If you have been surfing the web for a while, or have a site on the web you have no doubt heard the term PageRank. If you own a web site and have not heard about PageRank now is a good time to learn.

What is PageRank?

Essentially PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by Google. PageRank was designed to make search results more relevant to the person using the search engine. It works by assigning a value to a web page based on what sites link to it. However it goes much deeper than that. PageRank also looks at the weight it has assigned to the linking pages. From the number of links to web page and the value of the pages linking to that site, PageRank determines the value it assigns for that page.

Sound complicated? That is because it is complicated. In fact my brief description does not really do it justice. Plus add in the fact that the engineers at Google are always updating the algorithm to prevent it from being abused. Not long ago Google rolled out a few changes that had dramatic effects across the web. Sites that had a PageRank of 7 (PageRank is out of 10) went to a PageRank of 3 overnight. needless to say it was a shock to a lot of people.

How does PageRank Affect a Website?

Well firstly PageRank will affect where the web site shows up in Google search results. As you probably already know the higher up a site appears in search results the more traffic it will get. But if you have or want to have advertising on your site it is also important. A lot of advertisers look at a websites PageRank when determining if they will advertise there or not. I also believe Google AdSense takes into account a sites Pagerank when determining which adds to place on the site.

At one time TenaciousCreations.com had a PageRank of 4. At the time I was upset that it was only 4, but now not having any PageRank I would gladly go back to having a PageRank of 4. However when this site had some PageRanking I consistently had Google placing higher paying ads on my site. As my PageRank decreased so did the price per click of the ads Google Adsense placed on my site.

How Do I Improve My Websites PageRank?

Okay so now we know what PageRank is and why it is important us. But how do we improve our sites PageRank? Well if you have followed my site at all you will know I always stress good content. If you have good content, that people can benefit from and want. You will have other websites deep linking to your site. More relevant links == more PageRank. Link exchanges can also work. However I feel Google has got smart on this and now puts less weight to a link exchange than they do a deep link with in another site. When ever i created a new Photo Shop tutorial I always submitted them to a bunch of tutorial sites. Most of these tutorial sites are nothing more than a collection of links. For a while I enjoyed a very good PageRank, however at the time of writing this article I have a pretty dismal PageRank.

You have to remember search engines are always trying to improve the way they work in order to provide better search results for their users (ie customers). A search engine wants to make sure when a user enters his or her search terms, the search engine will turn up the results they want. If you keep this in mind and provide quality content I am very confident that will also improve your PageRank.

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 If you read about improving traffic to your site or selling a product you have no doubt heard about branding. When I think of branding I am remind of growing up on the farm. I can still smell the mixture of red hot metal and seared flesh. Just like the brand on cattle identifies them as some ones property establishing a brand for your web site or product does the same thing.

 Examples of this are the golden arches of McDonald’s, the apple of Apple and I am sure now that you think of it several more come to mind. An effective brand will create an emotional response in the consumer. Why an emotional response? Well research has proven that if an advertiser can create an emotional response in the consumer the consumer will have a great chance of remembering the message.

 I recently found this article from Microsoft about branding with in a piece of software. If you are a programmer this is really an interesting read and I would recommend reading it.

 Branding seems to be extremely important to marketing people. For some reason I never seem to fully grasp the marketing concepts. However now that I am building software as an independent developer this has become more important to me. If people do not know about my products they surely will not buy them.

 So how do you let people know about your products? Well that is an easy one to answer, you advertise. But wait a minute, how do you make sure you get the most effective advertising? How do you advertise on a budget? Should you focus your advertising to your potential market?

 These are important questions that need to be answered. To be honest I am not 100% sure on the answers to these questions. If you are a marketing guru please use the contact form at the bottom of that page to contact me. I do know I have to do some more research on marketing so that I can answer these questions. I would hate to invest more money into advertising than I am going to generate from software sales. But I guess it is a risk one has to take.

 My biggest decision has been if I should brand my software under the Tenacious Creations name or use a new name. To that extent I having even researched some over names. I was shocked to see how many of them already have domains registered with that name. No web site there, just people holding onto the domain name hoping to make a quick buck. That is where Tenacious Creations has an advantage, it has been registered for a few years and is easy to remember. The down side is it is difficult to spell and easy to misspell.

 Next is a logo, I don’t really have a logo for Tenacious Creations. Unless you count the coyote.

 In any case it looks like learning about marketing is going to be an interesting adventure. Plus it should make for some good blog posts. I plan to post what I learn so maybe other people can learn from my successes and failures. I hope I get a lot of comments and suggestions from you the readers.

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 A short time ago I wrote a post on how much I love white boards or dry erase boards. Well Julia the founder of Kleen Slate got in touch with me to tell me about some products she has created for white boards / dry erase boards.

Julia saw a need and filled it with her revolutionary idea of having erasers attached right on the dry / erase marker. No more having to hunt around for the eraser when you make a bumble while writing, or worse yet using your fingers to wipe off the writing.

 Now before you go telling me that it is just easier to use your finger let me relate this anecdote to you. While attending a conference the presenter was making extensive use of the dry / erase board to explain some formulae. Well he occasionally made a blunder and would wipe it quickly off with his finger. However one time after doing this he wiped his face and left a green mark across his face. Well no one in attendance told him and he went the rest of the day with a green mark on his face. I am sure this made him lose some credibility in the eyes of his audience.

 The first product I want to discuss is the KwikChek II. This is essentially a paddle with a plain dry / erase side and a lined dry / erase side. My wife who works in a nursing home immediately saw the advantage of this when she saw it. She told me it would be an excellent tool for communicating with her patients who are hard of hearing or have difficulty speaking.

  I think it is really well designed for many applications. It is one of those items that once you have it in your hand you can think up endless possibilities for it. A few are listed on Kleen Slate’s web site. I do like the fact the it has a holder for the marker, this way you can always have the two together.

Other possible uses that I can think of right now are:

• To relay time information to runners / bikers in a race.
• To display the channel information for R/C enthusiasts.

 The erasers on the small markers are incorporated to the cap. This makes them extremely versatile. Once you remove the cap and place it on the end you have both your writing end and erasing end. Much like a pencil. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase eraser I have used. They remove all the ink with no trace leaving a clean dry erase surface. As for odour from the dry / erase markers they are not any worse or any better than those already on the market.

 The big markers do not have the erasers attached to the caps. A feature I would of really liked to have seen as I tend to be a little bit absent minded and can fore see myself misplacing a cap from one of the markers. This can be an advantage as you will be able to easily reuse the erasers from these markers with new markers. Again the erasers perform exceptionally well and are very nice to use. The odour again is much like other dry / erase markers out there.

 All things considered if you regularly make use of white boards (dry / erase boards ) I would recommend using these products. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase erasers I have ever used. I will make sure that all my dry /erase markers in the future are equipped with these erasers.

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 Admit it you could not wait for Sexy Pirate Women – Lesson Two in Keywords. Well in this lesson we are going to look at how and why to use keywords. If you haven’t read the first part of this I suggest you do — Pirates are Sexy – Lesson One in Keywords.

 As I am a blogger and the majority of my readers are bloggers I am going to focus on using Keywords from a bloggers perspective (however if I keep doing Sexy Pirate Women posts my traffic demographic may change). It is still my belief that no matter what you do in your blog, in the end good content will get you more traffic and regular readers than anything else you can do. But you have to let people know that your content is there, and that is the job of the search engines. However if you use keywords properly you help the search engines along.

 Keywords however are not just for the search engines. If you are running adsense your ads are also based on the words you use in your posts. What it boils down to is that if you have keywords that attract the demographic of people you are after your ads will also be targeted to the same demographic.

 Most bloggers I know track their sites stats be it with Google Analytics or some other tracking system. This is a good way to gauge if what you are doing on your site to get traffic is working.

For example as illustrated in the graph to left only 10.58% of my traffic comes from search engines. This may not sound like a high number but compared to my November 2007 stats which indicated only 3.04% of my traffic came from search engines I have increased it significantly.

 Not only is my traffic up from search engines but I am also getting more adsense clicks. No it is not because the sexy pirate women are intimidating my readers to click on the ads. It is because the ads are becoming more tailored to my readers and offering them products and services they actually want.

 Now I know your saying to yourself “Okay thats great but tell me how to do that.”. Well the first step is to get to know your audience. Who are you targeting your writing to? What is your niche in the blogoshpere? For me these were hard questions to answer. Who am I writing for? Well anybody who is willing to read my blog. What is my target niche? Well I try to target people who enjoy being creative and are looking for resources to expand their creativity.

 For me each post I do is focusing on a unique group of people, kind of like sexy pirate women. So when I choose a topic to post on I ask my self these questions.

1. What am I providing in this post that will be deemed useful?
2. Who will this be useful to and in what way?

 Although this post mentions sexy pirate women a lot I doubt it would be of any benefit to them. My intention with this series of Pirates are Sexy – Lessons in Keywords is to inform my fellow bloggers on how I learned to use keywords to benefit me. Hopefully they can use what I have learned to benefit themselves.

 Knowing that my target audience is bloggers allows me to figure out which keywords to go after. There are terms that most bloggers are familiar with – traffic (in the sense of visitors to a web site), keywords (no not words that unlock things), post (not the kind you build fences with). Outside of the blogging world these terms mean different things, this is something you have to keep in mind when you write, or speak for that matter.

 I am an active member of my local Toastmasters club. If you don’t know Toastmasters is a group that helps you improve your public speaking by you giving speeches to your fellow Toastmasters. One thing that I have learned is terms that are familiar to me (baud, RAM, coder, EOD, HLVW, etc) are not to the majority of people. So to make my speeches appeal to a broader audience I make sure to explain these terms.

 Like wise when you are writing posts and trying to optimize your keywords you have to keep in mind you want to attract the larger audience. The classic example is with airlines. “Low fares” is more of an industry term in the airline industry, and although it is searched for, it is nowhere near searched for as much as “cheap flights”. My point – know your audience, and try to predict the terms that they would search for. Once you have determined that, then it is time to use resources like Googles Keyword Tool to see which terms are the most searched for. These are the terms your audience is using. By using them you are not only going to get some of those searches directed to your site, but you are also going to communicate with your audience better.

 In Pirates are Sexy – Lesson 3 I will discuss how placement of your keywords in your post affects there performance.

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 You are probably wondering what in the world do sexy pirate women have to do with keywords. Well in case you didn’t know sex, or anything to do with sex are most highly searched for terms on the internet. I am not a keyword expert but this is what I have learned on the web so far.

 Knowing what keywords people are searching for can help you help them find your site. Plus if you run adsense it can help you attract higher paying ads to your site. Keywords are important, but not as important as content. To understand keywords we first have to look at how a search engine works.

 A search engines primary goal is to provide the user with links relative to the keyword that they have searched for. Now it is in the best interest of a search engine to provide you with good content. If you get reliable results from the search engine you are going to use it again in most cases. How many times have you clicked on a link from a search engine that had nothing to do with what you had searched for? I am sure we have all done this at some time or another.

Search engine algorithms are designed to try and prevent that. Google’s being one of the most successful as it is based on how many times the content is linked to from other sites. The more the content is linked the higher the Google Page Rank and in theory the more relevant the content will be to your search.

 Now what does this have to do with sexy pirate women? Well nothing really other than I am targeting the keywords “sexy pirate women“. Actually as I write this post pretty much any word that I have in italics (save for italics) is a targeted keyword. Once adsense crawls this post I should be getting ads related to sexy pirate women costumes.

 If you do a Google Search for sexy pirate women you get tons of listings for women’s pirate costumes. When I write a post I use my new plug in (which is just about ready for beta release) to find out what are the most likely keywords in the post. Then I go and do a web search on them and see what turns up.

 For example with sexy pirate women I get a bunch of links for women’s pirate costumes. Now this is okay if my post is indeed about pirate costumes for women. In this case it isn’t, it is about keywords so it is going to be tough for this post to get search traffic who are looking for information on keywords.

 But never fear I do have a plan for that as well. After I see what a Google Search turns up, it is off to do some more keyword research. My next step is to use Googles keyword Tool. After entering the keywords “sexy pirate woman”, Google Search turns up, it is off to do some more keyword research. My next step is to use Googles keyword Tool gives me a listing with some valuable information.

Screen Capture from Googles keyword tool

 Not only is Google giving me suggestions for other keywords but it is showing me the highest cost per click, how much competition there is for that keyword as well as the average search volume for those keywords.

 A word of warning here for you Adsense publishers. Just because a certain keyword has a high cost per click it does not mean that you get a high pay out per click. The CPC you see here is just the maximum amount an advertiser will pay for that keyword. In my next post Pirates are Sexy – Lesson Two in Keywords I will go into how to use this keyword information to improve the money you make from Adsense.

Pirates are Sexy Lesson Two in Keywords will be posted in the next few days, stay tuned.

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