My friend Marios Alexandrou, an advanced SEO who loves to test ranking factors, worked with my programmer to update the popular Wordpress plugin I had built, Internal Link Building. (more…)

Yesterday, I described what I saw as a trend towards content communities becoming commodified. We ended on the question – how do you build a competitive advantage in such a case? (more…)

Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities. (more…)

Good copywriting does more than just explain the details of a website’s products or services. It needs to speak to a person on an emotional level, giving them hope while getting the point across fast. It also needs to compel a person to take action. (more…)

Competitive intelligence provides entertainment, an inside-track on industry trend-spotting, and the potential to develop tangential business opportunities before others, or at least catch up quickly. I gluttonously consume information, and thought I’d share some parts of my diet with other competitive intelligence collectors with hearty appetites. (more…)

Let’s face it – you’re only worth as much as it costs to replace you. Most businesses are going through budget cuts and lay-offs, or have at some point in the last two years, which makes it more important than ever to prove your value to your company or client.

They could hire another SEO for your salary… but they can’t hire another SEO; and a merchandising analyst; and a marketplace analyst; and a PR firm; and a blogger; and a customer service rep for your salary. Yet, a good SEO will be ALL of these things! (more…)

And I’m lucky to have been nominated in two categories!

1. My post, “The 4.5 Personas of My SEO Site,” is nominated in the SEO category! If I get into the Finalists round, I’d love for you to vote for me to win!

The post has also made it as a reference for Full Sail’s Internet Marketing Master’s Degree.

2. My article on 101 advanced tips to buy text links also got nominated in the Link Building category.

Here’s hoping the judges will consider my writing good enough to go through and win!

Check it out at Wolf Howl:
7 Tips To Make Training Your Web Team Merry

Get the scoop at Janet’s Search Marketing Sage: “Two Must Have Plugins for Landing Page Testing.” The second one you probably never heard of, but Janet makes a great case for !

This is a guest post by Arnold Zafra for TopHost.gr, a hosting company offering shared web hosting plans as well as dedicated servers. The English is a little awkward at points, but Arnold still shares some valuable tips.

So, you just snagged a deal with a client. Everything seems to flow smoothly and according to plan. You’re able to deliver the goods, but somewhere along the way, you client become restless and starts playing hardball.

And you wonder what could you be possibly doing wrong? Why is the deal running not so smoothly, where in fact you’re doing everything that you promised to do. How can you re-establish rapport with your client especially when your SEO deal is still ongoing? (more…)

It’s a weird thing that some of the smartest affiliate marketers are also the dirtiest. (more…)

You all know how strong of a critic I am towards Google, but I thought this user research and testing was pretty unique, cutting edge, and can potentially lead to some great benefits for Sub-Saharan Africans (like finding health info, as mentioned…). http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/designing-useful-mobile-services-for.html

This is a guest post by Mark Ius, on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Ireland, which includes both a web design company, and an SEO company.

It’s well known that most SEOs hate link building with a passion. Why? Two reasons. (more…)

Until about December 22nd. In the meantime, 2803.fr brings us news on one of the first information products for the iPhone: A consumer reports guide that uses the iPhone camera to scan barcodes and report back its product rating accordingly. (Post is in French, fyi.)

I got the question recently from a friend at a big corporation, in the context of buying reviews. Of course, Google does not make the law (yet), but there are laws restricting misleading marketing. (more…)

I just spent a few hours creating and editing an affiliate PPC campaign with Facebook Ad Manager, a Firefox extension that lets you mass-create, upload and split test ads (including split-testing images) on Facebook.

Now, while Facebook Ad Manager saved me a bunch of time, I screwed up with my Prosper 202 tracking setup and so the whole campaign needs to be rebuilt from the start.

Here’s what happened, and how to avoid it happening to you. (more…)

The following is my favoured reading list when it comes to search marketing, especially on the SEO side. It includes PPC and usability/conversion optimization stuff too, because you can’t really become advanced in this field without focusing on the bottom line. Check out my description of each blog to see if it fits your interests. (more…)

@Search Engine Land: How predictive heatmap tools work and how they can lift your conversion rates. I write for SEL’s Just Behave (Usability/Conversion Optimization) column once a month.

@Wolf-Howl: Why Google HQ Really LOVES Thin Affiliates . I write at Mike Gray’s site periodically, when I have something that will fit with his audience.

@Wildfire Marketing’s Marketing Tips: An Interview on Link Building With Yours Truly

If you liked those, you should add my rss feed to your reader because some of the best stuff I write gets published here before it gets cited or repurposed in other contexts elsewhere…

Time and date based navigation offer terrible usability and even worse SEO. Have you ever heard of mystery meat navigation? Maybe not, but you’ve probably seen archive navigation that meets the following description: (more…)

Are competitors mining your backlinks with tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Linkscape and Majestic SEO? Just because they can check your backlinks out, doesn’t mean you should make life easy by giving good data to their link building tools.

So here’s how to dirty the data that competitors see when using backlink checking tools or hub finders.

(more…)

Surprising people forces a reaction, and if it’s a silly surprise, that reaction is laughter. That’s why list-jokes or series-jokes are a staple of comedians everywhere.

In high school, I remember my friend Johnny Shanaan giving a speech to our English class for his public speaking assignment. He was talking about body language, and handshakes in particular. He said,

“There are different types of shakes. There’s

• The firm shake,
• The weak shake,
• The clammy shake,
• The power shake,
• And the milkshake.”

What’s nice about series jokes like that is that the first items in the list create an expectation. And when you know what people expect, it’s easy to throw in an oddball item that surprises them.

That’s also true of humor generally. If you can set up an expectation, it’s easy to find the unexpected.

A favourite line of mine when I want to loosen people up is that I shower regularly… first of every month. (Stolen from a Get Fuzzy comic strip, to be honest.)

So the next time you want to lighten your writing, your small-talk, whatever… look for what should follow from what you said, and say the opposite. Look at what people relate to, their social reference points (like showering daily) and step outside of them.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader or check out some other content posts.

If you could find out your competitors’ top converting ads when you enter a market, you’d save a lot of time optimizing campaigns, wouldn’t you?

It would be like knowing where the jelly is in a jelly donut – you’d bite right into the good stuff and skip the mostly-dough areas. (more…)

If you could find out what competitors’ conversion rates are and you can estimate the traffic value to your competition? Surely the PPC pros could use that conversion data…

Well, it turns out you can get a pretty good idea about competitors’ conversion rates. (more…)

Reading is the best investment you can make in yourself, and it’s also incredibly enjoyable. So to share the fun and help you build your businesses, I’m giving away a copy of The Knack, a fantastic business book by Bo Burlingham and Norm Brodsky. (Here’s my review of The Knack.) (more…)

First, the information that’s valuable to all my readers: Check out my most recent usability guest column for Search Engine Land, How Much Detail Do Product Detail Pages Need?

Second, in response to my 4Q visitor surveys, Tara Cervantes wrote me the following in response to the question, “What do you value most about the [company] website?”

“[I]nsight, shared knowledge, great food for thought. I’m an Internet Marketing Master’s student who just can’t get enough (more…)

Hey guys,

After my previous great experiences going to you for advice, I thought I’d ask how I should go about creating my “Best Of” page? In particular, I’m interested in 2 things:

1) What posts belong there?

2) How should I highlight the page? I used to have a best of page in my main navigation, but it got very few clicks. I’d like to perhaps try a different approach – what would you guys suggest?

Cheers

Gab

As my friend Mike Gray pointed out at SMX Advanced, RTing is a great way to get people’s attention and build a relationship with them. The difficulty is getting people’s attention when they write a really popular post that gets RTed 100+ times.

So here’s the greyhat solution. (more…)

Here’s what I’ve been reading for the past few months. Most of these are excellent, and I encourage you guys to get your own copy. (more…)

To visitors coming via my 101 Advanced Text Link Buying Tips article on Search Engine Journal, welcome. Here’s an overview of my link buying services. (To my regular readers, check out the article and link to it or link here if you like it . )

The main benefits of using my text link buying services are that I

• Reduce your risk,
• Get you the most value for money, and
• Maximize your ROI.

To buy text links effectively, I follow a few principles:

- Minimize risk by making paid links indistinguishable from unpaid links. This also maximizes effectiveness.
- Purchase links for rankings, but also for branding and community building. Brands and communities are valuable assets that drive traffic and revenue.
- If it can send traffic that converts, the link is worth buying. This is why demographic targeting is a valid approach to buying links.

My rates start at $1000 for every $1000 in paid link spend, which is based on the average amount of time involved in managing such a budget. For link purchases beyond $8,000/month, we can negotiate better rates. The rates are also negotiable for long-term commitments of 9 months+.

If you’d like discrete text link buying services, contact me.

It may not be possible to automate all of SEO (or other business processes) with software, but that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid the chores in SEO. If you can document the processes, you can delegate them to virtual assistants (VA). (more…)

I’m working on an absolutely massive text link buying piece for SEJ. To keep your appetites whetted, here’s a little sneak preview. (more…)

I’ve used each of the SEO and webmaster services and tools below in the past, and can vouch for them. (more…)

SMX West’s video SEO panel taught me that the number of embeds your video gets is important to having it rank better at Youtube, and potentially in Google’s universal search results. So why not speed things up by buying a few installs and links for your video?

If more embeds means better SEO, there seems to be an argument for buying installs, just as there is for buying links in normal SEO. An embed is when someone copy-pastes the html code from Youtube to put a video on their site. (more…)

I’m working on some pretty detailed, informative pieces on link buying. One is a MASSIVE how-to. The other is a niche how-to for a specific type of content. If this type of link building is your thing, add my rss feed to your reader for more.

There have been lots of innovations in technology, in the algorithms, in products and search engines (hi Bing!). I’m curious to know what you feel has had the greatest impact on SEO. Feel free to name multiple things, and share practical tips!

I often take screenshots as I browse the web, and I’ve found some weird rankings. This isn’t really outing, just some odd things I’ve noticed around. I’d love to hear your theories as to what’s behind each of these. (more…)

My friend Geno Prussakov wrote a fascinating book entitled, Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes. This is my review of Geno’s book, for those who might like to buy it.

(more…)

I wrote a guest post at Wolf Howl on how to find niches and pick wisely amongst them, for affiliate marketing newbies. Gurus who give you a list and tell you to select randomly amongst them without explaining their reasoning inevitably cause dissapointment, so hopefully this will help you guys discover affiliate marketing opportunities and choose wisely amongst them.

If the topic is of interest, have a look also at how to protect your keywords from a loose-lipped affiliate manager.

And all that said, you should add my rss feed to your reader to keep up to date with my latest posts. You can also subscribe by email. Both are free .

What are the pros and cons of buying links? What risks and rewards should I consider in a cost-benefit analysis of a strategy of paying for backlinks?

(more…)

Templates and Themes

Scriptorium Fonts, Art and Design

Landing Page Directory (more…)

…Hacked websites are really no big deal. Sit back, kick your feet up on the desk, grab your coffee and let me tell you a story about Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch and I. (more…)

One is at Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-mythbusters-content/12810/

The other is at Blogue Marketing Interactif: http://www.bloguemarketinginteractif.com/flogue-collette-judy/ (in French)

Card sorting is a technique from usability, whereby usability pros ask others to arrange a set of cards in the most coherent groups possible. Usability experts use card sorting to organize the information architecture of a website, but it’s also valuable for SEO.

Today I had two consultations over the phone that dealt with the navigation of a website, so I thought I’d touch on how you can use card sorting for SEO. I’m currently writing what I hope will be a small book on advanced SEO, and one of my themes is that SEO and usability fit closely together – improving one often improves the other. This is one of those cases. (more…)

Is PPC necessary? Why is PPC necessary or not? If so, when do I need to do it? (more…)

by Stuart Frisby Identify link patterns. Look around a niche and ask: (more…)

In June I spoke at SMX Advanced. Earlier this week I spoke at Affiliate Summit East. Time to show some love to the folks I met! Here they are,  in no particular order: (more…)

What are your direct competitors doing in the way of backlink development? My research in over 30 verticals sheds some light on the question. This is part 2 of 2.

I posted Part 1 “What 70+ Hours of Backlink Checking and Research Shows…” on Search Engine Journal, in which I covered:

• Practical uses for this competitive intelligence,
• My methodology in conducting this research,
• Some fun data points for niche research,

Here, I’ll go over these three points:

1. Screenshots of the data,
2. My analysis and conclusions,
3. Some caveats.

At the end, I’d love to hear comments from people of all experience levels. Don’t worry about sounding “dumb,” because there are no dumb questions: a desire to learn shows great intelligence!

(more…)

In no particular order, here are the folks I’m looking forward to seeing at Affiliate Summit East, where I’m on the agenda to speak. (more…)

(To my advanced readers: You know most of what’s in this post. This is to help out the readers newer to SEO, using a question-and-answer style to address frequently asked questions (FAQ).

If all goes well, there should be some feature length, deeply researched stuff for you SEO pros later this week.)

Question: Does it matter for my site’s SEO in Google or other search engines if I use www in the domain name? For example, do I need to use http://www.example.com or can i use http://example.com ?

(more…)

And that means tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings (more…)

10. Why yes, those viagra footer links will rank our kids’ toys site higher.

9. We’re experts in the three types of link: the reciprocal link, the paid link and the chainlink.

8. Of course it’s normal for link counts to change day-to-day by +/- 50,000.

7. This will cost you your time, money and sanity. (more…)

“How do I sell more hourly consultations?”, I asked. Unfortunately, all the answers failed miserably, despite some of them being so brilliant that I gave away links and consulting time (Vinh Nguyen and Michael Galbus, you can still claim your 1 hour of consulting each ). Why? (more…)

While reading Canada’s Trade-marks Act (IDK why it’s not spelled Trademarks, but anyways…), I found the following (more…)

The scams described in the video below have a lot in common with the Google cash, Google Money and other similar scams prominently found all around the internet. (more…)

Problem: FutureNow requires Javascript to see the content in the some of its tabs (see “How it Works” and “Details” in the image below), which hides this content from 5% of its visitors. According to studies, (more…)

Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have been nice to enough to give me a speaking spot doing an “Advanced Search Marketing (more…)

Is where fools rush away their gold for domain names.

Hello, and welcome to scratchpad! This is (more…)

I’ve got a new piece up over at Michael Gray’s Wolf Howl, rebutting Seth Godin on why journalists should or should not get paid. (more…)

… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.

(more…)

… posted at Search Engine Journal: Landing Pages On A SMB Budget.

See here for details: #Iran Election: “Mousavi likely winner” – Google Trends.

I’ve pinged feedburner, but it doesn’t seem to change the fact that when I view this site’s RSS feed via Google reader, it’s out of date and stuck with posts from April…

Any ideas how to fix this?

Does the legal team or your boss absolutely insist on having a splash page? Here’s a tip to SEO the homepage in the search engines despite the splash. It’s untested as of yet, but I feel it’s good enough to be worth a try.

Are you ready?
(more…)

PageRank was supposed to be a probability distribution of the likelihood of someone clicking a link.

When that changed, (more…)

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some information retrieval theory with Dr Edel Garcia, who is a researcher and professor in the field, as well as a longtime SEW Forum moderator (aka Orion). He helped me understand what Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) is, and what it has been used for in the information retrieval field. Dr. Garcia generously agreed to let me publish our conversations on this blog.

(Update: Apparently Dr. Garcia is no longer active at SEW as a moderator.) (more…)

Carolyn Nolte, Customer Service Manager at Footshox, a company that sells insoles and shoe inserts, understands what it takes to seriously impress customers. (more…)

by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post: (more…)

To all my readers: If you’re going to SMX Advanced, I’d love to meet you. I’ll probably check comments on this post etc Monday n see what’s up, but the easiest way to meet is to: (more…)

De-Fense! [Thump Thump] De-Fense! [Clap Clap]:

Alex Chudnovsky killed it (more…)

Nick Carr: Google is getting a little carried away with self-importance, maybe? (more…)

Ruud Hein and I conducted this interview by email, which is why some of the tantalizing bits he leaves off on don’t see a followup – it was a preset bunch of questions. In any case, the interview is about business, but gets personal too – all of which makes for a great read, imho. Enjoy! -Gab

You’re known as a technically savvy SEO, as seen via your Search Explained series. Does that interest come from your programming background? Either way, can you share some detail?

Sure. (more…)

Actually, this post should be titled: “How did I cloak my way to lower rankings?!” Because the truth is that it was completely unintentional – as evidenced by it causing my traffic to drop like a rock. (more…)

This is a guest post from Ian Lurie, who runs a Seattle SEO shop, on behalf of Groomstand Groomsmen Gifts. They have such items as personalized pub signs and engraved cufflinks.

A number of problems set back the usability of various sites in the wedding vertical, and particularly those catering to Groomsmen. Here are some case studies on things to avoid, so that your site’s checkout isn’t avoided like a sweaty marathon runner…

The basic paradigm we need to assume is that laid out in Steve Krug’s excellent “Don’t Make Me Think.” People browsing the web: (more…)

Been doing some local events lately. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting… (more…)

Some awesome reading on conversion and time management: (more…)

Bruce, how did you make the transition from being an SEO consultant to an SEO agency?

Photo credit: Jon Hochman of Hochman Internet Marketing Consultants (more…)

Affiliate-management-for-beginners-attributing-credit-for-the-sale/

Attributing-credit-when-email-and-affiliates-overlap

Hope you enjoy!

I’m currently being worn out by a confluence of taxes, client work, personal projects and preparations for SMX Advanced. So please excuse the disorganization of this blogrolling post. Consider it a scratchpad link love post, if you will.

Is your site a one-visit wonder? by Ben McKay, UK SEO Consultant. See also SEP’s 3 Ways to Get PPL Talking About You – by Cindy Alvarez, product manager and user experience pro. (more…)

You NEED to attend SMX Advanced. It’s that simple. The single best investment you can make in your search education and professional life this year will be happening in Seattle, June 2-3, 2009. Here are 5 sweet reasons to attend. (more…)

The defining mantra of OG SEOs, which I’ve read time and again, when it comes to paid links: “Do what it takes to rank.” Keep that in mind. (more…)

I’ve seen variations on this link building trick, but it’s the first time I see it producing additional links beyond the value you already have. (more…)

For school, work and taxes. Therefore, posting will be light or nonexistent for the next two weeks. When I return, I’ve got some massively juicy content for you, including interviews I did at SMX West with Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Internet Marketing and Gillian Fishkin of SEOmoz. (more…)

Thinking and Ideas:

Jimmy Wales is a big thinker, and I give him a lot of respect. The founder of Wikipedia recently did some great interviews: (more…)

For a long time, I resisted using Feedburner for my rss feed analytics, but I’ve finally given in. Ok, fine, Borgle – you can have another data point on me. For now. Until a non-Google entity provides comparable analytics. (more…)

On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that (more…)

By observing patterns in visitor intent and demographics, conversion optimization and redesigns can be planned more intelligently. The patterns you identify can be used to create personas. Through my use of 4Q visitor surveys, I’ve learned the top reasons people visit SEO ROI Services and developed corresponding personas.

What’s a persona? (more…)

by detritus My friend Gyutae Park recently blogged about making money by tasting domain names based on Google Hot Trends. It’s a neat idea, but there are some caveats you should know.

Tasting domain names is the practice of buying them with the intent to return them during the 5 day grace period, while profiting off the typein traffic the domains get during those 5 days. It’s the web equivalent of buying a prom dress for prom then returning it. Google Hot Trends, for those who don’t know, shows you the 100 keywords with the greatest change in search volume in the past 24 hours.

Anyways, trendy domaining is something I’ve done in the past. From personal experience, I can confirm that there is money there to be made … but very little, if you’re not automating things. That’s because: (more…)

Normally, a 404 Not Found error is shown to visitors when they try to visit a non-existent page. But what about when there is a page there, only it doesn’t have what they want – what do you do then? One solution is to offer them a link to the right page, duh! Sounds simple, but it can actually be a bit tricky. Another is to update the page and answer people’s question. (more…)

Hey SEO ROI readers – time for another Friday Photos! Today I’ve got analytics stuff for you, advertising tidbits, some interesting/miscellaneous calls-to-action stuff, and some SEO material. This post is filed in the case studies category fyi. (more…)

Then you’re way ahead of the curve and understand what Matt Cutts is talking about, late in this video, on getting crawled and indexed more rapidly and deeply. If not, it’s time to understand search like Matt Cutts and read up on submarine crawling. This also goes back to what I was writing about thinking like search engineers and what Google wants. These are not merely abstract ideas, despite appearances. Grasping these notions puts you a step higher on the ladder, closer to “SEO Director” and further from “SEO data entry monkey,” because you can solve problems rather than merely execute other people’s solutions. (more…)

by Josh Russell People keep promoting the tactic of getting tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, for the sake of having massive influence with any single tweet. The catch is that if everyone followed everyone else – the ultimate expression of this influence-by-broadcasting tactic – then the tactic dies. Because the actual attention given to any single tweet would be so infinitesimally small that it would be meaningless.

Your Twitter stream would amount to a blur of tweets. In that case, no one would have very much broadcasting influence, even though everyone has millions of followers.

So I came up with some simple math to calculate your true Twitter broadcasting reach / influence. (more…)

You all know I hate spam email. And chances are you get annoyed by those too. But people don’t have a problem with opt-in email newsletters … or do they? Here’s an April Fools trick to get your friends spammed by legitimate email newsletters!
by Tancread
(more…)

I want to flip the tables and this time ask you, my dear readers, for some advice. What can I do to sell more one-hour consultations? It’s my favourite service to provide, typically clarifies a lot of stuff for the client and provides them with great value, and it’s quite convenient as far as overhead/organization goes. I’m open to anything, so don’t be intimidated or feel like it’s a “stupid” suggestion or “too obvious.” (more…)

I’ve long had All In One SEO, but I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with it. It only handles posts, not pages, it won’t auto-301 posts when you change the permalink, and doesn’t let you mass-edit titles/descriptions. Not that I’m ungrateful, as it’s been good to me, but it’s kind of annoying having an All In One tool that isn’t all in one. (more…)

A little while ago, Willy Franzen of One Day One Job was doing a 1-hour phone consultation with me, and he asked whether a second link from any given page would also boost the page’s ranking. (more…)

1. You need social proof? “As Seen In [the following media]” is a popular and well-trusted form of social proof. So next time you run a campaign, why not hit up Google News for inspiration, plus the internal search functions of major news networks and trade publications? (more…)

I’m starting a new column, Friday Photos, featuring observations from around the web. This week, we have some interesting advertising, analytics, email and ranking factor material. I left the ranking material stuff for the end, because, like any mother will tell you, save dessert for last! (more…)

Bruce Clay scooped a great link building ‘crm’ or perhaps more accurately, ‘prospect relationship manager’. Sphinn it like it’s hot! (more…)

A visitor dropped by my site asking whether Google cared about a link’s styling. I got in touch with Matt Cutts, and he was nice enough to take a few minutes to share an answer. Here’s what Matt said: (more…)