I’m organizing a contest for SEOs to share their most creative and powerful tactics, which I first announced to my advanced SEO newsletter / the people who get a free chapter from my book. Entrants can win a variety of prizes, discussed below, and the best entries will be included in the next edition of The Advanced SEO Book.

In my last email, I said that I was looking for feedback on how to run a contest seeking new SEO tactics and case studies. Many of you generously chimed in with prize and voting suggestions, in particular that you would prefer for the prizes to be memberships to tool sites and the like.

Well, you asked and I’m delivering. (more…)

Andy Hagans used to run TropicalSEO.com, and I’ve reposted his popular quiz as to whether your site was defensible and updated it for 2012.

My updates and comments are in square brackets [ ].

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David McBee, one of the web’s savvier link builders, shared with me this parody, tongue-in-cheek infographic about infographics, via ComicalConcept.com:

I like it .

Answer: “We have a big win coming up!” hehe .

I don’t normally do PPC but have been for my work with illuminea and a client, Traffix Systems, who came to them for web design who also was running AdWords ads… very badly.

It occurred to me you could also say, “We have an 20% conversion rate!”

Got any big win stories of your own in online marketing? I’m always looking for case studies to publish here! Contact me for details, or start by reading the guest post guidelines page.

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:

Read this brilliant comic by XKCD, parodying a popular field of internet marketing…

It’s funny because it’s an observation about reality which is absurd… and yet, I wonder if this is worth testing as an internet marketer…

I recently failed to find things when searching by name. I tried looking up a foreign song by its name, and a restaurant by its name, address and city (all in one query). Both those searches failed.
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The IM scene here in Israel is growing and is ripe for a monthly meetup for schmoozing and having fun with your peers. That was most evident this Sunday at SphinnCon, which was very well-attended and featured some pretty impressive presentations from the likes of Barry Schwartz of Rustybrick Web Dev and Adir Regev of Go Internet Marketing in particular.
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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! (more…)

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. (more…)

To my friends, acquaintances and readers: I’ve got a sweet link opportunity for you that combines charity with trusted educational links.

Together with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s student union (the “Aguda”) and the Office of Student Activities of the Rothberg International School, we’re organizing an anti-smoking programme. The idea is to give away -free – nicotine gum to students who want to quit, to help them kick the habit.

We’ll be setting up stalls where students can come ask for a pack of the gum, and invite them to give us their names/emails for follow up to see how they’re doing a little later. Permission marketing rather than interruption marketing, to avoid giving away gum to students not really determined to quit.

If you want to contribute to buying these gums for students, send me an email at gab@seor.. for details. I’m taking payments for this through Paypal, as well as contributing $1000 myself. We’ve also got people matching donations dollar for dollar, so that if you give $10, you’re helping us get $20 total.

For the links, any donation over $100 gets you a link on the aguda’s old, trusted site and another one on the program’s site. We may get a third link n Rothberg’s site, but it’s unclear for now.

I’m not sure whether we can give optimum anchor text, but I’ll do my best to arrange it. For the record, Matt Cutts approves of charity-donation links.

Again, to send money and get links, email gab at this domain (seor..).

It’s sad in a way, but one of the biggest businesses online is charity. Numerous sites out there will handle payment processing etc. for charities for ‘only’ about 3% of donations (the same as Paypal or any credit card processing company). I’m trying to set something up with student union of my university and accepting donations online is proving to be a challenge. For those who qualify in the UK, however, I’ve found one site that does this for free : (more…)

10. Why yes, those viahra footer links will rank our kids’ toys site higher.

9. We’re experts in the three types of link: the reciprocal link, the paid link and the chainlink.

8. Of course it’s normal for link counts to change day-to-day by +/- 50,000.

7. This will cost you your time, money and sanity. (more…)

Carolyn Nolte, Customer Service Manager at Footshox, a company that sells insoles and shoe inserts, understands what it takes to seriously impress customers. (more…)

To all my readers: If you’re going to SMX Advanced, I’d love to meet you. I’ll probably check comments on this post etc Monday n see what’s up, but the easiest way to meet is to: (more…)

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

You all know I hate spam email. And chances are you get annoyed by those too. But people don’t have a problem with opt-in email newsletters … or do they? Here’s an April Fools trick to get your friends spammed by legitimate email newsletters!
by Tancread
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I’m accumulating a list of beefs I have with the current iteration of the site and am already at over 20 grievances. I would love to hear your problems with the site. Nothing is too small or too big or too trivial or too stupid. Often the ‘stupid’ ideas are the million dollar “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas.

Great answers get a free download of my super secret PPC plugin for managing multiple landing pages off a single wordpress minisite. Plus you can have the satisfaction of seeing your ideas implemented in the redesign .

Also, the title’s questions are just a starting point. Feel free to recommend plugins, highlight usability problems, suggest superior seo tactics, advocate for how I should use the header space currently taken up by varying taglines/testimonials (besides the search bar), different graphics, different conversion paths/tactics … anything!

UPDATE: In response to complaints about the font, I changed a global style in the stylesheet so the first font listed in the font family reads “Arial”. Please tell me if this is easier for you to read!

Aaron Wall, cuz I love reading his blog and in particular when he releases new fantastic tools like this. Even better when those tools let me gloat about my call on the trend towards  data commodification. (more…)

Matt cuts cv leeks [for pita filling]!

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