Arnie Kuenn, Conversion Conference Speaker

Click here for a $100 discount on Conversion Conference. You’ll see the discount code listed in the upper right after the click.

Arnie Kuenn is President of Vertical Measures, who offer services in link building, content creation and notably their content marketing guide. We met at Pubcon, and he’ll be speaking at Conversion Conference on video. He was kind enough to give us this sweeeeet interview . (I previously interviewed another Conversion Con speaker, Keith Hagen

Can you give me a little background about you?

You bet. Well first I am the founder and president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company. Our focus is helping our clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business from their websites. I am an entrepreneur who had had two previous businesses in the world of new technologies and marketing. I am also a frequent speaker and author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing (available on Amazon).

What knowledge level are you addressing in your preso at ConvConf?

This particular session is on video marketing and using video to increase conversions. Therefore I would say the people attending this session will be a little more marketing oriented as opposed to technically oriented.

You’re talking about video for conversion. What video content can your average ecommerce merchant create to lift sales?

It is a bit difficult to define the “average merchant” due to all the product possibilities, however, in general, videos that help demonstrate the product or video reviews of the product tend to be most successful in providing an increased conversion rate.

We’ve seen this at some of the major ecommerce sites like Amazon and Zappos, but even the little guy is finding success with video. [Emphasis added.]

For example there is a guy selling a home fitness product who saw a 46% increase in conversions when he used video. In addition to product demos and reviews, how-to videos can be pretty powerful too. In fact, I will be discussing a case study where one business grew exponentially over the past several years all based on how-to videos.

Can you share some links with companies going DIY with their video, please?
Sure. One would actually be Vertical Measures. We have actually turned one of our offices into a small studio and are doing more and more video in there: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/content/how-do-you-use-yahoo-answers-for-internet-marketing-video/

Here is a Golf School creating their own videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CollegeofGolf/videos?sort=p&view=0

And here is a link to one of the examples I will use in my presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/user/FixYourDLPcom/videos?sort=p&view=0

What attracted you to Conversion Conference vs another show?

I have known Tim Ash for quite a while now. Tim and I have spoken at many of the same events.

About two years ago I wrote a book about content marketing and Vertical Measures added content marketing services to our mix. Tim and I were talking one day and he asked if the kinds of things we were doing were helping clients with conversions. Of course the answer was “yes” so he invited me to speak at his San Francisco event.

I guess I didn’t mess that up too bad, so he invited me back to talk about video.

I will say, Tim runs one of the best conferences I have spoken at. He has a real eye for detail and takes the attendee and speaker feedback to heart.

Can you specify what feedback you’ve seen Tim take to heart and implement to improve the show?

I can think of two examples but I can’t say that I have seen it implemented yet, as I have only done the one event so far. But in San Francisco, Tim joined our lunch table for a few minutes, one of the attendees at the table made a suggestion and Tim quickly pulled out a piece of paper and started jotting down notes. He then asked the entire table for feedback. It’s not very often you see the person in charge of the event doing something like that.

The second example, was someone complaining about the sightline in one of the presentation rooms being obstructed by a pillar. You could tell Tim was already aware of the issue as he just bristled. I am pretty darn sure, there won’t be any pillars in the way in the future.

You’ve been to the show before. Who makes up the audience, in terms of job position?

Yes, as I mention above I was at the San Francisco event. I can only speak for the group that attended my particular session, but I saw quite a cross-section of people there.

There were developers, marketers and business owners there.

But all of them were focused on how to get more out of their website. I spoke on how to generate content ideas, so I think my group was a little more slanted towards the marketers, as opposed to designers.

Who are you looking to network with most, and why? (Can mean some specific person/people or types – eg other speakers to learn, inhouse ux people for lead gen etc).

Since I am not a UX guy or a developer, I tend to gravitate to the business owners and marketers.

I love to hear what others are experiencing, the challenges they are facing, and some of the solutions they have come up with to grow their businesses.

Everything in our world is moving at such a fast pace that it’s great to have a chance to get out and talk to people who can totally relate to each other.

What tips would you offer for people to get the most out of their networking, besides the standard ‘don’t start with self-promotion’?

Pretty short answer: ask questions. Like you said, don’t talk about yourself, ask question about others and their business. It’s the best way to learn and engage.

What’s a growing trend that you see in video for conversion (besides increased usage)? What are people getting right that they used to get wrong?

I think the biggest trend is the DIY aspect.

Rather than hiring a production firm, some businesses are talking the bull by the horns and creating their own videos. This might mean they hire a videographer on staff or it might mean they just use webcams and simple equipment to produce decent video all on their own. To me, just trying is doing it right.

My only real caveat is that most viewers are pretty tolerant of less than professional grade videos, but you must get the sound and lighting right. People will just click away if they cannot hear or see the video due to low quality production.

Now with respect to conversions, little things do matter. Something as simple as pointing (in the video) to the form you want them to complete can see a drastic improvement in conversion rates.

Your company specializes in link building. How can link building consultants satisfy customers in the short term, when relationship building is a long-term effort?

Vertical Measures is definitely known for our link building, but more and more of our link building efforts are centered around creating link attraction through great content.

And Penguin/Panda have only accelerated that area of our business. Most clients are now convinced that patience is a virtue when it comes to obtaining the proper back link profile.

The Google updates in March & April went a long way in helping us explain this to our clients, but we also have many case studies demonstrating where creating solid content, then promoting it, drove backlinks to their website.

In many cases the cost per link was substantially lower than the standard “ordering 10 links for $2500” approach. The only difference being it took a couple months longer with the content approach.

This would have been a different answer just a few months ago, but anyone paying attention to SEO these days seems to totally get it.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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 who clicked like.

He incentivized the like with part 1 of his free report, and incentivized the email optin by upselling folks to get part 1 AND part 2.

I’m planning to test that, as well, with the following adaptation of Ryan’s landing page: 

Key elements in the lander and my adaptation on Ryan’s take:

- I’ve made the optin area 1.5 times as wide as the opposite area.
- Moved the word Or to the height of the end of the left-hand section’s heading.
- Widened the optin fields.
- Used my brand colours.
- Adapted the call to action to reflect a successful button I use in my standard book optin squeeze page.
- Ryan cleverly made the “part 1 only” section of the lander black and white only to be less enticing. That could backfire, as whitespace is known to draw the eye. For now I’m rolling with his hypothesis.

What do you predict the results will be? Ryan told me that the case study was a bit old and the numbers aren’t what they used to be. I’m still optimistic and think this can both increase my conversion rate as well as cut my cost per click, so it should be two simultaneous wins! Plus there’s the potential to get likes, which are like their own list, and which can be used for friends-of-connection ad targeting as well as sponsored stories. I’m salivating .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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 target misspellings (or accents or abbreviations), so it was necessary to add misspellings as separate keywords, which resulted in low quality scores since the landing pages did not also misspell the keywords.

Alternately you could target these keywords using modified broad match and broad match targeting, but this meant lower CTRs since the same ads would have to target a wide, diverse audience.

Google has, starting May 1, changed the default nature of phrase and exact match keywords to include these variants: misspellings, singular/plural, stemmings (swiming will also match swim), accents and abbreviations.

So you can achieve high keyword quality scores on phrase-matched keywords without worrying about writing ads that both appeal to your regular audience and your misspellings demographic with modified-broad-match ad writing.

Cesar Barba has a useful post that explains how to see if the change is profitable, and Steve has a nicely illustrated, colorful explanation of the change.

P.s. Anyone who doesn’t want this can opt-out via the Campaign settings selections page.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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 eyes so it’s worth starting with those to get a high CTR and low CPC.
Social Ads Manager (SAM) by Brighter Option – bulk ad creation, upload, powerful tracking built in, save targeted interests for reuse, great support by skype and email, cost is % of spend
Pixlr & MS Paint – Cropping, adjusting image brightness and contrast to shout louder, adding text and certain effects. Free! YAAY.
FBAdsToolbox – To add standard effects like image borders in different colors and certain neat image effects like scroll buttons, video play buttons etc. Very affordable at $58/year (save $60+) or $12/mo.
Confessions of an Advertising Man – ad copy guidelines by David Ogilvy. I also want to get Ogilvy on Advertising and my friend Marty Weintraub’s Killer Facebook Ads
Google Website Optimizer (on html, not WordPress) – conversion rate optimization

PreRequesites:
Landing pages set up and ready to be split test in GWO.
I use html/css pages instead of WP for ease of editing and GWO installation, plus max flexibility. If your pages are based on WP, not to worry, you can save the files and then edit the html to add GWO’s javascript code snippets, on which the whole system is based. See the workaround details here.

Step 1: Collect Pics

Browse for useful pics and download new ones to my pc. Useful = Faces, and anything that jumps out at the eyes. I’m looking for contrast, bright colors, faces, action shots, and niche stuff. Ex. of niche: With SEO, I got pics of guys in black hats. (The copy with those ads should say “Outscale Blackhat SEO.”)

Step 2: Make Pics Eye Catching

Go to MS Paint, Pixlr and FBAdsToolbox to tweak the pics so that they pop more, model’s eyes look towards my ad text (right) or towards the center of the screen. (That’s a test I’m running against best practices (which say have eyes look at your Call to Action), based on a hypothesis that if my model can catch their gaze by looking where I expect the user’s eyes to be, that I can boost CTR.

Step 3: Write Campaign & Upload Pics

Upload pics en masse to SAM then choose those I’ll use – aim for max variety so testing has higher impact. Ex.: White woman and black woman, border vs video play button etc. As more experienced campaigners have noted, images matter more than copy on FB, so that’s the bulk of my effort.

(Note: This skips some of the initial setup work you need to do in SAM, such as creating a product, setting revenue levels, creating interest targets and saving them as clusters for reuse etc, because much of that is one-time work.)

SAM takes the different versions of copy, URLs, and images and multiplies them all by each other, as well as by your demographic targets. So if you’ve got 2 titles, 2 body copies, 5 pics, 2 URLs, and 5 demographics, you’ve got 200 ads created. Much easier than trying to do that manually .

Important optimization tip: I recommend duplicating campaigns to target each country separately, because this way you avoid overpaying by bidding high for the US/UK and paying the same price for countries where traffic costs less. It’s worth separating out, depending on your time constraints, from 2000+ people in your target audience, imho. You may want to try this for age and gender as well.

Step 4: Measure and adjust

Monitor results. Reuse copy, images, countries, landing pages, ages and interests that got best CTR and conversion rates. Cut the rest or bid lower on them.

Step 5: Stay patient

Just because you can post an ad in 5 minutes, doesn’t mean that winning at the ads game is fast. It takes time to create everything, set up tracking, split tests etc and then measure and repeat. The more you do it though, the faster and better you get at it because you realize how to move faster, what your better targets are, etc.

If you liked this, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO! Or get my latest posts by email or RSS!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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 route to take and I’m considering both approaches. I’d love to hear your opinion on why you made the choice you did, if you don’t mind sharing. ”

A: It’s not been my conscious decision, it’s just been a product of circumstances, really. I started consulting when I was turning 19 (started SEO 6 months before ) and I couldn’t build an agency while being in university. So that was 2006-2010.

I moved to Israel December 30 2010 and then was back in school studying Hebrew for 5 hours/day for the next 5 months. Then I got engaged and was busy planning the wedding with my then-fiance (now wife). Around the same time I also finally launched my book and obviously that took a fair amount of effort.

The closest I came to running an agency was doing a decent volume of guest posting where I subcontracted with up to 12 bloggers at a time. Problem was that with monthly-renewal contracts you don’t have the stability to hire people full time so you’re limited in what you can build.

That’s for circumstances.

For my personal intentions, I did want to build a shiny big agency when I was new and starting out. SEOmoz‘s high rates and cool work really motivated me to imitate them … until, like them, I realized that SEO services have limited scale.

I’m pretty ambitious in terms of the size of the business I want to build. When I see brilliant SEOs like my friends at NVI, Distilled, SEER Interactive, Portent and elsewhere “only” growing organically as opposed to the growth of a Facebook or a Twitter, it just makes it painfully obvious to me that the way to go for mega-success is to be the market owner – the Walmart, eBay, Odesk – instead of the guy owning a stall in the market. I have some ideas on that and hopefully I’ll get around to building a startup eventually.

For the time being, circumstances are such that am going to continue offering consulting services for the foreseeable future. I’m still having fun with SEO, with my book, and I’ve also got a stint in the Israeli army coming up – I just got my first summons as a draft-eligible 24 year old. Consulting and book sales give me the flexibility I need in my work.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I love Twit Cleaner!

Some of my work recently has involved creating a follow policy as well as helping manage a Twitter account for a software protection company called Wibu, through my job with illuminea (they’re illuminea’s client, not my own).

Anyways, I was going through the people Wibu were following and realized loads of them were irrelevant – based on their bios/descriptions – but that checking for dead accounts, bots etc isn’t easy based on Twitter’s web interface alone.

The problem is that the web interface will only show you a person’s 3 most recent tweets, and that you often need to click through to see each account, one at a time, after seeing the initial three.

(The reason you need to see more is that you’d have to check if this is someone who is self-centered, only tweets based on RSS feeds or otherwise uses Twitter in a way that won’t allow you to build a relationship with them.)

Also, you have to remember to open the user profiles in new tabs. Otherwise, when you click back, you start at the top of your followers list, and may need to wait for the AJAX to load more followers when you scroll down (the “view more followers” function that loads their profiles when you get to the end but without loading a new page) .

So there’s lots of points where the web interface slows you down when trying to prune who you’re following.

Enter TwitCleaner which is a Twitter app that will check all these profiles for common patterns of anti-social behaviour and generate a report for you. From there you can just click user profiles to unfollow.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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

What Do CTRs Look Like By Position In 2011? – This excellent research piece by Phil Golobish (T: @saintphilip) of Slingshot SEO was a preview of their massive research piece featuring data from 170,000 visitors to their client websites.

Not to be outdone, a glorious case study on mobile web analytics and conversion optimization came to us from the skillful Stephan Croome, who sells ipads, talks about hair styles and dreams up marketing ideas like www.startupbeanbags.com.

Longtime contributor Everett Sizemore taught us about affiliate marketing, and specifically how an affiliate got merchants to promote him! Everett blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Ben Jackson wrote me a clever link request email that turned into a case study on his approach. As a result, Ben published his experience with broken-link link building (broken link building for short), where you look for dead pages or sites and go after the people who linked to them… Ben writes at SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with link building strategies, amonst other goodies.

We got another two case studies in a single article by Liz Krause, on how to reverse negative reviews. Liz writes for EtherSpeak, a company specializing in Unified Communications for internet phone service. They are a Microsoft SIP provider and also offer internet encryption for business class VOIP.

Guest Posts on Tactics:

Post-Panda, Here’s How To Beat Scrapers Outranking You With Stolen Content was 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.

How To Recover From A Wild Panda Attack: 3 Cheap Tools
This post was written by guest Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

4 Advanced Ecommerce Tactics

This guest article was by James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

Can you rank on page 1 for one-word keywords? Find out the inside details how in another great guest post by Brian S Patterson, partner at a Virginia SEO firm known as MangoCo. You can also follow Brian on Twitter!

How do you produce professional video for your blog? We learned all about angles, lighting, editing and more in a guest article by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

Guest Posts About Tools:
… Or Tools for Guest Posts: How to Use Scrapebox to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities/

This guest post came from Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services.

6 WordPress Plugins That Automate Your SEO was an experienced based guide by Pedro Cardoso who runs a site teaching folks to fix their slow @#!*% computers, as well as his blog, slices of life.

Found the content here interesting? You can be featured here in 2012! Read the guest post guidelines then contact me with your idea. Preference is obviously given to case studies, tactics and anything original you can share!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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. The title of a press release from comScore last year says it all:

Free Shipping Day Punctuates Heaviest Week of U.S. Online Spending in History as Four Individual Days Eclipse $900 Million

Gadgets rank at the top of the growing “computer hardware” category for the holiday season with purchases of handheld devices like the iPad, iPhone and Android phones driving sales. Mashable took note of this yesterday when the posted the Top 10 Tech Retailers Delivery in Time for Christmas, featuring Free Shipping Day as a reward for procrastinating tech junkies. But Mashable isn’t breaking any stories here. A search on Google News will reveal a flood of media coverage about this event.

With all the hype around Free Shipping Day, one would think that it is like any other similar shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But it’s not. The big difference here is that Free Shipping Day™ also happens to be a trademarked day that belongs to the affiliate website FreeShipping.org.

Luke Knowles is the “super affiliate” behind this $1-billion dollar day. When looking into marketing and retail stats he discovered that holiday shopping online peaked around December 10th because consumers were worried that they may not get their orders in time to wrap and put them under tree before Christmas if they ordered any later.

So Knowles, who was already an affiliate with thousands of online merchants via FreeShipping.org, had the idea to get stores to commit to guaranteed delivery by Christmas nearly a week after the December 10 peak. The extended shipping deadlines, combined with coupon offers, was an instant hit with consumers.

Merchants don’t typically like to help their affiliates with marketing efforts, and for good reasons. But this doesn’t seem to apply to the Free Shipping Day franchise (which is now growing in Canada and the UK as well). Below are some of the ways this affiliate manages to get merchants to help promote their site…

Vanity URLs

Every store gets their own URL to share with their brand evangelists and customers via email and social media channels. But having thousands of pages of thin content (i.e. a couple of coupon codes) isn’t a viable SEO strategy these days.

So instead of making these URLs pages the site appends a parameter to the URL that changes the sort order to show each different store’s coupon first. By having Google and Bing webmaster tools ignore that parameter, and by using a rel canonical tag, the site manages to funnel all of that pagerank into their home page.

Social Media Interaction

The next step is to get brands to share their vanity URLs. In addition to sending each merchant an email with their URL, the site encourages them to share it on social media channels (example). In addition to the custom link, they also provide the hashtag to use: #FreeShippingDay . Imagine hundreds of small, medium and huge brands tweeting a link to your affiliate site along with your own custom hashtag. #WouldBeNice

Badges

Every merchant also gets a badge with custom code that links to their vanity URL to display on their website, while badges with a link to the home page are available to all. Badges are nothing new, but it amazes me how often websites create badges, put them on a page and just expect people to use them. What’s the motivation? In this case, it is to show off that you are participating and to link shoppers directly to your vanity URL.

Sharing The Love

If you are an affiliate who is out hustling via guest posts, PR and social media to get traffic and build your own brand, it should be a no-brainer to let the merchants you work with know that you are benefiting them beyond just sending direct sales via affiliate links.

When the LA Times mentioned BestBuy and Toys R Us in an article about Free Shipping Day, an email quickly went out from FreeShippingDay.com to the marketing departments at each company to let them know about it.

Is this possible for all affiliates to add this kind of value? Probably not. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution to building links and traffic into an affiliate website. But this example should illustrate that it is still possible to compete with big brands with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of marketing sense. I’ve heard the masses predicting that affiliate marketing is dead, and with recent brand-boosting, affiliate-punishing changes from Google – not to mention stuff like this – you have to admit it is an uphill battle. The days of putting up some reviews on your blog, or publishing coupon feeds from LinkShare and raking in the dough while you sleep are long gone.

The moral of the story here is this: Add value for the merchants and treat your affiliate site like a brand and you may still stand a chance.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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 .

I had taken screenshots at the time which I never got around to posting on the blog, and while visiting my parents (who have the computer I was using then), I found the proof pics and sent them to myself. Here ya go:

Incidentally, I also once dominated all of the top 3 results for link building on Google.ca . I couldn’t find that screenshot, but here’s one of me at #1.

Before somebody asks, no I didn’t edit these photos in Photoshop or the like. If I had, I wouldn’t write this post about it because some Photoshop pros could analyze things and show what a photoshop amateur (and general idiot) I am.

What do I attribute the rankings to? You mean, besides my good lucks, charm and humility?

Mostly efforts at building relationships and sharing attention with others, which they were courteous enough to reflect back on me . My Internal Link Building plugin (currently over 25,000 downloads) was a pretty sweet piece of linkbait, too.

Want to be #1 for your terms? Get my latest posts sent to you free by email or RSS and learn your way to the top.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

What is broken link building?

In case you’re not familiar, broken link building is the process of finding an old resource that is now a 404 error page and rebuilding it. You then contact anyone still linking to this page and inform them that they have a broken link on their site and you have a similar, updated version of this resource on your site they can link to instead.

[Editor's note: It's like cloning expired sites for links.]

The Benefits of Broken Link Building

An advantage of broken link building is that the pages you recreate were already great link bait. Tons of people linked to it in the past so they will likely link to you now.

After your broken link building campaign you can also get more current links by sharing it through social media, social news sites, and any other outreach plan you have.

• It’s a great way to get in-content authority links.
An in-content, dofollow link on an authoritative page on an authoritative domain is arguably the best kind of link you can get.
• It bypasses most of the brainstorming involved with linkbait
The 404 page was already link bait, so you KNOW you’re going to get some links and the type of resource you’re going to recreate
• It’s an ever-green source of links
If you feel like you’re starting to run out of link sources, you can always get more links by doing some broken link building

Resources You’ll Need:

Xenu – for finding broken links
SEO Quake – for checking backlinks

There are a lot of ways to go about broken link building. Here’s the path that I took…

I started by finding some SEO and Internet Marketing blogs listed in Dmoz. I purposely selected a few sites that hadn’t been posted on for a year or longer. Current sites also have broken links, but I thought I would have a better picture of the sites of yester-year like this.

Once I gathered a list of about 5 sites, I ran each one through Xenu. Xenu is a site-wide broken link checker. My jaw drops every time I see someone checking for broken links page-by-page. There was just a post in SEO Moz about a plugin that checks one page at a time quickly. YAWN! Turn on Xenu, and walk away.

I had Xenu create a report for each site and then looked through the broken link section for any outgoing links leading to 404 pages.

Tip: You’ll find all kinds of links that won’t help you at all, but you can tell right away by the URL if a page is going to be good to recreate.

When you come across any link that could be a good page to rebuild, visit the page and check the backlinks it has with SEO Quake. If the link profile is good then you have a potential winner, save it in a notepad or other file. If it only has a few links then move on.

Tip: Don’t be discouraged if you go through a couple sites without luck at first. After your first time you can build a network of go-to sites in your niche.

Once you find a few broken URLs that have a good amount of backlinks, visit the Wayback Machine. Put in the URL and go back to when it was still online. This way you can see exactly what the resource was and how you can make the same thing, but much better and more modern.

Now this is a case study, so let me tell you exactly what I did…

One potential page to rebuild I found was a 404 page on a site called Dosh Dosh, you may remember it. The page had a good amount of backlinks, but it was very extensive and about a topic I didn’t feel particularly qualified to write about. What I then realized was that the site was still online, but every single page was a 404 error.

I then Googled “Dosh Dosh” and found a post listing 18 Must Read Posts at Dosh Dosh. I looked through this list and picked out the one I thought I could recreate with the most ease. The page also happened to have 690 backlinks.

Here’s the page I made on my site. I improved the Dosh Dosh version by including a few different metrics and putting the sites in one easy to use table.

While there were 690 links to the page at Dosh Dosh, the majority of them were repeat links from obscure and abandoned sites. However, I did find a good number of links with PR.

A lot of SEOs recommend developing a persona and building a relationship before requesting that the webmaster links to your page. Since I was emailing people mostly in the SEO industry I thought this would be annoying and I cut straight to the chase. I notified them of the broken link and also mentioned my similar and updated resource in my first email.

Who I emailed:

I emailed anyone who had a page with any PR. I also emailed a few who had 0 PR, but had decent Alexa rankings. I did this in hopes that the sites were still well-maintained and could potentially send traffic.

I ignored sites with 0 PR and very high Alexa rankings, and also pages that had tons of links on them.

Tip: Be careful not to email the same webmaster twice – that’s just awkward.

My Results:

I emailed about 40 different webmasters and got these results:

7 emailed me back and linked
3 emailed me back and didn’t link, 2 of them said they would
1 did not email me and linked
1 person emailed me back, linked to me, and wrote a blog post about how I was building links and linked to me again (an authoritative domain as well)

The PR break-down of the links:
PR 3 – 3
PR 1 -1
PR 0 – 5

It might seem like very little for a lot of effort, but there are many more benefits and potential links here.

• I emailed a lot of sites somewhat indiscriminately that haven’t been updated in a while – they might link eventually
• The post was a good addition to my site and easy to share and get traffic to since it was very useful
• Broken link building provides excellent insight for what makes for great link bait
• It can be a good way to make new contacts ie it’s why you’re reading this guest post now

Looking at my broken link page, you can easily discern a few of the keywords I was attempting to rank for. The only keyword that gained immediate traction was “social news sites“. My page is currently jumping between pages 2-3 for the keyword. Not bad for Keyword Difficulty score of “62% Highly Competitive” from SEO Moz.

Besides the links I got from my broken linking, I’ve linked to it once with partial match anchor text from a guest post I did for Business 2 Community, but I expect the ranking to increase relatively quickly once I begin building some exact match links.

What I Did Wrong

• I was not as organized as I should have been.

I didn’t copy down a list of URLs that I tried to get links from. This would have been especially helpful for the sites that I had to use an on-site contact form for. I would advise anyone doing this to copy down the URLs and email addresses of every single webmaster you contact, and what their response was.

• I didn’t have an outreach plan.

I got the links I could from the broken linking, but due to the nature of the page, I could have capitalized on my resource more as link bait. I shared the post on social sites, linked in a guest post, and also had a lot of “recent post” CommentLuv links from blog comments. This was okay, but not enough to get the linkerati on board.

• My page has a lot of outbound links

I could be getting more benefit to my site from the links I got if I didn’t have so many outbound links on the page. It’s a matter of SEO VS User Experience. Having the links clickable is draining the PR, but it also makes it easier for users.

[Editor's note: I think this is a good thing: we know Google rewards good linking out.]

What do you think? Should I un-link the names of all the sites?
For now, I’m just building some exact match links and waiting to hear back from the busy webmasters at Copyblogger for a potential PR 5 link. Wish me luck ?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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…

Anyways, as I had once previously had a site hacked, I tried what worked last time – I hired someone from Odesk, for $100 one-time fee. The person in question successfully removed the injected pages… but the hacker outsmarted him and had a script that automatically replaced the injected pages within a day or two.

I then hired another person from Odesk, explaining what happened previously, but again this contractor could only delete the pages and not permanently remove the vulnerability.

In both cases, these contractors had previous experience and positive reviews in their Odesk profiles regarding site cleanups. But this hacker outsmarted them, and as we’ll see, Google too. (Not in terms of malware detection.)

The light at the end of the tnnel:

Finally, exasperated, I turned to the guys at Vaultpress. They offer a security service for WordPress whereby they

• Scan your site for vulnerabilities
• Recommend action to patch the vulnerabilities
• Remove hacks and other crap, including if it comes back
• Backup your site in 11 different places in the cloud, so accidental deletes or screwups aren’t fatal

And they delivered. I installed their plugin, gave them FTP access, and they cleaned up my site. (Also my sister the makeup artist Maya’s site.) Not only that, but they went above and beyond, doing miscellaneous stuff that wasn’t part of the official package, because I’m not tech-savvy enough to do it.

Their basic service including cleaning up your site starts at $15/month, but that doesn’t include security monitoring for the future, just a one-time cleanup. Ongoing security costs $40/month and it’s the plan I’m on, because it buys me peace of mind and stability for my business.

I highly recommend Vaultpress for WP security.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

2) In addition to that, I’m going to seek out reviews from my contact network. Already I’ve been in touch with a number of people, giving away free review copies. I want to maximize press from the blogosphere. Again, this is to drive traffic to the free chapter download page.

But it’s also got the added benefit of pre-selling people, which should increase both the visitor -> free chapter conversions and free chapter -> buyer conversions.

A further benefit of that is that it should provide branding and hopefully search traffic.

3) To manage my outreach, I’m going to use BuzzStream CRM (probably focusing on the link building side of the tool). That will allow me to keep track of emails sent as well as Twitter messages.

4) I’m going to educate myself on Google Website Optimizer so I can run my own tests on the site and determine what are the most effective messages and so forth to use.

5) Continue usability testing the site and seeing where I can make improvements that will prove profitable.

6) Blog a lot over here so that I increase my sub count and get a variety of juicy inbound links. The focus will be on evergreen content that can be shared…

7) Eventually I plan to look into scaling traffic generation with an affiliate program and other ads.

Cut the distractions by reading much less from my RSS reader, answering email once or twice a day, and constantly ask myself if I’m being productive or just active. (Hat tip: Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Workweek )

Hopefully at the end of this I’ll be able to write a juicy case study on how I made a bajillion dollars and you can too!

Add my rss feed to your reader for progress updates .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.)

Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page’s keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don’t want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda’s filter. They’ve got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original…).

So I’m thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.

Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I’m considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I’m open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.

What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?

p.s. Good answers get dofollow links .

Add #1:

Stever is a local SEO Consultant
Miguel is a organic SEO Consultant

p.p.s. Related note: I’m looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for this blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you’re interested.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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?

Some clients have a short-term mindset, and education won’t change a thing for them. If they’re just a run-of-the-mill client, you can pass on them knowing that 10 more are just around the corner.

But there’s a limited supply of big-budget companies. Not as limited as most SEOs think, but still not that common.

So if a company with lots of money to spend on SEO wants to see results in the short term, should you turn the revenue away? Adam thinks the answer is a clear-cut “yes, turn it away.” I’m not sure the issue is so black and white. Consider the pros and cons.

Pros:
1. Big short term revenue/profit boost
2. Relatively easy work, even though they don’t know it
3. The business results as measured in dollars of ROI will be there

Cons:
1. A savvy SEO in their company may criticize your mediocre links and cause the gig to be lost after just a few months
2. You’ve invested time into a project with a short lifespan, when similar time could be better invested elsewhere.

At times, business calls for you to seize the opportunities you get and take the easy money. In this case, Adam didn’t do anything unethical – the work itself was just easy. And depending on how open-minded or close-minded the client was, education may not have persuaded them to take a longer-term approach. So if some company was going to make the money, and no one gets hurt / nothing unethical has to be done, why not be that company? What do you guys think?

If you liked this post, add my RSS feed to your reader for more.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

First, the copy is cleverly written and memorable.

Direct Response Flyer with a clever title, "On Canada's best network, they're not just smartphones, they're geniusphones."

“On Canada’s best network, they’re not just smartphones, they’re geniusphones.” I grant you that it’s feature/advantage copy instead of being benefit oriented, but the witticism sticks with you, and encourages you to read on. I guess that’s another way to grab people’s attention, besides QPBC.

The subheadline does a good job clarifying what they mean, although it’s still advantage oriented rather than getting into benefits. What’s the point of fewest failures, clear reception and global coverage? “Do more things in more places” is a pretty vague benefit statement.

Another thing I like about the top of this flyer is the bold blue stripes. They’re reminiscent of Bell’s corporate colors, and kind of steal credibility from Bell’s own branding efforts, which have involved lots of strongly branded ads here in Montreal.

Direct response flyer with good call to action usability

Finally, I want to point out the intelligent design of the call to action. Besides for numerous pull-and-tear phone numbers, the phone number is still listed at the bottom of the ad. Even if all the pull-and-tear numbers are torn off, the ad can still generate calls! Smart thinking. You also have the address on the bottom and the nearest metro station (torn blue square, at right).

If you liked this post on advertising, get my latest posts by email or add my rss feed to your reader for more similar commentary.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

In the year 1999 I scored my first real, full-time web development job for an audio company. My boss was a man named Tim Storm. I learned a LOT working for Tim. I went from dabbling and hacking, to actually producing and innovating. Tim started Fatwallet.com (a coupon site) as his hobby while we were still working together. I felt honored to be a part of its community development in the first couple years. Tim quit his day job and went full-time on Fatwallet.com shortly after.

Fast forward to 2006. I was a web developer for Fatwallet, on a team of 4 or 5. I had been dabbling in SEO on the side for the last two years, mainly for my wife’s [former] online scrapbook store. I was incredibly passionate about Fatwallet. Tim, and his company, had both done great things for my career. Knowing some SEO basics, and seeing the major SEO problems and HUGE search traffic potentials of the site, I went to Tim and told him that the company needs to spend some time on SEO.

Maybe I wasn’t clear with my intentions since Tim transitioned a different coworker to SEO. The next six months were miserable as I was the developer in charge of implementing the new SEO’s techniques. I watched and fought tooth and nail as the SEO spent countless hours on extinct techniques like meta keywords. After several arguments with the SEO, and whiny complaints to the man in charge, old SEO out, Troy in.

I was given 3 months to see if I could make an impact on traffic. Tim and I both agreed that we needed a kickass metric system for measuring the efforts and results – so I spent the next 2 months doing nothing but writing a new search traffic analytic tracking system. I used it to monitor the current search traffic, and find opportunities for easy optimization.  I quickly found terms like GoDaddy coupon that were driving some traffic to pages that were NOT optimized (and quite unfriendly to search engines).

I rewrote URLs throughout the site, changed paging systems, implemented dynamic cross linking systems, cleaned piles of dirty, messy, pathetic code (that I had written in years past). Once the site was search engine friendly, and KINDA optimized, we watched the traffic increase day after day. After a few months, search traffic had doubled. Hell yeah, I felt like a winner.

Then I met with Tim again. Tim wanted to know which terms were converting, and how much traffic has increased to the terms that are the highest converting. It took another couple of months to tweak the system and start producing metrics that prove ROI. And then I became the full-time, in-house SEO for FatWallet.

The next couple years were brutal, as I fought many challenges. FatWallet’s search traffic is incredibly long-tailed, with a million plus members in the forums, the site is loaded with rich user generated content – and we all know how search engines love UGC. However the terms I was expected to target were far from long-tail, and often far from reality. Most people in the company didn’t really know what I was doing, hell sometimes *I* didn’t really know what I was doing.

I kept trying and kept learning…and more importantly, I kept finding search traffic opportunities that could align with our content. My passion for the company, and now for the industry, fueled debates with sales managers, designers, developers, and sysadmins. In the end, our results have made it all totally worth it.

My responsibilities, and respect for what I do, are higher than ever at Fatwallet. I’m producing results, getting involved with big projects, and even driving big projects.

Tim continues to inspire us, and is currently a finalist in the Entrepreneur of the Year contest.

My career has been created by passion and a strong desire to learn and succeed. What drives you guys in your search careers?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

Again, this censuring of Latma shows the problem we have with Google’s dominance in search. If you rely on the information highway for access to information, and people put roadblocks up on certain branches of the highway, the highway’s very essence is undermined.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.  

First, I recognize my mistake on the H1 point.

That was done years ago when I didn’t appreciate fully the distinction between sites and pages, and wanted to rank for SEO on the homepage. The H1 is acceptable for that purpose, but it’s a sitewide element – other pages are also getting “SEO ROI” as an H1.

 Oops! Thanks Boston SEO !

Second, the first link question needs some context for newer SEOs. Various studies have been done (eg by my friend Branko, the SEO Scientist) on whether all links on a page pass value or just the first.

Some say only the first does, others say all do, and maybe there’s a possibility the first passes mroe value. So best to make the logo the second link, after a more anchor-text optimized link.

Well, I don’t recall the studies in depth, but I think the context was external  – not internal – links. Also, the testing by Branko says all links pass value. Third, I can spend time on more productive things.

If I couldn’t spend my time better and did believe that internal links, specifically the first one, pass more value, then the solution is simple: Use CSS to position the logo in its place, but have the code for the logo appear below the first properly anchor-optimized link on the page.

If you liked this tactical discussion on SEO ideas, add my RSS feed to your reader for more! And check out my upcoming advanced SEO book - you can download some free chapters!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

(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

Site search [analytics data?] shows locations in a drop down. They monitored destinations people wanted to go to and especially the top cities of interest.
- They inferred from searches for two tickets that the person searching was part of a couple.
- Home page navigation was not reflecting people’s interests.
- They understood that there were seasonal variances in people’s choices of destination. Bangkok was big in winter, London in summer.
o But volume [of searches] does NOT tell the whole story!
o You need to compare the volume numbers to the ecommerce report.
o Why? Because though the volume of searches change, that doesn’t necessarily correlate to average order values (AOV). So items with low search volume were still valuable because the AOVs were higher.

What does this suggest in terms of changes to the site? Dynamic navigation or highlighting of navigational elements that adjusts to demand and AOVs.

Final tip: Don’t allow yourself to create reports with so many parameters that you end up overwhelmed. View fewer parameters, and make them actionable.

If you enjoyed this post, come back tomorrow for more coverage of SphinnCon’s web analytics tips. Or, because we want to make life easier, you can add my rss feed to your reader for more (that link also lets you subscribe by email).

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.