Knowing SEO Can Help Everyone with a Website

”SEO is a waste of time!” claim some web developers when approached on the subject. Being the smart, web-savvy individual that you are, you know different. In fact, you are the smartest person you know on
 SEO and how to incorporate it into websites. What is the best way to communicate effectively about SEO with your web developer? Tread lightly and return with an arsenal of information.

Included in this arsenal of information will be some convincing and teaching on your part. You need to let your web developer know the following:

1) Statistics show that at least 86% of all web visitors use the search engine to find what they are looking for. Your web developer usually likes statistics. If your site isn’t SEO relevant, it is a waste of both time and money. In fact, you could remind your web developer about all the hours he or she took to develop such a beautiful looking site. Isn’t there a bonus available for a web developer who comes up with a site that increases visitor traffic? Don’t they want that raise for having developed an efficient, and pleasant looking, site? Of course, they do.

2) SEO (search engine optimization) is not a passing trend. It is here to stay. Content on a website needs to be relevant to the search engines and people. Your website needs to be picked up by the search engines in order to be worthwhile. Search engines feed on SEO. 

a. Bring in documents containing charts, studies, and interviews with top officials regarding the SEO world. These will be used to provide references for your knowledge. Hopefully, they will lead to discussion.

3) Keyword placement and frequency help determine popularity with SEO. Use examples of keyword search tools to help show this point. Overture works well here. In fact, let your web developer know that keyword search tools have increased in popularity simply due to the necessity of knowing SEO. Your web developer loves keeping up to date on the industry trends, right? 

Lisa Katayama at 8:21 AM Wednesday, May 26, 2010

You can now purchase dried zombie meat at your local convenience store in Japan. The packaging claims it contains blue flesh aged to perfection in the graveyard.

via Pink Tentacle

I do want to that unless you have citations that show a RR of higher than 20, I'm not really interested in discussing the relative merits of diet change, weight loss, cholesterol control, heart disease control therapies, pharmacologies, etc. I just don't think findings that have a lower RR than 20 are really worth about, especially in a general and largely theoretical discussion like this. not epidemiologically sound and from my perspective are not worth considering. They're more like tilting at windmills or lashing out against the dark, and are tiny better than faith healing.

If using that BMJ editorial by Glasziou to justify this thinking, you've really misread his point — a point by the way, that many biostatisticians would disagree with. His point applies only to single cohort and case-series studies, not randomized trials. Moreover, he argues for a threshold of relative risks ranging from 5-10 to essentially take these studies as "definitive," not a threshold of 20.

Using an effect magnitude threshold to assess biomedical research is a very poor alternative for actually using good judgment in reviewing the methodology used, its limitations, and the potential for unaccounted for confounding that may exist. To justify doing this based on the notion of signal-to-noise makes no sense because the RR alone does tiny to capture "noise."

In fact, the conventional statistics (p-values, confidence intervals) are quite good metrics of precisely what might be described as signal-to-noise. Take the example of a one-sample t-test. The t-test Z is defined as the mean difference times the root of the sample size divided by the standard deviation of the difference. In other words, it is signal (mean difference or effect size) divided by noise (standard error). Most statistical approaches used are parallels of this. Even modern empirical approaches (bootstrapping, jackknife, permutation testing) provide statistics that are for all intents and purposes, a measure of signal-to-noise. If there is a demand for more critical vetting of study outcomes, a lower alpha level does a much better job of this than looking at the RR. RR is signal only — no accounting for sample size, no for variance. This makes no sense at all.

Consider the simple example of my case-series of two patients — a man and a woman. I followed them for a few weeks and the man had a heart attack while the woman didn't. Are you satisfied with the conclusion that men have a RR of infinity for heart-attacks relative to women? Of course not. So you state "well, I will look at the sample size. It sucks. I look at the sample size and the error statistics in making my judgment." Fine, but this is essentially captured in a rigorous quantitative way with the results of hypothesis tests typically presented in papers.

The magnitude of the relative risk is NOT a good reflection of a "real" effect despite or regardless of confounding. In other words effect size and confounding may be correlated on average, but they are poorly so. This is throwing out the baby with the bath water to the extreme. Consider the fact that an arbitrary high RR ignores the impact of baseline outcome incidence on potential results for a study. Not only is the example of a RR of > 10 or > 20 a bad idea, it's mathematically impossible in many circumstances. Take a disease in which 10% of patients consistently have spontaneous resolution and the other 90% die. If a drug for this condition yields a 90% cure rate, your true relative risk will be 9. Studies that sample populations treated and untreated with this agent will have a mathematical limit for the point estimate of RR that is always potential for confounding even after careful control of known confounders with appropriate statistical adjustments. Let me be clear though: establishing unequivocal causality in the absence of a randomization, sufficient sample size, and blinding is near impossible, regardless of the magnitude of effects reported in such studies. In this sense, I am more conservative than that BMJ article, because I don't assume truth or causality from any single study like that, regardless of the magnitude.

Lost in this is the fact that science is an empirical study — it may always be seeking the "truth" but it will never find it. Ideal evidence evolves over time. In the case of biomedical research, that evidence is an accumulation of the results from an aggregate of studies of varying quality, in the context of pre-clinical data that often includes animal models and in vitro data. A single study is never definitive — even RCTs. That doesn't mean the results are valueless and to be ignored, and it doesn't mean that authors' conclusions from a study are also taken on faith. It means you do the best you can with the information you have. To do so with biomedical research in good faith requires educating yourself about the methodology in the first place.
posted by drpynchon at 9:29 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]

Things are looking up.  I received a really sweet letter from P.  He seemed to be doing well.  Is working out.  Eating more.   On the envelope, he (or someone for him) drew a heart around his address, a heart around my address and then in the middle was roses with another heart.  He colored it in with colored pencils.  Such a silly thing, but I wish my scanner worked.  I'd scan it in.  It was too cute.  I am laughing thinking about this 49 year old guy drawing on an envelope.  Just because I think it is so sweet and hard to imagine him doing that. 

Now that I think about it, after my brother left jail he would do alot of drawings, too.  Maybe it is part of jail therapy. Who knows?  I have to get my scanner working because his letter was so cute too.  I think he is getting that PA accent back.  He kept writing "yous" which I think is a regional thing. 

I sent my resume in for a Financial Aid job.  Got a call and did an abbreviated phone interview.  He said he will be calling in a couple of weeks for a face to face interview.  Does that mean I made the first cut?  Crossing my fingers, my toes, my ankles, my eyes and I would cross my ears if my big noggin wasn't in the way! 

But, I wonder if hiring managers even read cover letters.  So, if they don't read them, why write them?  Go figure.  Tomorrow, I am going to apply for a job with AmVets as a Donations Supervisor.  That sounds so interesting!  It is like an logistical position, planning, coordinating, scheduling.  I would so love to get that.  Ugh just to figure out what to wear.   It is too hot to wear my regular business suits. 

And I have to go grocery shopping.  I really have to plan the menu.  JNI reminded me again that she wanted Tacos.  Okay.  That is what she'll get.  Because it is Cinco de Mayo, which I always thought the holiday was like our Independence Day.  Who knew?  I think I have everything on hand except lettuce, sour cream, and cheese.  I don't want to go grocery shopping.  But, then I can hit a couple food pantries too. 

So so far this week has been GREAT in my book:

1.  I didn't get a fine for Taz getting loose beyond what I had to pay at HHS
2.  A letter from P that picked up my spirits.
3.  A nice phone call from Snakeman.
4.  Some jobs to apply for and I did apply!

The Phillips Phile is talking about the Postal Service's Food drive on Saturday.  They just had the guy on from Second Harvest.  He is talking about what people can donate.  I am so donating my pinto beans, powdered milk and  powdered mashed potatoes.  Oh and that can of Yams.  Is that wrong of me?  Moira says tuna fish, peanut butter.  No, Moira.  No more peanut butter!  Really no more peanut butter.  Or Spaghetti sauce. 

Jim says beets, aritchoke hearts, cans of new potatoes.  Okay, I LOVE those foods.  But, I know I am weird. For once, I agree with Jim.  I would love to get artichoke hearts.  They are so yummy.  Like candy to me.   Jana says she feels bad that she is cleaning out her cupboard and giving the food she hasn't eaten.  She feels like she should making  her contribution to  mirror what she likes to eat.  Jim says, "Well, you can do that too." 

I was getting irritated listening to the show.  Obviously, none of them had ever visited a food pantry before and tried to work with food that you get.  It really is hard.  Especially when you've always fed your child one way and then all of a sudden the whole way you eat changes.  And they are a teenager! 

Speaking of food, Bob of Bob and Sheri had one of his infamous lists but I have to admit I didn't hear the whole list because my neighbor came out and we started talking.  But I think it was about the most hated foods in America.  I only caught the first three:  beets, hard boiled eggs and grits.  Oh I did hear liver but I don't know the place on the list. 

I think there are only three foods that I really don't like:  liver, pea soup and lima beans.  I'm kind of on the fence with Okra.  I don't really like peas as a side dish, but otherwise they are okay. 

And here is something that I've noticed over the years that always amazes me.  I think I might have met maybe one person who doesn't like the smell of coffee.  Even when people don't like the taste of coffee ,don't drink coffee, they always like the SMELL of coffee brewing.  Our Target has a Starbucks (I think it is our only Starbucks) and man when you enter the store, it smells so great.  Even JNI will smell it and go "mmmm…" and I don't think she has ever drank coffee! 

I was a coffee addict early on.  I had to visit a dietician (sp) when I was pregnant with JNI because I had gestational diabetes.  She asked me about my coffee drinking.  I said I drank about a pot a day.  I said something like, "I grew up on coffee."  Well, my Mom happened to be visiting so I dragged her along for my appointment.  I can still see my Mom.  It was the funniest doctor visit I ever had.  I am sure the dietician wrote on my chart, "This woman is hopeless." 

When I tell the dietician that I grew up on coffee, my Mom had her arms folded across her chest  and she shoots me a look.  "T, you did not grow up on coffee."  Mom, I drank coffee ALL the time."  But she was offended, thinking the dietcian probably was thinking my Mom put coffee in my baby bottle.  I think I started drinking coffee when I was about 14.  It was too funny.

But, I have to say that was one of the most eyeopening experiences in my life.  It was really good to sit down with a dietician and examine my diet.  She did a good job and I did put pretty much put all her suggestions in place.  I did cut down on my coffee, but I do go on a coffee bender every so often.  I still drink more coffee than I probably should, but I don't drink a pot anymore.  I think I am down to 8 cups.  And I will from time to time, not drink any coffee. 

And the wierd thing is I have never had Starbucks coffee.  Here is my logic:  I think that I would become too addicted to it.  I have a personality prone to addictions and my coffee habit is one I think, rightly or wrongly, I can control.  But, if drank Starbucks, well, I might be jonesing outside the Target store and I don't want that for myself.  I try not to drink to coffee out.  I just don't need another addiction to feed.  But most restaurant coffee is pretty lame. 

It is only Tuesday and I am loving this week!  This has got to be a sign of things to come!  I am hoping!  And praying! 



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Fine isnt it ?