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.
SEO ROI Services had its 100,000th visitor this week! I was a bit of a stats hawk and watched my Sitemeter analytics just as the number went from 99,999 to 100,000 (and no, I wasn’t the 100,000th visitor :P).
Another little item that was fun to see show up in my logs was another branded search for my content. This person was looking for my item on “Peekaboo Navigation,” which as you can imagine, isn’t a generic keyword. These branded searches help with link building.
Still on the analytics side of things, while researching for an ad campaign, I found that some networks openly share the referrer data of their publishers. Referrer data is useful for retargeting, and also for link building if you’re a competitor of that publisher!
Sticking with the ad topic, I was stumbling around and got to EbaumsWorld, an entertainment site. I’m not sure why, but WPromote had banners running there as a roadblock (i.e. they bought all the banner slots)! Additionally, they’re not even following the AIDA formula for making banner ads.
By contrast, the Conservative Party of Canada has a self-deprecating banner on their site that does use AIDA, directing youth to join the party. You’re already there, so they’ve got your interest, there’s attention because of the headshot and then desire/action is generated by the simple slogan, “Freak Out Your Roommate. Join The CPC.” IMHO, they’d convert more visitors if the following page stuck to the roommate line, but telling folks they can freak out their ex-girlfriends works too!
Speaking of taking action, I noticed this social call-to-action area and thought it was visually pretty yet simple, so I thought I’d share it.
I also liked Microsoft’s ad for its social media accelerators, which you can use in your IE8 browser to go direct to Facebook (which MSFT partly owns) Digg (which MSFT supplies ads to) etc. Smart! The only thing that wasn’t clear was what the Windows logo was there for, since it appears the other accelerator is for Live Search, not Windows Operating System.
On the same topic, an ad encouraging people to buy Acai Berry garbage – which features testimonials of a dubious legitimacy – lead to a lander with this hidden, weasel-legal language:
On a related note, whoever designed the FTC’s website didn’t engineer the complaints page to maximize click-throughs to their complaints form. Your eye moves down this text column, separated by a long vertical bar from the neighboring one. The actual button to get to their complaint form is on the right-hand column, which fast-scanning readers like me would miss, causing them to give up!
While we’re on the topic of getting users to submit content, how about this request for reviews I got from Amazon? Pretty simple and to the point, in my books, so it likely works well. Plus it boosts their site’s usability, I’m sure. The only problem? I never opted in. Amazon isn’t only broken, they’re spammy too!
Getting back to basics and sticking strictly to SEO, did you know you could get distribution by default via Twitter? This is what I was talking about in my SMX West presentation in reference to Portals 2.0. Highly useful for link building, particularly with linkbait.
On that note, here’s an interesting recent screenshot that shows how valuable exact match domains are, both for the boost Google grants them and for the superior links you can build. Quality beats quantity.
That said, some people are clearly very effective at launching sites with a massive [whitehat] content strategy.
Finally, some amusing items from Google. First, they called me a Kunt. Or maybe that was an Obama-esque Yes I “Can,” in Dutch? Second, they need to SEO their AdWords FAQ. Third, their submarine crawling seems to have outfoxed itself by crawling my search form and “discovering” content that wasn’t there. I’m not cloaking anything, so it really beats me how they got that snippet when the landing page shows no posts.
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