Websitetology

This post would have been a lot more interesting if all the sites using WordPress were linked-but, I believe that the list is probably right. My only question is why haven’t any of these government agencies hired The Next Wave to do their sites- since we are an SDVOB and HUBzone?

Here is a list (probably not all-inclusive) of United States government agencies or organizations using WordPress (whether privately or publicly):

* Air Force

* Army

* Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

* Coast Guard

* Defense Intelligence Agency

* Department of Energy

* Department of Homeland Security

* Department of State

* Department of Treasury

* Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)

* Marine Corps

* Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

* National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

* National Reconnaissance Agency

* National Security Agency (NSA)

* Navy

This list was revealed at WordCamp San Francisco, 2008.

U.S. Government Agencies Using WordPress « Mark on WordPress.

While the seasoned WP person can usually tell if a site is done in WP or not- some rookies can’t tell. An easy way to find out is just try adding /wp-admin after the primary URL and see if it takes you to the login panel.

Although putting your video in 20 different places probably isn’t necessary- if you are looking for wider audiences (and have time to join each site) TubeMogul makes it easy.

TubeMogul.com – Online Video Distribution and Analytics
TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.

Being ubiquitous is one way to build an audience.

Someone said on the hackers forum: “The analogy I use is that Categories are like a book’s table of contents, and Tags like its index.”

However, be aware that categories that are actual search terms are very strong Google magnets.

So, instead of using a category “lines we carry” think about “High Performance Motorcycles in Dayton OH”  and then use tags to highlight the brands and product names.

Tags are ways to identify the keywords or concepts in each post- categories group the posts in ways that make sense for others. Lately, Google has started dinging sites for putting a single post in more than three categories (which is too bad)- so think carefully about your choice of categories.

There is always Google ad sense, but, what if you want to sell even more ad space?

AdBrite is a way for publishers to add revenue to their site.

AdBrite – How AdBrite Works
AdBrite’s aim is to provide our publishers with the most control, best service, and highest payout possible.
Step 1 – Choose Products

Through a single snippet of HTML, AdBrite can serve any combination of the following ad formats:

* Text and banner ads with customizable layout
* Full page ads – A high-paying full-screen ad on the third pageview of your site, shown only once per user per day

Step 2 – Attract advertisers

Anyone visiting your site can buy an ad directly on your site by clicking “Your Ad Here.” You’ll also be listed in the AdBrite marketplace, and represented by our busy in-house sales staff.
Step 3 – Control

You can choose to review each ad before it appears on your site. You can set the price for ads bought directly on your site. You can even have AdBrite show another ad network (your Google AdSense ads, Burst, etc.) if we can’t meet your minimum revenue requirement.

For really high volume sites, you can look to other ad placement services like Doubleclick which is now also owned by Google.

One thing you have to be aware of: once you ad advertising from a remote server, your page load times can start slowing down, which can lose you readers and reach. Some really successful sites can sell their own advertising and serve the ads internally, but you have to have a really targeted audience that advertisers want to reach.

It’s nice when the New York Times writes about blog superstars like Mark Cuban- who gets thousands of comments on a post, but, what about the rest of us?

Everyone knows something about something- at least that’s the premise of Wikipedia. But, when it comes to getting that Google love, the Times has a few good tips:

So You Want to Be a Blogging Star? – New York Times
More to the point, linking to other bloggers is the best way to get them to link to you. Links from other bloggers increase your readership two ways: they send readers directly from other sites, and they raise your ranking in search engine results. A blogger who posts about a hot topic like Eliot Spitzer’s secret life, but has no inbound links, will lose out to one who already has dozens of inbound links from other sites.

Plug yourself. That’s what all the name-brand bloggers do. It’s not bad form to send a short note to a prominent blogger drawing his or her attention to a really good blog you wrote. Some bloggers place links to their sites in comments they write on more established blogs. And some bloggers are on to the trick and refuse to allow it.

A more direct way to draw a crowd is to submit your blog posts to news aggregation sites like Digg, Fark and Boing Boing. Readers vote on how much they like the posts and new readers are drawn to the list of most popular posts. Granted, it helps if your blog post includes a home video of someone being attacked by a cat or really arrogant e-mail messages from a hedge-fund manager. Those get passed around virally in an instant.

You have to think about what you write, how useful it will be to your audience, and how to get connected with other sites. Finding your community and your voice can take a while, but once it’s there- lookout.

Of course, if you take the websitetology seminar, you’ll know a lot more about how all this works.

The next Websitetology seminars will be held, Monday January 21, 2008

8:30am to 5 pm

Location Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410

If you are wondering if you should take this seminar: http://websitetology.com/?p=91

Sign up for it here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=247

Matt Cutts is the guy at Google who figures out how to deliver better search results- what gets to the first results page. Officially he’s the Head of Web Spam at Google- which makes sense once you realize a big part of his job is making sure that you aren’t trying to “game” Google. All those SEO tricks that may work for a minute- aren’t near as useful as new helpful content on a fairly regular basis. We’re in an “Expert Economy” and those with the newest, best answers to solve searchers problems- will be the people who get to the front page.The days of the static brochure type site are long over.Watch the video- and realize, everything that Matt is talking about is what we teach in the Websitetology seminar. He even praises WordPress, our content manager of choice right at the beginning of the video. And if you need further proof that Wordpress is the bomb, it’s the tool he uses for his blog (see link above)Some tips Matt makes are some of the things we emphasize- like make sure you add descriptions of your audio or video content as text, because Google can’t index audio. (That’s what we’re doing here!) He talks about Googles other tools, like Google base, Google Maps, Google local, as well as tips on video- Google video longer for videos longer than 10 minutes, YouTube for 10 minutes or less (although we’ve got “Directors Status” and have loaded up 30 minute videos to YouTube). He also reminds smart web content creators to use Google ad words to generate alternate key words for your posts.Matt’s best advice to a budding site builder- use a really old browser, or a text only browser to see how a bot sees your site. Flash and Javascript make your site much harder or impossible to crawl. If you do insist on using Flash, use it as decoration, but leave the navigation in HTML.If you are in Dayton OH, and want to learn all the ins and outs of building the best site for Google rank, or, if you want a seminar on how to build an easy to use, effective website that can get you to the front page of Google, you can read up on Matt Cutts or you can take the Websitetology seminar which will give you the insight to get to the top, without having to buy ad words.

The next Websitetology seminars will be held, Tuesday Dec 11, 2007

8:30am to 5 pm

Location Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410

If you are wondering if you should take this seminar: http://websitetology.com/?p=91

Sign up for it here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=247

You often get what you pay for- and Microsoft is now so desperate to gain users and traffic for it’s Microsoft live search- that they are willing to host your site for free as long as you get hooked on their advertising keywords business.

Design tools, Web hosting, and business e-mail for small business | Microsoft Office Live – Microsoft Office Online
Microsoft Office Live Basics is the easy way to get started on the Web. If you have always wanted your own Web site, Microsoft Office Live Small Business has just made it easier — much easier.

• Free domain name and Web hosting
• Easy-to-use Web site design tools
• 500 MB of Web site storage space
• 25 company-branded e-mail accounts
• Web site reports
• Search advertising tool with $50 credit

Get Microsoft Office Live Basics for FREE
and get a $50 search advertising credit

As Johnny come lately to the world of search and even the Internet, Microsoft is so desperate to compete with Google that they will try almost anything- and spend good money doing it. A cursory look at the sample sites show that as always, Microsoft still doesn’t get the idea of easy-to-use- since the small business sites I looked at were still missing normal data: like a page title other than “Home”

AC Lawrence Real Estate

Seaport Photography

Neither site had RSS, or the search engine friendly features that come in the true Open Source solution we recommend that are built into Word Press. When you elect to go with a closed loop system like Microsoft office live’s free hosting- you will be forever locked into whatever feature set Microsoft chooses to support.

There are inexpensive hosting packages out there, and there is also www.wordpress.com where anyone can build a highly effective WordPress site for free- but in the end, you still get what you pay for.

We don’t demand you host with us after taking our seminar- although we do believe our $159 annual hosting fee with URL registration is reasonable, considering we provide support- and give you true Open Source solutions to support maximum flexibility and adherence to W3C standards.

If you want to see sample sites from our websitetologists, take a look here: Websitetologists.

Compare the amount of content on their sites to those of the sample Microsoft Live sites- and remember- content drives traffic for smart people. Paid ads drive traffic for, well, stupid people.

Having problems posting often enough? Always on the go when you see something that you want to share? Have a cell phone? Utterz might be the answer.

Although you’ve always had the ability to post via e-mail- without some serious pluginage, you would have a hard time adding cell phone multi-media to a post. Enter Utterz. Snap a pic, record a podcast, or a quick camera video and post it to your WordPress blog (even though they left WP off their FAQ-but use it for their own blog) with a simple call to their number (and yes- you pay for the call).

Utterz – Frequently Asked Questions
Utterz is the first way you can instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas, anywhere, using all the capabilities of your mobile phone. Utterz mashes together the voice, video, pictures, and text you call or send in and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace and more. [See FAQ how do I grab a widget, how do I use auto-posting and how do I embed my Utter?]

Just remember, if you are posting (utterz) of audio or video- remember to add text to make your post searchable- or you’ll just be uttering to yourself and your subscribers.

Not quite sure what the revenue model is- maybe they’ll make you listen to an ad before you post, or because the site aggregates public “utterz” they will be a high value site and end up with revenue from Google ads etc. Read what Robert Scoble has to say about it here: http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/17/utterz-like-twitter-but-with-audiovideo/

There is a lot of buzz about Twitter as the dawn of instant mobjournalism- instant “Twitterquakes” when something relevant happens to a large group of people who are connected. An earthquake or terrorist attack would instantly fill the twitter-ether with reports.

You don’t have to use Utterz as a social media tool- just a way to post- but, the options are out there.