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.

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Charities have a unique SEO problem: there’s not a lot of people searching to give to them, which makes keyword discovery difficult. I saw that with Mada Center, a soup kitchen in Montreal that I tried to do PPC for but we failed for lack of keywords, and recently have come across a similar challenge for Achiya, an Israeli charity for learning disabled kids whom I work with via illuminea, a web agency in Jerusalem. (more…)

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…)

Need A Free Ebook Directory? Here’s the Ebook Directory list….

Hat tip to Eric Ward for telling me about ebook publishing as a link building technique. It obviously helps more if those ebooks are free. Check out Eric’s link opportunity alert newsletter for more…

There’s an eternal debate amongst copywriters whether long copy or short copy is better, and the truth is that there’s no absolutely correct answer – the length of your copy depends on how much persuading your prospects need. Here’s the simple guide as to what factors influence how much copy you need.
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This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.

What the heck is ScrapeBox?

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This guest post is by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

You’ve no doubt seen the slick, professional video blogs Google and its representatives have churned out lately. Videos shot with pristine white backgrounds, inviting speakers and a whole lot of views. They’re impressive video blogs right? Well the following article explores how you can make the same professional looking corporate video blogs from the comfort of your own home. (more…)

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. It’ll help with content marketing. You can comment if you want to beta test, but I expect feedback. Expect this to seriously rock. If you’re not already subscribing by RSS, add my RSS feed to your reader now to get your free copy first once released! You can also get my latest posts by email.
4) Planning lots of guest posts and promotional content.
5) Planning a big piece of content: a remote usability testing guide based on my experience improving the book’s site.
6) Enjoying the beautiful city and life that is Jerusalem, where I live.
7) Applying to speak at WordCamp Jerusalem.

Like I said, get my latest posts by email or rss! Or get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book and see what all the fuss is about…

Jon Villiard, one of the pre-order customers, with his copy:

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!

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 against content scrapers and we’re the ones paying the price. It has gotten even worse since Panda, despite efforts to fix the problem. I know of several dozen websites that are being outranked by scrapers.

While Google might hope we’re going to do their job for them with tags like rel canonical, and rel author, this problem isn’g going away any time soon. You know things are bad when powerhouses like TIME.com are outranked by sites like this.

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep sites from scraping your content, (more…)

If you’ve read about Panda, you’ll know that the quality of your writing and editing is a key notion targeted by Google’s update. (more…)

While reading this recent commentary on Google’s progressive rollouts of algorithms worldwide, I picked up on Aaron’s mention that some sites competing in languages with less content are less likely to get whacked.

“In most foreign markets Google is not likely to be as aggressive with this type of algorithm as they are in the United States (because foreign ad markets are less liquid and there is less of a critical mass of content in some foreign markets), but I would be willing to bet that Google will be pretty aggressive with it in the UK when it rolls out.” [Emphasis mine.]

How do you figure out what those languages are? (more…)

Google’s promoting scrapers over Time magazine. Seems Google’s exception list isn’t as robust as one might have thought, or perhaps it’s that the news business just ain’t what it was…

Ideas why this is happening?

Update: 1 idea is that it’s tied to the latest algo change. See also Mashable’s status.

One guess I’d have is a high ratio of surrounding junk to the main body of content. That would fit under the layout/design/user experience angle targeted by the latest algo update.

If you have a legitimate need, read this review of three web screen scrapers?

Don’t limit yourself to bidding on competitors‘ brand / trademark keywords – rank your website for them organically, too!

This is counter-intuitive to SEO consultants – what content will you write and how will you get anchor-text rich links? That’s not a rhetorical question any more – there are a few types of content you can write to rank for competitors’ trademarks and convert the traffic!
(more…)

I have a problem with the ‘AIDA’ formula we as marketers use.

AIDA stands for ‘Attention, Interest, Desire, Action’ and is a rough summary of the buying process/marketing process. Unfortunately, it’s too vague of an instruction set for marketers, and vague instructions lead to screw-ups in carrying them out.

So I’m changing AIDA to QPBC. It’s less catchy, but a hell of a lot more practical as far as instructions go. It’s clearer.

QPBC stands for Question, Problem, Benefit, Call. (more…)

This is a guest post by John McElborough, a [ed: awesome!] freelance SEO from Brighton, England who blogs at johnmcelborough.com

There’s been a lot of talk in the SEO world of late about the idea of ‘content farms’-  sites which exist principally to attract mid to long tail search traffic through large scale content generation.

Several high profile SEO’s have been pretty critical of sites like ehow, mahalo and livestong who use these tactics. Personally if a sites earning that much cash through SEO I’d rather learn from it than criticise so for my first guest post here on Gab’s blog I want to take a closer look at long tail tactics and share some practical tips for how pretty much any site can cash in on their markets long tail potential.
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If so, I’d love to get a testimonial to that effect that I can use for my advanced SEO book.

Anything you can share about the following points in particular might be helpful:

• Case study
• Challenges finding time such as working 2 jobs etc
• Having a negligible budget to start with
• Before / after you started reading my blog

I’ll be happy to share the testimonial here on the blog and give you a dofollow link (with your chosen anchor text) for the time, so long as you’re being honest. Just type it into the comment box below along with your name, email and desired link/anchor text!

Thanks a bunch!

Gab

Update: Dan Hinckley of Exhibit Edge trade show exhibits is first in the comments. Thanks Dan!

Brian Patterson of Mangoco.com, a Virginia SEO company, emailed me the following.

“As a partner at a web firm increasingly focused on SEO, The SEO ROI
blog continually helps me keep in perspective that SEO isn’t just about
links or traffic or other basic metrics, its all about delivering a
positive ROI for our clients. Gab’s creative ideas help me continually
increase ROI, and our clients are loving us for it.  Thanks!”

Christina’s added a comment below. She runs a sleep help site .

“Mac help” by Mike. (See comments.)

—

Guys, if you want a link – I’d really appreciate specifics – stuff you’ve done based on this site or other details.

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page? (more…)

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is (more…)

There are a number of services of questionable ethics around, offering students to research and write full term papers for them. This is at the university level. For anyone familiar with the kind of work that goes into this, I would suggest that these sources can also be valuable sources for premium quality content. The type to linkbait professors, and (more…)

I recently read Rhys Wynne’s interpretation of John Mueller’s comment that it’s better to add content on your own site than to add it elsewhere. I disagree strongly that this is the right reading of John’s comment. There are numerous other readings of it:

- A bunch of links to a thin site (e.g. without valuable content) doesn’t make that site a positive user experience. So don’t guest post at the expense/neglect of your own site. (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…)

Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities. (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…)

And I’m lucky to have been nominated in two categories!

1. My post, “The 4.5 Personas of My SEO Site,” is nominated in the SEO category! If I get into the Finalists round, I’d love for you to vote for me to win!

The post has also made it as a reference for Full Sail’s Internet Marketing Master’s Degree.

2. My article on 101 advanced tips to buy text links also got nominated in the Link Building category.

Here’s hoping the judges will consider my writing good enough to go through and win!

Surprising people forces a reaction, and if it’s a silly surprise, that reaction is laughter. That’s why list-jokes or series-jokes are a staple of comedians everywhere.

In high school, I remember my friend Johnny Shanaan giving a speech to our English class for his public speaking assignment. He was talking about body language, and handshakes in particular. He said,

“There are different types of shakes. There’s

• The firm shake,
• The weak shake,
• The clammy shake,
• The power shake,
• And the milkshake.”

What’s nice about series jokes like that is that the first items in the list create an expectation. And when you know what people expect, it’s easy to throw in an oddball item that surprises them.

That’s also true of humor generally. If you can set up an expectation, it’s easy to find the unexpected.

A favourite line of mine when I want to loosen people up is that I shower regularly… first of every month. (Stolen from a Get Fuzzy comic strip, to be honest.)

So the next time you want to lighten your writing, your small-talk, whatever… look for what should follow from what you said, and say the opposite. Look at what people relate to, their social reference points (like showering daily) and step outside of them.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader or check out some other content posts.

Reading is the best investment you can make in yourself, and it’s also incredibly enjoyable. So to share the fun and help you build your businesses, I’m giving away a copy of The Knack, a fantastic business book by Bo Burlingham and Norm Brodsky. (Here’s my review of The Knack.) (more…)

My friend Geno Prussakov wrote a fascinating book entitled, Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes. This is my review of Geno’s book, for those who might like to buy it.

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One is at Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-mythbusters-content/12810/

The other is at Blogue Marketing Interactif: http://www.bloguemarketinginteractif.com/flogue-collette-judy/ (in French)

Then you’re way ahead of the curve and understand what Matt Cutts is talking about, late in this video, on getting crawled and indexed more rapidly and deeply. If not, it’s time to understand search like Matt Cutts and read up on submarine crawling. This also goes back to what I was writing about thinking like search engineers and what Google wants. These are not merely abstract ideas, despite appearances. Grasping these notions puts you a step higher on the ladder, closer to “SEO Director” and further from “SEO data entry monkey,” because you can solve problems rather than merely execute other people’s solutions. (more…)

I wrote about poor man’s retargeting tools for Search Engine Journal. Well, guess who picked up on the article and gave it top billing in their weekly roundup? Hello Media Post! I think this is where the 1337 gamer in me shouts, “W000000000t!” . On a related note, a previous post I did on how to be creative got picked up and linked to by Aaron Wall in a roundup post titled, “Worth Sharing.” I’m looking to expand my distribution this year and build my brand as a leading search/internet marketing expert so if you have a hot property (online or print or trade show) with wide distribution, do give me a call (438-882-3017) or write gab at the domain you’re visiting (can’t spell it out because spammers would send me even more junk then).

Gab Goldenberg in Media Post

The Complete Newbie Guide to SEOmoz

Three Tools For Retargeting Ads, a followup to my first post on poor man’s retargeting.

Leave some comments there folks!

I was very fortunate with my Internal Link Building plugin to have many East European folks talk about it and give me links, but this time it’s a full post I’ve got translated. Now, by the looks of it, it’s probably done by machine and spammy crap… but if it’s not this is cool. Anyone here speak Japanese?

http://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp/e/2009/01/13/4760

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…)

Kevin Kelly recently wrote about how you can sell something that might otherwise be obtained for free. I disagree with his premises: (more…)

My first impression of Guy Kawasaki was that he was a genius writing brilliant blog posts. My second impression of Guy Kawasaki was that he was arrogant and gratuitously mean. Turns out I was right on both counts, as Guy’s new book, Reality Check, proves. (more…)

The video with my thoughts and questions is after the jump. Please give me some feedback on this – what can I do for you guys? (more…)

Since the first time he impressed me with his SEO experiments, Marios Alexandrou of All Things SEM has consistently been one of the people whose blogging I most respect for being original and intelligent. He won’t rehash old stuff everyone’s said… he’ll make a statistical analysis of what topics come up most frequently, tie it to Matt’s blog posts, and thus prove that Matt is really the center of the [SEO] universe ;D. Unfortunately I’m lazy about using my Feedreader, so I don’t get to enjoy his writing as often as I should. But I got into it today and found these little gems: (more…)

Aaron Wall hasn’t written extensively on WP blog security in the past, to my knowledge. However, he knows it’s a topic likely to be popular with the general blogger community and not too technical to push them away, while still being meaty and fresh enough to appeal to his regular SEO audience. (more…)

Google has officially announced first-click free, it’s new attempt to fist clueless fools for all they’re worth.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Huh? What? Read on to find out how Google is encouraging content producers to lose a little more control over their content in its ongoing efforts to fight copyright. (more…)

Noticed this through Sphinn, and I have to say, Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design has really hit a home run with her recent (more…)

25) 25 Tips on writing good titles. (more…)

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

So I got the following pitch in an email, in summary:

We will create personas and add value to communities around your topic and get links to you from members of those communities. Each link costs $xyzabcd.

When link buying turns into genuine, valuable editorial content that people would be happy to find in a SERP, which content only indirectly affects the links you built… is link buying still problematic?

Update: See more on what google wants, from the horses’ mouth.

Have a look – yours truly is in a Web Pro News video on buying sites, and at SEOmoz‘s Whiteboard Friday, where I shared some local search stuff!

Here are some of my most popular posts that I’ve published on this blog. You’ll probably find a few that you never read before, and if that’s the case, then I encourage you to dig through my archives. I hope you enjoy!

Social Media Analytics – How to Measure Social Media Activity (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Welcome Search Newz visitors! It seems that Search Newz’s syndicated version of my article, “If You Listened When Google Announced Submarine Crawling,” which follows up the one you’re seeing now, forgot to link to an important Matt Cutts video. So there’s the link to help you out. Anyways, on with the show – here’s what submarine crawling is all about, as interpreted from Matt Cutts’ explanations.

Matt Cutts’ post and this Webmaster Central post recently explained that “high quality” sites are being given special treatment – submarine crawling.

We all know that links from high quality sites are more valuable than those from average or mediocre sites. Now, Matt and Google have given us a new measurement for finding high quality sites – submarine crawling – and thus high quality link prospects.

Russian Submarine courtesy of Orpheus Grey.

So WHAT is Submarine Crawling? (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…)