Category Archives: Learning

SEO for Growth – Bend Google to your Way!

Leave a reply

SEO for Growth

SEO for Growth Book

SEO for Growth

Bloggers often make fortunes with financialsamurai.com being a great example.  The question, how do you become a successful blogger and more importantly a successful marketer.  SEO for Growth by John Jantsch and Phil Singleton discusses how you can optimize your blog to beat those Google Search rankings and be listed on the first page.  That can be the difference between getting no traffic and being like this cute pug watching money fall from the sky.

Cute pug watching $1 bills fall

Isn’t he cute!

What does Google hate?

Spammy pages that look more advertisement then content!

You forgot smart phones exist!

You cover half your webpage with Eye Junk!  The other half is infinite scrolling.

You are a copy-paste king/queen.  Very original!

What Google Likes!

Google is in the business of answering search queries.  Anything that detracts from that is bad business.  Google is interested in original content that best answers search queries and penalizes websites that produce noise or distraction. To simplify marketers and web designers lives Google provides resources on best practices curate great content and provides tools to analyze your website (site maps, simulations of google crawls, viewing data and more).  Google also graciously provides paid advertisement as well:

Adwords!

Each day, 3.5 billon people ask Google a question.  Over a single year, that is 1.2 trillion searches.  That’s as many searches a day as Donald Trump is estimated having in cold hard cash.  You as an advertiser wants a slice of those people’s attention, which is where Adwords comes into (word) play.  Adwords let’s you bid on search terms, the questions people ask.  Rarer search terms have less demand.  SEO for Growth says this is fertile ground as you can bid for more targeted terms that better represent your customer.  In turn, your customer is more likely to convert into a purchase or blog reader.

Google Analytics! 

Everyone loves a dashboard.  Don’t they?  Google Analytics might be a Marketers Mecca in that it prevents a view of your audience.  Do people coming to your websites like your article on clothing or would rather stalk your About me page?  Google Analytics also tracks other useful information.  For example, where did the person originate?  Did they start on another 3rd party website or where they intensively Googling for an answer?  This type of information can help you fine-tune what appeals to your audience and, if you are clever, be utilized for A/B split test.  A/B split testing is when you send people to two webpages that differ by a single feature.  You then see who stays around, buys or clicks on more ads (group A or B).

Google of course provides a lot more tools than presented in this blog.  I will most likely get into more details in the future.  For now, I have a laundry list of site improvements mentioned in SEO for Growth!

Hopefully, with these tools, I can finally have my website pay for my next Latte!

Best Luck Blogging,

Chris

 

Powerful Accessories to Excel – Introduction

Leave a reply

Dear Readers,

I wanted to start a quick tutorial targeted at Excel users and highlighting cool technologies that are relatively easy to learn and can provide a lot of benefit.  Basically, they are technologies that provide a lot of bang for their “effort” bucks.  The technologies I want to cover in order of ease to learn are:

Bash/Batch – Bash and Batch are shells for Linux/Mac and Windows respectively.  Shells interact with your operating system to allow you to do things like read files, manipulate data, create remote login sessions and schedule tasks on your computer.  One of the great things about bash and batch is that if you study it long enough, you can start using “cloud” computers, which allow computers to do work, while you are sleeping.

SQL/RDBMS – Relational databases allow you to store data compactly on your computer and provide a convenient interface for doing data manipulation.  One great reason you should pick up this tool is that it allows you to specify relationships between data: Student – Class -Teacher – School being a good example and then make statements like: I want only class taught by John Naughton that are considered math classes and only students whose first name starts with A.  One great thing about databases is scale.  You can work with 100s of millions of rows. Since SQL is a standard for data access, there are SQL-esque access to big data tools like Hadoop and Spark, which is software that allows you to take dozens of computer and have them process things in parallel.

Python – Python is a general purpose programming language that provides countless libraries for different purposes.  Do you want to develop a website or automate networking?  Python can do this.  Do you want to scrape a website, travel through a social network or do analysis on wikipedia?  Python is a great tool for it.  Do you want to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and AI by having direct interface to more advanced libraries?  Python…  Python can also be used for data manipulation and processing, which I will focus on.

I focus on the above three based on my knowledge.  Other noteworthy technologies include R, which I hope to cover in a future article.  During these tutorials, I might also mention other cool concepts or technologies.

If you are interested in this lecture series, I will put it under tutorial categories.

Best,

Chris

 

Boston Python Group: Fluent Python and Think Python

Leave a reply

Hello Readers,

I tend to have a few books that I really like.  The usual one I recommend for beginners is:

Think Python by Allen Downey.

http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf

The one I tend to recommend for advanced Python programmers is Fluent Python:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032519.do

The later just gets into so many cool little things about the Python language.  Dictionary comprehensions.  How to develop a card deck in a short class (with cool use of list comprehensions) and lots of interesting technicalities.  There is a reason it has 4.9 stars on O’Reilly Media.

Last night I provided some advice to Python beginners and mentioned the above two books.

Chris