As always, work has been so hectic that I've been neglecting the blog. It's ironic... part of our consultation to clients is often that a blog should only be started so long as a commitment is made to post frequent updates, lest the blog reflect the negative image of poor organization upon the company. And here I am falling prey to that very same mistake.
Anyway. Part of what's keeping me busy is that we are in the early stages of taking Darrin Ward's professional SEO services to the Spanish market. The decision has been made to open an office in Madrid, Spain, and I am spending a lot of time working through the logistics. Fortunately, we already have some very talented Spanish speaking SEO's on the team, so this will be a very natural extension, and I am extremely excited.
If you are interested in becoming a client in Spain or know someone that may be interested, please contact me. If you just want to keep an eye on how things are progressing, www.darrinward.es will be the Website address.
There is no definitive launch date for Darrin Ward's operations in Spain, however things look like they are progressing nicely for Q2 2010.
As they say... "Watch This Space". There's a few other major announcements that I will be making over the next 3-6 months.
- Darrin Ward
I use a BlackBerry 8820. I've got an iPhone, used to have a Sony Experia X1 (Windows Mobile) and I have tried a plethora of other phones (including other BlackBerry's), but the BlackBerry 8820 is the one for me.
However, one thing that used to irritate me about the phone was that it wasn't very easy to sync my iTunes music podcasts and some business documents from my Mac to the SD card in my BlackBerry. So I wrote a simple shell script that takes care of those things for me. The script I show here should also work with other BlackBerry's.
The script uses rsync to overwrite folders on my BlackBerry with folders on my Mac (like my iTunes folder). I saved the following code into a file named bb-sync.sh in my ~/ folder:
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts/" "/Volumes/BB/iTunes/Podcasts/" &&
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Desktop/WalkMusic/" "/Volumes/BB/iTunes/Music/" &&
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Documents/Passwords.kdb" "/Volumes/BB/Documents/Passwords.kdb"
The formatting of the above code may look weird owing to linebreaks, so you can also Download bb-sync.sh.
This is 3 separate rsync commands because I am syncing 3 folders. On each line, the first reference to a file or folder is local on my mac and overwrites the second stated file/folder, which is on my BlackBerry SD card (they all start with "/Volumes/BB/").
My blackberry SD card mounts as a volume named "BB". Yours will probably mount as something else, but you can check by using "cd /Volumes/" in Terminal when your device is connected to see what name it uses when it mounts. You may need to plug it in and out to see the differences between mounted/unmounted states. The Volume name will probably also show up on the OS X Desktop as a drive when your BlackBerry SD card mounts. Substitute BB for the name of your BlackBerry SD card volume and change the directories that you want to sync.
When my BlackBerry SD card mounts, I sync by opening up terminal and typing "sh bb-sync.sh" and it prints out a report of the files it's deleting and new files it's uploading.
There are two last things that I will say: 1) That this technique will work for any mounted volume; it's not specific to BlackBerry, and; 2) You can fiddle with the rsync flags and options to get a two way sync, or some other functionality. But I'm not going to bother with that. See the man page for rsync if you want to do something other than what I have described here.
Now if you'll excuse me... I am going to listen to some recently synced podcasts on my BlackBerry while I go for my evening walk. :)
I absolutely loathe flying. I'm not scared of flying (in fact I find takeoff and landing to be quite exciting), but rather I just find the whole experience of public air travel to be utterly deplorable, and frankly, disgusting! Airports are congested, people on planes have zero personal hygiene, getting the shakedown at airport security, etc. is just an invasion of my personal space that I rather not endure, which is why I only fly when it's absolutely essential.
However, there are a couple of upcoming projects for which I may have to travel, so I was recently looking at some airfares, which is why I was very interested to see that the bing travel blog has an interesting recent post about airfares rising faster on the west coast vs. east coast. Cross-country fares have also risen by a whopping 23% over a 4 week period.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting enough to share. Personally, I think I'm just going to line up as many conference calls as I can over a 2 day period and drive where I need to go rather than fly. That way I can still get work done and I don't have to fly. Unfortunately, I was hoping to make an international trip and I may just have to concede and fly, because I can't drive and I can't afford to charter a large yacht (though I would if I could before flying).
Many analytics programs allow you to see referring search engine "keywords" and "keyphrases" as two separate reports, and it's important to understand what the difference between these for SEO or PPC. ("Keyphrase" is probably more correctly written as "key-phrase", but my spelling has never been perfect, so why start now!)
A "keyphrase" report will show you the exact referring search phrases, usually sorted by volume/hits. A "keyword" report will show you the hit count for each unique keyword across all of the referring keyphrases.
Keyphrases are pretty simple. The analytics program will track each exact referring phrase from each search engine, and each time it sees a new hit for a keyphrase, it will increment the count. For example, if 10 different people find your site by searching for "download music", then that keyphrase will have 10 hits. If another 10 people find your site for "music download" (the same words reversed), then this phase will also have 10 hits, and the keyphrase report will be:
A keyword report will separate each individual keyword from it's keyphrase and find the hit count for that keyword across all search keyphrases. So, given the same 20 referring search keyphrase hits from the example above (10 for "download music" and 10 for "music download"), a keyword report would show the following:
This is because the words "download" and "music" appear a total of 20 times each.
First and foremost, the keyword report does not give you a clear idea of exactly how people are finding your site. Instead, it gives you a very broad overview of the main keywords that are being used to find your site, but not the exact keywords. These keywords may have a "long tail". In our example above, none of the traffic came directly from searches for "download" or "music", yet both of these show 20 hits. Looking at the keyphrase report will tell you the exact keyphrases that drove traffic.
The total hit count for a keyword report will also be inaccurate. In our example, the total traffic was 20 (10+10), yet our keyword report gives the impression that we received 40 (20+20) hits.
All-in-all, both keyword and keyphrase reports have their place in SEO and PPC, but you need to know what you are looking for. Most often you'll really want a keyphrase report rather than the keyword report.
It's interesting to note that Google Analytics has a keyword report, but it's actually a keyphrase report. Google Analytics doesn't have a true keyword report.