Archive for September, 2008

Okay, last word on Google, I promise.

But this word will be a good word because it’s my first video post! Inspired by Emily, Enrico, Kerri, and Dr. Anonymous, I decided to join the fray. So have a look and tell me what you think!

Just a quick reminder for everyone to take a deep breath. The financial news is coming out of Wall Street faster than we can absorb it; and the political news is coming out of Washington faster than we care to take it in.

I’m not happy about what’s going on, but I’m not really worried about it either. The market needs to be corrected. If a company has been using credit to make its payroll, well then maybe that company has no business being in business in the first place.

Even if we have some tough times ahead (and I’m pretty sure we do,) we will continue to do what we do; work hard, play hard, love hard, debate hard, and laugh heartily.

That is all.

(creative commons photo courtesy of thelizabeth)

The first thing I did after finding out that Google was hating on me was to sink into a pit of despair. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and I was starting to pride myself on being someone who was able to give out SEO advice to other bloggers. All of a sudden I’d suffered the opposite of search engine optimization: search engine demoralization.

My husband said, “Hey, it least you didn’t lose all of your traffic. I think it shows what a loyal readership you must have.”

What a wise man he is. I’d like to thank you, loyal readership.

Then I decided to ask Shane for some advice. He took a look at my HTML and realized that the content of my blog didn’t actually start until 2/3 of the way down the page. He guessed that perhaps the Googlebots were getting halfway through my page, looking for an actual blog post, and then just giving up. Googlebots are applications that that crawl the web, looking for content to index. They then return the information they’ve collected and it becomes integrated in Google search results. The problem is that sometimes you have too much gobbledy-gook code in your HTML, and the bots look at it and say “nevermind!” and move on to the next website.

So the problem was in my Wordpress theme, and more specifically in my layout. Remember my three columns of idiocy? Not only is the three column a bad idea design-wise, it’s also a nightmare for SEO. So I switched back to my old Wordpress theme because I knew it was better optimized for Google.

But I changed Wordpress themes in January. So shouldn’t my traffic have dropped in January, rather than in May? What happened in May?

I was working on Orientedx3 a lot in May. I’m worried that Google is interpreting it as a link farm, which is not what I intended it for at all. Also, I have this habit of coming up with new domain names and installing Wordpress on them in the hopes of starting a new blog. I usually abandon them when I realize that I barely have enough time to write this blog. I’m kind of the queen of unfinished projects. I have over a dozen domain names - some day I’ll show you the list and I promise you’ll get a kick out of it.

Anyway, I sometimes insert a link to PixelRN in these unfinished projects, just to see what the link will look like. So now I’m worried that Google might also think I’m a splogger. (spammer + blogger = splogger). A splog is an “artificially created site which the author uses to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites.” It’s a fake site with links on it.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that I have no way of really knowing what happened. The only thing I can do is change my theme, get rid of any blogs I’m not using and just start posting again. Only time will tell if Google decides to love me again.

There is a silver lining to all of this. I have decided to take one of my little unfinished projects and finish it - which means I will be starting a new blog! I’ve been working on it all weekend and I hope to launch it soon. In the meantime I’ll keep posting here in the hopes that Google will show me some love again.

So how did I find out that google wasn’t just knocking me down a few notches but was completely ignoring my blog?

I started searching for key words that I knew Google should rank me high for (like nurses on twitter). Google did not seem to acknowledge that I had written that post. In fact, Google was ranking some of your blog posts that linked to my post, but was ignoring the actual post itself. Hardly seems fair, right?

So I decided to confirm my suspicions by checking my “google juice.” Here’s how you check your google juice: Choose one of your blog post titles that is fairly long and doesn’t contain any cliches. Pick a phrase that you are fairly certain wouldn’t show up anywhere else on the web, except your blog.

Copy and paste the entire title in google and hit search. If you chose a good title, and have a reasonably well positioned blog, your blog should come up at number one for the search.

Here’s an example: Take “Now they don’t want my blood…” from DisappearingJohn. Google it, and DisappearingJohn’s blog shows up at number one.

Google likes Disappearing John, and rightly so! (he’s a great nurse blogger.)

So I did this google search for some of my own titles and that’s when I realized that Google wasn’t listing my blog for any search I could come up with. As Shane put it, “Google is really hating on you right now.”

I decided to take a closer look at my stats. You know when you check out all the funny keywords people use to get to your blog? Well, it turns out the only keywords that were being used to get to my blog were “PixelRN,” or “pixelrn.com.”

(Yes, some people actually put PixelRN into google to get to my blog rather than putting it on the address bar, *ahem*, Mom. But I digress. I don’t care how you get to my blog, as long as you show up!)

I then checked to see what percentage of traffic was coming to my blog via search engines, and at what point in time did it drop off. Here’s what I found:

So as you can see, my search engine traffic seemed to drop off drastically some time between May and June of this year, and in September, it got even worse.

In part 2, I’ll try to figure out what I did in May, 2008 to offend the Google Gods.

(creative commons image courtesy of Ninha Morandini)

Forget about the economic crisis we are facing.

Readers, I am in the midst of a full fledged blogger emergency. I’ve recently discovered that Google is blacklisting me for some reason. I have completely lost all of my search engine traffic from Google and I’m not sure why.

Luckily I have Shane working on the case, and he suggested changing my wordpress theme around. Instead of getting into that, though, I decided to just revert back to my old theme (which Shane, himself designed!) until I can figure things out.

I have some ideas about what happened, and I’ll be posting more on this later. Meanwhile, if there are any other SEO experts that might happen upon this blog, I would love to hear from you.

What could a travel nurse possibly want to know about social networking? How about everything? In my view, every travel nurse should acquaint themselves with at least one or two of the social networking tools that are available. I can’t think of a better way to stay in touch with friends and family while you’re on the road.

With that in mind I wrote a series of articles for my friends over at travelnursingblogs.com. You can find part one here. I’d also like to thank Medical Solutions for sponsoring my trip to Blog World Expo. It was well worth it!

Also, I just finished writing my about page. I’ve had this blog for a long time and it recently occurred to me that I’d really like to tell the story of how I got here to people who arrive by *accident* Enjoy!

(creative commons image courtesy of slack 12)

One of the great benefits of attending Blog World Expo 2008 was all of the great advice and inspiration I got that will help me to keep on blogging.

Hands down, my favorite blogging advice was dispensed by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week:

Talk to your readers the way you would talk to your friends after 2 drinks.

This makes perfect sense to me, and here’s why:

What happens when you sit down with some friends and have a couple drinks?

You start to get that relaxed, warm fuzzy feeling.

You start to loosen your inhibitions.

Your enthusiasm starts to bubble up to the top and affects what you say.

As people who blog, we all have something to say. The question is, What’s the best way to say it? And how do we write a really good post without letting all of our little insecurities and doubts get in the way? And the answer is, blog like you’re buzzed!

I think the 2-drink rule is brilliant, and I’ve already started to implement it. And what’s more, Tim Ferriss actually wrote his entire book with that rule in mind. Did I mention that it’s a New York Times bestseller?

If 2 drinks are good, wouldn’t 3 or 4 or 5 drinks be even better?

Easy now, I don’t want to encourage any lush-like behavior. At three drinks you start to take that turn where warm and fuzzy becomes silly and sloppy, and bubbly enthusiasm can turn into incoherence and long-windedness. Which is fine if you’re at the bar, or a party, or even sitting at home watching House and tweeting - Goodness, who would do that? ; ) - It’s probably just not good for your blog.

And obviously the 2 drink rule would need to be adjusted to fit your weight and tolerance. If you weigh 98 pounds, a scant glass of sherry might do it for you, but if you’re > 200 pounds, you might be halfway into a six-pack before you start getting the warm fuzzies.

And remeber, we juSt pretending we had two drinks, right? Not like we drink so much we forgette how to type an spell. And maibee even fall off out of the chair wile we are blogging.

*hiccup*

I see you later. guys,. Got t0 go take nAp.

o_O

You are a nurse. You are out in public, going about your business and you see a person in distress, or a situation where someone has been harmed or injured in some way.

What would you do?

I had a conversation with some fellow nurses yesterday that I found kind of surprising. Someone was cursing their husband for telling her son’s little league team that she was an ER nurse. Now the coach wanted her to volunteer to run the first aid station at some of the games.

“I never tell anyone I’m a nurse,” she says.

The other nurse agreed and said that she never wears her scrubs home when taking the subway, because she would be expected to help if something went wrong.

Now, I understand where this mentality comes form. Everyone’s afraid of liability. Everyone’s afraid of losing their license if something goes wrong.

Call me naive and idealistic, but if I saw someone in distress, or someone who had been harmed, it would take wild hungry pit bulls to keep me from helping them. You see, it’s kind of why I became a nurse in the first place. Not only is there something so infinitely rewarding about being able to help someone in a crisis situation, I also consider it to be my duty. And I may not have the type of first-line emergency skills that many ER nurses and EMTs have but I’ll tell you what I can do. I can hold pressure to stop someone from bleeding. I know BLS and if there’s an AED around I can set it up, calmly and quickly. I can hold someone’s hand, talk them through the situation and try to keep the scene calm until the EMTs get there.

And if you’re still afraid, well, there is something to protect you. It’s called The Good Samaritan Law.

I’m proud to be a nurse. Sure I may do my share of complaining about all the menial stuff, but in the end, I have pride in who I am. This is going to sound incredibly corny but when I wear my scrubs out in public, stopping to get coffee before work, or stopping at the grocery store after my shift, I hold my head up a little higher. The funny thing is that people seem to treat me with slightly more reverence when I’m in my scrubs. And I don’t mind that at all.

Blog World Expo has been an excellent conference. It is so energizing to meet other bloggers. This makes up for every person in my life that says “Huh, what? blogging?” and then their eyes glaze over. I’ve met so many other bloggers and feel completely rejuvenated and inspired to keep on blogging.

I can’t say enough about how cool it was to meet Kim (emergiblog) and Dr. Val (Revolution Health) in person. I really felt like Kim was an old friend, especially when she said she remembered when I graduated from nursing school!

The exciting thing is that we spent some time planning for next year’s conference. We are planning our own Medblogger/HealthCare track. What this means is that we can plan our own sessions and have an great venue to meet one another in person.

I can’t stress enough what a worthwhile experience this will be. In the future I will be blogging about how you guys can make this happen (budgeting for it, perhaps finding sponsorships to help you with expenses), but for now I will just urge you all to put it on your calendars: October 15th-17th in Las Vegas.

You know how much fun we have in the Dr. Anonymous chat room every Thursday night? - it’s going to be like that only 1000x better.

Sent from my iPhone

Posted by email from pixelrn’s posterous