I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting spam emails from my Gmail inbox. If my email is public and scraped, Gmail should still block the spam people send me. Since they’ve been horrible at stopping this for at least a year, and probably more like three years, I’m going to start posting these emails… Continue reading
Jon Cooper writes about an interesting negative SEO tactic: fake link removal requests. I have particular interest since I think I got one of these, recently. As I emailed Jon: “I recently got an email from someone supposedly asking for me to take down links to their company site. The weird thing is that the… Continue reading
I recently saw a video on FBEvolution.com about using a squeeze page (aka email lead generation landing page) on your Facebook fan page, which I’ll be adapting for the Advanced SEO book fanpage. In it, Ryan Deiss shares a case study on his landing page getting the name and email of 50% of the people… Continue reading
You can segment your email list by what page(s) they visited. That means you can use your email marketing for “retargeting” aka “remarketing.” Retargeting is an increasingly popular marketing tactic that targets prospects based on their having already visited your site (or a specific page, depending what pages include your retargeting-cookie-dropping code). You know from… Continue reading
While looking around for AdWords alerts, I discovered a very handy time-saving feature in AdWords called Rules. You can use AdWords Rules to automatically pause low-CTR ads, high-CPA keywords and likewise auto-manage other aspects of your account that don’t require human judgment. Here are some things you can do automatically with rules without having to… Continue reading
Keith Hagen of ConversionIQ is set to speak at the next Conversion Conference in Chicago. He graciously agreed to an interview ahead of the show. 1) What’s the topic of your presentation? How did you come up with that? The topic is “Testing What Matters” and it arose from a conversion I had with another… Continue reading
Here’s how to increase your adwords CTR and drop CPCs in 30 seconds, by finding more negative keywords. Sort by impressions. The reason this boosts CTR is because your CTR is determined by clicks across ALL keyword phrases people use – not just those you intended. Use negative match to block your ads from showing… Continue reading
Google is cutting the ROI on ecommerce SEO and has been for 8+ years. If ecommerce merchants don’t understand the changes below, they’re going to lose market share to savvier competitors. Read on for what you need to do to survive and thrive. Google has reduced the traffic and ROI available to SEO-ed sites by:… Continue reading
Manish Pandey, an SEO expert I’m familiar with, recently published a large article listing and describing all the phases of Google Panda. Check it out!.
Steve recently got a warning from Google that a number of pages were returning soft 404s, and the next week, his traffic dropped 10%. The following week, another 30% was gone. What are these dramatically harsh “soft” 404 errors? How do you fix them? What is a soft 404? It’s when your content is no… Continue reading
In writing a report for an illuminea client, Traffix Diameter Systems , I wrote the following about the new Modified Phrase Match and Exact Match: “The low-volume keywords (ex.: misspellings and 4-word phrases) have been paused to allow them to be targeted by other keywords set on phrase match targeting.”* *Phrase match did not previously… Continue reading
Should you focus on weekend or weekday traffic in your PPC ad campaigns? If you’re already getting organic search traffic, you have data that can answer that question in 30 seconds. Google Analytics will allow you to compare visitors to bounce rate. Here’s a pattern I noticed in a client’s account that makes it pretty… Continue reading
If you’re using both an autoresponder series of emails as well as “broadcast” messages that go out with no regard to sequence, you run the risk of annoying people with too-frequent emails. For example, if you have an autoresponder series that sends emails every 3 days, then broadcast on top of that, someone could literally… Continue reading
[Edit: I try to post original stuff but I realize here that I'm adapting "second page poaching." It only occurred to me after writing my post, but when you're done reading this, check out Virante's posts on second page poaching, relevant data collection and an API. ] While working on a huge site with 1000s… Continue reading
I launched some Facebook ad campaigns in the past few days and saw traffic skyrocket in Google Analytics. Problem is, the traffic was garbage – not the traffic I was paying for, which converted decently. It was Facebook’s ad reviewers, tasked with checking the 1000+ ads I uploaded, visiting my site once/ad. You’d think they… Continue reading
David McBee, one of the web’s savvier link builders, shared with me this parody, tongue-in-cheek infographic about infographics, via ComicalConcept.com: I like it .
Suppose you’re using Google’s URL building format to mass tag URLs with UTM_campaign, UTM_Keyword, UTM_content and other UTM settings – where do you see the data afterwards? Google Analytics used to provide UTM-tagged URL performance data under the Advertising tab/navigation item. Now, it’s moved. You can find the info in Traffic Sources > Sources >… Continue reading
This is the process I’m following to create ad campaigns on Facebook promoting my advanced SEO book. If you like this, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO! Or get my latest posts by email or RSS! Toolset: Images – Royalty free stock ex SXC, plus my own headshots – faces draw… Continue reading
Use Advanced Segments in GA to Discover SEO, Social Media and Ecommerce Insights Google Analytics (GA) is a tool that, while very useful to basic users who just want a quick look at their site’s statistics, is meant for power users that can take advantage of all of GA’s hidden features. Advanced Segments is an… Continue reading
My friend Andrew Breem of Outshine Online Marketing asked: “As far as I can tell, you’ve built your business as a sole consultant as opposed to say building out a big team. Was this a conscious decision or did it just evolve? I’m at a cross roads now where I’m trying to decide exactly what… Continue reading
I’ve been going back to basics and doing lots – dozens of hours worth – of manual link outreach. It ain’t pretty, but it works. Here’s how I build my link request list, without tools. (Come back next week for a tutorial on the rest of my process!) As most of you know, there are… Continue reading
Directory.Google.com is dead. All the links going to it and its associated URLs are broken. Follow the process of broken link building and you could find yourself with some massively juicy links. Step 1: Find links to relevant pages on directory.google.com in your favourite link research tool. Step 2: Publish a directory page with links… Continue reading
Does your competitor have some sweet old links you wish they didn’t have? Well, here are two sneaky ways – one’s even sly and nasty – to get your competition’s links dropped. 1) Run their site through your favourite backlink research tools. 2) Use something like Xenu Link Sleuth or your favourite link checker to… Continue reading
How do you make a form convert higher? What are the universal best practices? Yesterday I spoke to a lead who told me that people visiting his site never filled out the form. On a recent project through illuminea.com, an agency where I work part-time, we also recently had a customer who told us that… Continue reading
Brian Wallace runs NowSourcing, an infographics-specialist consulting shop . They recently redesigned and Brian was kind enough to tell me why and what the process was! Q – Tell us what your goals were. BW – To create a classy custom feel to showcase our infographic design and social media services. The old site showed… Continue reading