While googling around to help my sister Dahlia because her Gateway PC broke down (again … I think she got that 1/1,000,000 that makes it through QC when it’s a lemon), I saw the following search result. It’s entirely made up of forums, which is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing (at least, when not searching for forums or info about them).  Screenshot after the jump. (more…)

I recently spent $200+ testing out a text link ad broker who promised a big network of blogs, without footprints. This link broker sells on a monthly membership basis that ended up auto-renewing for a few months, partly because I was too busy to test immediately when I bought it. Lesson #1: Avoid buying on impulse. (more…)

I recently took my own endorsement advice and bought access to Spyfu for a PPC campaign I’m managing, which is having CTR trouble on some keywords.

Besides my use for my own campaign, the Spyfu membership – especially Domain Ad History tool – was useful in critically appraising this post from Epiphany, which discusses how Lego are apparently not buying keywords they’re targeting for SEO, an apparently obvious mistake. (more…)

Here are comments taken from my 4Q visitor surveys during the past 6 months, regarding how annoying these visitors find the immediate appearance of 4Q’s visitor survey. An exit popover would be a much better way of doing this, and here’s proof. (more…)

Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation. (more…)

Jimmy writes,

“I saw someone write to be careful or use the ilb in moderation to avoid getting penalized or something like that.

What are your thoughts on best practices?” (more…)

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington !

I’ve been into web development since 1995. I started dabbling in high school and just couldn’t stop. I felt comforted, and challenged by the vast sea of knowledge that I could learn. Plus, since the languages, technologies, and trends were always changing – I knew I wouldn’t get bored with it. (more…)

For those of you who don’t know, my name’s Gab Goldenberg and I run SEO ROI Services. There are a few practices that I’d like to share, which give me both pleasure and pride in running this business. (more…)

Brett Tabke n the gang at Pubcon just added me to a panel entitled, Post Click Marketing: Landing Page Optimization. Here’s what I plan to speak on, per my application: (more…)

Back when I used to do hotel SEO for the Hotel de Paris, one of the things that regularly came up in my competitive research was the importance of conference and convention hall facilities and networking in that field. (more…)

Guides

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web
http://mashable.com/2009/11/26/mobile-web-design/
http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946338/Great-Mobile-Landing-Pages – A useful presentation for beginners. The authors created Movitas, which has the most affordable WYSIWYG mobile page creator I found. (Besides the free, uber-basic Movylo.)

Mobile Web Design Galleries
http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/mobile-web-resources/ – A blog and design gallery with useful resources linked
http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html – Another gallery

WYSIWYGs

https://movitas.com/Movitas/pricingComparison.aspx
http://www.tekora.com/en/ – Another mobile WYSIWYG
Very basic: http://www.movylo.com/
Really pricey: http://mobify.me/features/

Slice Shops Turn PSD and AI Graphics Into XHTML, WML etc

http://www.mobilizetoday.com/xhtml-conversion – Seemed to have pretty affordable pricing for slicing up graphics into mobile landers, but it wasn’t clear if they’d do WML either…
https://w3-markup.com/ – A site that will slice your graphics into a working lander, but they don’t do WML. Use them if your target is newer devices that can support 320px wide graphics etc.
http://www.zestadz.com/help/help_landing_page_tool – Unclear if you need to use Zestadz to get their tool, however.

If you liked this post on mobile tools and resources, add my rss feed to your reader!

It’s a fairly well know tip amongst AdSense users that (more…)

Mixergy.com is one of my new faourite sites, because it’s got a huge archive of high quality interviews with fascinating people! The guy making it happen first and foremost is Andrew Warner, whom I got to interview. Here’s what we discussed.
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Let’s start with some notes and free-association thoughts on the text of Ontolo’s link building book:

A – The first chapter got off to a good start with some clever tips. (more…)

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page? (more…)

A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine: (more…)

When asking people to fill in the fields, be clear on the format of the answer you expect. Specify what characters can be used, and what characters can’t be used.

Don’t wait to correct people until after they’ve clicked continue, because you’ll be using up your visitor’s supply of patience. Advise them at the outset of the right process. Try combining this with AJAX error notifications that don’t wait until people click continue, in order to be more efficient. (more…)

Here’s a secret … I LOVE Aaron Wall’s Keyword List Generator Concatenator tool.

You take keywords, input them in a series of boxes, and it concatenates (glues) them together (with a space in between). If that sounds like gibberish, play with the tool. It’s super intuitive and you’ll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

In short, it’s a shortcut to building long keyword lists for exact or phrase matched ad groups.

Instead of typing out:

Adidas basketball shoes

Nike basketball shoes

Air Jordan basketball shoes

Kobe Bryant basketball shoes

point guard basketball shoes

You type out the modifiers in one group, with commas and no spaces: Adidas,Nike,Air Jordan,Kobe Bryant,point guard

And you type basketball shoes, once.

Then it sticks them together for you like with the list above. It can also add on quotation marks (” “) or square brackets ( [ ] ) for phrase or exact match purposes.

I was doing some of this myself in a local context and decided to save some time for the rest of you. Here’s a list of states, stuck together and only separated by commas, as you need them for Aaron’s tool. Note: I skipped the Marianas Islands (also some other islands I deleted, I think) and turned District of Columbia into Washington DC.

Alabama,Alaska,Arizona,Arkansas,California,Colorado,Connecticut,Delaware,Washington DC,Florida,Georgia,Guam,Hawaii,Idaho,Illinois,Indiana,Iowa,Kansas,Kentucky,Louisiana,Maine,Maryland,Massachusetts,Michigan,Minnesota,Mississippi,Missouri,Montana,Nebraska,Nevada,New Hampshire,New Jersey,New Mexico,New York,North Carolina,North Dakota,Ohio,Oklahoma,Oregon,Pennsylvania,Puerto Rico,Rhode Island,South Carolina,South Dakota,Tennessee,Texas,Utah,Vermont,Virginia,Virgin Islands,Washington,West Virginia,Wisconsin,Wyoming

If you liked this bit on keyword research , add my RSS feed to your reader.

Find out in this great, interactive linkbait piece by Vertical Measures.

Those of you who are subscribers know that you can always download my link reporting/scoring spreadsheet. [And have been able to download it for almost 2 years!]

The spreadsheet features the various factors that go into scoring etc in detail. Full details in my original SEOmoz post.

So… what are you waiting for? Add my rss feed to your reader, you link building lovers!

Just saw this piece via the ever-industrious Bill Slawski: Google’s Acquisition of MetaWeb & its Named Entities technology.
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I’ve been reading up on the Content Network before launching a first campaign there in years. The following’s a list of posts I’ve found useful and the key takeaways. They may repeat and overlap in some ways. That repetition is summarized below. The links are accompanied by notes on what’s unique in that guide. (more…)

First, get familiar with the board. The dutch LinkBuilding.nl outfit have the link building board clearly laid out for your benefit.

“One way to fight this sort of strategy [Google's strategy of playing in every market] is Yahoo!’s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy.” (-Google As A Publisher)

Amongst other moves listed there are the closing/selling of the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo’s answer to AdSense, and the outsourcing of Yahoo shopping to PriceGrabber. If you take that along with Yahoo’s failure to ever take the analytics company it acquired out of beta, you see a pattern emerging:
(more…)

Patrick Altoft directs search for Branded3, a Leeds-based full service digital agency. He also runs the popular Blogstorm SEO blog and is a pretty interesting guy to chat to overall! Hit him up if you’re looking for search services in the UK!
(more…)

Sebastian is the technical genius and SEO behind Sebastian’s Pamphlets. This warm fellow’s well-known avatar is rather ironic – a crab! (more…)

While measuring relationships should be the paradigm for social media analytics tools, relationship building is just an intermediate step for any marketing campaign. Ultimately, marketing needs to drive financial metrics found on balance sheets or income statements.

But the ROI you can derive from social media isn’t uniform across communities. (more…)

Jake was a quick-witted entrepreneur oozing with creativity.

He made decent money working for others at the agency that employed him. Somewhere along the way, Jake decided that he should come up with his own product.

So he did. Jake spent all his free time for the better part of a summer in quiet isolation. While he kept up his day job, as soon as the clock struck 5:00 everyday, the fire in Jake’s seat at his desk burned him right out the door to his hatchback.
(more…)

A long, long time ago… almost 2 years to the month… I asked a bunch of cool Sphinners I was getting to know for their advice and insights on that great search marketing network we know as Sphinn. For various reasons, I never published those interviews – until now! (SEOptimise reminded me.) In light of Twitter and Facebook‘s exponential growth in the past 2 years, the changes in the link graph this has engendered, and related developments, these answers are pretty interesting.

Dave runs the seo training center known as the Dojo. He’s got some remarkable testimonials, not least of which because of who is giving them. I recognized 4-5 names.

“Well sheee-it there monsieur Gabs, not sure what use this will be but I said I would give ‘er a go and I shall…. Right away I just wanted to say that while I appreciate your kind words and invitation to get social, I spend as much time playing the devil’s advocate in the world of Social Media Marketing as I do supporting it. I am certainly not a social media darling ( almost a Social Media Ninja though….)

Without further ado… let’s get into it;

What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn ?

Well, I suppose the real benefits have been;

1. Making new friends
2. Padding my address book
3. Maxing out my reader
4. Some increased visibility
5. And of course access to learning something new every day (more…)

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington, and his wife, an architect and photographer, at Johwey!

As the solo in-house SEO for Fatwallet, it is important that I keep up with the constant changes of the industry. My two staple conferences have been SESNY and Pubcon Vegas. Last spring I was toying with the idea of attending Pubcon South instead of SES when Danny Sullivan told me to skip both and go to SMX Advanced. I decided to go to New York. Big mistake. SES sucked, and the SMX Advanced conference was blessed with the nofollow pagerank evaporation announcement. (more…)

I was reading this post by Ann Smarty on SalesForce’s brilliant WP plugin, and it reminded of recent news from BuzzStream. BuzzStream are like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, but for link prospects. And they just added Twitter functionality.

Any link builder worth his salt knows that the best links are about repeatability.
And relationships are a big part of making links repeatable.
Twitter builds relationships.
Ergo, Twitter makes repeatable links possible.

It used to be the case that you had to copy-paste or do manual data entry if you were building relationships for clients on Twitter and using BuzzStream as your link prospect manager.
Now you can just synchronize Twitter and BuzzStream and your efforts will be pulled in directly.

Win!

Longtime readers will recall that human resource managers should be measuring social media for your company. This also ties in to using Twitter as a community, which imho is more efficient than seeing it as a broadcast platform.

If you like this post on tools/social/link building, check out my advanced SEO book and get a free chapter.

While working on some ecommerce affiliate sites, I tried to find the ecommerce merchant’s shipping prices. Unfortunately, it’s a remarkable pain in the neck to find shipping info at most mom-n-pop ecommerce stores.

I think it’s because they place a blind reliance in their ecommerce store’s shopping cart. The problem is that the cart was usually created by a programmer – not a customer service rep. So the priorities in design were easy coding, not easy buying. As a result, lots of shopping carts cause SMBs to lose sales.

Photo credit: Dan Chace, aka Lacrymosa

Here are some examples of what not to do, and why they’re bad ideas. If the ecommerce cart you want acts this way, switch!

1) Worst idea EVER: Ask for my credit card info before telling me the shipping price. (more…)

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is (more…)

In response to Google’s efforts to block access to Latma’s We Con The World parody, which is another proof of Google’s political bias and unreliability, I am going to go a month without Google search. I look forward to seeing how this works, and will report back. If you want to make a widget to this effect, or do the same, please feel free, and do let me know. (more…)

Caroline Glick and others produced a parody regarding the flotilla that’s been covered by most major news organizations worldwide. Google – which owns Youtube – decided to censor it from Youtube, which shows you the danger of having a single player controlling so much of the information highway.

There are a number of services of questionable ethics around, offering students to research and write full term papers for them. This is at the university level. For anyone familiar with the kind of work that goes into this, I would suggest that these sources can also be valuable sources for premium quality content. The type to linkbait professors, and (more…)

I recently read Rhys Wynne’s interpretation of John Mueller’s comment that it’s better to add content on your own site than to add it elsewhere. I disagree strongly that this is the right reading of John’s comment. There are numerous other readings of it:

- A bunch of links to a thin site (e.g. without valuable content) doesn’t make that site a positive user experience. So don’t guest post at the expense/neglect of your own site. (more…)

To my friends, acquaintances and readers: I’ve got a sweet link opportunity for you that combines charity with trusted educational links.

Together with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s student union (the “Aguda”) and the Office of Student Activities of the Rothberg International School, we’re organizing an anti-smoking programme. The idea is to give away -free – nicotine gum to students who want to quit, to help them kick the habit.

We’ll be setting up stalls where students can come ask for a pack of the gum, and invite them to give us their names/emails for follow up to see how they’re doing a little later. Permission marketing rather than interruption marketing, to avoid giving away gum to students not really determined to quit.

If you want to contribute to buying these gums for students, send me an email at gab@seor.. for details. I’m taking payments for this through Paypal, as well as contributing $1000 myself. We’ve also got people matching donations dollar for dollar, so that if you give $10, you’re helping us get $20 total.

For the links, any donation over $100 gets you a link on the aguda’s old, trusted site and another one on the program’s site. We may get a third link n Rothberg’s site, but it’s unclear for now.

I’m not sure whether we can give optimum anchor text, but I’ll do my best to arrange it. For the record, Matt Cutts approves of charity-donation links.

Again, to send money and get links, email gab at this domain (seor..).

To all my friends and readers, please be aware that due to some malicious people, there appears to be malware downloading onto computers that visit SEO ROI, or at least an attempt to that effect (some browsers seem to notify users and/or be impervious, eg Google Chrome’s notifications).

I’ve notified my hosting company and asked for their help, as well as posted a job to some freelancers I work with to see what they can do. So I’m hopeful to have this resolved by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Also, thanks to everyone who dropped me a note about it – your concern and looking out for me are really appreciated.

Cheers
Gab Goldenberg
p.s. Another good reason to add my feed to your reader, ironically – that way you can read without visiting and exposing yourself to bugs and other junk.

Reading the post Common SEO Mistakes: CSS Image Replacement, I found myself criticized for making the logo here an H1 tag, as well as for making it the first link.   (more…)

I’m currently working on an Advanced SEO Book. It will open with a number of principles that distinguish the thinking of advanced SEOs, and continue with a large variety of advanced tactics and ideas that illustrate this understanding. The following extract addresses the key question of people’s motivations. This applies equally to each side in a debate.

“What does the person comparison-reviewing these products want? To help, or to leverage their site into higher affiliate commissions?”

These questions illustrate the normal human instinct to use the argument that we think will be most appealing to the other side, or the argument that will make us look the most noble. We might tell a roommate that we did their laundry because we had some extra space [e.g. implying we’re nice guys] and not mention the fact that we’re hoping to have them OK a friend sleeping over on the couch next week.

Ask yourself why a person is arguing the way they are and not in some other way. Some useful questions in this regard are:

- Would it be respectable if they had some other motivation than what they’re presenting?
- Is this argument aimed at appealing to a wider variety of people than some other claims that advance a narrower interest?
- Who benefits from this? What are the consequences of accepting their argument, and how can people benefit from it?

Google’s Example

For example, Google may claim that one of their goals is providing a better user experience.

It’s well-known that humans rely on brands as a short-cut to decision-making. What’s less well-known is that one measure Google uses for the effectiveness of their search results are the speed with which people click through. So by placing brands in the organic results, Google encourages brand-based decision shortcuts.

[Ed: I wrote this before Google made the brand shortcuts idea explicit, so it's funny re-reading this now in light of how things have developed.]

What effect does that have when brands are showing up in ad slots? It’s plausible that the net effect is a greater CTR for brand advertisers, who end up depending more on AdWords traffic and a lot bigger budgets to PPC as a result.

Of course, this is just theorizing about Google’s motivations. I’m not saying I have some inside memo as proof for this. Rather, I’m just demonstrating the application of these questions and the kinds of insights you might derive from such critical thinking.

The Paid Links Example

Perhaps a more obvious and well known example in the realm of search marketing is the battle between Google and paid links. Google has repeatedly put out statements to the effect that they catch paid links and penalize one or both of the parties to the transaction.

To which many SEOs retorted that Google was just trying to fight a competing business model to their own, which is also selling links. For a long time I didn’t find that a convincing argument, because the phrasing was awkward.

Then one day Jordan Glogau explained it to me in these terms. Google sells traffic from the sponsored listings, and text link sellers really sell traffic from the organic listings. That clarified Google’s motives in the war on paid links where I’m concerned.

[...]

If you liked this excerpt, get another free chapter by email.

It’s sad in a way, but one of the biggest businesses online is charity. Numerous sites out there will handle payment processing etc. for charities for ‘only’ about 3% of donations (the same as Paypal or any credit card processing company). I’m trying to set something up with student union of my university and accepting donations online is proving to be a challenge. For those who qualify in the UK, however, I’ve found one site that does this for free : (more…)

Read my latest usability column for Search Engine Land, a review of usability testing tool Usabilla.

On a related note, I published a review of UserTesting.com not long ago. Before that, (more…)

The situation: Your competitors have inbound links that are broken because of typos, changes in URL structures etc.

The common link building commentary: Most SEOs who’ve been around the link building block will tell you that it’s an opportunity to ‘build links’ for free – to pick low hanging fruit. Just drop the site owner a little email and voila – good as new. More juice for you! (more…)

I’ve just been reading some of SEOmoz’s Pro member tips and seeing their suggestions to use affiliate URLs that use hashtags, also referred to as the pound sign, number sign or hash mark.* For example, site.com/#aff123 . (more…)

I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from P*able. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks. (more…)

(A guest post…) Local search is a chance for businesses to connect with their community and gain local prospects. As the foundations of local search remain vital- things such as local listings, local on-page SEO factors, etc.- new developments are beginning to emerge as many of the biggest players online – i.e. Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare – are now designing plans that will have a significant impact on local search. (more…)

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing analytics with a internal search case study from Adi Reguev, and PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Michal Neufeld – Google Analytics – Tying Adwords Into Analytics

Some pros of tying the two together:
- Understand the whole funnel, from search to site exit
- Instant and granular view of ROI on AdWords (more…)

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Adi Reguev – Go Internet Marketing – Internal Search

Some key questions…

1. What/how much people are looking for [something].
2. Does internal search answer your visitors’ questions?
3. Can they find what they need easily?

Case Study: Travel
(more…)

An increasingly popular question in attribution management and in advertising measurement is what effect ads – that were viewed but not clicked on – have. These ads are known in the lingo as ‘View-Thrus’ or ‘View-Throughs.’ The related question people usually have is what percentage of credit to give view-thrus for conversions that came via multiple touchpoints (e.g. the customer saw and/or clicked several ads, before buying).

I’ve come up with an idea for an experiment to measure the effect of such “view-thru” ads on conversion, as well as on acquisition costs. (An acquisition cost is the cost-per-action of acquiring the lead/customer.) (more…)

I recently visited two sites that I really liked, but only one of them designed their header space efficiently, such that they maximized the utility of the space above the fold. For those who don’t know, the space above the fold gets the most visual attention from visitors since it is by definition the space visible without scrolling. While screen sizes vary, a site’s header is above the fold in 99% of the cases.  (more…)