Technorati Ping Problem Solved

Check my main SEO blog for the solution to the Technorati ping problem.

Technorati Ping Problems

This would normally be a post for my Pleasanton Web Design Blog, but therein lies the irony. Technorati doesn't like that blog. It tells me I haven't updated for 393 days. I don't believe that is accurate. I've pinged the crap out of them, written new posts, and even deleted my claim to the blog and reclaimed. Still didn't work. This blog is pinging and updating Technorati just fine. I have a WordPress blog on my Web Design Website that is also pinging and updating with no problem. I checked all of my settings on Blogger Beta, and they're tip-top. Is it them or is it me? It's them isn't it.

Well according to the plethora of comments (including mine now) on this similar technorati ping problem blog post, yeah it's them. I have an email into support and am hoping for a timely resolution to the matter.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

I just ran across a great tool in Google Accounts that I was not previously aware of. It's called Docs and Spreadsheets. I was reading the Silicon Valley Web Guild's User Experience Blog, authored by
Reshma Kumar, WebGuild Vice President and User Experience Forum Chair. She mentioned it in one of her posts, and I thought it was worth a look.

With Google Docs and Spreadsheets you can create, collaborate, share and publish documents and spreadsheets online. You can save the documents in Microsoft Word format, or PDF format, which got my attention. Unfortunately, on my first test I include an image in the document, and when saving as PDF, the image wasn't included. The text looked fine though.

The spreadsheet interface looks like Microsoft Excel, and you can export it do the same basic formats that you can with Excel, including .xls.

Overall a great tool. I'm on the bottom of the learning curve right now, so maybe the solution to the image problem will come as become more familiar with the tool.

Microsoft adCenter

I just signed up for a Microsoft adCenter account for the first time. A web hosting company that I use was offering free trial vouchers, so I took advantage. I've used Google Adwords for Pay Per Click (PPC)advertising before, but at that time I was looking at the big head (a few competitive key phrases) rather than the long tail (many less competetive key phrases), so the ROI just wasn't there for me. Now that I am less lame at SEO, I decided to give PPC another try. It was free after all. Well, $5 for the set-up.

The account setup is very similar to Google AdWords. If you haven't done either yet, and are interested in seach engine ranking for your Website, you really need to look at the keyword tools in the AdWords, or Microsoft adCenter accounts (does the way marketing people mix upper and lower case letters in their product names REALLY bug you too?).

I haven't received editorial approval, so I don't yet know how Microsoft adCenter will work out for me. I am writing this now because one of my keyphrases in the campaign is "fremont web design" and in looking at the lay of the land on MSN after setting up the PPC account, I noticed that this blog was number one for that keyphrase already. So maybe I had better start writing something here.