Rich's Random Thoughts

Here’s a link to the outline of the Mobile Computing Discussion I’m leading today at the UVic Libraries.  Once I’ve cleaned up the notes, I’ll post them below:

Reading List for Mobile Computing and the iPad Discussion:

• Reminders From Out of the Blue [please take note of the location features] – David Pogue
• Urbanspoon iPhone App Adds Augmented Reality – Barb Bybwad
• QR codes for libraries – some thoughts – Aaron Tay
• Evernote for iPhone – Jeffery Battersby
• Looking at the iPad From Two Angles – David Pogue
• What are mobile friendly library sites offering? A survey. – Aaron Tay
• Amazon.com’s Kindle fails first college test – Amy Martinez

Read more…

What follows is an email I sent to a friend hopefully helping him to better understand how Google’s Page Rank system works, and how he can get his website on the first page of Google search resluts:

I’m glad that the Google stats for your site are looking up.  There is one thing that I tried to explain to you on the phone before Christmas that I don’t think I explained very well.  Let me try explaining Google Page Rank again:

Q1. What determines which websites are put on the 1st page of Google search results?

• The relevancy of the title and text on your web page to the search query.
• The number and quality of other people’s websites linking to your website.  You can think of other websites linking to your site as a vote… The more votes your site has, the higher your websites ranking will be.
• The best way to influence your page rank is to make sure you have good key words in the title of your page, the URL, and in the text on your page.  The other thing is to encourage quality websites to link to your site… These are the key things in your control (more info from Google).

Q2. What else can you do to monitor your website and find ways to improve it?

• Update you  website with current relevant content.
• Get a Gmail account so that you can access other Google resources to help your website.  http://gmail.com
• You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google, so you can modify it to make it more “Googlefriendly”.
• Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from geographically, and what other sites are forwarding users to your site.

I hope this helps!

I found an excellent article a few weeks ago, that outlines things people should do if they want to improve the Google ranking of their web site. You can read the full article by Danny Wall here. For those of you who don’t want to read all four pages, here is the executive summary:

1. Get a Blog! But don’t just just do product posts. Blog about interesting things related to your products and industry you’re in. Put links to Digg & Delicious on your blog.
2. Use YouTube to your advantage. Sponsor a contest for the "best" or "funniest" video related to your product or service, and offer a prize or two. Let other people be creative. Then let people vote on them. If the videos are good enough, viral marketing will kick in and you’ll get more than your money’s worth in advertising and web traffic.
3. Use press releases to announce things your company is doing. Make sure each press release has a web link back to your web site (PRWeb is recommended by the author of the article).
4. Be worthy of other people linking to you. If you have nothing interesting or good to offer, who will want to link to you? "It is only by being worthy that you’ll get to the top of Google."