First of all, blogging is a fantastic marketing tool. It offers a portal for professionals to share their expertise, thus helping to establish their credibility. If you blog on a regular basis, and have something of interest to them, people will find you. If you continue to offer information that is useful to them, they will return. And if you continue still, they will likely bookmark your site, or subscribe to your site so they don’t miss anything you have to say. You may have gathered that consistency is the key, here.

Yes, you have probably heard that most blogs are political rants or seedy journals; but you have probably also heard NPR or other news sources citing “award-winning blogs†lately in their commentary. That is because, like all media, one must know how to sort through the junk to get to the treasure. And if you are offering treasure, you will reap the rewards.

But I am not interested in discussing the benefits of blogging, Web 2.0, or social media, there are plenty of credible people out there discussing those topics. The purpose of this site is to make use of the tremendous advantage blogging platforms offer to search engine placement and overall Web exposure; not to mention the ease at which they can be implemented, and the power they put in the hands of laymen.

Let me explain, hopefully in laymen’s terms, one way most search engines, Google in particular, determine how well your site will place when someone enters search terms into their engines.

Simply put, Google’s algorithms, or “spiders†as they are called, regularly “crawl†the contents of your site and “index†it based on the most relevant words or phrases used throughout your site (these are usually referred to as “keywordsâ€). Other algorithms then use that index to determine how relevant your content is to the search terms that are entered by people searching for Websites like yours. Therefore, the more relevant the content is on your site to what you are offering, the better your Website will place when someone is actually looking for your offering.

Not only is the content important, but the rate at which it changes is as well. If the content on your site has not changed since the last time a spider crawled your site, it will not bother to re-index it, and that will also affect your placement. So what is on your site, and how often you change it are key elements to getting good placement.

By now I hope you see where I am going with this. Using a blogging platform such as WordPress - by its very nature - is a brilliant way to improve your search engine placement. Each time you post a blog entry to your site, you are reinforcing your site’s relevance, and keeping your site dynamic - two things, as I mentioned, that greatly improve your placement.

It is important to note, however, that your blog entries need to be relevant to what your site is representing. If you want people to find your site because you have a book to sell to them, or because you want to offer them counseling services, don’t blog about how cute your pit bull looked in the tutu you dressed him in last week. Remember that relevance is one of the keys to good search engine placement.

This is only one of many variables that will improve your search engine placement. I will talk about additional ways in which WordPress can lend to better placement in subsequent posts. If you would like to know more right away, visit Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog.

Just wanted to remind the ones that signed up, that we will be rehearsing the Easter Drumline material after MCM on this coming Sunday March 9th, 1-3pm.  Music will be posted on the website and emailed out wed/thurs.  The rehearsal should only be 2 hours (as long as you come prepared).  More info on the actual gig will be available this coming weekend.  Please RSVP to me joshnelson@musiccitymystique.org asap so I know that you are still planning on doing this.  ALUMNI if you would like to participate contact me and we should be able to work it out.  We are depending on you all that signed up to do this.  Thanks

 Josh

Our dog, Devon, hasn’t been feeling well lately. He stopped eating, and wouldn’t do much other than just lay in his bed. Lisa took him to the vet, where they did an abdominal x-ray. Something looked amiss. His intestines were compressed by something. The vet suggested an ultrasound to determine the cause of the compression. It turns out, one ultrasound and a biopsy later that he has some benign tumors on his spleen. One of them is 6 cm x 6 cm. Since there didn’t seem to be any cancer associated with the tumors, the vet suggested that a splenectomy would help him with the issue, and that he didn’t really need a spleen to survive. At this point I asked myself: what does the spleen do? The answer, as always, is available at Wikipedia. It turns out, it is possible to survive without a spleen, gallbladder, or appendix. I’m sure some fiendish mind has considered this as another possible form of weight loss.

All of these procedures we have done may sound trivial, but they have been expensive: the xray visit was $450. The Ultrasound visit was $650. The splenectomy visit is set to cost $2000. I just hope that this solves his issues. He is a sweet dog, and we all want to see him back to his old friendly self. Note to self: look in to pet insurance before the pets get sick…

The smart “post Web†money is looking at healthcare (and green solutions), right? But while the subject may no longer be search engines or ecommerce, it’s still about Web and mobile applications. And local is still the last frontier to conquer. At least, based on Health 2.0: User -Generated Healthcare, a conference that took place March 2-4 in San Diego,

“It is all local, local, local,†says Tony Miller, of Carol, a packager of localized, online health services. “Local providers, local consumers. Ninety-five percent of services are consumed with ten miles of a residence, most providers really understand that.†Carol has developed a set of 400 localized “CARe packages,†based on the premise that consumers want solutions more than providers.

A typical landing page, for instance, is “Welcome to Minneapolis/St.Paul: The CARe Marketplace.†The thesis is supported by research from The Pew Foundation, which has found that searches for doctors and hospitals are not as popular as searches for symptoms and treatment.

Xoova CEO Tommy McGloin, former GM of MapQuest, provides a dual focus on doctors and symptoms. “Health care is essentially local, online and offline,†he says. Xoova, formely known as Doctors Direct, provides searchable profiles of doctors and health care providers and primarily relies on banner advertising.

“We’re an example of the longtail,†says McGloin. “We take unstructured data on the Web; and we put it in a structured directory that is homogenous and easily discoverable via Google searches.â€

McGloin also notes that a site like his can happily live alongside health group Websites. He finds a clear analogy from the travel business. “We’ve always have Expedia alongside Southwest.com,†he says. “They’ve co-existed for a long time. The Google search is the key thing.â€

Xoova’s searches readily come up on Google and other search services. But Google, Google Maps and the new Google Health vertical, actually has a formal tie to Healthgrades.com, a competing provider that has its roots in hospital ratings. The partnership has been in place for about a year.

The industrial-strength service provides physician profiles on every practicing physician in the U.S., including information such as sanctions and malpractice cases. It gets over four million unique visitors per month. “We try to connect patients to the best health care provider,†says HealthGrades SVP Scott Shapiro.

A new initiative for the company is the addition of physician ratings. It currently has 50,000 ratings, and 1,000 ratings are coming in every day. Shapiro says the ratings are especially helpful in updating profile information. “Forty percent of health care directory information is out of date,†he says, citing a stat from The Wall Street Journal. The site is also adding physician videos.

The ratings focus is something that is embraced by many other entrepreneurial services as well. For instance, San Francisco on Call is a service that has gotten 36 local reviews on Yelp. Vitals.com is another one, seeking to become the “eHarmony or Match.com of medicine.â€
Healthcare.com is yet another lister of local health services. The difference is that it provides direct leads, which it tracks via dedicated call tracking. It has also built up its physician referral activities via health care verticals, such as hair transplant doctors.

In addition to its activities as a destination site, Healthcare.com is syndicated across the drugstore.com network. The relationships with doctors are “not mutually exclusive,†says Shapiro.

So — how do doctors and other health care professionals feel about such services? The sense from Health 2.0 is that a new generation of younger providers are fed up with the bureaucracy and inefficiencies of the current health system, and eager to provide more efficient, consumer friendly services – whether it is by enhancing a profile, or answering simple questions for $1.99 a minute – the business model for a “Human powered search” service called LiveWisdom from Organized Wisdom.

Another advice service, Hello Health from MyCA, calls itself “the Geek Squad for home health care†and charges $15 a month as a base. “In primary care, we are the lowest part of the food chain,†says Hello Health Founder Jay Parkinson, who notes that primary care bills are typically a couple hundred dollars a visit, compared to $800 just to see a cardiologist. His feeling is that Hello Health’s monthly fee is just a token amount, when it is considered as a check on the monthly insurance bill for many people.

Contemplating all the services, Dr. Enoch Choi says they “a wonderful way to find a physician.†But he says that many doctors will “roll their own.†He also says that larger medical groups may already be several steps ahead of the new entrepreneurial services. “Lager groups already have pages that describe a doctor’s expertise and background. But if these (new) sites become more poplar than their own sites, physicians will be clamoring to get on them.â€

Sorry to keep you guys out of the loop but this week, and last , all will be without new content. I’ve just started something huge, a new chapter in my life and will be unable to post until next week, or at least I hope. I’m so sorry about this but to keep you guys in the groove of everything, check out the great content from some similar sites located in the sidebar. Again, I’m sorry for not mentioning this sooner and can’t wait to be able to offer quality posts in the coming days.
-Michael

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Ahna Skop’s complementary interests in art and science are mentioned in “Turning Others on to Science,†part of a publication titled Remarkable Women in Science published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (more…)

This hungry cat resorts to increasingly desperate measures to get indoors. Perfect entertainment for Caturday.

One more after the jump.

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As a novice in online business or blogging, it’s often difficult to get started. Visibility of a site is very important in terms of both search engine optimization and in terms of advertising. Advertising in multiple places could not only seem endlessly time-consuming and expensive, but out of reach for some. However, there is good news for beginners. Directory submission for business solutions… most of you might be familiar with it, but for those who are just beginning it’s the shortest and easiest way to market a product, a website, a blog site. There are numerous web directories and business directories. Now the question is: How would you choose a Business Directory, a Business Resource for your own company website?

Do you need massive campaigning? Do you need paid directories? Do you need well-promoted and high traffic directories? Are there too many links to camouflage your own? Would you organisation or company link stand out? The obvious answer to the obvious questions is that all business directories will definitely not be worth your time, effort or money. Not all directories make dedicated efforts to attract regular visitors, and so it gets even harder to divert visitors to your own site.

As a form of Web Promotion and Web Marketing, you might want to focus mostly on niche directories, preferably relevant to your own site, so that the directory as well as your website has a common target audience. BizFive.com is a good bet if you are looking for something distinct, and not the generic web directory. What makes it unique is the articles and content that you might also want to read or use for your business development while submitting your site. Located in America, BizFive.com is a Business Directory is a directory featuring businesses, merchant services, restaurants, retailers, government links and products.

BizFive.com Business Directory has the potential to be one of the top business search engine and business directory designed to helps its users find the companies, products, services and other useful information they might seek. Overall, the layout is search-engine friendly, however a tableless CSS design would work better. Neat and clean, this business directory does stand out from the rest. It’s professional, with lots of whitespace, and pleasant to the eyes.

The interesting features of this business directory are business articles which include business basics, business issues, business finance, design and development, online monetization, search engine optimization and marketing and web hosting, and of course, you can add your site to the directory.

Also, for your reference, you can check business documents with enhanced business features, how-tos, details, checklists, techniques, standards and information catering to the increasing web trends of Business-to-Business (B2B) services and exponentially increasing demands for web-based resources and information. Current categories available on the site are Board of Directors and Shareholders, Business Planning and Management, Credit and Collection, Customer Service, Employment and HR, Finance and Accounting, Internet and Technology.

A business directory is not just about online business. Even if you have a brick and mortar shop, you could benefit largely from a wider audience by simply being visible online. If you can have a blog or a product review section to further enhance the buying experience for the user, it’s bound to bring in a lot more traffic and customers. BizFive.com lists many such articles which you could put to use in no time… just check it out, it’s absolutely free.

From the basic conceptualization, to content, to usability, to visibility, to SEO to making money online to business how-tos, browse through hundreds of articles, all for free. If you are interested in design development articles, and more, read a few excerpts from the web design principles available on the site.

Yahoo doesn’t really want to be owned by Microsoft.  And who can blame them?  I know I don’t want to be owned by Microsoft.  A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo will almost certainly mean a loss of a lot of jobs, as divisions get merged and rolled together.  And Yahoo has always seen Microsoft as competition, so there’s some underlying dislike there already. 

Yahoo’s CEO sent a memo out to his troops, detailing the current status.  He says:

“Our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape.”

Translation:  “We’re desperately trying to find some non-Microsoft company to buy us out instead, but time is running out.” Rumors swirl that Yahoo put out feelers to the likes of Google, NewsCorp, AOL, and even Comcast… to gauge possible interest in one of those behemoths taking them over instead of Microsoft.  It’s like in school, when I was a big nerd, and allowing myself to be bullied by one guy meant that all the other bullies would leave me alone.  The lesser of two evils, if you will. 

Yahoo just doesn’t have many options.  They’re already cutting jobs and losing profits.  I’m no economics professor (at least, not anymore I’m not), but Microsoft timed their offer rather perfectly.  From the article:

If Yahoo rejects Microsoft, most analysts believe the company will have to line up another acquisition offer or make radical changes to satisfy disillusioned shareholders.  But most analysts doubt any other potential suitor will have the financial muscle — or desire — to try to outbid Microsoft, which has $21 billion in cash and a market value of nearly $265 billion.

If Yahoo spurns Microsoft’s advances, and doesn’t find another company to buy them, they will now likely face a lot of angry stockholders who might wonder why.  As this article states:

If it spurns Microsoft’s offer, Yahoo’s board of directors will be under pressure to give stockholders a soothing cash payout or even borrow money to buy back shares and turn the firm private.

So, Yahoo is backed into a corner.  They have to do something.  And so far, none of the other bullies have stepped up to plop down the billions.  One thought I read a lot about is that Yahoo–whose search used to be powered by Google as recently as 2004–might turn over it’s search operations to Google again, cutting enough costs in the process to allow them to stay independent.  But Yahoo worked hard enough for years to develop their own search division–to compete with Google–that just reverting to the past would seem like a giant step back. 

Google, you may know, is vehemently against this merger.  Cue the chorus of “Duh” from the peanut gallery.  A Microsoft/Yahoo merger means a huge new competitor for Google’s dominance in search, and Google knows it.  MicroHoo (or YahooSoft) would also be a company bolstered in the area of online advertising–another market Google has a bit of dominance in.  I’m not sure Google’s argument that this merger hinders an open, competitive web holds any water (especially when compared with the numerous acquisitions and mergers Google themselves are guilty of. 

We’ll keep you posted.  Just know that one way or another, Yahoo as we know it is going to change.  My money’s on the merger going through.  And while Yahoo and Google may not prefer that, I do think the end result to us users is a good one.  A significant competitor in search can only mean better search service for all us computer users out here in the real world.