Odesk: Change the world, make $250

Am I the only one to see the irony here?

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This is a guest post by Jonathan Villiard. You can find him at his SEO website and at his Funny Blog.

Yeah, OK, so Gabriel knows about local SEO, cool. But he does not know all there is to know, since he never gave you the following advice!

Here is a simple yet effective tip about how to have your company show up on Google Maps!

Now I just have to wait to see if Gabriel will add this advice into his book…

Thanks Jon for this fun Friday Photo guest post !

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.

Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation.

Seen in a Google AdWords account I manage:

Gotta love bloopers .

This is part of my Friday photos and fun categories. Like it? Get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.

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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Been doing some local events lately. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting…

Rebecca Xing, a Supply Chain Management and importing/exporting expert, also a graduate of John Molson. (Picture needs to be rotated and it’s not working; will post soon.)

Martin and Tom from Izzit Green? I was really impressed by their ideas and savvy, so keep an eye on them.

Karen Tucker, who’s now starting her own administrative assistant recruiting company, as well as Bernie Li, a principal of iNovia Venture Capital.

Paul Dawalibi of Praized, a local services and software platform.

Kelly Rusk, community manager for Smart Hippo mortgage ratings n stuff. No picture unfortunately. You can also check out her own site at Web2DotWhat.com and find her on Twitter.

Francis Moran of inmedia, Matt (didn’t see the last name) of Backtype and John Beales of 4RoadService were other cool acquaintances, but somehow it didn’t occur to me take pictures of these folks. Go figure.

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.

Hey SEO ROI readers – time for another Friday Photos! Today I’ve got analytics stuff for you, advertising tidbits, some interesting/miscellaneous calls-to-action stuff, and some SEO material. This post is filed in the case studies category fyi.

SEO ROI Services had its 100,000th visitor this week! I was a bit of a stats hawk and watched my Sitemeter analytics just as the number went from 99,999 to 100,000 (and no, I wasn’t the 100,000th visitor ).

Another little item that was fun to see show up in my logs was another branded search for my content. This person was looking for my item on “Peekaboo Navigation,” which as you can imagine, isn’t a generic keyword. These branded searches help with link building.

Still on the analytics side of thing, while researching for an ad campaign, I found that some networks openly share the referrer data of their publishers. Referrer data is useful for retargeting, and also for link building if you’re a competitor of that publisher!

Sticking with the ad topic, I was stumbling around and got to EbaumsWorld, an entertainment site. I’m not sure why, but WPromote had banners running there as a roadblock (i.e. they bought all the banner slots)! Additionally, they’re not even following the AIDA formula for making banner ads.

By contrast, the Conservative Party of Canada have a self-deprecating banner on their site that does use AIDA, directing youth to join the party. You’re already there, so they’ve got your interest, there’s attention because of the headshot and then desire/action are generated by the simple slogan, “Freak Out Your Roommate. Join The CPC.” IMHO, they’d convert more visitors if the following page stuck to the roommate line, but telling folks they can freak out their ex-girlfriends works too!

Speaking of taking action, I noticed this social call-to-action area and thought it was visually pretty yet simple, so I thought I’d share it.

I also liked Microsoft’s ad for its social media accelerators, which you can use in your IE8 browser to go direct to Facebook (which MSFT partly owns) Digg (which MSFT supplies ads to) etc. Smart! The only thing that wasn’t clear was what the Windows logo was there for, since it appears the other accelerator is for Live Search, not Windows Operating System.

On the same topic, an ad encouraging people to buy Acai Berry garbage – which features testimonials of a dubious legitimacy – lead to a lander with this hidden, weasel-legal language:

On a related note, whoever designed the FTC’s website didn’t engineer the complaints page to maximize click-throughs to their complaints form. Your eye moves down this text column, separated by a long vertical bar from the neighbouring one. The actual button to get to their complaint form is on the right hand column, which fast-scanning readers like me would miss, causing them to give up!

While we’re on the topic of getting users to submit content, how about this request for reviews I got from Amazon? Pretty simple and to the point, in my books, so it likely works well. Plus it boosts their site’s usability, I’m sure. The only problem? I never opted in. Amazon isn’t only broken, they’re spammy too!

Getting back to basics and sticking strictly to SEO, did you know you could get distribution by default via Twitter? This is what I was talking about in my SMX West presentation in reference to Portals 2.0. Highly useful for link building, particularly with linkbait.

On that note, here’s an interesting recent screenshot that shows how valuable exact match domains are, both for the boost Google grants them, and for the superior links you can build. Quality beats quantity.

That said, some people are clearly very effective at launching sites with a massive [whitehat] content strategy.

Finally, some amusing items from Google. First, they called me a Kunt. Or maybe that was an Obama-esque Yes I “Can,” in Dutch? Second, they need to SEO their AdWords FAQ. Third, their submarine crawling seems to have outfoxed itself by crawling my search form and “discovering” content that wasn’t there. I’m not cloaking anything, so it really beats me how they got that snippet, when the landing page shows no posts.

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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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!

Want to promote your content? How about running display ads trying to encourage people to read you?

In a related vein, I’m seeing more and more sites offering cash for UGC providers. This sort of thing has been around since I got my guest writing start back in the day with Sitepoint and ISEdb, it’s true, but my feeling is that it’s accentuating and getting mainstream. See e.g. Helium.com’s ads all over the content network.

The following ads are interesting because they’ve been running all over the place (the first and third ads). When you see particular copy repeated all over the place, you know that it’s successful.

The next screenshot features Google’s own advertising on the NYT, which ironically violates their own policy banning capitalization of every word.

Illustrating an experience I’ve had myself when bidding on an acronym, these advertisers bidding on the keyword ‘wow’ are not getting their money’s worth. The email correspondence was my ‘wow’ reaction to someone’s behaviour, and nothing to do with the Sham-wow product (which some are calling a sham, period), nor with World Of Warcraft.

Would you like to become a fan of Sun Life? Why? So you can have the power to advise others on their finances? This has to be the cheesiest, least compelling ad I’ve seen. Not to mention that it looks like they’ve got the Raisin Bran plastic figurine (they used to give it away in cereal boxes) for a mascot. There are better ways to build your brand.

For example, a great way to build your brand is with quality content. When people want to reread, link to or share it, they’ll search for it again. Here are just a couple of recent examples of that. While ‘link buying 2009 is arguably generic, an intitle:link intitle:buying intitle:2009 search shows only 22 other results, none of which are about the topic, so my feeling is that someone read the post first and wanted to return to it.

Now, onto some interesting direct marketing stuff. First, you fail if your thankyou page is public. That’s no way to track anything.

Second, you win if your thankyou page has a contact-us-immediately-for-emergencies phone number.

Third, Air Canada’s admitted to spamming me with various BS newsletters I never opted-in to (they got my email because I had the misfortune of flying with them to SMX).

Fourth, my student union sent an email out whose subject line looks like something from a Nigerian viagra spammer with Eur Mi11i0n$ for me to inherit from Kink QuasiM0-dough.

Finally, we get to some search-specific stuff.

Did you know Google doesn’t know what good content means? Maybe that’s why they’re indexing tracking URLs.

On a related note, I saw this quirky result in Google Maps, which methinks be geotargeting. Some hotel on Quebec street, in Leeds, UK, was shown to me prominently, which I would guess has to do with my being in the province of Quebec, Canada. That said, it has a bunch of positive reviews, is in the city center, has an image, so it’s pretty well optimized for local search and this may be nothing to do with geotargeting.

Last, but certainly not least, did you know that different folders can constitute different sites, where Google’s rankings are concerned? And that may apply even when the two folders don’t constitute separate websites (as is sometimes the case with hosted blog providers, who let people blog at provider.com/yourblog or provider.com/hisblog). Separately, I think that this SERP domination indicates that Google sees Adsense as a pretty big money keyword…

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.