Content Marketing Cannon is a new WordPress SEO plugin.

It consolidates many ordinary posts on topic X into the authority article on X, increasing longtail traffic possibilities, PageRank per post, and linkworthiness of your content.

Other benefits include easier browsing of archives (due to less pagination), time savings, and innumerable supermodels chasing after you.

To download this plugin, you can (i) “pay” with a tweet or Fb-share or (ii) get my latest posts in your RSS reader or email, free. (You need to wait for the weekly email to if you choose the email option.)

FYI: You can edit the tweet/Fb share or cancel before it appears in Twitter/Fb.

The problems CMC solves: pagination, PageRank dilution, content division

Blogs can only include so many posts on a category page before you need to paginate. And if you paginate, posts on page 2 etc won’t get as much link juice. Sure, you can set posts to appear that to 100 posts, but then the category page will take a while to load which isn’t ideal either.

I offered a few solutions to this problem in my advanced SEO book, one of which was:

Consolidate posts on a specific topic into a single authority article.

1) You get an in-depth authority article that is more likely to attract links than smaller bits of info.
2) The link juice from those articles consolidates onto 1 page, making it more competitive (e.g. use 301 permanent redirects).
3) There are more possible longtail combinations to hit.
4) You reduce the number of posts and thus have more PageRank flowing from the categories into posts . Also, you reduce the need for pagination.

An example scenario: Roof repair blog

In one post you talk about wooden roof frames rotting and in another about wooden roof frames warping shape and a few others on wooden frame issues.

You consolidate your wooden roof posts into the authoritative article on wooden roof damage. You 301 the subarticles (e.g. the ordinary posts now part of the authority post), and remove the 301 posts from the homepage, category pages, tag pages, search pages and sitemaps.

Thus your authority article has more PageRank than any of the subarticle ones did – and it stands a better chance to rank. Meanwhile, all the site’s remaining articles have a greater share of your PageRank, too.

Plus you now get longtail traffic you couldn’t get before because the two articles were on separate pages, like “wood roof rotting because frame warped.”

You can see a case study of the plugin at work from SEO consultant Kieran Flanagan’s SearchBrat blog. He beta tested the plugin. Here’s a screencap of what the results look like:

The problem is this demands a fair bit of manual work…

Unless you automate it.

Oh wait! That’s what Content Marketing Cannon does:

- Include any post in another with a simple shortcode that refers to the subarticle’s post ID: writing [ spid=123 ] in the article will include the post with ID #123. 123′s title will become an h2 in the authority article. (Don’t use spaces between the “[" and "]” .)

- Adds a column to the “edit all posts” page, which column displays posts’ IDs.

- Add a table of contents for the post Wikipedia style with another shortcode [ toc align=left ] or [ toc align=right ] (Don’t use spaces between the “[" and "]” .)

- Adds a box to the post editor page, below the main post area, which allows you to redirect the post to any article on your site. Delete the text and save again to undo. The plugin doesn’t assume you’ll redirect because sometimes, as on Wikipedia, content is included in more than one post. So you might want to use it differently.

- Removes redirected articles from the homepage, category archives and sitemaps.

- Adds a subarticles page to the WP Dashboard so you can find all redirected articles in one convenient spot.

- Adds a settings page for CMC where you can request tech support, new features etc. There will be more settings added to it with planned features.

So how do you get the plugin?

Either pay with a tweet, Fb-share, or get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.

FYI: You can edit the tweet/Fb share or cancel before it appears in Twitter/Fb.

Sponsors we’d encourage you to patronize:

Sponsors of the plugin helped develop the current set of features. They’re also helping us add an auto-redirect feature for the next version, which will automate the process even more!

Get professional SEO services from SlingshotSEO.com.

Get VPS Hosting from Prohoster.gr.

Get search engine optimization from Stepforth.com .

Get local SEO from PoweredBySearch.com .

Get link building from CanadianSEO.com.

Use a analytics URL builder from WebStrategy360.com.

Use link tools and other goodies from SEOTools.net .

Get online PR and social media marketing services based in Ireland from Simply Zesty.

Get WordPress themes built for direct marketing performance from Progo.com.

Image of Gisele Bundchen via BobBekian.com, creative commons license.

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 written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that provides a to do list application and, who also consults for a company that offers psd to html 5 service.

Google Analytics is great at collecting lots of data for your clients, but once you create a graph or a spreadsheet showing traffic and keyword trends, many customers will ask, “What’s next?” There is no shortage of website data available, but the hard part is figuring out how to create a useful SEO report that will help clients improve their return on investment and keep them happy.

Reports are an easy element of SEO marketing to overlook. While creating a report by itself does not magically lead to more hits on a client’s website, creating an actionable report is an essential tool that will make you more effective and help you retain clients.

How to Present an SEO Report

SEO reports force you to sit down with your clients and discuss the goals of their SEO strategy, measure their progress, and plan for future growth and effectiveness. As you look at the various reporting tools available, you’ll need to think of various ways to present data to different clients and different groups within larger organizations.

SEO expert Max Thomas suggests that a report to a marketing team should include more data and metrics as well as analysis that makes it easier for them to report to their superiors, while a report to a boss or board will need to be stripped of search jargon and focus on analysis that summarizes your findings in a way that shows your SEO work is contributing to brand awareness and the bottom line.

Sam Crocker of OMD UK, writes on the SEOMoz blog, “there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.” Different actions will be required by each segment of a company, and therefore be sure your reports target the specializations of each department—such as return on investment for the boss or keyword competition analysis for the marketing team.

Workbooks CRM

One of the most attractive tools for generating an SEO report is Workbooks CRM because of its price tag (free) and its powerful ability to track the conversions generated from keyword traffic.

Daniel Bianchini of SEOptimise writes in Search Engine Journal, “Workbooks is able to track from first touch all the way through to conversion from the site, and then on to completion of the buying cycle. With all this information you are then able to produce incredibly insightful reports and calculate ROI down to keyword level, allowing better analysis of SEO and PPC campaign effectiveness and improved efficiency in the allocation of budgets.”

Besides SEO effectiveness, you need to be able to present why the current ROI justifies maintaining the current strategy, adjusting it, or giving it a complete overhaul. In other words, the profitability of your marketing business and your clients rests on presenting a clear, easy-to-follow report tied to the ways your strategy is paying off.

Analytics Canvas

For a larger company’s SEO campaign, Analytics Canvas provides clear and simple SEO reports along with the added functionality of integrating data from the Google Analytics accounts for multiple websites. If you’ve ever been frustrated with managing multiple reports from a company’s various sites, this powerful tool will streamline your data into one report that allows you to capitalize on all of the data from your clients’ sites in order to create a complete picture of their market share and SEO success.

Analystics Canvas does not provide any unique data on its own. You’ll only be working with the data Google provides for queries, landing pages, and geography. It’s up to you to figure out how your brand is performing, but Analytics Canvas will allow you to integrate large data groups into charts that are easy to create so that you can present extremely broad trends and new opportunities to marketing teams and executives.

Recognized by Google as one of its top API developers, Analytics Canvas is not a free tool like Workbooks CRM. However, it should pay for itself with all of the time that it saves. If Analytics Canvas is a little too pricey for your budget, check out ShufflePoint.

Google Analytics Reports

As of October 2011, Google Analytics integrated Webmaster Tools data into reports, which SEO strategists had been clamoring for, but the data remains incomplete in the eyes of some reviewers.

SEO consultant Cyrus Shepherd writes, “The Landing Pages report shows how many times your top landing pages were shown in search results, again along with average position and CTR. Average position isn’t as useful in this report, as you don’t know the exact search query.”

In addition, the query report on the top 1000 terms presents the average position based on a metric that averages a page’s rank rather than simply presenting its highest position. While Google Analytics is easy to use and accessible, some of its tools will need refining before it receives a firm endorsement from many SEOs. Workbooks CRM provides a far more valuable insight into keyword tracking since it can tell you the exact return on investment for your keyword strategies rather than mere rankings. While Google Analytics provides helpful data for a marketing team, it still falls short of what you’d need for a report to a CEO or board.

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.

Ever needed to send a link request but lacked anything better than “webmaster@site.com” as a contact address? I’ve been back to basics with a client recently, and of course this classic situation has come up. Here are a few tools/tricks I’m using to get more information to personalize the email/phone call and increase the success rate:

1) Whois data: For those who don’t know, “whois” refers to the registrant information and associated contacts for domain names. Often a person is listed in the whois data even though the site itself doesn’t give any names of people to contact.

2) Sometimes, Whois only lists a company name. In such a case, I’ll look up the company on both Bing/Google and LinkedIn. Maybe the company behind my link-target-site has a brochure site about themselves with contact info. Better yet, maybe they’re on LinkedIn and I can contact them there!

3) At times, you’ll find a site for the holding company via Google but because of server or other issues, the site’s not accessible. And that’s where search engines’ cache and preview can be really handy! In particular, try a site:example.com inurl:contact search to find a contact page on your target domain, then use cache or preview to see if there’s an email or phone number publicly visible.

4) Another valuable resource I just discovered is searching for a company by name – often yellow pages type directories come up in the results with valuable data.

Liked this post on link building? Get my latest posts by RSS or 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.

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.

Want to learn usability testing? I promise that any complete beginner who applies the lessons in this guide thoroughly will see a higher conversion rate in 30 days, guaranteed!

Q: What is usability testing? What is remote usability testing?

A: Usability testing is the process of having people interact with a website and provide feedback on it. The purpose of this testing is to find out why users are using the site as they are.

The value in understanding why users behave a certain way is that you get actionable insight, which raw data on what users are doing doesn’t tell you. You can see what’s tripping up users and fix it!

Note: Usability testing is also used offline for testing products, but for our purposes we’ll stick to website usability testing.

Remote usability testing is a method of usability testing where the users testing the website are in a different location than the person giving the test. The test giver, known as the moderator, sets up the test and provides instructions on what to do.

For now, let’s see how usability testing works. Later we’ll address specific issues like remote vs in-person usability testing, moderated vs unmoderated testing, and what tools to use for specific tasks.

How Usability Testing Works

Photo credit sxc

There are 5 steps to running a usability test.

1. First, you decides on tasks you want people to do on your website, such as search for a product and add to cart.

2. You recruit users, ideally ones representative of the site’s audience for the test. Typically, 3-5 testers are used in each round of testing, after which changes are made and another round of testing begins.

(If you can’t recruit users, there are companies who do that and usability testing tools with panels of users you can recruit.)

3. Users attempt to do the tasks set by the site owner.

In the most popular and effective form of usability testing, test-takers record their screen and voice, while sharing their thoughts out loud as they use the site. In other types of usability testing, feedback may only be written afterwards.

A short questionnaire typically follows screen-and-audio-recording type tests. Questions focus on problems encountered using the site, possible solutions, and how the tester would have behaved had it not been a test.

4. You review the user feedback to understand what the users were trying to do and why. Make note of the most common difficulties.

5. The site owner makes changes to the website to solve the problems discovered from the recordings.

Note: For ease of reference, I’m going to use “the moderator,” “site owner” and “you” interchangeably, but the roles can be shared between team members as you see fit.

Let’s see each step of the testing process in more depth.

Step 1: Deciding On And Writing Tasks For Users

The first step is figuring out and writing what you want your users to try to do. You need to describe outcomes for users to achieve, and avoid (to the extent possible) being too explicit in how to do a task, avoid mentioning the names of particular links to click (e.g. the task reads “learn pricing,” when the site has a “Pricing” link).

A good task description is, “Get in touch with us,” not “Click ‘contact’ and fill out the form.”

Photo credit sxc

Start by asking, what is the purpose of the site? Then work backwards and ask yourself what steps are needed to get a visitor to accomplish those steps.

The following example illustrates how this works at a coarse level, but you can go more granular and test sub-elements within each step.

Ecommerce example: Let’s imagine we’re usability testing a running shoe retailer.

6 – Purpose of the site: The site’s purpose is to sell running shoes.

5- Previous step: To sell merchandise, users need to checkout.

4 – Previous step: To checkout, they need to have added something to cart.

3 – Previous step: To have added something to cart, they need to have found a product that adequately meets their needs.

2 – Previous step: To find that product, the users must sort through the site’s products easily.

1 – First step: Before sorting, visitors need to be convinced not to bounce with a credible appearance that’s relevant to their intent in visiting.

For step 1, since users are coming to your site to do the test, they won’t bounce on their own. To find out if your site is credible and relevant, use a five second test task description:

Ask people to look at the page for five seconds, look away, then share what they remember. Does “what people remember” match the landing page’s traffic sources, such as search keywords and ad copy? Is the design credible or does it make people flee?

For steps 2-6, a regular usability test with screen and voice recording would work fine.

Task description

Good: “Find a pair of Reebok running shoes and buy them. Find answers to any questions that come to mind.” This leaves discretion to users to browse for Reebok running shoes the way they naturally would. This allows them the choice to browse with search or clicks, refine their options as usual… in sum, to be themselves, which is what we want to see.

Bad: “Click the Reebok running shoes button in the lower left sidebar, click on a pair of shoes, add them to cart, and fill out the checkout forms.”

Step 2: Recruiting Users

(image credit Vintage Military Ads)

This is where most web pros aspiring to run usability tests give up. Frankly, recruiting testers is hard.

First, it’s not always obvious who your audience is. Who are these “representative users” anyways?

To answer that, build personas (easier), and seek keyword-level demographics (harder). If you’ve never worked in the field, you can always email the owners of existing sites and ask them; if they’re competitors, look at
people offering the service in a different city or language.

Second, how do you go about soliciting people to test the site? Why would they care or bother? Where do you find them? How do you approach them?

Commonly, usability testing will pay testers for their time. With remote usability testing, paypal payments or online gift certificates (ex.: Amazon.com) are common. Others are interested in helping just to be helpful or because they’re friends.

Once you know who your representative users are, you need to find them. To do that, first try the free way and solicit amongst family, friends and contacts by email and phone.

After exhausting this pool or if your contacts just are too different from representative users (you’re starting a hispanic dating site without knowing anyone hispanic), you can run demographically or professionally targeted ads. Places to advertise include Facebook, PlentyOfFish, LinkedIn, MyAds (demographics powered by MySpace) and supposedly the Google Display Network (formerly the Content Network).

Another option that recruits directly from your users is Bolt|Peters‘ Ethnio recruiting service.

Originally, Ethnio was offered at a rate of a few hundred dollars per person because it was an offline, labour-intensive recruiting process. Today Ethnio is a software tool with a free trial that just requires you to copy-paste some code to get started. It intercepts visitors as they come to the site, asking them to participate in your test. The downside is that the test needs to consist of a survey or Usabilla click test, which helps but isn’t as useful as getting them to record their screen and voice.

Another easy way out of recruiting is buy a remote usability testing service with a panel of users.

Tools in this category that will have users record their screen and spoken thoughts include TryMyUI , UserFeel -whose panel includes testers in the UK and Greece- and UserTesting.com. (UI means User Interface, such as the part of the website customers interact with by clicking and typing.)

On a lower-tech level there is Feedback Army, which surveys visitors after they try using your site. While it doesn’t record audio or video, it’s also only $15 for 10 users to provide their feedback.

Note that these panels are only appropriate for sites geared towards a general audience. Sites requiring knowledge of particular jargon (e.g. SEO) won’t find representative users here, since user selection criteria are limited to demographics and tech-savvy (“technographics”), and don’t break down by vertical.

A word on “representative users”

Finally, while it’s ideal to get representative users, it’s also fine to get users who are less representative and grade on a curve, proportionately to how closely they match your audience. (Hattip Steve Krug)

Step 3: Running the Test

Once recruited, it’s up to users to follow instructions and do the test. This either happens at agreed-upon times (moderated testing), or at the user’s discretion (unmoderated usability testing).

Test Preparation

With moderated testing, the moderator either sets up a computer with screen and audio recording software before the test, or instructs users to use browser-based software to record their screens and voices.

With unmoderated testing, the user is responsible for ensuring the audio and video recording software is on and recording, at the right level.

Note: Both of these comments assume a regular usability test, as opposed to a limited or partial test aimed at discovering how users interact with particular aspects of the site. This includes mouse-movement tracking and click measurement tests, for example, as well as visual analysis tools like FiveSecondTest or predictive gazeplot-and-eye-tracking tool Feng-Gui.

A gazeplot generated on Amazon’s mobile homepage by Feng-Gui.

Tip: It’s important to make sure that both video and audio are recording at the start, and that the sound levels are high enough, to avoid wasting time and money.

What Your Instructions  Need To Cover

Once the audio and video are on and at the right level, there are three things your instructions must cover:

a. Asking the user to say what hes doing and why out loud, constantly. To quote TryMyUI:

“Clearly say exactly what you are thinking as you are thinking it. We are interested in your impressions, expectations, and the motivations for your actions. Don’t edit your thoughts as you navigate the website! Simply say exactly what you are thinking at each step.”

Steve Krug’s excellent book on usability testing, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, emphasizes that you should make clear it’s the website being tested, not the user. They can’t make mistakes here!

This serves the highly important purpose of preventing self-censorship, as alluded to in TryMyUI’s instructions.

b. Providing a starting URL for the user. With in-person testing, you’ll have this pre-loaded.

c. Provide a written list of tasks. Don’t just provide it orally, because you want to ensure the same phrasing each time.

If users get distracted and go off to do their own thing, the moderator gently encourages them back to the task at hand.

Step 4: Reviewing The Feedback

Once the tests have been run, what’s left is data – not actionable insight. To turn that information into actionable recommendations, the moderator needs to review the collected feedback.

His purpose is to look for patterns in what gave users difficulty.

By focusing on problems common to more than one user, you ensure that you get the most bang for your buck in making changes and fixing the site. This is also why running a test with one user is insufficient.

Conversely, to save time and money, you shouldn’t test with more than 5 users per round of testing. By the fourth or fifth user you’ll already know the main issues the site has and having the same problems highlighted another half dozen times isn’t productive.

The problems the moderator will discover can usually be categorized by WiderFunnel’s classic LIFT model of conversion optimization:

• Value Proposition: What’s in it for the user. This is the core which the other factors act upon.
• Anxiety: How design -security reassurances, layout- and content -answering questions, social proof- affect trustworthiness. Reduce anxiety to lift the conversion plane.

• Distraction: The page features too many eye-catching elements. Focus is drawn away from the page’s main purpose. Reduce distraction for more lift.

• Relevance: The degree to which the page matches users’ expectations before arriving. Increase relevance for more lift.

• Clarity: Do the design and content work in synergy to explain the value proposition?

• Urgency: Do users have a reason to act now?

To return to our earlier example of the online running shoe retailer, here are some things you would look for in your analysis.

First, as mentioned earlier, is the landing page’s credibility and relevance to traffic sources. Is the site secure? Is the graphic design professional? For relevance, you can show the traffic source (ad, link or search listing) briefly before taking users to the landing page. Within the five second test, you can ask if the landing page matches the expectations the traffic source created.  – Relevance, Anxiety, Clarity -

Visitors need to drill down and find a product that suits their needs. Can they browse and search their way through your categories to find an adequate fit? How effective are your refinement options? When clicking through to a subcategory or product detail page, does the content there match expectations? – Relevance, Clarity -

Third, visitors need to get sufficient information from the product detail page. Does the information answer visitors’ questions? Does it convey benefits? How scannable is the information – bullet points or paragraphs? Where’s the refunds policy? Are the shoes in stock? How much is shipping? – Value Proposition, Urgency, Anxiety-

Users also need to be able to add to cart easily, and then modify the contents of the cart. Is the add to cart button noticeable and clearly a button? Are the cart buttons clearly labelled and laid out in a hierarchy reflecting their importance? Does the site need all this information the checkout requests? – Clarity, Distraction, Urgency, Anxiety -

Step 5: Implement The Changes

Again, follow Steve Krug’s excellent advice: Change the least possible to solve the problems.

For example, instead of redesigning a page’s graphics to reduce distraction, comment out some of the graphics. Test again and see if that solves things. To save time on such visual makeovers, you can just use a visual testing tool like Feng-Gui or Five Second Test, mentioned earlier.

And don’t wait for the “upcoming redesign”… 99% of the time it’ll go live months after promised. In the meantime, you’ve wasted loads of traffic.

Miscellaneous Testing Tips and FAQ

How do I test…

… information architecture (aka the organization of content on a site into logical groups)? Use card sorting. Do users look for content where you expected? Do they click the right links to drill down to the content you want them to find? (Image credit Revium.)

… where people would click next? Look at click based tools like CrazyEgg or Usabilla.

… how people make their way through a model of the site? Try wireframe creation software that (i) lets you interact with the wireframe by clicking the navigation and going to the wireframes for the relevant pages and (ii) allows you to share your wireframes online, so testers can access them. Some wireframe tools are designed to only be used in a desktop environment, so read carefully to avoid that.

See

Remote Testing vs In-Person Testing Pros and Cons

Remote testing is

- Cheaper: Don’t need to pay for travel, premises, computer equipment, food
- Less work to organize
- Easier to recruit for because there’s no geographic restriction
- Commonly paid for via Paypal or gift certificates

In-Person testing is

- More personal, you can get body language
- A more compelling opportunity for the whole team to witness the testing simultaneously and debrief, which can get things moving faster
- Commonly paid for in cash
- Instantaneous feedback; you view the data as it comes in, instead of waiting until later

“Moderated Testing” vs “Unmoderated Testing” Pros and Cons

Moderated testing:

- Is significantly less likely to encounter errors requiring retakes, such as setup issues with hardware or software, or testers veering off topic
- Yields richer, more useful data
- Tends to have representative users

Unmoderated testing:

- Sometimes yields obnoxious or useless responses, like FiveSecondTest and Feedback Army testers more interested in accumulating credits or micropayments than being helpful.
- Costs less on an individual test basis, because there is no moderator, or because it typically involves testing narrow interaction aspects such as click tests or visual feedback
- Is commonly associated with narrow aspects of interaction
- Tests of particular aspects may or may not have representative users
- Can save time when run through a service with a panel of testers, such that recruitment effort is negligible. This advantage makes it an easy entry-point/stepping stone for beginners to enter the world of usability testing.

Additional testing tools references:

There are many tools available for usability testing specific aspects of a website, or the whole shebang.

Kyle Soucy of Usable Interface put together a helpful, comprehensive overview of these varied tools.

Concluding Tip: Start as early in the web design process as possible

- Talk about the idea with friends and family and see what are the most common questions/objections raised, so you can answer them.

- Create user interface mockups in Photoshop and do the 5 second test (with or without the site): namely, ask people to look for a few seconds, then look away and ask what they recall.

- Put early design mockups through Feng-GUI as a sanity check – are there too many visually ‘loud’ areas?

- Imperfect testing is better than none. As the French say, “the best is the enemy of the good [enough].”

Further reading:

Sensible – Steve Krug’s site
Usability Post
RemoteUsability.com/tools

http://okcancel.com/archives/article/2006/07/guide-to-remote-usability-testing.html

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/remote_online_usability_testing_why_how_and_when_to_use_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.

When it comes to the often-overlooked art of internal website optimization, too many people stick with the standard methods such as being mindful of keyword use within content and relevant tags.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with those techniques; they certainly won’t hurt unless you overdo them. However, there are yet other ways to improve your website’s internal optimization that take nearly no maintenance or additional thought, and which can provide a nice boost to your SERP rankings over a couple of weeks.

With that in mind, this article will showcase six optimizations to your website that you can achieve easily using free WP plugins. Take an hour today to make these changes to your website, and you may soon realize it was one of the most time-efficient efforts you did as part of your website promotion endeavors.

1) Show Most Popular Posts in Sidebar

Not only is this a great way to show off your most successful posts, but it’s also an effective
way to improve optimization of such posts. When you activate a sidebar list showing the most
popular posts, you’re automatically creating side-wide links to those posts. This will strengthen
the internal optimization of said posts, and likely improve their rankings.

How it’s done: There are several plugins that can be used to this effect, such as “Popularity
Contest” and “WP-views”.

2) Floating Social Share-bar

In this day and age, most webmasters already realize they should install a plugin that makes it easier for users to share content across their favorite social media channel.

What not all webmasters have realized yet is that a floating share-bar that follows users as they scroll down the page will indeed get more clicks. Each time someone bookmarks your content, you’re getting additional links, so this is actually a way to indirectly have users build links on your behalf!

How it’s done: The most popular WP plugin to add a floating share bar is called “ShareBar”; if
for some reason this plugin does not work for you, try using “Share Rail”.

3) List SEO Search Terms After Post

Links inside your website will go a long way towards effective search engine optimization, and the same guidelines apply as with off-site optimization: you want those links to be relevant to the content, and you want to use related long-term keywords as anchor text. This is why adding a list of incoming search terms to your posts linking to the actual posts, will usually help
improve your website’s ranking for those keywords.

Make sure to cap the list to the 10 most popular search terms, because too many internal links in a single page may trigger the link spam flags and actually hurt your rankings (based on experience).

In a future post, we’ll publish a case study that explains exactly how this plugin improves your SEO; make sure to subscribe to this blog, if you look forward to that!

How it’s done: If you’d like to add this feature to your blog, the most popular plugin is called “SEO SearchTerms 2”.

4) WP Minify Code

Code Minifying is a process that involves stripping off redundant code and annotations (which are often interspersed in your website’s backend) before they’re sent to a visitor’s browser. Doing so will often reduce the size of your pages quite a bit, which in turn will make your website load faster and improve the user experience.

5) Gzip Compression

Did you know that most modern browsers support Gzip compression, meaning that you can broadcast a compressed file with all the resources necessary to display your page, as opposed to sending the bloated individual files one at a time? This technique can reduce the total size of your website quite drastically (as much as 80%), which in turn will cause a noticeable boost in its loading times.

6) Server Side Cache

If you have a moderately busy website which relies on plenty of plugins and sophisticated features, you simply can’t do without a cache plugin. What it does is keeping a file with your website in static .html format which is served to your visitors directly (as opposed to rendering the website from all its dynamic code and plugins), thus significantly cutting down on the
strain to your server.

This approach will make your website load much faster to visitors, especially if thousands of them happen to access your website simultaneously.

How it’s done: There are separate plugins you can use to implement WP minify, Gzip compression and cache in your website, but the problem is that some of these plugins can conflict with one another. Luckily, there’s also a free 3-in-1 solution that you can rely on, and it’s called “W3 Total Cache”. Look it up, install it, and you’ll be amazed with how faster your website gets.

This post was brought to you by Pedro Cardoso who runs a site to help fix slow computers. Come see us if you could use some tricks and advice to make your computer faster, so that your hardware does not bottleneck your workflow.

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 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.

Why Create A Video Blog

A video blog is a great way to showcase your brand or business as an approachable and engaging organisation. Corporate video productions allow organisations to connect with potential clients and show a human side to their brand or business. A prospective client will always feel more comfortable using an organisation if they feel they know the people behind it.

Sales pitches, adverts and marketing strategies can’t connect with an audience like a personal one-on-one video can. This is why so many organisations of all niches and sizes are starting to create video content to engage with their future customers.

Where Should I Film My Video Blog?

You don’t actually need to step foot outside your house or flat to find a great filming location. A garage, spare room or simply just a room that has a bit of free space to set up your equipment could work perfectly as a makeshift studio.

What Equipment Do I Need?

What Background Should I Use?

The infamous Google white background can make any video look powerful and professional. It’s a background technique used by many corporates in their video blogs and it works like a charm. Surprisingly it doesn’t actually cost an awful lot to create this effect. If you’ve got a bit of a budget then perhaps you can afford a film standard white screen, but you can create the same effect with some white sheets or even just by painting a wall in a glossy white shade.

What Camera Should I Film With?

Depending on the style of your video, whether you want to appear sat down for a desk-side chat or standing up for a more animated performance you may need some different equipment. If you’re sat down you could use anything from a standard Webcam to a high end film camera depending on your budget. If you’re presenting a standing presentation you’ll need either a Flip cam or a standard camcorder and you’ll definitely require a tripod to position it. If you’re shooting at desk height you may find you can rest your camera on an object nearby to save you purchasing a tripod. The quality of your images will depend on the quality of your camera, but even the most poor quality visuals can be boosted in post production.

What Lighting Should I Buy?

Your lighting is what makes both you and your background look slick. You can use anything from household standing lamps (around £40) to industry standard florescent lighting (around £100+ per light). The brightness of your image can also be boosted in post-production so don’t fret if the lighting isn’t as bright as you’d hoped.

You’ll need to position your lighting as follows; one light to the right of your background, one light to the left and one left next to your camera positioned at a 30 degree angle to the subject you’re filming (perhaps yourself). This three-point lighting will help to give you the best quality lighting for your video production.

Here’s a quick sketch of what I mean:

What Microphone Should I Use?

If you’re using a Webcam or any type of video camera you may find you have a built in microphone that works rather well. Whether you opt to buy an external microphone will depend on your cameras positioning and whether it can efficiently pick up your voice from your presenting position. If you have to get an external microphone choose a lapel/lav mic. These mics capture great quality audio and are very easy to hide during filming.

What Do I Do When I’ve Finished Recording?

When you’ve wrapped finishing your video blog it’s time to get editing and work on the post production side of your corporate video. You can get a variety of free editing software if you’re a Mac or Windows user (iMovie/Windows Movie Maker), but it might be worth paying for a more extensive piece of software (Adobe Premier), which will offer some extra tools in post production.

When you edit your video try and keep it as short as possible; short and snappy is always a winner.

The post production stage will allow you to:

• Increase the brightness on your video if your lighting wasn’t bright enough during filming,
• Alter any colour aspect of your image you wish to enhance whether you want to give your video a warm orange hue, a black and white finish or a neutral white hue to make the image seem more crisp
• Get rid of any shadows that are being cast during filming or reduce any light glares or reflections spoiling your shot.

Using such tools will help make your videos look as professional and polished as possible.

In Sum…

Follow these tips to create effective corporate video blogs that present your brand or business as a powerful and approachable organisation.

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.

The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that need to be taken into account. We work a great deal in the eCommerce space; here are some of the ways I know will take your or your client’s business to the next level.

Put an End to Ranking Cannibalism

The problem

eCommerce websites are notorious for having multiple versions of very similar pages which can cause serious SEO headaches. This is because there might be multiple URLs as a result of sort/search parameters or category labels.

In an ideal world, you will have one page that ‘champions’ each keyword so you can concentrate resources and measure progress.

I’m not talking heavy anchor text linkbuilding here e.g. all links pointing at your page for ‘picnic blankets’ need to be for ‘picnic blankets’. I mean a general awareness across your organisation that you are trying to get ‘yoursite.com/picnic-blankets’ to rank for ‘picnic blankets’.

There’s nothing wrong with getting multiple listings for a term –if you can. But if a client isn’t visible for a term because they have split links and social signals between 2 or even more pages, get a first listing ranking, then you can worry about a second listing.

The solution: How to eliminate page overlap in ecommerce SEO

1. Generate a crawl report using SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool (or comparable software).

2. Run a Google Analytics Top Content report.

3. Go through the sitemap (and the site itself) to identify content that overlaps and go through the crawl report to identify pages with duplicate content.

4. You should now have a list of pages that need some attention from you.

5. Using the data from both the crawl report and the top content report, you can now run through each page and analyse the best resolution – this might be redirecting or canonicalising one page to another, building out the content on a page to make it sufficiently different or useful, or perhaps consolidating content from multiple pages into one hub and redirecting all link juice into one place.

If you are unfamiliar with the term canonicalising, then I am simply referring to the use of the rel=canonical tag. This indicates to Google and other search engines which version of a page you want to rank.

The rel=canonical tag is easily implemented by adding the following tag to the of a page that is not your keyword champion, but has similar content.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example/product12345.html" >

Manual implementation of rel=canonical across a site could take a great deal of time but there are numerous plugins for a variety of platforms which can make the process a lot less painful. Also, many of the leading eCommerce software platforms have started to incorporate automatic rel=canonical tags into their system to make the process very straightforward indeed. Check with your eCommerce provider or web developer to see what the situation is for you.

Caveat: Social shares don’t appear to redirect in the same way link juice does so take this into account when deciding what to do with a page.

If you are an SEO practitioner then I think you will be amazed at the impact you can have on a client site just by doing this kind of housekeeping. As Warren Buffett would say “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

Optimise Detail Pages’ Content with Structured Markup

There’s more to on-page optimization in today’s richer web than titles and keyword use, and with stronger competition, the need to go that extra step is increasingly important to gain an edge.

On-page optimisation for eCommerce websites is an extremely diverse subject but one area I would concentrate on initially would be on-page markup since it is apparent that Google will be focusing more and more on this in future. In particular, I would be looking at adopting the Schema.org principles.

Schema.org is a set of html tags for structured data that is supported by all the leading search engines. It allows you to add rich context to your website’s pages, by telling search engines what parts of the content refer to commonly sought information such as price, average review score, number of reviews, colour etc.

In turn, the search engines use this to make your search listing that extra bit jazzy. They create rich snippets in the search results displaying things like price, rating, availability, brand, condition, model number and much more besides.

The main benefit is an increased clickthrough rate. Over time, it could also actually improve your rankings because Google is working user feedback metrics like clickthrough rate into its algorithm.

Schema-Creator.org is a fantastic free tool which allows you to easily add the required markup to your pages. You can enter all the details about a product for example and it generates the markup code which you can then copy and paste into the page on your site.

Afterwards, you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure you have implemented everything properly.

Scale is currently an issue when it comes to implementing Schema.org but as this area advances, readily available tools to automate and scale this will almost certainly follow. There is already a WordPress plugin (I haven’t tested this yet though).

I would also suggest that many of the leading eCommerce software companies out there will create of add-ons or plugin because the future of SEO is all about a richer web.

If you have an able web developer then chances are they will be able to advise you as to the best way to implement structured markup in your particular situation. Planning a redesign or a restructure – now is the time to look at ways Schema.org can be incorporated into your code.

Finally, also in the context of richer markup, you might also consider implementing rel=author for any content, blog posts or guides you have on your site. Rel=author is an html attribute for the link tag (like the alt attribute for images) indicating who has created the content, and allows authors to carry their authority around the web with them, regardless of what site they write on.

This will ensure you or your client, any authors on the site and the website itself will all start to build a reputation within your chosen industry. At some point in the future when Google really starts to take into account the Google Authorship Markup (rel-author) you will be ahead of the curve and likely gain an edge over the competition.

Don’t Set and Forget Keywords

Very few organisations review their keywords’ performance regularly, if at all. That’s a big mistake.

To many, keyword research, is a set and forget exercise, believing it is possible to make your keyword selections and then just plug away building links and content for months or even years, regardless of whether that particular keyword is still performing well in a business context.

The first step we take with clients is to understand and analyse their keyword portfolio, in particular the performance of individual keywords and categories of keywords.

How you decide to structure your audit depends on the goals of your client, but we mainly analyse looking at metrics like current ranking, current traffic, current conversion rate, revenue contribution, future potential and time to conversion.

Time to conversion is a particularly interesting metric because it helps you to identify what stage in the consumer decision making process a keyword might fit into. This helps you tailor content that targets this keyword to be as relevant as possible to the user.

For example, a keyword might have an average time to conversion of 35 days, a relatively long period of time.

Such a keyword is likely at the problem recognition or information seeking stages of the consumer decision process. You would do well to encourage users who arrive via this keyword to download a product brochure perhaps, get a product tour or even a demo.

In contrast, if you identify a keyword with a short average time to conversion – say a few minutes to a few days – this would suggest the consumer is much further along in the decision making process. So you should be encouraging ‘add to basket’ type actions as visitors are clearly on the verge of handing over their money – offering up a product guide or a product tour is inappropriate this late in the process.

Point #6 in my recent SEOmoz post talked more about performing keyword audits.

Auditing keywords is no easy task. There is quite a bit of data to trawl through but it will be worth it because it can help you to shape an overall SEO strategy that delivers a far higher return on investment, over a strategy that relies upon throwing links at the wall to see what sticks.

• Look specifically for keywords that contribute a high-level of revenue or have a particularly high conversion rate – identify ways you could increase traffic on these keywords. Are you ranking as high as you could be?

• Look for keywords that have strong traffic but a poor conversion rate – this could be an indicator that something is going wrong and is a good place to start when it comes to fixing and optimising the performance of a site.

• Look for ways to branch out around high-conversion keywords. Identify common themes amongst your top performing keywords and see if there are associated terms that you could be targeting.

Essentially a keyword performance audit is about identifying opportunities and looking at ways to capitalise on them.

Build a Community

SEO and social are now inextricably linked – we are hurtling towards life after link trust so your website and your business need to be ready.

Building a community serves multiple purposes both now and later down the line:

• Build a loyal base of customers – brand loyalty, less churn, increased profitability.

• Helps with SEO – user generated content can help scale your SEO.

• Future-proofs your website – if Google switches to more of a social trust algorithm, you’re not going to end up out in the cold.

First and foremost, your community should be respected – don’t be ‘that company’ that fakes a community or sells them out to turn a fast buck. Building a community can be a long term strategy that is beneficial for both business and individual alike.

You can leverage the power of your community in the following ways:

• For content – encourage community members to add comments, submit reviews and generally contribute to your website. All of this is long-tail content that enriches your pages and helps improve visibility AND you haven’t had to write it yourself or pay someone else to.

• For linkbuilding – As Patrick Altoft from Branded3 points out: “Commercial sites struggle to attract natural links.” This is because the person you are requesting the link from knows that in some way you are going to (over time) benefit financially from the link, in the form of direct traffic and increased search engine visibility. Leveraging a community for links can mean running competitions and prize giveaways to generate social shares and actual links. Rewarding users for linking back to you, or even giving them an identity (and a widget/badge) to show their commitment to your community.

• Grow your revenue – encourage advocates/ambassadors by offering rewards and incentives for helping you as a business achieve your goals. Referral bonuses or community points that can be exchanged for goods or cold hard cash are great ways to kickstart a community growth explosion.

Use Punchtab – a great engagement app that helps you easily reward your community when they perform a particular action e.g. like you on Facebook, makes a comment, submits a review and so on.

For further reading, you should try Motivating a Community and Gamify your Community; both provide valuable insights and tactics for encouraging and building a community even in a commercial context.

More posts on ecommerce and ecommerce SEO:

Don’t Leave Shipping Rates To The Cart
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence
Ecommerce Widgets and more – video
How Inhouse SEOs can Add Value Beyond Search
Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Shopping

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.

Short tip for today, scratchpad style:

Retargeting ads are very successful … because they target an audience that already visited your site, and because they tend to offer deals to people who almost bought, but for whatever reason left before purchasing. These deals help push people across the threshold and get them to buy.

What if you did that offline? Someone comes into your car dealership and walks away with no keys… Call them back the next day with another offer based on what you think would close the deal. Don’t start chasing the next prospect [yet].

Have you guys ever done this? Or taken other online tactics offline?

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.

If you need web hosting, you can get a variety of other things, free! Hosting is a very competitive field, because companies can make $100+ / year from each user, and the reality is that most people don’t change hosts. As a result, hosting affiliate programs pay out commissions around $100 – even for new affiliates!

They’re willing to only break even in year 1 or even make that a loss leader, knowing that they’ll recoup their money in the long term.

As a result, you can get free:

- Programming services/code
- Logo creation / design
- Custom landing page designed and coded…

How does this work? You buy the hosting through someone’s affiliate link so that they get the commission, and in exchange they provide you with whatever service you’re seeking. In essence, you get hosting and the hosting company pays for you to get a bonus.

By extension, if you’re willing to move hosting each year, you can get this deal annually…

I’ve done this so I know it works .

Liked this post? 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.

Want to a/b test your WordPress (WP) website without the cranky, unreliable Google Website Optimizer (GWO) plugins?

The problem with using Google Website Optimizer with WordPress:

1. Google Website Optimizer was designed with static html pages in mind, as opposed to pages created by a content management system like WordPress.

Each post on a WordPress-powered website relies on multiple different files, such as header.php, sidebar.php, post.php etc. Google Website Optimizer requires you to place code on the page you’re going to test, which is made more difficult because of the dynamic inclusion of the header, sidebar, body of the post etc.

2. Various WP plugins supposedly resolve the difficulty. In fact, they don’t solve it for two reasons:

• These plugins limit what you can test to the content of the post, and not the title, layout, navigation and other very important aspects of the page.
• They don’t work with custom themes – which is likely your case if you’re putting money into A/B testing or multivariate (MVT) testing. I’ve failed to make GWO work on this WordPress site despite numerous efforts and following instructions to the letter.

In short, what you need is for your WordPress pages to be static html …

So here’s how to a/b test any page/post on your WordPress site, and any aspect of it!
All for free using Google Website Optimizer…

1) Navigate to the WordPress page you want to test, in your browser.

2) Click File -> Save File As and download the page. With Firefox, this downloads two things: i) a folder including all the graphics, CSS and backend voodoo that makes the page pretty and ii) the final html that is sent to the browser to display on your screen.

3) Upload the folder and html file from step 2 to your server. This is your control version of the page.

4) Create one or more copies of the folder and html file, and edit as needed for your test. This is your experimental version of the page.

5) Upload the copy/ies to your server. Important: Don’t upload to a folder in which WordPress is installed, because doing so will cause the newly uploaded page will take forever to load (in my case, 30 seconds+). This means that if WordPress powers your whole site (e.g. it’s installed in the root folder), you’ll need to test on a subdomain or another domain. I suspect this may also be true of trying to upload the file to a page where other CMSes are installed

6) Edit both the control and experimental pages to include the Google Website Optimizer code.

7) Optional: Use a 302 Temporary Redirect on the existing page to send the traffic to your control page and let GWO split the traffic between the “A” (control) version and “B” (experimental) version of the test page. You want to use a temporary redirect because you’re only doing this until you find a better version of the page.

Alternately, you can use a 301 permanent redirect if you don’t want to be bothered keeping the WP version of the page later.

Optional: If you tested layout or something graphical besides content, have a dev create a special “page template” that you can select when creating a new WP page. That way you’ll be able to keep the new version within the control of WordPress, while getting the higher conversion rate of your new version.

A summary of this approach’s benefits:

- It’s easier than breaking your head trying to install GWO on a custom theme and never succeeding at having it validate.
- It provides more flexibility in what you can test than the existing plugins out there.
- You’re still using GWO, so it’s free.

Liked this workaround to a/b testing using GWO and WordPress? Add my rss feed to your reader for more tips on conversion and usability and advanced 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.

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, including easy ones like simply asking them to remove it, or bureaucratic messes like filing a DMCA complaint and reporting it to Google. But neither of these options is practical when your’e dealing with more than a few sites or a few dozen pages of content.

In looking for an effective strategy to combat scraper bots you should consider a multi-faceted approach that is scaleable, and then pick up any that get through the cracks using cease and desist letters and reports to Google and/or their host.

The Multi-Faceted Approach To Fighting Scrapers:

#1 – Due Dilligence
First, make sure your message is heard loud and clear. Have your copyright visible in the footer of every page, and include something like the following on your Terms page, as well as in an area commented out within the body copy code:

<!– COPYRIGHT NOTICE: The content of this page is owned by MyWebsite.com and is protected under copyright law. All rights are reserved. Using this content in any way is forbidden, except when permission has been given explicitly in writing from MyWebsite.com. Any use outside the given permissions constitutes copyright violation and will be prosecuted within the full extent of the law. All access to this website is logged. –>

While that probably won’t stop a lot of scrapers, it provides you with the first line of defense and shows that you have done your due diligence from a legal perspective should you have to file a DMCA report.

#2 – Robots.txt
Disallow any bots that you don’t want accessing your site from your robots.txt file. While a lot of scrapers will ignore your robots.txt file (more on that later), many of the popular tools used to scrape websites do respect this file. As an example, you might consider these two lines:
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: /
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0 Disallow: /

Disallow a specific file and then record any traffic that accesses the file, which should also have a robots noindex, nofollow tag on it. For example…
Disallow: /do-not-open.html

#2.5 – Bait the Trap
Now link to the disallowed file from within the body area of every page on your site. It can just be an href tag, or you can put the link around a 1 pixel image if you like. All of the “real” search engines will respect your robots.txt file and not visit that URL. If they don’t respect that file then you can bet it’s a rogue bot, even if they are “spoofing” Googlebot’s user-agent.

#3 – Htaccess (Or your Windows server equivalent.)
You should be recording which IP addresses, referrers and user agents access that do-not-open.html page, whether with a script or just by viewing the log files. The next step is to block all of those from accessing your site. You have some options here. For instance, you could deny them access, send them to a custom page (like ScrewYou.html), or get a little tricky and redirect them to their own IP address, which has the benefit of crashing some bots by sending them through an infinite loop. Eventually they’ll get the point and just stop coming to your site.

You can try and get a head-start on the process by blocking the scrapers that are already on blacklists like…
Referrer blacklist by Perishable Press
User Agent blacklist by Perishable Press

For more technical instructions, including the code to use in your htaccess file, see this great post on PerishablePress.com: Eight Ways to Blacklist with Apache’s mod_rewrite

There are probably as many ways to deal with content scrapers as there are ways to scrape content, including several WordPress plugins that mostly just ensure the scrapers give you a link by embedding them into your RSS feeds. What are your favorite methods and why?

[Editor's footnote: Conversely, if you have legitimate uses for scrapers, here's an article on three web screen scrapers for SEO. And if you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader! ]

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.

In a thought-provoking article, Russ Virante of Virante SEO asks whether, instead of manually checking through competitors’ backlink profiles, it’s perhaps possible to automate the analysis, at least to dig for paid links. He suggests that by using SEOmoz’s link index, and comparing the numbers on some backlink profile metrics against those of Wikipedia [which has never manipulated its backlink profile], it’s possible to get an idea o how natural a site’s backlink profile is.

I think the idea is brilliant, but there’s another caveat beyond that listed: not all categories of sites build links in the same way/pattern. Nor do all industries.

In fact, Wikipedia is quite unique in that it’s reasonable to expect that more of its links go to deep pages than the home page.

Conversely, for SMBs (for one example), it’s much likelier that most links will go to the homepage. Think of the basic directories, mentions in local press, BBB etc.

I get that the idea was to find a site that hasn’t manipulated its backlink profile intentionally, but the choice of Wikipedia still has several other difficulties.

The fact remains that this automated analysis of link profiles is a pretty clever notion. Perhaps a better alternative would be to use the tool on competitors in the niche and thus appraise what they’re doing at a glance, in contrast to oneself/one’s agency.

Check out Russ’ tools.

• Link Proximity Analysis Tool
• Source Link Depth Tool
• Multiple Links Analysis Tool

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.

Flipping websites is a common and popular practice, but you can make more money in the long term by renting websites out, instead of getting a one-time payment for them.

This technique only works in a few niches; one in particular is the local business niche. Many local businesses are still in the dinosaur age and this means one thing: It’s time to cash up on local businesses that have no Internet presence whatsoever or a very weak one if that.

One reason local Internet business marketing can be so lucrative is that while the keywords have low search volume, they are still worth an enormous amount of money to the right people, and they also tend to have weak competition. City-service keywords are some of the most unique type of keyword phrases in terms of SEO and ROI on the planet and cashing up on them all starts with owning the exact match domain name.

How to GamePlan Your Strategy

Getting into the local business market fast is all about owning the right domain names to begin with. The “May Day” Google algorithm update of about a year ago – hit people banking on exact match domain names pretty hard. But exact match domain names are still very effective in the local business niche because competition for the keywords is very low, and thus the exact match still holds a lot of weight in the Google algorithm.

Rural Regions vs Large Metropolitan Areas.

Keyword research is absolutely crucial for choosing your domain names.

You don’t want to choose a keyword that has no search volume – and that is the exact problem with areas low in population. The search volume is so low that it not measurable, thus it is a good idea to use this strategy is highly populated metropolitan areas only.

The problem with large metropolitan areas, on the other hand, is that in the last two years, a large percentage of exact match domains have been registered – so you can’t get a hold of one unless you pay a premium on the aftermarket. However, if you find the right niche (HINT: Dumpster Rental is one good one still available widely across America) you will be able to cash up.

Side Note: There is a workaround for keyword research in low populated areas: use Google AdWords.

Create A Funnel of Web Sites

A funnel is when you create multiple websites aimed at targeting multiple different keyword phrases that all funnel people to dialing up the same number and reaching the same company.

You want to take this strategy to the large metropolitan areas. The reason is that in many large metropolitan areas there are suburbs whose keyword data is measurable. Your goal should be to make 3-15 different websites that have exact match city/service domain names. Example: “Miami Bankprutcy Trustee” and its suburb “Grapeland Heights Bankruptcy Trustee.”

Finding Clients and How to Charge

Finding a client(s) will be the toughest part of the whole procedure. The best place to start is with friends, family, or friends of the family. If no one you know owns any sort of local business then it’s time to start cold calling or further networking within the area. The good part about not having a client right away however is that it will give you time to work on the SEO for your websites so that you can establish rankings and have something to show them when you pitch.

Another good idea is to get a phone number up and running on the website. Phone.com is a pretty cheap way to get an (800) number up very quickly of which you can forward to any number you like (they provide numbers for around $5 a month).

It will automatically keep track of all your calls and how much time each conversation lasted and from who it was from. This is valuable information, especially when you are trying to make a sale. Any local business will tell you that there main goal is to get somebody one the phone – and if you can do that for them then you will have done your job in the marketing department. Some local businesses even have it down to how much money it is worth every single time the phone rings.

What you go about charging will depend on a lot of different things. You’ll need to price each niche differently mainly because a potential client is worth different amounts of money depending on what business you’re in. The higher amount of money a potential client is worth – the more likely that you will be able to charge that company on a monthly or annual rate.

The less a potential client is worth – the more likely you will have to charge your clients per lead. Although this is more frequently the case, each situation is different and you might be [doing the opposite:] charging a dentist per lead while you charge a dumpster rental company on a monthly or annual type deal.

When you design them you want to make sure that you use the triangle theory as part of your design. What do I mean by that?

The triangle theory was a study that Google did back in 2005 that shows that the first thing that a person looks at when entering a website is the top left corner, and that their eyes scope it in the shape of a triangle. You want to make sure that you get a logo, phone number, and any free estimate form you have in that triangle.

Side Note: Once you find a client that wants to run with you, this is when you will be plugging the logo and phone number in. A good way to do this is to order a number from Phone.com and redirect it to the company. That way you can see just how many leads you are generating them – which is essential if you are going to charge by lead.

While your off-site SEO like link building and social networking won’t be as important (exact domain name helps that a lot in this niche) your on-site SEO must be flawless. You really want to stress proper placement of keywords. Your link building will consist of 10-50 links obtained through quality paid link directories or some sort of contextual links.

You should begin to see these sites ranking within 3 months given that you chose some quality keyword phrases. After that it’s on you to go out there and get clients!

This article was written by Anthony Benedict. Anthony helps to run and maintain inetzeal.com. This website is an entity of an Internet marketing company which provides many services, which includes a white label link building service as well as many other services that you may get a SEO Quote on at any time.

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.

The purpose of advertising is defeated by “engaged” audiences. I came across an old advertising saw in Vanessa Fox’s recent article about the Food Network vs AllRecipes traffic battle, namely that advertisers want an engaged audience. That’s idiotic.

Why?

Engaged audiences don't click.