Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

Bounce Rate has become my very favorite metric to watch when looking at website traffic statistics. This article explains what bounce rate is, how it’s measured, what bounce rate statistics look like, and what the bounce rate is trying to tell you to do.
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I client recently asked me what is “social bookmarking”. You may have seen those little icons at the bottom of my blog posts and wondered what they heck they are for. Those are “social bookmarking” icons, and they make it easier for people who are members of social bookmarking services to bookmark my blog articles. I found this wonderful video that explains social bookmarking, in particular, “del.icio.us”, but it applies to many other services as well. Enjoy!

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I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking what the heck is a “trackback” and a “pingback”? This is my humble attempt to explain these two types of blog to blog communication and why you might want to enable this behavior in your WordPress blog.
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You’ve selected DreamHost as your hosting company and now you need to configure Outlook Express to read your email from your website. Here are the necessary 10 steps to configure Outlook Express. If you need to configure Outlook, please read this article on how to set up Outlook. Note: I no longer recommend DreamHost as a hosting company.
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I got a phone call today from a Google AdWords representative. Two weeks ago, I had submitted an email request for help, because a particular keyword had a “poor” quality score and I couldn’t figure out why. The online chat representative had recommended I break the ad groups into smaller pieces, which I did, but the keyword was still “poor” after a few days so I emailed in for more assistance.
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I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…
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Dynamic Ad Title Generation - Just Say No! If you are thinking of signing up with a PPC company, or are already running a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign, I strongly suggest that you make sure they aren’t running ads with dynamically generated titles. I’ll show you some examples of what these look like, and whey they can lead to poor quality clicks, and in some cases false advertising.
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I learned a new word the other day: “arbitrage”. I was having an online chat with a representative from Google AdWords to learn more about PPC quality. What I learned gave me a new addition to my click fraud vocabulary, and a new warning to give to clients who may be thinking about launching a pay-per-click advertising campaign: Beware of traffic that comes from arbitrage or “made for adsense” websites and directories.
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If you’re in the market for an online forum, this article may save you time and trouble. I recently had a client with a dog forum. She had to abandon her phpBB forum because of a bug so severe, it literally corrupted the entire forum database…three times! We were able to transfer the entire forum to SMF…with no loss of data. Simple Machines Forum to the rescue!
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I frequently do Google AdWords consulting for my small business clients, and they often express confusion in understanding the difference between enabling the search network and the content network. Since this is one of the many choices that they must make, I wanted to try and clarify the differences with actual examples.

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