SEO ROI

Tweet Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they… Continue reading

Tweet The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers. eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that… Continue reading

Tweet Short tip for today, scratchpad style: Retargeting ads are very successful … because they target an audience that already visited your site, and because they tend to offer deals to people who almost bought, but for whatever reason left before purchasing. These deals help push people across the threshold and get them to buy…. Continue reading

Tweet An infographic that provoked my curiosity, by longtime expert in the linkbait field, Muhammad Saleem: Research and Design by: Online Colleges Site While it starts off strong, personally, I would have liked the infographic to go a bit deeper into the consequences and any existing research, similar to what Nick Carr did with his… Continue reading

Tweet Mobile websites’ homepages beat the pants off regular websites’ homepage designs at achieving a homepage’s goal: driving the visitor deeper into the site. Q: Why are the homepage designs of mobile sites so much more effective than the design of ordinary homepages? A: The reduced space on mobile screens forces choices in what to… Continue reading

Tweet Full disclosure: I’m getting a free review copy for this review. Eric Ward, aka Link Moses, has been at link building since the bad old days when Yahoo Directory actually was a place to start your search (imagine!). More importantly, the man is great at unearthing very high quality link opportunities, often hubs, that… Continue reading

Tweet My site was hacked for a few months now, in what was mostly a benign, but nevertheless annoying way. The hacker injected spam pages onto SEOROI.com about debt and financial products, which you can still see in Google’s cache. Only Vaultpress was able to remove the hack… (To be 100% clear: there was no… Continue reading

Tweet Social media generates ROI in the form of networking benefits. Social media ROI comes from the relationships you build on Twitter, Facebook etc. Listen to the name – it’s social media. The point is to network, only online. Hence the related term, social media networking. The benefits you gain from networking: You attend industry… Continue reading

Tweet Two reasons: 1) Some of the most popular contact form plugins, including Contact Form 7, don’t provide a thankyou page. That means that you can’t easily set up a simple ab-test in Google Website Optimizer (GWO) to increase conversions, because GWO requires a thankyou page. Doh! (I realize I’m running that plugin, but I’m… Continue reading

Tweet 1) I got engaged. 2) Preparing the book ordering site. I’ve done two rounds of usability tests and set up a split test on the book chapter download to see if I can increase performance there. 2.1 ) Shipping pre-orders. 3) Creating a new free WP plugin based on one of the book’s tactics…. Continue reading

Tweet If you need web hosting, you can get a variety of other things, free! Hosting is a very competitive field, because companies can make $100+ / year from each user, and the reality is that most people don’t change hosts. As a result, hosting affiliate programs pay out commissions around $100 – even for… Continue reading

Tweet I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS… Email: MailerLite: Was on Discount from MightyDeals (found via Yoast) for $49/year!! Up to 10K subs… Love this pricing! Or MailChimp: Free for up to 2K… Continue reading

Tweet From LiveCity: “LiveCity provides a website building service, which is both easy to use by novice website builders, and robust enough to allow skilled customers to express themselves by accessing the background code. The LiveCity system was developed by us, and with more than 200,000 websites already opened with our website builder, we are… Continue reading

Tweet Try the Internet Archive’s 2M+ ebooks and texts. Of course, there’s also the Gutenberg project which everyone knows, but it’s only got 36K docs, and anyways I don’t think the IA’s database is as well known. Liked this tip? Add my rss feed to your reader to get all my latest posts! Tweet

Tweet M.-J. Taylor is a moderator on V7N’s forums and has been working in SEO since 1997. She’s recently launched a SEO & social blog and offers services via her site Cyber-Key , focused on the web design and SEO in the Florida Keys. How did you get involved with V7N? I was a moderator… Continue reading

Tweet Want to a/b test your WordPress (WP) website without the cranky, unreliable Google Website Optimizer (GWO) plugins? The problem with using Google Website Optimizer with WordPress: 1. Google Website Optimizer was designed with static html pages in mind, as opposed to pages created by a content management system like WordPress. Each post on a… Continue reading

Tweet This is a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems. Want to fight the scrapers outranking you with your own content post-Panda? Google is losing the war… Continue reading

Tweet Here’s the gameplan to sell my advanced SEO book: 1) The main target is to get people to download a free chapter from the book. To drive traffic to that page, I’m going to focus on guest posting on SEO and search blogs, especially if they allow me to include my author bio or… Continue reading

Tweet This is a guest post by Phil Golobish, Senior SEO Consultant at Slingshot SEO. When he’s not writing posts for Gab, Phil helps Slingshot achieve digital relevance for deserving brands. You can follow Phil at @saintphilip or +Philip Golobish. In 2006, AOL accidently released a ton of Google click through rate data. Clever marketers then… Continue reading

Tweet Have you been paying $29 and now $39 a head for usertesting.com? Mashable has a list of free and commercial screencasting tools, including web-based/online ones. (New to remote usability testing? – Read my user testing guide .) The Screencasting Handbook has another list with certain other ones listed and describing relevant feature differences. Finally,… Continue reading

Tweet In a thought-provoking article, Russ Virante of Virante SEO asks whether, instead of manually checking through competitors’ backlink profiles, it’s perhaps possible to automate the analysis, at least to dig for paid links. He suggests that by using SEOmoz’s link index, and comparing the numbers on some backlink profile metrics against those of Wikipedia… Continue reading

Tweet Paul May co-founded BuzzStream, a CRM for link building and PR/social media that allows online marketers to manage relationships and be more effective in getting results, be they links or press. He gave me the following two-part interview about the software creation and startup process. I’d already interviewed Ann Smarty before about her creation… Continue reading

Tweet Flipping websites is a common and popular practice, but you can make more money in the long term by renting websites out, instead of getting a one-time payment for them. This technique only works in a few niches; one in particular is the local business niche. Many local businesses are still in the dinosaur… Continue reading

Tweet The purpose of advertising is defeated by “engaged” audiences. I came across an old advertising saw in Vanessa Fox’s recent article about the Food Network vs AllRecipes traffic battle, namely that advertisers want an engaged audience. That’s idiotic. Why? Engaged audiences don’t click. Ask any AdSense publisher who clicks his ads most, and you’ll… Continue reading

Tweet A friendly business acquaintance of mine, Jean-Julien of Sid Lee, asked this question recently on Quora. I thought I’d answer here for the benefit of my readers. The question is kind of futile, in my view. It’s the same way many marketing award shows are only aimed at promoting themselves (they charge thousands per… Continue reading