&pws=0

You can also sign out of google’s personal web search program in your account settings.   Even if you do not use the search wiki to vote results up or down, google does appear to be trending and custom tailoring results based upon your traffic patterns.  In doing SEO, it is important to know that the results you are looking at are not biased.

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The green movement has no doubt tipped into the public’s consciousness, and yet still hasn’t been consolidated into a feasible, economic starting point. I attempted to unify the myriad of renewable energy and consumption/waste innovations in my last post with the concept of ‘nature to the grid’, and will now attempt to expand on it further. The question is where can the average person start incorporating this concept into their life to not just benefit their ecolistic mentality and environment, but to save and make more money?

In continuance of our nature to the grid dialogue, I’ve come to the conclusion that it starts, from both an ecological and economical standpoint, with people taking a proactive role in turning their home into a renewable power station… turning their home into a ‘tree’ if you will.

This intuition has been a long build for me, from the passion that has developed over my life as an environmental scientist, to my first company doing insurance adjusting assessment and appraisals on homes damaged by hurricanes, to the Powering the Planet event at the World Science Festival in NYC last year where representatives of all areas of green power concluded that the home needs to become a power station, to the West Coast Green conference in Silicon Valley last September, which I thought was going to be filled with crazy energy innovations, and was instead 90% green building companies, not to mention a huge model green home in the middle of the trade floor. When you take all this into consideration and add on the bad debt/mortgages causing the current economic collapse, the realization hits. Our world is dealing with a natural resource crisis in building our homes and buildings, and the place to innovate and make money, the place to really seed this whole green movement is with the home.

Turning the home into an energy efficient power station is the way to take the green/clean/sustainable movement to the world and actually change it… one home at a time. If you use thermoregulated windows and wall materials, energy efficient home appliances, and solar installations and fuel cells, you’re on your way to having a self-sustaining renewable home that doesn’t need energy from the grid. It’s almost like a revitalization of the cottage industry, in which everyone can get involved with their own home, and those that are successful with energy efficiency and renewable energy systems will reach zero energy (needing no energy from the grid), and even produce a surplus to sell back to the grid! Add in growing your own food or buying locally, collecting your own rainwater, recycling systems that pay you for your garbage and prevent materials from heading to the landfill, and you’re home becomes a renewable system that contributes to a renewable community. Think of the home as an individual tree contributing to the forest… it needs to pull it’s own weight by generating its own energy and then sharing that with the ecosystem in a symbiotic relationship. Now that’s nature to the grid.

I had a great time with my friend Doug of Faithful Investments in Philadelphia this past week. Doug is a property investor/developer who likes to buy worn down houses, perform complete renovations, and then rent out to tenants. Say we test out various green building technologies over the coming years, making the homes more energy efficient, allowing us to charge a premium on rent by lowering utility bills for tenants, and upping the asset value of the house… not to mention helping the environment.

This seems likes such a practical solution to restore faith in the banks and the mortgage industry, as it will drastically boost the asset value of the home as well as the passive income potential! It’s investors like Doug that are in a position to make great change, as most people are clueless and aren’t able to afford green consultants to tell them what to do, and certainly aren’t in a position to get a loan with the state of the economy.

So let’s take it a step at a time. Work with real estate investors and developers (who have clout with banks) to implement green innovations that will make homes more profitable, while allowing the economy to gradually recover. Basing off this experience, develop a green building program to help the average person upgrade their home with energy efficient materials and renewable energy systems, which they can capitalize on when the lending industry has restored confidence and is granting loans again.

Conserve energy, lower utility bills, generate your own power that reverses the grid and puts passive income in your pocket. The home is the testing ground. This is where it begins.

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The clean tech economy is taking off, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what will actually work. What concept will bring it all together?

From a production (energy) standpoint, you’ve got solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, and ethanol. And with consumption, you have to ask how are we going to create products, how are we going to deal with waste, and where are we going to get our food and water?

When you start looking at all these variables, you seem to get to the root of the sustainability problem… it’s very fragmented. There needs to be a new holistic approach that attacks the whole issue. Where do we get our energy, our food, and a new paradigm for products and waste? To us, the answer is quite clear… it’s found in nature, where the essence is growth. Grow our food, grow our energy, grow our resources. It’s all about growth energy… bioenergy.

Currently, the word ‘bioenergy’ is somewhat limited so I’m going to define how it’s currently perceived and then go into how its meaning has the ability to grow itself.

Right now, bioenergy means the act of using organic waste products and/or algae and other microorganisms to create ethanol fuel or some other type of crude oil replacement. The company leading the way is Coskata, backed by legendary Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla. It was recently voted Hottest Company in Bioenergy. They are doing some incredibly innovative stuff, and claim to be able to produce ethanol for less than $1/gallon with their hybrid gasification and fermentation system. As Khosla says, he is a pragmentalist, not an environmentalist, and his company is surely capitalizing on the growing market for ethanol fuel. Yet, you have to believe that although ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, it is only a short term fix… it’s almost like putting a band-aid on a cut that needs stitches. More so, with an electric car infrastructure on the horizon, doesn’t it seem ethanol may not even be a part of our future?

This leads us to our broader concept of bioenergy. The grapethinkers are obviously inspired by nature and have always found photosynthesis fascinating. The method by which the chlorophyll molecule uses sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create energy in the form of glucose and oxygen, ultimately the components that power nature and our own bodies. Some incredible scientists at MIT, one of which (Dan Nocera) I was fortunate enough to meet at the World Science Festival in NYC last May, are currently all over this and have invented a contraption that mimicks photosynthesis. The device uses sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, which can be stored in the form of hydrogen fuel. This is ground breaking because it makes solar energy, more specifically photosynthesis, seem to be the sustainability solution. Right now, solar cells are completely reliant on silicon (and a few other innovations), making them cost ineffective due to the price of materials, and more so because of the inefficiency of the PV cell in converting sunlight to energy and having the capacity to store this energy. By incorporating these new photosynthetic systems into solar panels, homes and office buildings will be able to generate power for their operation during the day and store excess energy in the form of hydrogen fuel in an on-site fuel cell, which can then be used at night for normal usage and electric vehicle recharging.

If you install these photosynthetic solar cells into buildings, use biodegradable innovations like Ecovative Design’s products, and start the process of urban farming, we will begin to grow our homes and buildings into living, breathing, self-sustaining bio-towers that produce enough energy, food, and other bio-materials to supply the inhabitants of that location as well as excess to send/sell back to the grid. With this, we will truly start to model the growth of nature.

Maybe if we can succeed in incorporating this paradigm shift into the way we produce our materials, food, and energy, then the mindset can move into the public mentality. Then we can grow our minds and our relationships and our businesses. Organic growth opposed to the fundamental mindset of immediate gratification and synthesis that has manifested itself in Big Pharma, Big Oil, and all the big consumer product companies. A whole new perception of bioenergy.

I’ll expand more on renewable homes, urban farming/biotowers, bio-materials as well as the ‘growth’ theory in future nature to the grid posts. It comes down to developing a symbiotic relationship with nature and embracing what has evolved over billions of years as inspiration for an ecolistic world.

Nature to the grid!

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Religion is losing us because it invokes disagreement and violence, and encourages negative characteristics such as laziness, procrastination, and moral confusion. We have a more unified understanding of the world around us with both scientific and artistic ways of thinking and being. We understand Einstein’s theories, we live for music, we are bio-inspired… we are a very intelligent generation and we love life. And with this one life we’ve been blessed with, why not use it connecting with each other and making positive change? This is the essence of the millennial generation spirituality.

Having grown up on the Internet, running our lives through social networks, and using our PDAs as a ubiquitous connector to the cloud, we’re innocently cultivating a true sense of connectedness among each other. Technology is becoming much more than silicon chips and software algorithms… its transcending the boundary betwewen art and science and influencing a unified spirituality.

I find when millennials connect, no matter the color, nationality, ethnicity, culture, language, or any other label, we tend to feel much more in touch with each other. We know that we’re all experiencing a similar since of technological spirituality in our lives, and thus feel our similarities greatly outweigh our differences. We see ourselves as global citizens above anything else and are becoming in touch with the force that connects us all. Call it whatever you want, energy, divinity, technology… I call it love.

Some see love as a human emotion that you feel for family and friends. However, love is so much more. It is gravity, breath, chance… it’s that divine infinite energy beyond the quantifiable reality that we perceive on the surface. ‘For example, a house has a set square footage, a car has a specific make, model, year, and color… all physical objects are limited and can be measured. And yet the deeper layer of existence has no specifications. It is inherently infinite.’ This is what love is, that feeling we have inside that we can’t explain, we can’t define. This is a real force that technology is helping us cultivate in our hearts. It’s something greater than ourselves and as a generation, we feel it. Call it the millennial generation spirituality… the millennial zen.

We don’t look at this selfishly or arrogantly though. We feel it’s a gift given through the use of connected technologies throughout our lives, and we believe anyone has the ability to tap into it. You have to let go of your personal ego, national ego, cultural ego, religious ego, and incorporate technology into the spiritual growth of your life. Become motivated to connect with something greater than yourself and to benefit others and the world around you.

“When the power of love exceeds the love of power, the world will know peace.”

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technology adoption is inversely proportional to its complexity / unit value

One technology that fits this complexity equation is the Semantic Web. If you look at the initiatives such as standards, notations, reference implementations, technologies, and even products, a few obvious observations can be made:

• Most of the “members” of the Semantic Web community are in Universities, working in R&D labs for commercial companies or governments or in high-tech fields such as bio-tech.
• Much of the work is designed for and by individual researchers and users. From what I’ve found, very little work has been done to support multi-threading, concurrency or even performance at Web scale – that is an exercise for the user. Perhaps commercial products provide this, but they are too costly and their trial versions are insufficient time-wise if you have a day job and a life or capability-wise if you want to do something slightly complex.
• Much of the work to date is theoretical, however there are some excellent examples of Semantic Web solutions. Unfortunately, these real examples are too complex and esoteric for mainstream extrapolation, but it does prove that given sufficient motivation one can make the Semantic Web real (but not really practical for most. Which brings us back to the complexity equation above).
• Risk. If you have sufficient time and/or resources to develop Semantic Web solutions, you can. Most can’t; or won’t due to Risk. The value of the solution is often exceeded by the risk (actual or perceived). Given the Risk (and cost due to complexity), most companies would choose to invest in solutions that use mainstream (“proven success in the market”) technology

But what if you really want, need or could use what the Semantic Web promises and avoid the complexity equation?

The good news is: you can. Faced with the challenge, promise and opportunity of semantic technology, a Web community formed to address practical use of semantics. Perhaps not intentionally, as they had a more practical need and semantics could have been an implicit byproduct of their efforts. Using available standards and tools (e.g., HTTP, HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS, Atom,…), they created a set of agreed conventions and a common, collaborative model. The alternative would be to create formal standards bodies, and have expensive meetings around the world, and develop rigorous, mathematically sound models, structures, etc. But, really, who has time for all that? What, with all the real work that needs to be done?!

Now this community is open to anyone to participate, suggest, recommend, discuss and contribute ideas. The conventions are agreed, yet are still extensible. Best of all, using the set of available standards and technologies already available, they could include this metadata information in their current Web content where others could discover it, those who did not care to use it could simply ignore it and everything still works as it should! Who is this community that formed the essence of the lower case “semantic web” (vs. the upper case, ivory tower “Semantic Web”)? Why its microformats!

Embedding and including meta-information in content to provide basic, but potentially very rich, meaning in content on the Web was a pragmatists dream. This pragmatic, practical approach to add structured semantics to Web content in a manner accessible to a wide range of Web practitioners at many levels, was at the opposite end compared to the approach of the formal Semantic Web.

While the big R&D shops, universities and others with deep pockets continued their theoretical modeling and implementation exercises of the Semantic Web in their Ivory Towers; bloggers, wikimasters, webmasters and other denizens of the Web began to structure, define, add and share meta information using the common tools at hand to create something new, practical and usable. Since microformats are made of very basic components of the Web (and Web 2.0), they are readily understood by the many and varied denizens of the Web from PhDs to corporate developers to Junior High kids who can put them to use in whatever context they require.

In essence, the upper-case Semantic Web has found itself circumvented by the defacto conventions (still not standards) of the lower-case semantic web used by many. Again, simplicity has trumped complexity in the utilization of technology, in this case, semantic technology.

Even if the Semantic Web is better, richer, fuller, rigorous, etc., than the semantic web, simplicity will usually win over complexity. In this context, winning is really widespread use. Widespread use infuses more content throughout the long tail of the Web with semantics through simple meta-information, which in turn leads to more meaning in Web content. With the increase in meaning in Web content, we have a richer set of meaning with which to work in the next round of Web content creation and distribution. This is recursive, as more semantic content leads to more meaning, which leads to more semantic content…

Have a look for yourself; Compare and contrast these: microformats and Semantic Web and see which is best for your semantic needs.

Peace.

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These cases are generally the result of bad linkbuilding. There are so many varying opinions and resources for linkbuilding that as a novice web marketer, you can easily travel down the wrong path. The problem with all of the advice you find across the web, is that most of it is outdated.

For example: A year ago, it was extremely popular for marketers to try and use deep-linking (linking to pages inside of their site instead of the homepage) as a means to boost the rankings for those particular pages. Well.. this became common knowledge, spammers took advantage, and now that tactic raises red flags. If you are a blogger reading this, you know that more often than not, when you link to a website, you reference the name of the site, and link to the homepage ( e.g. Fermentation Wine Blog ).

Here are some more linkbuilding concepts that you should avoid:

1. Reciprocal Linking – Yes.. it is great for cross promotion and comradery among bloggers and other sites, but it serves very littly, if any, purpose for SEO. If I give you an apple, and you give it back to me, we net 0.
2. Directory Submissions – Unless it is a high quality directory, you’ll most likely be establishing a relationship with spammers, and do much more harm than good.
3. E-zine articles – If you want to write content to increase your SEO, write it for your own site. The rss feeds from E-zine articles get scraped by spammers, and duplicated thousands of times across the web. Next thing you know, it looks like YOU duplicated the same article and put it out everywhere, and YOU are the spammer.
4. Excessive Submissions to Social Bookmarking Sites, Commenting on Blogs and Forums – ONLY do this if you have legitimate comments and stories. Otherwise, your site is reported as spam.
5. Links that cost less than $10 – If someone tries to sell you links for less than $10, they are most likely going to do all of the things that I just said not to do, and charge you for it. Then you have to hire someone to clean it up.
6. Rapid Linkbuilding – If you are using legitimate means to linkbuild, but do it too quickly, the search engine Gods feel cheated, and you will get banned from the search engine.. (your site doesn’t even get indexed anymore)

Obviously the overarching concept here is that if you want to do linkbuilding, you should do it legitimately by having a great site with great content. If you need some help, let us know.  If you want to try linkbuilding on your own, we recommend Blogsvertise… please be sure to use this affiliate link so we get credit for telling you about their great service!

Click here to read about our SEO Services

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Keyword Discovery and Analysis:
This is the first step to a proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Campaign.  The goal of the Keyword Discovery and Analysis is to determine the keywords that will provide the best Traffic on Investment.  We start off by developing a list of “seed” terms, which are the words/phrases that best represent the results you wish to optimize your site.  We use these “seed” terms to generate a comprehensive list of alternatives which may also be used by your target audience in searching for your site.  After developing this list of keywords, we analyze them individually to determine not only the quantity and quality of the traffic they currently and historically generate, but also the competitiveness of these terms.  We conclude by providing you with the list of Keywords, and our recommendation on those we feel would provide your best return on investment.

Onsite Performance:
How your website is designed and deployed plays a large part in how well your site ranks in the search engines.  When conducting our Onsite Performance Analysis, we evaluate your site from a search engines perspective and provide you with specific recommendations on how to correct the problem areas.   Our Onsite Performance Analysis addresses the following major areas of your website:

• Meta Information
  • This is the descriptor information that you are able to give to the search engines.  It is important that the Titles and Descriptions you provide are concise, unique, relevant. This is one of the most common starting places for onsite SEO.
• Site Content
  • How well is the content of your site written?  Is it unique page to page?  Is it unique to your website? Do your pages contain the best keywords, proper density, and best placement?  Are you using the image descriptions in your site as a means to further provide “guiding” information for the search engines?  We answer all of these questions and more.
• Current Incoming Links
  • It is important to understand what type of links are pointing to your site.  There are many types and qualities of links that can benefit, or even sometimes hinder, your search engine rankings.  We evaluate the number and source of the incoming links to your site, including the anchor text currently being used.  This helps in obtaining a greater understanding of your current situation, and provides insight for linkbuilding.
• URL Structure
  • How are your URL’s formed?  Do they include random strings of text, and characters that would be meaningless to any human reader?  This portion of the analysis addresses URL canonicalization issues, query strings, and other items that will help your pages display as more relevant to particular terms.
• Server Settings
  • This analysis takes a close look at your DNS settings to ensure you are using the proper CName and A records for your domain and subdomains (www.), MX records, and similar items.

Offsite Performance:
There is only some much that you can do onsite to optimize your search engine rankings.  The final, and one of the most crucial tool for SEO is linkbuilding.  If done properly, it can be a valuable tool for increasing your search engine rankings.  If done improperly however, it can be extremely detrimental to your rankings, and possibly even cause permanent damage to your domain name.

• The Logic of Linkbuilding
  • Modern search engines place extensive value on the quantity and quality of links to your website for several reasons:
    1. Each link provided to your site acts as a vote of credibility.
    2. The anchor text used for that link gives contextual reference to your site
  • Some types of Links are better than others:
    1. Links that come from sites relevant to yours
    2. Links that are used in context to your site
    3. Links that come from higher PR sites
    4. Links that contain anchor text relevant to your site
    5. Links that can be followed by the search engine crawler
    6. Links that come from .edu or .gov domain names
  • Some types of Links can hurt your website:
    1. Links that come from link directories
    2. Links that come from penalized sites
    3. Links that appear to be spam (no context)
    4. Links from sites associated with spam
    5. Links that are built to quickly
• Our Method of Linkbuilding
  • GrapeThinking has developed a large network of bloggers across many industries who write about lifestyle, travel, wine, technology, products, financial advice, family, holistic health care, and more.
  • When we are contracted for linkbuilding, we check the bloggers in our network against the criteria mentioned earlier to ensure that we build only the highest quality of links.
  • We then pay these bloggers to write articles/reviews about your products or website, using specific anchor text (determined through Keyword Discovery) for their links to your site.
  • This method not only generates the links that we need for SEO, but can also generate traffic and clients to your site from the articles.

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For more information and a FREE quote, please fill out this form:[contact-form]

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1. It’s a widget… this means you can easily place it in the sidebar of a wordpress blog.
2. It’s smarter !  Depending on what page you are looking at, it displays different posts that are relative to what you are reading.  To see this in action, click a tag, category, archive, or an author in the sidebar, and check out the most popular posts within that section.

The widget does require that you are running WordPress 2.5 or higher.  (If you have an older version of wordpress, just leave a comment requesting the older version and I’ll send it, but it needs a little tweaking)

I must extend my thanks to Alex King, and all of the devlopers who have worked on this plugin before me, for without them, I would not have been able to do this.

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Drag Image to Toolbar to Add Bookmarklet

Google recently announced the release of a free safe browsing diagnostic tool. I have been frequently using this as a quick check tool on client’s websites in looking for possible penalties that could be hindering their search engine rankings.

Since it is a useful tool, I figured I would make it easy for you to test your site using Google’s safe browsing diagnostic tool by creating the simple form below.

We are in the process of updating our website, and will be providing more access and information to the tools we use on a regular basis for our clients. We hope you find this one useful!

Here are a few links to other great sites talking about this new functionality:

• Dancho Danchev at ZDNet.com
  
• Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand.com

***UPDATE 5/27 – Due to recent request, I have made a bookmarklet for the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool… click the image at top of post and drag it to your bookmarks. Anytime you are at a site, and wonder what Google thinks, just click the button and Voila!.. there is a link at the bottom of the Google page to return to the previous site, so no need to worry about messing up your tabs.

***Update – Welcome Digg Users!

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My search returned the following result.

I was behind a proxy for Canada.. but.. does this mean Canadians aren’t allow to look at the news?

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