Computer and Internet Usage by State

I saw this little tidbit in the paper today and thought it was worth a mention.  The Washington Post published a listing of percentage of households that had a computer and Internet access.  The data, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, is a little old, October 2003, but I would imagine the numbers for today would be similar.

I've pulled the data into Excel and sorted to find the five highest Internet access States:

Alaska 68.5
New Hampshire 65.5
Colorado 63.4
Connecticut 62.9
Utah 62.6

And the five lowest:

Mississippi 39.5
Arkansas 42.3
Louisiana 44.1
New Mexico 44.8
Alabama 45.8

The national average for households that have Internet access is 54.7%.

Are your website visitors seeing what you're seeing?

One of the greatest challenges I have as a web developer is making sure that a client's website renders as accurately as possible across multiple browsers, operating systems, and screen resolutions.  Since each browser vendor interprets the standards differently, you would be amazed to see how a website looks in different browsers and machines.

Fortunately for me and my clients, I have a number of computers that I can test websites on.  Testing Windows to Macs, Internet Explorer to Opera, 800x600 to 1024x768 is fairly easy for me.  But what about you, the business owner who paid good money for a website that looks great on your machine?  How do you know what your website looks like on other machines?

Luckily there are services available to test to see exactly what your website looks like on different machine and browser platforms.  Typically these services will send you screen shots of a single web page in different browsers and operating systems.  More sophisticated services allow you to log into their testing servers and surf your website just like a visitor would see it.

The pricing for these services ranges from $15 for a one-time usage to about $1,000 for an annual subscription with all the bells and whistles.

Here are two services that I have used in the past:

BrowserCam
NetMechanic's Browser Photo

If you are relying on your website to generate leads or sales to your business, then I would highly recommend that you spend a little money to make sure that you are not accidentally turning away visitors. Let's face it, a visitor coming to your website will blame you for the display problems and not their browser.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Ever wondered what the most important factors are for gaining high rankings in the Search Engines (SE)?

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org has published an article that contains a list of the factors that can influence a web document's rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase.  In addition to Rand, he invited 12 leading SE experts to offer their opinions on what factors most affect SE rankings.

In this article you will find:

• Top 10 ranking factors
• In-document (or on-page) ranking factors
• Link ranking factors
• URL, technical, hosting, and server-side ranking factors
• Detrimental ranking factors (what not to do!)

This is a great opportunity to peek inside the minds of the experts and see where they focus their attention.

Should You Buy Text Ad Links?

Most everyone has heard of banner ads and pay-per-click ads, but what about text ads?

Just as the name implies, text ads are advertisements that you purchase and place on third party websites that link to your site.  These ads are text only (no images) and you typically pay a monthly fee for the ad space.  These are not reciprocal links, they are one-way links into your website.

Quick Review of the Benefits of Incoming Links

High quality incoming links to your website are viewed by the Search Engines as an unbiased vote for your site.  This vote will increase in relevancy if the link comes from a website that is thematically related to yours.

The more relevant incoming links to your website, the higher your link popularity will become.  This is especially important to your natural (organic or free) search engine rankings.  Google places a lot of emphasis on link popularity when they rank websites.

When obtaining links to your site, you should keep these two factors in mind:

1. Linking from quality (thematically related) websites.
2. Using your main keyword phrases in the anchor text.

Advantages of Text Ads

1. By placing text ads on thematically related websites, you can increase targeted traffic to your site.
2. Gaining links from websites that are related can dramatically increase your site's link popularity.
3. You can typically control the anchor text in the link, thereby giving you the opportunity to use your best keyword phrases.
4. You can increase the number of links into your website, making your site appear more popular to Search Engines.
5. You can purchase what are called site-wide (or run-of-the-site) ads.  These ads will appear on every page of the referring website, often at substantial discounts.

Tips on Buying Text Ad Links

Purchase text ads only from websites that are relevant to your website.  Don't go for the higher PageRank pages thinking that will automatically increase the value of that link.

Vary the anchor text used in the link.  It will look unnatural if all of your links, paid advertisements and free links, use the same anchor text.  Search Engines are getting smarter every day.  You run the risk of being penalized if the vast majority of your incoming links use the same keyword phrases.

Link to different pages on your website.  Again it will look more natural if incoming links direct visitors to different pages on your site.

Buy your text ads from web pages that limit the number of outgoing links.  Each page has only so much voting power (PageRank).  The PageRank of the page is divided equally by the number of outgoing links.  Plus the smaller number of outgoing links, the better chance you have of a prospect clicking on the link.

Be patient.  Acquiring incoming links and having them count towards increasing your site's rankings will take some time.  It's not unusual to see your rankings increase after several months have passed.  You should evaluate this strategy over the course of six months to a year.  Often times you can get a discounted price on your ads if you buy them for longer periods of time.