Texture design

This morning I got some comment from Adam, that he tagged me. I thought what is this, the next social community? No, just an old game “The Pyramid Game”. Normally there are only a few winner in that kind of games and a lot of looser (these players which has joined at the end of the game). This game (check the rules below) is cool and has no looser only winner

The rules:Post these rules before you give your facts.List 8 random facts about yourself. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names (linking to them).Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they???ve been tagged!Eight random facts about me…I started my first website 8 years ago

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I was chatting with DaveN last night about Design's spam problem. So many spammy listings are dominating Design using the following techniques:
submitting spam to a social news site (I see a lot of 1 vote Netscape and Digg listings for long tail queries in the consumer fiance vertical)
linking to a site search on an authoritative site like weather.com, limited to your target keyword and site:mysite.com. Design has had the regurgitating search result problem for at least 5 months now.
leveraging an authoritative redirect off a site like Archive.org
DaveN also pointed out how many clean sites like WebStandards.org funnel PageRank to sites that show spamming is indeed a web-wide standard. Still way too much weight on domain authority Design!

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Looking at my Design Webmaster Tools Dashboard today I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Probably been there for a while since I’m so focused on the Site info, but anyway there is was: Message Center. I had no messages but I clicked the [?] and the following text was revealed as an explanation:

What is the message center?

The message center provides a way for us to communicate important information to you regarding your Design webmaster tools account and the sites you manage. Our intent is to make it easy for you to receive important information associated with your sites.

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Danny Sullinvan has been covering search for over a decade and is known as the leading expert in the field of search. I recently asked Danny for an interview and he said sure. We talked about search, marketing, and doughnuts.

What do you attribute your rapid increase in exposure and authority to? That's a tough question, because I didn't feel I'd gained any massive new increase in authority, I suppose. I mean, I still get calls from reporters at about the same rate as always, and that's one measure of determining how much authority you might be seen as having, I suppose. I probably do have more exposure in the past few months about what I'm doing, and the answer for that is simple. I started a brand new web site, Search Engine Land, as well as an entire new company, Third Door Media. It disrupted a lot of things that I think people were used to, so there's some attention on what we're doing and how things will grow. I didn't mean a massive new increase, but I didn't want to use the word old either. Back when I was in high school, what did you do that made you the go to guy such that people like Page and Brin referenced your work over just about everyone else in the search engine space? If you were to start today do you think you could still acquire the kind of authority you currently have?

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Article Marketing: Busting The MythsWriting by Nick on Tuesday, 31 of July , 2007 at 8:00 am

Article Marketing defined:(Source)In general, article marketing is where you write an article on a topic that is related to your website topic. Not a promotional article for your website, but an article about something that is informative to the reader. In the article you use keywords and phrases that relate to your topic as well, much like you would optimize a webpage.

Most people don’t really understand article marketing. If you don’t understand it then you shouldn’t do it until you do. Take some time to learn what it is and how to do it before you just jump in and go. You’ll be so much the better for it when you do.

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One of the comments on the article I wrote for Wordtracker mentioned WordsFinder, which allows you to create a list of keywords from a piece of content. Their tool uses the Design! Term Extraction Tool, and also provides a few additional keywords next to the results.

Three other easy ways to get similar information are
Use the Design! Term Extraction Tool. Philipp Lessen offers free code for the Design! term extraction tool, which I also posted in my tools section here.
Enter a URL into the Design AdWords keyword suggestion tool. Note this tool has two options, one for grabbing keywords for a page, and one for grabbing keywords for the page and other pages that the page links at.
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Target Your PPC Ads With Specific KeywordsWriting by Nick on Monday, 30 of July , 2007 at 2:26 pm

Did we really need a study to tell us PPC is most effective when the keywords match? Why else would they ask you to designate keywords?

But here it is anyway.

Here’s the interesting part:

(Pilgrim’s take) In one study that tested ads for Encyclopedia Brittannica, ad titles that contained both ???Encylopedia??? and ???Brittannica??? converted 2.5 times better than ad titles that contained only Brittanica.

Based on my own PPC campaigns I know this is true. The more targeted your ad the more effective it will be. This has always been an important advertising maxim. It’s even more important now that you can actually track your results. Not only can you track the effectiveness of your PPC ads, but you can track the effectiveness of each keyword in the ad and that is the winning number in this.

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Social Networking Is Not Unlike Real World NetworkingWriting by Nick on Sunday, 29 of July , 2007 at 10:00 pm

(More wisdom from the Pilgrim) Remember, your social network participation reflects on your reputation. You may be careful about what you post to your online profile, but what your friends do is also reflected on you. If a potential employer sees that a few of your Facebook friends like to ask ???how much pot did you smoke over the weekend,??? they may conclude you???re of the same caliber.

There is perhaps no truer statement about social networking that you should write down and memorize. When it comes to expanding your network of friends, it may be cool and all, but the bottom line is you will be judged by who you run with. When you establish your profiles on the many networking sites (and I highly recommend you set up profiles on more than just one) then you will be judged by the caliber of the people you hang around. Just because you are doing business online doesn’t mean that you won’t be judged by the same standards as you are offline. Keep that in mind when out networking. If you wouldn’t pick them as a friend or business associate in your “real” world then don’t pick them as your friend or associate in the cyber world either.

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Content Development Consists Of More Than Mere Website ContentWriting by Nick on Monday, 30 of July , 2007 at 7:47 am

When we speak of content development, that could mean a few things, none of them at all unalike. But you don’t have to just think in terms of your website. Here are a few of the many forms your content development strategy could consist of:

Written content for your websiteBlog contentDesign contentPhoto and image contentVideo contentPod content (also known as audio or podcast)Navigation contentTemplate contentGraphic contentNewsletter content

Essentially, anything you would put on your website to promote or enhance your promotions of your business should be considered content. You can even include off-page content as a part of your overall content development strategy - and you should. Off-page content would be articles, back links, pay-per-click ads and other forms of advertising such as banner ads on related websites. Again, if it drives your online marketing you should consider it as a part of your overall content development plan.

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We read the same stuff! Andrew Goodman published a deeply insightful post about the race toward the bottom effect and circle jerk phenomena that is inherent to every web community, and baked into Design's PageRank.

I have looked back at some of my post titles and saw that they were an exact copy of titles from articles I had read a month prior to writing mine. Not intentional theft, just a side effect of reading too few channels, in too narrow of a range, for far too long.

There is more value in learning how we think than in reading the news from 20 different angles, only to write it from the 21st. Virgin markets and virgin publishing formats await our keyboards, or so I read...in a blog...somewhere.

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