Caydel’s SEO Blog

Yesterday, my wife and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for our nephews and nieces. We went into Toys-R-Us in order to see what we could find. Looking at all the rows and rows of toys available for kids, a couple thoughts came to me:

Every parent has an innate fear that their kid is going to be anything less than the intellectual elite for their age group. No parent wants that - it reflects poorly on them! (Yes, I know, slightly cynical…)

Toy makers know this, and to that end have done everything in their power to create a marketable ‘educational aspect’ to every toy they make.

• ‘Baby’s First Mobile - teaches shapes, colours, counting, arithmetic and discrete mathematics. Ages 6-24 months’

Ok, the example above is somewhat exaggerated. But I am sure you understand the kind of marketing I am referring to. They are marketing to parents who want to justify to themselves that they are intellectually stimulating their children and providing for their intellectual development when then leave them in a corner somewhere because they are too busy with their own lives to care for their children before they are old enough for daycare.

At any rate, ranting and cynicism aside, many SEOs have children. So what type of toys would be appropriate to develop the skills necessary for SEO work in their children from a young age?

• Link it! - a fun game where players must link together a network of websites. Watch out for those spamlinks! Ages 3-6
• Baby’s First Adsense Heatmap - train your child to instinctively determine the best ad placement. 0-18 months
• Keywords! - Develop long tail keywords. The player with the longest list wins! 6-12 years
• Plush Silky Matt Cutts Doll - Give your child someone to take comfort in and suck on when everything is bad.
• Mechanical Spider & Web - Hang on your wall! Watch the thread color change as the Spider assigns trust! 3-6 years
• Google Dance Party for the Xbox 360 - Teach your child the unpredictable steps of the Google Dance!

Ok, those were poor - what can you come up with?

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I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

6 months have gone by, and this blog seems to have begun to develop. Thanks to all the commentators who have taken the time to give feedback and their own views on certain issues - your input is very much appreciated. Thanks to my subscribers out there - I can see on my stats that there are a lot of you pulling in my feed. I doubt I ever feel motivated to write at all if I didn’t know you were somewhat interested in what I had to say.

As a thank you to all of you who have commented, I have removed the ‘nofollow’ attribute from all the comment links. Since you are putting work into the comments that you leave here, you should recieve some type of reward out of it!

Once again, thank you to you all. Have a Merry Christmas!

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EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.

EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.

Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.

What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.

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I may be a day behind the rest of the blogosphere in reporting this, but Search Engine Journal’s 2006 Search Blog Awards are open for vote. The categories up for vote this year are:

• SEO Blog of the Year
• Search News Blog
• Best Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
• Best Link Building Blog
• Best Search Agency Resource Blog
• Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006
• Best Social Media Optimization Blog
• Best Black Hat SEO Blogs
• Best Local Search Blog
• Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Best Web 2.0 Blog
• *BONUS* Best Search Engine Marketing Community / Forum
• *BONUS 2* What’s your favorite Search Podcast?

Rather than being a ‘pick the best’ type vote, voters are asked to rate each of the nominations on a scale of 1-5, except for the ‘Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006′ category, in which you are to pick only one. Of course, if you are not familiar with the nomination, you are asked to leave it blank.

There are a large number of good blogs and bloggers on the card for each category. The two most interesting categories to watch will be the ‘Best SEO Blog of 2006′ as well as the ‘Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006′. The Best Search Blogger had about 20 names on it that I read daily; I was hard-pressed to rate them against eachother since each of the nominations does an outstanding job.

Voting will be open until December 24th. Winners will be announced some time after the holiday season is over.

Place Your Vote!

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It appears that Commission Junction has shut down my account do to a lack of activity in the last couple of months. Searching around, it seems that the only solution is to sign up again with a new email account, since they don’t seem to re-activate people’s accounts.

I am giving Shoemoney’s Ebay Ads script another shot on a few of my sites. I’ve used it in the past, but not with any really spectacular results. I guess it all depends on the niche, and your visitor demographics. Yesterday, I thought of a new site idea which could capitalize big on these ads. Unfortunately, to use it I need my Ebay publisher’s ID which I can only get through my Commission Junction account….

If you are curious what this script looks like, take a look at the sidebar on the right. Currently, it *should* be showing a Google T-Shirt up for auction, although occasionally, in a show of defiance for all logic, a 3 Stooges DVD collection seems to come up for my ‘google shirt’ query. In a day or two, I may change the query to try to find some ask.com swag, or something else cool.

I have a real great idea for a new site where the Ebay ads will do great - it is a niche of collectibles in which people will purchase dozens of this item used over eBay. And the niche is small enough that a single new site in it will immediately be noticed by the community.

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Seems like I have been tagged into the ‘5 Things About Me’ blog game by Dave / Hawaii SEO. I apologize in advance if this list is rather mundane - as far as I know, I haven’t done anything superbly strange, akward, or interesting in my life. If you want to see the ‘grand view’ of how this game has progressed, check out the SoloSEO Blog Tag Tree.

1. I am still in University - I am finishing up my B.Sc in Computer Science, Minoring in Mathematics at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, ON. I will graduate in May.
2. I have only been out of Ontario 5 times - Yes, I am a bit of a provincial. I’ve been to the Six Flags Darien Lake two or three times, and I’ve gone to Montreal twice and Quebec City once for my honeymoon. Other than that, I have not been outside of Ontario. I plan to break this tradition with a variety of conferences in the next year or two.
3. I spent two summers as a treeplanter - I planted in the Spring contacts 2004-2005 at Haveman Brothers Forestry. This was not out of any environmentalist streak in me; rather it was a great way to make money to pay my tuition. Some of my best memories are from these contracts. I would gladly treeplant again if I could see my wife every night, and work it as a 9-5 day job, no sleeping in the bush. I should write a fuller post about my experiences as a treeplanter…
   
4. I’m a Rails Fan - I strongly believe that Ruby on Rails is one of the most underappreciated languages in the programming world. Although it is now starting to gain popularity, it still has a long way to go before it topples PHP as the most prevalent Web Programming language… I’d love to talk about a new project I am starting with it, but there is an NDA in the way. Nevertheless, Rails Rocks!
5. I am holding in my Hands a Hawaiian Coconut - To honor the fact that Hawaii SEO pegged me for this contest, I am writing this post in the company of one of the few genuinely Hawaiian items at my disposal - the Coconut mailed to me by the Blogtown Press blog network as a winner of their Link to a Coconut contest. There’s still two other coconuts to be won, so get your entries in if you want a coconut as cool as mine

Here are the five people I pick to continue the game. Due to the fact that the game has been running for so long already, some of the people I have picked have already been pegged by other people, but have yet to fulfil their end of the game. That said, here are my choices:

1. Matt Cutts
2. Eli / Blue Hat SEO
3. QuadsZilla / SEOBlackHat
4. Greg Niland / GoodROI
5. Chris Boggs

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Here’s a tip for all the bloggers out there trying to monetize their blogs with Adsense:

When you are writing a blog post, write yourself a first draft. Work on it until you are happy with what it says, but don’t publish it yet. When you are done your first draft, open the . Copy the text of your drafted post into the keyword box, ensure that the ‘Use Synonyms’ box is checked, and hit ‘Get More Keywords’. Set the ‘Choose Data To Display:’ drop-down box to show ‘Cost and position estimates’, select USD from the currency box, and set a max CPC of $10.

Now click the column header which says ‘Estimated Avg. CPC’. This will sort all the CPC values for the keywords into descending order. What you will now have is a list of high-paying synonyms to a variety of the phrases within your article. Substitute the phrases you would like to use from the Adwords tool into your draft post as necessary.

You will find that a lot of the phrases that you used had higher paying variations compared to your original draft version, while still conveying the same information. If you do this consistently as part of your blogging habits, you will see your blog’s CPC and Adsense revenues as much as doubling.

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