You heard me right! There are items in your house ‘sucking a nickel of every dollar’s worth of the electricity that seeps from your home’s outlets’. The items I speak about are the ones in “standby mode”, such as your computer or any type of electronic waiting for the touch of a hand to fire it up. This includes rechargeable and trickle charge devices for cell phones, tools, toothbrushes, and any idle appliance such as an oven, dvd player or microwave that displays a clock.

An average household in the US will pay an additional $200 per year due to electronics on standby which is why The Vampire Slayer Act of 2006 has been approved by the California Assembly.

For ways to conserve energy I found this site to be of value and informative.

As for vampires in your home, they may be the ones shouting “Trick or Treat” at your door tonight.

Happy Hallowe’en from all of us at StepForth!

Ps. The picture of the kitty was added by Ross because… well a picture of a vampire kitty just seemed to work in his crazy Halloween-filled mind.

Less than a month ago, On October 02, 2007, I wrote how Google shares were about to exceed the $600 mark. Web analyst Gene Munster had said in a report that he estimated the stock to exceed $660 within one year. I guess he was right.

In less than a month, Google shares have risen dramatically. Google stock has broken the $700 mark hitting as high as $707.00 on Wednesday afternoon. According to a simple Google search for “goog”, the stock showed an all time high value of $707.00 as of 4:00pm ET time on Oct 31. That increase is simply amazing given only a short 29 day window.

To put this into prospective, an investor putting in $10,000 when the stock first went public at $85, would now see their shares valued at $83,176. So how high can Google’s stock go? According to the Associated Press, Dinosaur Securities analyst David Garrity is predicting a reach to $985 in 2008.

Today Priyank Garg of Yahoo announced that some changes to the Yahoo algorithm had been taking place over the past few days and will be completed soon. He has asked for feedback on the results… whether Yahoo will listen is another matter.

StepForth is happy to announce that we have all been afforded an extension until November 30th on the great 15% discount for annual subscriptions to WordTracker. If you have not already signed up then follow the directions below:

What is WordTracker?
WordTracker is a phenomenal keyword research tool that allows subscribers to find out which keywords drive the most interest online. With this information in tow subscribers can change their SEO and pay-per-click keyword targets to make more money.

My friend Jennifer Laycock suggested an article today that I am glad I checked out called “Twitter Guide Part #1” written by a blogging newcomer by the name of Caroline Middlebrook. It is a useful guide for an increasingly popular social property located at www.twitter.com. Read more…

Loren Baker over at SearchEngineJournal.com announced that Matt Cutts had confirmed the PageRank update that happened last week was ‘primarily’ a response to link selling. No additional information was provided except that Google would be continuing to look “at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.”

If your sites’s PageRank was damaged by this update Loren suggests taking a close look at your site and ironing out any wrinkles before asking for reconsideration via Google’s Webmaster Tools. Be CERTAIN that your website is wrinkle free otherwise you may get yourself in hotter water if you tell Google to give your site special attention.

IMPORTANT
Remember that it is always wise to wait for the fallout to clear before making any considerable changes to your website in response to a search engine update. Often we find that when search results stabilize many falsely affected websites are automatically reinstated – at least partially. Here’s hoping that the same happens this time around.

Hello all. My name is Tim Rule and I’m the most recent addition to the StepForth team. I believe my current title is “Gopher”, but I’m preparing to take over PPC management from Scott in the very near future.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to introduce myself to this blog by sharing an interesting thread I read in Slashdot this morning.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has been fairly quick to recognize the long term threat to their dominant stature and have already taken steps towards addressing this.

With the XO not even released yet, I find it amazing the speed with which they have undertaken to insert themselves into this relatively recent initiative. It makes one wonder why they often seem so sluggish to resolve problems with their own products and yet find the energy to jump into new initiatives.

For those of you not familiar with the upcoming XO laptop you can learn more on this site.

Personally, I applaud this initiative and intend to pick up one of these myself. I can think of no globally worthwhile investment an individual can make to beat this. It is pretty hard to beat getting a warm, fuzzy feeling, a nifty new toy and a tax write off in one fell swoop.

I like the irony of the XO name as well.

Here is a list of some articles that my staff and I came across today and thought worthy of sharing. Enjoy!

• I, Cringely wrote an excellent article today describing Google’s plans to host all of our applications. Cringely’s insights are well founded in my opinion. This one is definitely well worth the read.
• According to a mobile study released by Portio Research over half the worlds population will have a cell phone by 2009 and 75% of the population will have one by 2011.
• “The Senate on Thursday night approved a seven-year extension of a moratorium on state and local taxes on Internet access.” Honestly it is amazing to me that such a tax is even being considered – damn politicians!
• “Google Inc. is confident that its $3.1 billion bid for online ad tracker DoubleClick will win over European and U.S. regulators.” Personally I hope it doesn’t go through simply because it has a very real possibility of giving Google a very damaging advantage over other search engines. I am still holding out hope that another player will steal more market share from Google because I prefer a more level playing field but I am well aware that is unlikely anytime soon.

And since we are approaching Halloween, here is something a little frightening for your day. A Zogby/463 Internet Attitudes poll states that 1 in 4 Americans feel the Internet is a decent substitute for a significant other for a period of time. Yikes. Oh and some other very interesting and occasionally boggling data was collected in the same poll so check it out for a laugh or two.

There are a number factors involved in having a successful PPC campaign. These include everything from keyword selection, bid management, and campaign setup to your destination website. This article will discuss five of the most important areas: Keywords, Ad Copy, Destination URL’s, Organization, and Analysis.

1. Keywords
Having a successful PPC campaign starts off with keywords. While your keyword list will likely change and evolve over time, it is important to start with something that makes sense.

Base Keywords
First you will want to start off with your base keywords. These are any words you feel are relevant to your site. You may not end up using all of these in your PPC campaign but they will act as a stepping stone to finding other related phrases. Let’s say you own a camera shop. A few relevant keywords may include “digital camera” or “digital SLR”. Read more…

Google has upgraded its PageRank algorithm and it has negatively affected a whole host of popular websites.

What does this mean for you? First I should note that no one REALLY knows the reason these sites have been affected. After all, it is possible these PageRanks were reduced for another reason but with all of the righteous posturing from Google over the past year over purchased links I think it is a fair assumption that paid link advertising is the culprit. So with that in mind, if you have a high number of reciprocal or paid links on your website then it is quite possible you will also see a drop in PageRank soon. You should also ensure your site does not have links to websites that may have a vastly lower reputation – penalty by association. Read more…