I love Twit Cleaner!
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2011 was a beautiful year for guest posts on SEO ROI as more and more of the web’s top SEOs shared advanced ideas and original material, right here on this blog. I don’t publish rehash, and it shows in the unique tactics, case studies and tools reviewed.

If you want to guest post, read the guest posting guidelines then contact me. Benefits include links, the attention of 2600+ RSS subs, 1600+ emails subs and social love…

Guest Article Case Studies & Research (more…)

This is a guest post by Everett Sizemore, who blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Today is Free Shipping Day and thousands of online stores are participating in what is going to be one of the largest online shopping holiday of the year. (more…)

Did you know I used to rank #3 for SEO on Google.ca – without being logged in or anything – behind only two Wikipedia results? So de facto, I was the #1 top ranking SEO in the country . (more…)

This guest post is by Ben Jackson, founder of SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with free tutorials, link building strategies, and more.

This is a case study of my broken link building campaign. These are the steps I took, the successes I had, and the mistakes I made.
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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 malware. Google detected none, McAffee detected none, CodeGuard detected none and so you weren’t at risk by visiting my site.)

The backstory… (more…)

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 links at the start, instead of at the end. (more…)

I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.

A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that…

and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text… nice number of footprints.) (more…)

In Adam Audette‘s recent link building column (via Wiep’s link roundup), he claims to have failed at link building (or more accurately, client relations). The client – a major corporation with 10 big websites – wanted results in a short time frame, so instead of going for high quality links that take time to build, Adam went for “freebie” links like profile links in order to boost up particular URLs on client sites.

As a result, though the SEO results were there, Adam’s client saw unimpressive reports about the actual links, so they left.

Adam blames himself for abandoning his normal M.O. and going for the easy links.

Did Adam really make a mistake though? (more…)

Today, Twitter suggested I follow Bill Gates. It’s the best suggestion I’ve received in a while on who to follow from amongst the advanced SEO community. How is Bill Gates part of the advanced SEO community you ask?

As I explain and detail in my book on advanced SEO, a key requirement of advanced SEO is the willingness to learn from everyone and to think laterally.

Bill does that exceedingly well, as he shares in the following post. He visited a Coca-Cola distribution center in Kenya and drew lessons for preventive health care. Read the post on his foundation’s site.

Update: The article and insights are actually written by Melinda Gates, as pointed out to me by Trish Thomson. I just saw it tweeted by Bill, and assumed it was his item. So yeah, Melinda Gates would be a great SEO!

Add my RSS feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email for more out-of-the-box thinking on SEO.

I saw this flyer at the busstop and had to grab it to share with you guys. I think it’s brilliant advertising, and here’s why. (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…)

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…)

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…)

(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
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When I created my first websites, I have to admit that I was pretty naive about the graphic/visual side of things. SEO ROI is a good example. (more…)

I knew for a while that I wanted to try out UserTesting.com, based on the referrals from my friends at Closed Loop Marketing and various blogs on usability I read (Future Now, Usability Post), but I never really had the opportunity to go ahead and get on it. (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…)

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…)

“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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

For all you internet marketing pros out there, here’s the only brand building guide you’ll ever need. I’ll begin with some brief introductory notes, then get into meaty examples you can sink your teeth into. (more…)

The government’s ad campaign sucks, but what can you do? Well, you can check out Search Engine Journal, where I’ve covered this Canada.gc.ca/taxinfo fiasco – the post should be up Monday, March 2nd.. In any case, the information you probably want is at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/menu-eng.html. (more…)

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

As the summer wound down on my hybrid consulting/in-house SEO job with Ice.com, I had to hire my replacement. The boss wanted an SEO rockstar and champion who would make SEO front-and-center in the web dev process as well as continue to improve the current situation! Here’s how I hired an elite SEO. (more…)

… while the Bloc Quebecois are seen on AdSense blocks on Cyberpresse, (more…)

The following has been sitting in my comment queue:

The purpose, imvho, is to find blogs with poor comment moderation practices. The goal of this comment spam isn’t linkbuilding directly – it’s finding (more…)

I’ve just seen this in Google on an experiment an acquaintance of mine is running (she doesn’t blog on SEO, hence it being here; she also OKayed me writing this up). A recently registered domain, without having any links pointing to it, is now indexed. (more…)

In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, (more…)

I was out to meet a potential client this week, and after he showed me his list of specs for the proposal, I asked what he wanted to use the percentage of repeat visitors numbers for. How would it be actionable? I was applying the “So What?” test Avinash has taught me to use so effectively. The answer to the ‘percentage of repeat visitors’ vs ‘absolute number of repeat visitors’ question is after the fold. (more…)

You often hear best practices saying that Google won’t index your pages if they force Googlebot to take a sessionId. Is that really true?

How does Googlebot treat session IDs?

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See here for how to get links from Google by spamming:

In Google’s defense, looking at the source code those links appear to be generated clientside – I couldn’t find the string ‘vox’ (as in searchenginemarketingvox.com) in the page’s source code. So the links don’t count for SEO (yes, yes it’s anticlimactic, I know). Still funny that 3 spammers are getting links that human visitors can follow from an official Google blog. Hmm, maybe the Gmail team are part of a bad neighbourhood and they’re trying to hide it…

It’s no secret that this auberge de jeunesse in Montreal, the Auberge de Paris (I realize the name is unusual), is a client of mine. For a while now they’ve had issues with their reviews being merged with their sister downtown Montreal hotel‘s reviews.

The problem is that (more…)

My reaction was a loud WTF when I tried logging in to check my click stats. Click Audit, the link/click tracking tool I was using until very recently to track subscriber count to SEO ROI has just been turned into a parked domain! In other words, it just features a bunch of useless ads. It may be a temporary thing, because the site likely didn’t make the owner(s) much money, but I’m not waiting around to find out. (Updates below; I found another click counter, and Click Audit is back online.) (more…)

I recently got this email: (more…)

Google killed former SEOmoz CTO Matt Inman’s widgetbait because some Guardian reporter didn’t like it and wrote his negative opinion up. Then Aaron Wall was unlucky enough to trust a jerk who asked Matt Cutts about Aaron’s affiliate program based linkbuilding.

The question is: Will Amazon get a beat-down too? For their (more…)

If you live in Montreal, you’ve probably seen Silver Star print ads. But you’d be a lot less likely to see them in search results on any major search engine because their search marketing effort is nonexistent (well OK, maybe MSN might return them). Not only is their SEO (What is SEO?) non-existent, it’s a near-100% duplicate of Mercedes-Benz Canada’s site!

If you’re Google and some random Canadian searches for “Buy Mercedes Benz car,” would you rather return the more authoritative Mercedes-Benz website or a total copy on a subdomain?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. (more…)

Google Analytics is broken (like PageRank is broken), and leaking my data into the index. All the site searches here on SEO ROI are resulting in site-SERPs pages getting into G’s index. How is this happening?

Final Update: This has been disproven as being the source of the site-search-results appearing in Google’s search results. I had good reason to believe that Google Analytics was the source of this (you can see below for my original thoughts on the matter), but there’s now a clarification. My apologies to Google and to my readers for the mistake.

A while back I saw a video about using Google Analytics to (more…)

Ever see that classic gag of a couple of people standing around staring upwards at nothing and pointing in the same direction? A crowd grows around them, and gets gradually bigger. The point is just to see how many people they can attract into their crowd of starers (more…)

• If knowledge is power;
• If information is knowledge;
• And if Google is organizing – and, more importantly, distributing – the world’s information;

Then isn’t Google the single most powerful organization in the world?

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Actually, I didn’t. And that’s why this post matters. (more…)

I’ve gotten two emails from a certain “RankRanker@gmail.com” (aka “webmaster@RankRanker.com”) trying to sell me their “Free SEO System and Link Exchange With Extra Earning”. While spam email pitches for terribly named, grammar-rule-flaunting, “get rich quick” systems (NEW: Now With An SEO Twist!) (more…)

The following are four cases involving reputation management. The paragraphs are long because (i) they were written that way and it felt natural (ii) I’m too lazy to edit (iii) most importantly, we’re all suffering from shorter attention spans. I promise you good content if you read on. Some definite lessons to be learned about proactive reputation management for those of you who are attentive to detail. (more…)

A girl I was close with in high school wanted to get her nipples pierced. I’d heard some horror stories about nipple piercings and decided that I’d do some research on the topic to try and dissuade her, assuming she’d learn from others’ mistakes. (more…)

Think you’re going to linkbait people with whitepapers? Maybe get their email or have them register for your webinar? MyVenturePad is bringing the stakes of the game one step higher: They’re giving away Meatball Sundaes! What is a Meatball Sundae? (more…)

I ran a poll on Facebook targeting Facebook users 18-24 to find out whether they were aware of the existence of the Facebook Blog. 83% of them were not. This was following up on what Jane wrote at SEOmoz, regarding how she would make the Facebook blog more visible and certain other changes she’d make. After the jump, the precise details of the poll data. (more…)