Mobile Website Navigation

The question always comes up when building websites for mobile applications…what will the mobile website navigation look like?  Before you even design your mobile navigation, it is important to look at the web enabled devices to target. 

Building the best mobile website navigation will involve the traditional ideas of architecture, design, browser capabilities and so on.  For my next post I will give a little more direction on how to build your mobile website navigation.

What are Tag Clouds?

This may seem like an easily answered question to many of you in the bloggosphere, but many others are not familiar with the concept of tag clouds.  I thought it would be a good idea to give some of you quick explanation of the concept of tag clouds.

So what are tag clouds and why are they important? I want you to look at it this way:

Every bit of content added to a site, be it videos, images, blog posts, articles, can be "Tagged" with keywords. Take this for example.   I upload a photo to my "wall."  There will be a field called Description which allows me to enter the description of the photo. 

For example: I upload a picture of a red rose.  I can type in the description: "This is a hybrid red rose grown in my science class."  Also on the screen would be a field called "Tags."  It is here that I can type in short keywords "classifying" this photo.

In this case my tags would be: flowers, science experiments, hybrid

Next, I can write a blog post.  This post will have some elements tied to it.  For example, a title field which is the title of the blog post, the story field; which is the whole blog post, and the Tag field, which I can type in short keywords classifying this blog post.

For example: I write a blog post titled "How Hybrid cars can save the world"  and the story would be something about hybrid cars and how they work and how they are good for the environment. Now and can add Tags to classify this blog post.   In this case I could tag the story with "hybrid, electricity, green, cars"

Here is an screenshot from my Wordpress Add New Post screen…notice the Post Tags section to the right:

So now, with this added content, my tag cloud would display ALL of the tags  "flowers, science experiments, hybrid, electricity, green, cars." BUT since there are more tags for hybrid, the tag cloud would display all of the tags, but the tag Hybrid would display in a larger, bolder font.  The more content that is added and tagged with the keyword Hybrid, the bigger and darker the word Hybrid would get.

This gives visitors an indication of what is popular on the site…the bigger and bolder tags indicated the most popular content.  Here is the tag cloud from tonyrocks.com:

When you click on any of the tags in the tag cloud, you are presented with a list of all content associated with that tag (similar to a Google search engine result). My blog tag cloud says that Twitter and SEO are the most popular content items on my site.

cheap flights to islands – my new niche

Cheap flights to islands was an interesting term that I stumbled upon while looking for my next bum marketing experiment.  Travel pay per click terms in Google are quite expensive, so when I ran into this little gem i was amazed.  I was shocked to see that the general term for cheap flights to islands in the serps returns 14,300,000 results, but the specific term for “cheap flights to islands” only returns 8 results, but with a TON of sponsored links.

Now, according to Adwords, the term does not fetch a high bid, but still, a good niche to tap if you want to promote travel sites for cheap flights.  A few more cheap flight related terms that also peaked my interest:

• Cheap flights to Jamaica – $1.67-  942,000 general, 11,500 specific
• Cheap flights to LA – $1.92 – 18,200,000 general, 0 specific
• Cheap flights to NY – $1.96 – 20,400,00 general, 2,950 specific

So go ahead and have some fun bum marketing with these cheap flights to variations.

Pittsburgh G20 – I’ll have the best view in town!

The Pittsburgh G20 summit is only 8 weeks away and I am still excited to see how things turn out.  I hope the weather in Pittsburgh improves by then…but still, I will be in the Brady Communications office watching from above.  We had an incredible view for both Pittsburgh Steelers parades.  I know the summit will be held at the convention center, which is quite a walk from us, but I’m sure there will be plenty of things happening at The Point as well.

President Obama actually invited the Netherlands to the Pittsburgh G20 summit. 

Obama says “"We think that the Netherlands not only is one of the world’s largest economies and most active internationally, but (the) prime minister has very specific expertise and experience in working with a whole range of world leaders."

I think Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende will be impressed at what Pittsburgh has to offer…I’m sure he’ll agree that selecting Pittsburgh as G20 summit host was a great idea.

Black Hat Article Generation Secrets

It is no secret to many "black hat" SEO folks that one of their favored approaches to building site content is by using automatic article generation. Please allow me to explain, for those of you who are not familiar with this.

The trick is to generate lots of unique content that either contains Adsense ads or even pages that point to landing pages with affiliate links.

You can grab an article by rss aggregator or "stealing" something from one of the many ezine publising sites such as Ezinearticles.com. Heck, people have been stealing my submission for quite some time!

The next thing to do is spin the article in some way to generate multiple version of the copy using synonyms and a web tool such as JetSpinner (my affiliate link if you are interested).  The tool is free, but they charge you if you want to "promote" your articles.

The concept is simple, take a word (or phrase) you would  like to switch up and replace it with synonyms, separated by bars and surrounded by curly braces.  For instance, if you want the article to replace the word Apple with three variations of apple, you could do this:

• I would like a juicy red {fuji|honeycrisp|Mcintosh} for lunch.

You can then assign tell JetSpinner to create 3 variations of this sentence, effectively giving you:

• I would like a juicy red fuji for lunch.
• I would like a juicy red honeycrisp for lunch.
• I would like a juicy red Mcintosh for lunch.

However the power in the spinning is that you can replace phrases with other phrases in multiple sections:

• I {would like|always want|always hope for} a {juicy|crispy|sweet but tart} {fuji|honeycrisp|Mcintosh} apple for {lunch| a lunchtime snack|brunch}.

The spinner works recursively, so you can even have curly braces within curly braces to really mix things up! You need to understand factorials (I stink at math, so I’m not going to explain it) in order to see how many possible variations of this sentence can be generated…all for the sake of creating non-duplicate SPAM copy for content websites.

Some black hatters may even use some kind of Markov Generator to really mix things up.  Markov sequences can be used to scramble source text which is really cool for swapping sentences in multiple paragraphs.  This guy has a Markov Generator for you to play with.

To complete the process: Post the thousands of newly created variations of the same article for others to pick up.  This can be done by using the multiple article submission sites out there.

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