Adsense and Adwords

I got one of those free little cards that google sends out in the mail because I signed up for adsense.  I see I just got one because of google places too.  Anyways, I set up an "Add Words" advertisement for a web site design company in Ballard.    Supposedly they are going to match me up with some key words that I chose like website,design, Lynnwood, Seattle or Ballard.  I have a google adsense account over on the right side, so let's see if one of those ads come up there. 

Picture of giant ball made of Driftwood.  Taitung, Taiwan

I tried to see if the ad would appear in the google search results based on those key words, but it did not seem to.. That may be a different system or I may need to target some narrower keywords for the test.  Anyways, this post is mostly just to test out the system..

An interesting thing happened as well, apparently they (Google) don't allow ! in their ad titles, so my ad was immediately rejected.  There was a little link for "Request an Exception" which I clicked and waited until just today (4 days later) to get a reply back that my ad was "disapproved"!    This is the reason they gave: 

"Punctuation and Symbols: Punctuation & Symbols: Per the 'Ad Style &
grammar' section of our Editorial Guidelines, we do not permit
excessive or unnecessary punctuation or symbols. The following are
examples of guideline violations: "

Apparently they don't allow Exclamation Marks in the title, so I had to remove it from ad title "Get a web site now!".  After then it was immediately accepted.   Supposedly.  I'll believe it when I see the ad somewhere, like on this blog.

Cheers and Happy Last Days of Summer !

Keith

Containers used for river embankment.  Taitung County, Taiwan

Snow

That was some wild wacky snowy weather we had this winter.  It snowed and then snowed some more.  Thank goodness for wood heat.

SEOmoz is a Waste of Money

Looking for a job pretty much sucks - a lot. Putting yourself out there again and again to be rejected is just not fun at all. I had this brilliant idea that for every company that rejected me so far, I would start up my own competing company and "teach them a lesson"! ... Well, to date I would need to set up a massive online book-seller, an online car shopping system, and a global coffee store chain, not exactly the easiest of tasks! Well, this latest company "SEOmoz" is a little more in the ballpark.  I know a thing or two about "SEO" and I have been involved with it much longer than the founder of their company.

This SeoMoz offers a Pro (read: Expensive) search engine optimization service from $99 to $2,000 per month. What a complete rip-off! Most of what they offer can be found for FREE on the Google Webmasters page, or the Yahoo Site Explorer.  All your incoming links, page ranks and search engine queries can be found on these two excellent services from the major search engines.  I'm usually not that fond of Google, as I believe they are becoming too big and powerful.  However, you don't argue with a 1000 pound gorrilla and they have all the control in this situation, so you might as well go right to the source and don't waste your money on SEOmoz.

If you need any extra help with SEO, drop me a line, I will set you up for less than they charge, and also give you personalized service.