hesitant to give it a try.” Bill Coleman, Webinar Moderator
Webinar Dates and Topics
October 3rd Global Trends in Broadband
October 17th The Economic Impacts of Broadband and Technology
October 31st Web 2.0 Applications
Webinar Times
8:30 – 9:30 AM
Webinar Instructions
Our webinars are internet and conference call based. It’s easy…
Internet
Click on this link to join us via the web: https://umconnect.umn.edu/blandinwebinar
Conference Call
Dial: 866-316-1519
Passcode: 14223904
Mostly Google likes web sites that are popular – and they define popularity by how many web sites link to a web site. So it used to be great to get links from everyone and anyone.
Well that changed a while ago – maybe 2-3 years ago. Google still liked links – but they only liked “quality links”. That means they don’t links from link farms – generally those sites are short on content, long on links. The magic number is 200 – Google doesn’t like links from web sites that have more than 200 links on them.
OK that’s fine. The goal shifted to only getting relevant links, which makes sense. Well, the latest hot topic is – should you pay for links?
In theory, the search engines seem to frown on paid links – but I think it’s very hard to define “paid” or ignore the fact that sometimes paid links are valuable. I work with lots of resorts and I can tell you that you pay to get listed on Explore Minnesota (www.exploreminnesota.com) and that you get lots of traffic from them too.
So what’s a web owner to do? Pay for links if you think it will bring you good traffic – so from your local Chamber or industry association. But the better bet these days is trying to get links from web sites related to your industry (or location, or targeting your general market) and offer them content.
I used to suggest writing articles for online newsletters – and that still can work if your industry is not flooded with articles (real estate is, manufacturing isn’t). Now I think placing comments on blog (related comments!) and/or contacting blog owners to ask them to mention you can be the way to go.
So there you go a few words on getting links for your web site.
I just finished a fun web site for kids as part of the Eagle Nest Lodge web site. Eagle Nest Lodge is located near Grand Rapids (it’s really in Deer River) on Lake Winnie (aka Lake Winnibigoshish) and Lake Cutfoot Siouux.
It’s a fun resort – especially for families with kids. It’s open through the fall.
Someone asked me last week about dynamically generated web pages and how they ranked with the search engines. Traditionally anything that was dynamically generated did not do well in the search engines; the big test is if your web pages have very long addresses and include symbols, especially a question mark or equal sign – that was not a good sign.
The search engines are getting smarter about dynamically generated pages. All things being equal static pages are easier for the search engines, but the dynamic pages can do well too. Here are a few tips to help improve the ranking of dynamically generated pages:
- Create static links to your most important pages. You might do this on a sitemap or by providing links to pages on your homepage.
- Create turn your dynamic URLs into static URLs. How you do this will depend on the server you use – the following articles can help:
- Create static copies of key pages to replace the dynamic pages for the search engines. If the dynamic pages still exist, be sure to include a robots.txt file that disallows the dynamic pages in order to ensure that these pages aren’t seen as having duplicate content.
- The more complex the page, the more difficult it is for the search engines. If you try to keep the dynamic portions of your site to fewer than three, that will help. A script that has to pull from too many resources will make the job more difficult for the search engines.
- Add titles to the dynamic pages. I work with one company that uses a Content Management System that creates pages dynamically. We put titles onto each page but about every 6 months I get a call because they have fallen off the search engines rankings almost entirely. Without fail it’s because the system has been upgraded and has deleted our good title tags in lieu of something too generic.
- If your pages are static but your URLs are dynamic, look into getting static addresses just to make things easier for the search engines.
Well I’m still in Dublin and my Internet access is still not stellar – so today I’m going to mention something I read in the newspaper over the weekend.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) founder, Jimmy Wales is building a search engine that is going to debut is December. Wikipedia is the popular community-written online encyclopedia. It has 8.2 million articles in 253 languages. (That compares to 500,00o articles in Encyclopedia Britannica.) Article are written and modified by volunteers/readers. Mostly I like Wikipedia. I find that the articles I have looked at have been pretty well balanced – and the portions that are biased are usually somehow labeled as opinion, not fact. However, I know that Wikipedia has received criticism for articles that are biased and/or less than professional.
The proposed search engine (Wikia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia,_Inc.) will be a mix of computer and community. Apparently the code for the search engines will be open for anyone to change (if they have the technical skill) for those of us who are less technical, we can participate by ranking web sites as they come up on the search engine.
I have seen some of these social search engines in the past and have not been hugely impressed – mostly because I’m not sure who, if anyone, takes the time to rank the results unless they have something to gain by artificially inflating or deflating results. On the other hand, Wikipedia has some 4,000 editors so if anyone can encourage participation I think the Wikipeida folks can do it.
