I have read several articles about how Alexa ranking was useless, but never took it to heart.  While I don’t hold Alexa in the same high esteem as I did when I first started, I still believe Alexa ranking provides great information about the type of traffic you have.

Above are the graphs for Alexa and my Google Analytics traffic for the last 30 days. The first thing you’ll notice with Alexa is I have major spikes about once a week.  You’ll also notice the huge spike on Oct 31 (who would have thought Halloween would have been my highest traffic day to date).

Strangely, Alexa doesn’t really reflect the huge traffic spike. In fact, on days where I had less than 1/6th of the traffic, I had nearly the same Alexa rank.

Alexa Gives Quality Information About The Type Of Traffic On A Site

Clearly Alexa isn’t a perfectly reliable source for traffic volume ranking.  It does, however, give you an idea of the type of traffic you are getting. Alexa tracks a few things Analytics doesn’t specifically track.

Analytics will give you the referring site, but it doesn’t tell you what other sites visitors have visited either just before or just after visiting yours.  It isn’t the same as referring site or outbound links (although they will probably have some correlation).  This is helpful if you have a lot of direct traffic, but what to know what other sites your visitors read.

Demographics are another thing Alexa tracks that Analytics doesn’t.  Since not all visitors have Alexa, these demographics might not be totally accurate, but they are better than nothing.  Knowing your audience is critical for success.

Finally, Alexa gives related links (if your site gets enough traffic for Alexa to recognize trends).  This is helpful for finding other sites in your niche or other sites similar to ones you like to read.

Alexa definitely is not a reliable source for directly comparing traffic, but it does give you some decent point of comparison, and it tells you things about your visitors other tracking methods like Analytics and WP Stats might not include.  That alone makes Alexa worth keeping an eye on.

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Webpage design is critical to effectively capturing your reader’s attention and keeping them on your page.  If a reader arrive and nothing catches their eye, they are likely to bounce right away.  When there is too much going on, a reader might not know where to start, get frustrated, and leave too.  Finally, if the reader’s attention is drawn to unimportant parts of your page, they won’t end up reading the information you think is important.

Use Feng Shui for Graphic User Interface Eye Tracking

One of the best ways to increase the impact your site has on a new visitor is to optimize the design of your site so their eyes are attracted to the important things.  You might remember one of the 10 Guidelines to Making Your Site User Friendly was to pay attention to where faces in pictures point.  That is a perfect example of how heatmapping can improve your design and user experience.

One amazing (free) tool I’ve found for heatmapping is Feng-GUI.  Feng-GUI allows you to upload a jpg or png of your site (or anything else for that matter), and it will return a computer simulated prediction of where the human eye will travel during the first 5 seconds of viewing.

The programmers have gone to great lengths to take into consideration 9 important factors which attract attention (Basically: color, weight, size, and shape).  You can see examples of how each plays a role in capturing you’re eyes attention on their FAQ page.

You can only use Feng-GUI for free once every 5 hours, so make sure make the most of your time.

Use Eye Tracking Heatmaps to Attract Your Readers’ Attention to Key Elements on Your Page

Now that you have a way to track your readers’ eyes, and you know the 9 things that attract attention, you can use those things to optimize what people look at.

The first step in optimizing is deciding what you want your readers to do while they are on your site.  Some things your might want your readers to do include:

• * Read one article
• * Read a targeted articles
• * Read as many articles as possible
• * Subscribe to your RSS and/or Newsletter
• * Follow your Twitter
• * Click on Ads
• * Buy affiliate products
• * Bookmark your page
• * Share your page using social media (Digg, Stumble, etc…)
• * Daniel Scocco’s eBook Make Money Blogging goes over more things you might want your reader to do.

If you try to get your reader to do all of these things, they will feel overwhelmed and leave.  Instead, pick out the top 3 or 4 things you want your visitors to do.

Once you’ve picked what you want your reader to do, just use a couple of the 9 attention attracting methods to draw their eyes where you want them.

It sounds easy, but  there is a lot of work involve.  For some well established sites, tweaking a few colors and shapes might be quick and simple while others might find it easier to start from scratch.  Either way, the changes will be worth it.

Remember, you only have one chance to make a first impression.  Use eye tracking heatmaps to make the most of your first impression.

P.S.  My page is currently very poorly optimized right now.  Now that I have a heatmapping tool, you’ll notice some subtle (and no so subtle) changes.

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While the writing style of an author or the quality of a product are huge aspects in branding, there is nothing more important to branding than the name.

When you hear John Chow, you think of Make Money Online (or evil blogger depending on how long you’ve known him).  When you hear Nike you think sports apparel.  When you hear Twitter you think of spam… errr.. I mean social media.

The point is, without a strong brand name, your product will be hard to recognize.  Having a consistent brand name across all online media networks is important for building your brand.

How annoying would it be if you wanted to register a Twitter account or a Facebook vanity name only to find out someone already took it?  When I started Props Blog, I was lucky the name wasn’t taken anywhere.

Use NameChk to Help Protect and Build Your Brand

NameChk is an awesome utility that lets you check the availiblity of a username on well over 100 different social media, file sharing, and bookmarking sites.

Simply, type the name you want to check for, hit “Chk,” and  NameChk will quickly list which sites the name is taken on and which sites it is still available.

It is important to make sure that you have your brand name locked up for several reasons.  Having a consistent name across all networks and sites will make it easy for users to find you, identify you, and most importantly, remember you.

Also, the last thing you want is to work hard building your brand only to find out someone is tearing your brand down by impersonating you on another site.  The easier way to prevent that from happening is stop it before it starts.

Don’t get stuck having to use off names like Problogger007 or JohnChowBrownCow, and use NameChk to lock up your brand name today.  A little time could go a long way.

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Ever since I started using computers, I’ve always been interested in ASCII art.  I remember how cool I thought I was as a 10 year old making faces like };^> (the devil).  When I found the internet the level of ASCII art stepped it up a few notches.  Being able to draw crazy pictures in IRC using macros once again made me feel cool.

I’m more grown up now.  I only laugh half the time when people burp or say the word “penis” (haha!).  ASCII art no longer strikes me with awe as much as it once did, but there are still actually a couple of fun uses for it.

Three Fun Uses for ASCII Art

First, If you use any instant messaging client like AIM or Skype, dropping a ASCII picture on an inspecting friend can always get a great laugh.  It’s almost as fun as rickrolling someone.

Some sites do not allow image links in their comment sections, so the second unusual use for ASCII art is to use them in comments.  You have to hope that the site will actually format the post with the right number of characters per line, but if it does, it can really pay off.  Depending on the crowd, other people will be very impressed by your crazy ASCII Art.  (Without knowing the audience and author of the blog, this might not be appropriate according to blog comment etiquette; sometimes it is fun to break the rules… I would lol if someone did this on my blog)

The third and more practical use is branding your theme, code, and/or plugin.  You see, most code writers just have a little byline that no one ever notices or sees when they are skimming over the code.  Most people don’t even think twice about the person who wrote the free theme they are using and there is nothing to catch their attention.

This is where ASCII art comes in.  If you add in a comment at the top of each piece code that you write with an ASCII art picture of yourself or your webpage logo, people are far more likely to notice.  Once you have their attention, you can ask them to visit your webpage, follow you on twitter, or signup for your mailing list.

Use ACSII-O-Matic For Your ASCII Art Needs

You can spend hours trying to figure out how to make cool ASCII pictures, or you can just use the ASCII-O-Matic tool from typorgansm.com.  Typorganism has some really cool tools, but the coolest is the ASCII Art tool.  Just resize your image to 60×50 (weird dimensions, I know) and upload it to their site.

You can have your image rendered using either letters or squares, and they can be in color or in black and white.  As you can see by the two images above, the square makes a slightly more distinct and clear picture.  You really have to use color to get the most of the letter setting.

Just click the Generate HTML button, and you’ve got yourself some wicked ASCII art to surprise your friends with or put in your theme.

I look forward to seeing what nonsense comments I get over the next couple of months because of this.

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There are countless theories behind what helps your SERP rank. In my opinion, anything that changes the way you write isn’t worth trying because if you aren’t putting your readers first, there is no point in blogging.

So how can you optimize your SEO if you don’t change the way you write?

Website Grader by HubSpot

When I first saw a Website Grader badge, I assumed it was silly ranking that had little to no relevance to the site like an Alexa badge.  The truth is, it really didn’t provide any benefit to the site, but it was a great link to follow.

When you get to the site there are options to enter your webpage, competing pages, and your e-mail.  I didn’t enter my e-mail, but I did compare my site to a few top blogs just for fun.

The results were far more useful than I expected.  Website Grader gives you a free break down of each part of your webpage that search engines look  and gives you tips on what you can improve.  While there were 5 major categories Website Grader analyzes, there were two section that I found very helpful:

On Page SEO

1. Metadata – Your Page Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
   Apparently my page title was too long, so it gave me a warning notice that I could improve my SEO by shortening my page title.
2. Heading Summary – It checks all the pages  for header tags h1, h2, h3, etc…
   I recently was reading an article by Chris Pearson about how search engines use headings to read your page and how to improve your heading use.  Tomorrow, I’ll go into more depth about this.
3. Image Summary – A summary of all the images on your page and their tags
   Apparently, by removing the 16×16 gravatars that I include on my top commentators, I could make my webpage load faster.  I’m not sure that I agree with this, but it is something to take note of.  It also noted images that didn’t have alt tags.  Those tags effect the images rank in image search engines, so this was very helpful.
4. Page Analysis – This just checks the other pages on your site like contact, about, etc..
   Nothing really insightful here for me.
5. Readability Level – tells the level of education you need to read the site.
   Apparently someone in secondary school/high school can read my webpage.  Maybe I should start writing more articles about chemistry?

Off Page SEO

1. Domain Info – Just general info about your domain.  For some reason this site things I don’t have paid hosting, and that I’m using Blogspot… I’ll never be 100% apparently.
2. Google Page Rank – If you don’t know what Google Page Rank is you better ask someone! jk
   I’d like to be around PR 3 sometime around Christmas.  Is that too much to ask from Google for Christmas?
3. Google Indexed Pages – How many pages on your site Google has indexed.  I think my site isn’t old enough to rank other than “n/a.”
4. Last Google Crawl Date – I guess this is why I don’t have any indexed pages.
5. Traffic Rank – Your traffic rank is based off Alexa’s traffic rank for you.  Mine is top 0.725% at the moment.  In 3 months that will be better!
6. Inbound Links – How many inbound links you have.  I don’t know what system they are using to measure the number of inbound links, but 4,842 isn’t terrible for under 3 months.
7. DMOZ directory – They spelled it wrong.  I’m going to e-mail them about that.  I am not listed in DMOZ, but if it will help my SEO, I’ll register tonight.
8. Yahoo! Directory – Again, I should register.
9. ZoomInfo – Not sure

There are actually several other sections regarding social bookmarking and feeds, but I don’t think they give me anything new to consider.

What To Look For To Improve Your SEO

The On Site SEO section really struck me as the most helpful.  Labeling your images with meta/alt tags is very useful for your rank on Image Search engines which can drive more traffic to your site than you might think.

I also found the heading summary to be extremely useful too.  Search engines use header content to determine the important of the information on your site and places extra weight on those words.  Seeing that my sidebar labels were h2 and my post titles were h3 was kind of bass ackwards.  Just checking the heading labels to appropriately fit the content will greatly help your SEO.

The off page SEO useful for knowing some of the directories to register with.  The information itself is something I have minimal control over other than making sure I am registered.  Also, having a good idea of how many inbound links you have and focusing on increasing that number will help your SERP greatly.

In the end, a lot of your SERP comes from anchored text links from other sites.  Link building is a key part to getting your page ranked, so make sure you write quality content that will get others linking to you.  Also make the most of guest posts to get high quality links from high authority pages.

Discussion

After I post this I’m going to make the corrections to my site to improve my website grade.  How high is your website grade?  Is it higher or lower than you expected?  Were you able to use Website Grader to improve your SEO?

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Yesterday, I was browsing Lifehacker and came across their First Look at Google Wave where one of the writers lucky enough to get invited to the Wave demonstrated the power of Google Wave with a screan shot fill review.  I promptly proceeded to devour that article followed by watching the 1 hour and 20 min Google Wave developer preview video.

What Is Google Wave

The developers of Google Wave said that e-mail as we know it is an old technology, and they wanted to design something that was like e-mail with updated feature.  If you were to take instant messenger, e-mail, outlook, and a webpage editor and balled them up into one place, you’d almost have Google Wave.

Google Wave Layout

In the First column, you have your standard e-mail navigation with your basic inbox, trash, sent (by me), etc… There is a contact list similar to most instant messenger clients that uses a green ball to mark online contacts.

Next you have your active wave column which is similar to your inbox on outlook with the list of all your active waves.  The unread waves will be bold.  You can also make other folders and view them in this column.  The right column is your reading and composing pane where the big action happens.

Honestly, the layout reminds me of Microsoft Outlook crossed with gmail, and I like it!

Source: http://www.lifehacker.com by Gina Trapani

Google Wave Features

Some specific features that Google Wave includes are:

• Inline replies (similar to threaded replies/comments) that can be hidden via widget
• The ability to embed maps, videos, games, and other gadgets (more on this later)
• Private replies and global replies
• Real time typing  (A lot of people are wowed by this, but ICQ chat had this feature back in 2000)
• Real time spell checking
• Drag and drop folders
• Wave revision playback – the ability to start the wave from the beginning and go through each revision step by step.  This is extremely useful if you join in on a wave late.  You can see who made each edit and even start a new wave from a previous step.
• Wave tagging
• Search operators
• Open source

Google Wave Gadgets and Robots

While the features listed above are all awesome and fun, they don’t truly show off the strength of the Wave. The gadgets and robots are where the real power of Google Wave is going to differentiate from everything else.

Some of the gadgets I’ve seen include: Chess, Risk, Google Map, and a cool “who is coming?” gadget.  Gina from Lifehacker also mentions a conference call gadget called Ribbit that dials out to everyone while keeping each phone number private.

Since Wave is still in development, there aren’t a ton of gadgets, so don’t let the simplicity of this gadgets fool you.  I’m positive many game gadgets will pop up quickly.  Real time typing for Texas Hold’em should be fun!

One of the coolest features is a robot called Bloggy.  By adding this robot to your wave, you can publish the entire wave on your blog.  Other Google Wave users can join the wave from the blog.  The wave and blog will update in real time, so anything you write from the wave client will show up on the blog and vice versa.  As they mentioned in the video, this could make flame wars get heated fast!

Currently, if you don’t have Wave you can’t read these blogs; however, I understand that they will have a read only feature for non-Wave users developed/implemented shortly… How do you think this is going to change blogging?

Summary

The demos of Google Wave that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this product and the possible features it will have.  The real time editing and playback features will make it easier than ever for multiple users to collaborate on projects.  This will also make social interaction over the net among a group of users easier, faster, and more accurate than ever.  I’m looking forward to getting on Google Wave.  Are you ready for the Wave?

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Enter Smashing Magazine, one of the premier sources for all that is graphic and design related.  On my birthday, they wrote the gift of an article 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines which are:

1. Form labels work best above the field
2. Users focus on faces
3. Quality of design is an indicator of credibility
4. Most users do not scroll
5. Blue is the best color for links
6. The ideal search box is 27-characters wide
7. White space improves comprehension
8. Effective user testing doesn’t have to be extensive
9. Informative product pages help you stand out
10. Most users are blind to advertising

What makes this article reliable among other design recommendations is that legitimate research was cited and used for making each of their 10 claims.

Some of these tips are not surprising like tips 4, 9, and 10, and other tips like 3 and 5 are probably common knowledge among established web designers; however, there were three guidelines that I really found useful.

Users Focus on Faces

This one was especially interesting to me because there were some findings that were a little unexpected.  If you look at the two heat maps showing where users clicked, both showed that many people clicked on the baby’s face.  The unexpected result was the image with the baby facing toward the text; the area where the baby was facing received a much higher concentration of clicks than the baby facing straight.

In the future when I’m picking images for my site, I’ll be keeping in mind where the images are facing.

                    

Credits: Photographer - Wes Wolfe, Model - Leah Waddill

White Space Improves Comprehension

This is a simple one that both web designers and textbook writers could take note of.  There are many sites that seem to try to cram as much information into as small of a space as possible.  The sad fact is, doing so actually reduces how much the reader gets from the page’s content.  Textbooks could also take a lesson form this study.

Again, this isn’t groundbreaking, but I find it shocking how many “wall of text” articles and super busy/crammed themes are out there.  I even find myself guilty of not putting enough white space sometimes.

Effective User Testing Doesn’t have to be Extensive

This is actually really useful information for someone adding new plug-ins and/or changing his or her theme.  The stupid things that break are often surprising and easily overlooked on your own page.  Just by having 3 or 4 of your friends have a look over your site can save a ton of headache and embarrassment.

Whether or not you’ve had gurus feeding you lies, you now have proven tips to increase the usability of your site.  How many of these guidelines does your blog or articles follow? Which tips surprised you?  Are you planning on making any changes?

P.S. I have been shopping around for the past week for a new theme. I have narrowed my choices down to 3 and plan on choosing one this weekend.  Expect to see a greatly revamped design by Monday.  If you know of any themes you want to suggest for last minute consideration please let me know!

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I have a simple confession that many people can identify with.  I am an music junkie…  I can’t help it; I would listen to music 24/7 if my work and family let me.

Last month, I was really high on the Spotify Music Player, but Spotify noticed I was listening from a US ip and put a 14 day limit on my listening.  I could hunt down a proxy server in the UK to listen through if I really wanted to.

Instead, I remember my all time favorite music player of all time (yes, intentionally said all time twice to make the point that I love it that much): Screamer Radio.  From the name you’d think they played awful music or sound clips from tacky movies, but you would be wrong.

Screamer Radio is a free internet radio player that allows you to listen to any streaming audio you’d like.  You can either either enter the URL of the stream, or you can select from their ever growing list of preset online radio stations.

The radio stations can be sorted by genre, network, language, and region.  It can be fun to listen to music in different languages.  I’m convinced if I listen to enough foreign radio while I sleep, I’ll learn another language.  Anyone else want to try?  They also offer a web directory with 4000+ free online radio stations.  This is a great place to hear both underground music and hot 100 music alike.

As you can see from the picture above, Screamer Radio is extremely lightweight.  It uses way less resources than any other audio program I have tried which is awesome if you do any gaming, video editing, graphic rendering, and any of those other resource hogging activities.  Oh yeah, it’s great if you have a slow computer (netbook, anyone?) as well.

Finally, my favorite feature is the ability to record the music you are listening to by pressing the “Rec” button.  In the preference settings menu, you can specify which directory the files will be saved to and how the files will be named.  Each time a new track starts, Screamer Radio will automatically create a new file!  This feature is amazing for someone like me who loves Digitally Imported techno since there aren’t a ton of options in the states for this type of music.  I have been able to add huge amounts of music to my already ridiculous collection doing this. [Note: I am not sure of the legal ramifications of ripping streamed radio, so please don't do anything illegal, okay?!]

I look forward to hearing if anyone else falls in love with Screamer Free Internet Radio like I did!  Please Tweet, Digg, Facebook, or comment if you enjoyed this.

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That article told the story of girls selling their worn panties for outrageous sums of money; they even charged extra to remove them in front of the buyer in a public place.  After reading that article, I dismissed Craigslist as legitimate online classified ads.  I figure it was mostly for obscure adult fetishes and online prostitution.

About 2 years ago I heard that people were selling their World of Warcraft accounts on Craigslist, so I posted my account in the for sale sections.  24 hours later I had $700 in my PayPal account and a ton of extra free time; Craigslist started gaining a little legitimacy to me, but I still wasn’t sold on it.

The early 2008 I met Leah.  She is by far the best bargain shopper I know (and I’m not just saying that because I know she’s going to read this… It is very true).  Leah, like many girls I have come to learn, was a Craigslist addict.  Not in the way a shopping addict blows money they don’t have, but in the hunt for hours on end for the best more ludicrous deal possible way.  Leah was able to furnish our 4BR, 3 living room, 2 dining room house for less than half price (we decided to sell all the furniture we each had, and to get all new furniture so it would be “ours” and not “mine” or “yours”).  We are talking multiple couches, tables, chairs, dressers, etc… The furniture is all high end and looks brand new. If you take the time to obsessively check the furniture section for a particular piece of furniture you are looking for, you can save hundreds, if not thousands by buying it off Craigslist.

Not only can Craigslist save you bundles on furniture, but any other product too.  Looking for a designer purse or nice jeans?  Leah grabbed 31 pairs of name brand jeans for $100 and regularly finds designer jeans for under $40.  Occasionally, you’ll come across a “Divorce” sale, aka lying cheating husband/wife sale, where you can find people practically giving away their stuff to get back at their ex.  You can make a ton of money buying from these people looking to sell in a hurry if you are patient like the guy who traded a paperclip for a house.

Craigslist job section is amazingly useful too.  Since employers have to pay to post ads on Craigslist, the majority of them are serious positions they are looking to fill ASAP.  Sites like Monster and Career Builder might have loads of jobs too, but many of those positions are already filled before the posts go up.  Many of them are also recruiters posting about the same job opening.  If you’re having a hard time finding work, get on Craigslist and apply to anything that you look even remotely qualified for and watch the responses come in.

The free section has all sorts of gems.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure has never been more true.  It’s also really nice to be able to get rid of that extra stuff laying around the house without even having to leave home.  Most people will haul it out of your house for you.  We got a office quality solid wood L-shaped desk, credenza, and bookshelf for free because we were willing to rent a dolly and haul them down from the third floor of an apartment.

Finally, the amount of business you can generate from the for sale section is unbelievable.  For about three months I helped a flooring company develop a presence on Craigslist classifieds.  They were generating over $300,000/month of business exclusively from Craigslist!  As a reference, without Craigslist, selling $50,000/month is considered doing well.  Never underestimate the power of a strong Craigslist advertising campaign.

If you haven’t tried Craigslist before, give it a shot.  It just might save you enough money that you can buy that big screen TV or sick laptop you’ve been dying to buy; you might even be able to find it on Craigslist!

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In very basic terms, a proxy server is a server that allows someone browsing the web to be (semi) anonymous to the sites they are browsing by providing a different IP to the server.  What is my IP has a much higher level explanation regarding proxy servers if you want to know more.  They also provide a ton of tools for tracing IP address, detecting proxy servers, and a variety of other fun!

Image Source: http://sendanonymousemail.com/mail/

There are 3 major reasons a normal internet user might use a proxy server:

1. Bypass proxy servers are extremely useful for getting around those pesky firewalls setup by your work or school to keep you from looking at pages like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc…  By browsing through a proxy server you will be able to view pages that would normally be blocked.
2. If you are a Craigslist regular and often sell your products there, proxy servers can help you to flag down people breaking the terms of use policies (typically spamming).
   In the For Sale section of Craigslist, the average post takes 5 flags from unique IPs to get removed.  By using proxy servers, you can quickly remove posts that should be taken down.
   Craigslist is aware of this practice, so they do not count flags from IPs detected as proxy servers.  Fortunately, not all proxy servers are known, but you might have to use a proxy server list in order to find ones that work.  If your need something flagged down, please contact me, and I may be able to assist you ;)
3. Anonymous proxy servers are very helpful for having a truly anonymous voice on the web.  Most web pages and blogs log your IP when you contribute or leave comments.  Also when you e-mail someone, the header gives the recipient the ability to detect your IP address.  By using anonymous proxy servers, you can greatly increase the difficulty of tracking your real identity.

Disclaimer: I do not encourage using the internet when you should be studying in class or working.  This should only be used during lunch breaks or free time when it will not reduce your productivity at work or school!  Also, I do not encourage using proxies for illegal activity or to badmouth/libel others.  Please remember that no proxy can make you 100% anonymous on the web.

What a proxy cannot do is hide what information you look at on your own computer.  The history still shows the names of the webpages you go to (although proxies will prevent your computer for being filled up with useless cookies).  This means your employers and teachers can go back and see where you’ve been; don’t be dumb.  Also note that most web based proxies, the type of proxy I use, have a lot of advertisements on them.

Finally, because your information goes through a third party when using a proxy server (the proxy server itself), DO NOT recommend using proxy servers for handling any personal or financial affairs including purchases, bill paying, or banking.

The best free internet proxy server list I know is Centurian Proxy Network.  They publish several new web based proxy servers everyday.  What’s your take on Proxy Servers?

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