Came across the term vlog in digg.com and looked it up in wikipedia. It turns out all three words are synonyms. I believe this is the same as Prof. Gibson's idea of adding videos in a blog. I think this will be a great idea to include in the future.
February 22, 2006
February 13, 2006
Ginger Icecream
Have you ever tried icecream in ginger favor? Here you go! This is a special dish only available in Hong Hua Fine Chinese Dining Restaurant. The icecream is rich and creamy. There are small chips of sweetened ginger in it to induce a spicy favor but not too strong to ruin the dish. I am sure you will like it. A detailed review of the restaurant can be found here in www.nicetaste.com.
February 10, 2006
G-metrics Analysis
I set up g-metrics to analyse the keyword "Ann Arbor Food" (see results at the bottom), "Ann Arbor Restaurant", "nicetaste" and "taste of ann arbor". Some of them are added today so hopefully they will return more data later. The keyword "Ann Arbor Food" returns about 240,000 counts and is most popular among them. Three out of the four keywords (except nicetaste) have Zingerman's returned as entrenched competitor. Seems like Zingerman's is really popular when coming to Ann Arbor food.
However, one thing borders me is the problematic graph. It seems that g-metrics has messed up the x-axis values. The result is shifted by a day when Feb 5th's data should be Feb 6th's. Also, the zero google count on Feb 6th makes me doubt about the reliability of the data. I look at the graph again today and I notice a 100% jump in google count on Friday. Make me even more doubt about the results.
In order to compete with places like Zingerman's or Arborweb, I believe there are couple ways. For Zingerman's, I would suggest to partner with them (which our group has attempted to do so) and sell our blog as a third-party channel to give unbiased reviews to others. For Arborweb, I would say we need to provide additional value on top of just a restaurant directory. For example, our Google map and nice dish photos help to distinguish our blog site from it.
Adwords Analysis Part II
After some hard work adding more food content and renaming my blog to "Ann Arbor Food", I finally convince Google my blog is about Ann Arbor and Food :) I conclude that a blog's title is extremely important for search engine to tie your blog to the keywords you desire to be searched under. In other word, if you want your blog to show up when someone type "Ann Arbor", you better include that in your blog title.
In terms of keywords, I picked the following and ran the traffic estimator:
- ann arbor
- ann arbor food
- ann arbor information
- ann arbor michigan
- ann arbor restaurant menus
- ann arbor restaurants
The maximum CPC is $8.44, which is pretty high. It becomes much reasonable ($1.32) if I just keep "ann arbor food" and "ann arbor restaurants". I feel excited for what I did so far and believe I am on the right track.
February 06, 2006
Adwords Analysis Part I
I just did an Adwords analysis on my personal blog www.htchan.com. To my disappointment, it returned keywords mainly related to blog and weblog (see picture). I believe the major reason of that was my poor choice of blog name and description. My guess is that Google puts a quite heavy weight on a blog's name and catchphrase when deciding the adwords as they show up basically in every page. Another reason of the poor result could be due to the fact that I had quite a few postings of technologies throughout. That is probably one major thing that I was different from my teammates. I guess one lesson learned from here is importance of having a focused topic for one's website. Once Google thinks your blog is of certain kind of topic, it will take a long time for it to update the impression (it has to crawl your website again). More important, we just don't know the algorithm it uses and it may cache your site's old content and thus you can never 100% refresh its impression to your site. For example, this entry is already hurting my blog's relevance to Ann Arbor food. I have updated my blog name and catchphrase to include "Ann Arbor Food". Also, I plan to add more food postings to dilute my technology contents. Hopefully, the right adwords will appear soon.
February 05, 2006
February 04, 2006
Go Red For Women
What's that little pin on the left? It is used to raise awareness of heart diseases are no.1 killer of U.S. So please wear red or wear a pin to help to spread the news. For details, visit http://www.goredforwomen.org.
