Max’s program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association’s efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.

Many of the students going through Max’s program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year, and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. “Quaker” is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay’s Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song (“with his shaggy shaggy locks”). So there’s a real culture shock when they show up in Max’s class and he hands them a Bible. “I’ve never touched one of these before” and “Why do we have to use this?” are non-uncommon responses.

None of this surprised me, of course. I’ve led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction (“we graduate more Quakers than we bring in” was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where’s the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?

There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. It’s pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn’t seem healthy to have such separated worlds.

Convergent Friends

Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we’ve shaken hands a few times but he didn’t recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we’re described. It was positive (we “bear watching!”) but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we’re a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I’ve graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listing all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage–I’m going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the “New Monastics and Convergent Friends” workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF’s were young adults. “That’s the first I’ve heard that” she said; “me too!” I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr’s October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.

Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism

The most useful part of Max’s talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He

• Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
• Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called “Concordance Capers” that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian” at the end of the class.
• Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
• Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
• Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they’ve profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta’s Open Door.
• The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.

Random Thoughts:

A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.

PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I’ve fixed it so that this odd spread won’t happen again.

I’m not going to focus on any of the underhanded tricks to fool search engines into listing an inappropriate page. Google hates this kind of tactic and so do I. You get visits for having good content. Good search rankings are based on good content and the best way to boost your content is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the content they want. Part one is on website analysis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your website is easy to navigate. One of the neatest things about the web is that we have instant feedback on use. With just a little tracking we can see what pages people are looking at, how they’re finding our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are currently using four different tracking methods. Most utilize javascript “bugs,” tiny snippets of code that send individual results to an advanced software tracking system. I put the code inside a Moveable Type “Modules Template” which is automatically imported to all pages. Installing a new system is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Template and rebuilding the site.

• AXS Visitors Tracking System
  This software installs on your server but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the easiest installations I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can narrow it specific pages on your site, or even particular search engines or search phrases.
  There’s also a option to view the lastest traffic by visitor. I love watching this! You can see how individuals are using the site and where they’re navigating. I’ve been able to identify different types of visitors this way and understand the complexity of the audience.
  It doesn’t seem like AXS is not being developed anymore. The latest stable version came out over two years go, which is a shame.

• HitTail
  This service watches search-engine links and makes recommendations for new keywords. I wrote about this service yesterday in Blogging for the Long Tail.

• Reeferss.com
  This is a simple simple bit of software. Like every other tracking system it keeps track of referrers: search engines and websites that bring traffic to your site. But unlike the others that’s all it does. Why care then? It provides a real-time RSS feed of these visitors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a customized start page, see below) and scan the results multiple times a day.

• Google Analytics
  The internet’s gatekeeper bought the Urchin analytics company in April 2005 and relaunched the product as Google Analytics shortly thereafter. This is becoming an essential tracker. It’s free and it’s powerful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as others have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what people are saying about you online.

• Technorati
  This service tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Technorati will tell you where blogs are linking. Give it your URLs (or those of your competitors!) and you’ll know whenever a blogger puts in a link to you. You can also give it keywords and find out when a blog uses them.

• Google Blog Search
  Google can also let you follow blog references or keyword mentions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s linking to your site (or to the competition). There are lots of other services that track blogs and mentions–Sphere, Bloglines, etc. They all have different strengths so try them and see what you think.

• Feedburner
  The best RSS massager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recently introduced page tracking software too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feedburner’s other offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of this information. Most of the tracking services provide RSS feeds (See The Wonders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a customized start page, to pull these all together into a single page that I can scan every morning. Here’s a screenshot of part of my Netvibes tracking page–the full page currently shows fourteen tracking feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With tracking you find out what people are looking for on the internet. This helps you create pages and services that people will want to find. You might be surprised to see what they’re already finding on your site. Some examples:

• Analyzing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bringing in high Google traffic. I looked at these pages again and realized they did a good job of describing the company’s mission. I consequently redesigned the site homepage to feature them and I made sure that those pages contained direct links to its most important services.

• When I started work for another client I looked at their site and suspected that they’re most important articles were not being seen–visitors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of tracking confirmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to convince the executive director that we made some small modifications to the design. Having this strong content linked right off the homepage helped bring in Google traffic.