My friend Andrew Breem of Outshine Online Marketing asked:

“As far as I can tell, you’ve built your business as a sole consultant as opposed to say building out a big team. Was this a conscious decision or did it just evolve? I’m at a cross roads now where I’m trying to decide exactly what route to take and I’m considering both approaches. I’d love to hear your opinion on why you made the choice you did, if you don’t mind sharing. ”

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

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

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

That’s for circumstances.

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

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

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

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Brian Wallace runs NowSourcing, an infographics-specialist consulting shop . They recently redesigned and Brian was kind enough to tell me why and what the process was!

Q – Tell us what your goals were.
BW – To create a classy custom feel to showcase our infographic design and social media services. The old site showed the typical internet marketing services you’d expect, but we wanted a more visual feel as well.

Q – What were the problem(s) with the old site?
BW – We wanted to make a great showpiece site highlighting our infographic work as well as our other services. Additionally we wanted to show the depth of our team. Earlier iterations of our site were mainly the strength of the blog but did not highlight our services enough.

Q – Why not just tweak old site, why do a full redesign?
BW – that’s a measure we tried before. Sometimes it makes more sense to really jump to the next level and make a big splash rather than incremental updates that site visitors might not even notice.

Q – Did you guys do usability testing as part of the redesign? what did you discover?
BW – Yes we did and for good reason. It’s important to check out new sites on all sorts of platform/browser and screen resolutions.

Q – Who did you work with and how did you select them?
BW – We worked with longtime partner NoFavorite out of NYC. Greg Passuntino and the gang are the best

Q – Any tips on redesign workflow to be efficient?
BW – Have swift, brutal and honest feedback. You’re not hurting anyone’s feelings. Just make sure to back it up with suggestions.

Q – What advice would you have for others redesigning?
BW – know your target audience and don’t just make something that only you like. Marketers are often in their own echo chamber. Show people outside of your industry. It will pay off in the end.

If you liked this, check out more interviews in seoroi.com/interviews or get my latest posts by email or RSS.

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This interview with David Wallace of SEM Firm SearchRank was part of a series of interviews I ran with prominent members of Sphinn. Note that these were carried out a couple of years ago, and thus are partly dated – but also interesting to see what still holds true and what predictions have come true.

See the full list of previous interviews at the end of this post, for more interviews.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

Traffic to my own site when posts I have authored go hot.

Also, Sphinn has allowed me to come across some really great posts that I might have otherwise missed due to the fact that I cannot add every possible feed to my reader.

Finally, it has allowed me to connect to some new people in the internet marketing industry as a whole.

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

How about two? Getting several stories to the home page which drove traffic to the site and very likely allowed us to pick up some new subscribers and also being able to highlight other people’s posts, especially those that might not get the attention they really deserve.

3) What other social networks do you participate in (Digg/clones, Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace, Ning-type sites, forums, specific blogs you comment on a lot)? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

I have pretty much given up on Digg. I have been using Mixx a lot lately and of course submit stuff to Small Business Brief (www.smallbusinessbrief.com) as well. Besides that, I am on Twitter all the time — it is always an open tab next to Bloglines.

As for user names, I typically go by my name (David Wallace or DavidWallace) or my company name (SearchRank). Most often I share content that is either related to search or social media. However on Mixx, I submit a wide variety of content including Christian related topics as well as anything related to Disneyland.

4) What features would you like to see on Sphinn?

Maybe a “Groups” function? It would also be nice to receive email notification when people “stalk” you as with Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

5) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Inactivity and don’t work to build their networks.

6) Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

Titles attract me. I have the “new Sphinns” as a feed in my reader which is where I most often come across new Sphinn items.

I also tend to return favors. In other words if people submit my stuff to Sphinn or other social media sites, I like to return the favor.

Number three – I am a sucker for humor, things like Matt McGee’s “Reasons Why You Need a Break From SEO” and the like attract me.

7) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

Probably “Authority – people will be most persuaded by you when they see you as having knowledge and credibility on the topic.”

I originally gained exposure by publishing articles on Search Engine Guide and then getting involved in forums such as High Rankings, Search Engine Watch and Small Business Ideas. From the stuff I wrote and the help I offered via forums, people came to see me as a person of authority in my industry.

What is the future of social media?

It is only going to grow. I think we will eventually see social media creep into just about every site in existence, at least those that want to draw repeat traffic.

I think we will also see social media sites drive significant traffic. I am already seeing sites like StumbleUpon and Digg drive more traffic than some of the smaller search engines such as MSN and Ask. Whereas SEO was getting kind of boring, social media has opened up a whole new world of possibilities in online marketing.

The Sphinn Interview series previously featured Tad Chef, Pat Altoft, Sebastian,  Dave Harry, Bob Gladstein, Bill Hartzer and Wiep Knol.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
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Ted Ulle is a veteran member of WebmasterWorld, where he’s better known as Tedster. He moderates the HTML and Google SEO forums there, as well as serving as an Administrator. He’s on Pubcon’s advisory board, the chief search strategist at Converseon, a global online marketing agency for enterprise-level companies, and is on Twitter as TedUlle. You can find out more about Converseon and Ted’s professional affiliations at the end of the post.

I saw Ted give a remarkable and controversial presentation at Pubcon Las Vegas 2010, where he notably criticized most implementations of dropdown navigation as overstuffed. We spoke afterwards and Ted consented to give me the following interview. For answers that required clarification, I inserted an asterisk at the appropriate spot and added the clarification question and answer immediately after.

1) Shari Thurow criticizes SEOs who organize information architecture (IA) around keywords. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyNCxltHrxk ) Assuming you have content that matches those keywords, what is the problem with that practice? Isn’t that “siloing” or “theming” your navigation?

I’d say Shari is right. Information Architecture (IA) needs to be designed around the VISITORS’ needs.

If you start from a foundation of “I need to get these particular keywords into the main navigation”, then you’re very likely to miss the optimum way to bucket your content. What you want is a natural, self-explanatory set of buckets that make browsing the site a joy instead of an anxiety.

There’s a major difference in context going on here. Keyword data is generated by people who are using a search engine. That context is pretty much unconstrained, semantically. But site navigation is offered to visitors who are already on your website. The context is now much more defined and constrained.

That said, once you do have visitor-oriented buckets, you certainly should use keyword research. It can inform you on how best to label those buckets for navigation. And I wouldn’t only use search engine keyword tools, either. I would mine social media, customer emails, and I would strongly advise involving customer service personnel in the vocabulary choices.

But again, themes and silo decisions are not, at their most fundamental level, IA issues. They are more like technical SEO issues. When it comes to creating the IA, SEO needs to be on the back burner and any compromises should lean toward visitor needs.

2) When a product can fit into more than one category (e.g. black shoes and New Balance shoes), should it be listed in both? Are alternative suggestions preferable? (E.g. Items in this category overlap with items in {category A} and {category B} ({links}) ) What’s your favored solution?

Human minds make extensive use of cross-categorization. That’s an essential survival trait for our species. The challenge is that no two people categorize in the same exact way. Any team who has worked on Information Architecture for a large site certainly has experienced this challenge, just among web team members.

So it’s inevitable that many schemes for classifying content are going to come up. However, it is essential to choose just one for the sake of not confusing the visitor. The visitor does not know your inventory or content the way that you do. If they navigate to the same item in two different ways, they will not be sure that it actually IS the same item.* Then they begin to feel that the site itself is confusing – and they lose the confidence needed to motivate a conversion.

So the main navigation – the core Information Architecture – needs to be a fundamental beacon that the visitor can depend on to stay oriented. The job of the Information Architect is to create a consistent structure that most people will relate to easily.

That said, there are certainly other ways to offer categorization. Faceted navigation systems of all kinds are possible through sorted site search, or via browsing categories. However these options should clearly be offered as alternatives, or supplemental avenues. They should not be presented in a way that is confused with the main system of buckets that forms the backbone of the site’s IA.

There are significant SEO challenges to these alternative offerings, too. But that’s a topic for another day. The essential point is to pick just one structure for the Information Architecture and then supplement that as needed to serve the minority needs that some visitors may have.

*) I don’t see how people are going to be confused by finding a pair of black shoes from browsing that category and seeing the same shoes when they click under “Brands -> New Balance.” Why would they doubt that it’s the same SKU. Perhaps this is more true for undifferentiated items/commodities?

Yes, I do see what you’re saying. I was trying to cover all types of websites in my comments, not just e-commerce. And that’s probably why it seems like we’re not on the same page. Pure shopping sites are ofen more like ordering utilities and customers can arrive with a pretty clear idea of what they want. However, when the product mix is diverse, then IA becomes important for getting more items per sale, as well as customer retention for repeat purchases – and that’s a major factor in ongoing success.

I’ve seen the problems that cross-categorized menu choices can make first hand, especially on corporate sites that are more by information than by direct selling. For a small e-comm site with a very homogeneous selection, users can discover almost anything they want quickly.

For shoes, you probably could have “browse by brand” and “browse by color” with no problem – but is that ideal for a main menu? How do you integrate the non-purchasing information pages, for example? And how do you draw the line on creating more splits? Browse by sport also seems important. Browse by gender? Browse by price? Browse by material? Laces versus velcro? The menu is getting chaotic now and I’m sure there are other divisions possible than the ones I named. What happens if the site expands into casual shoes and dress shoes too?

It’s been fascinating to watch Amazon’s IA evolve over the years. They do extreme testing and metrics, so each iteration is driven by results more than opinion. And they’ve now dropped the tabbed menu at the top completely – pretty much expecting people to use site search. Effective site search is another major challenge, but it’s not Information Architecture.

I guess Amazon became so huge that they couldn’t find a traditional IA resolution. How do you sell a Kindle book, a convection oven and a Steinway concert grand on the same site, you know? It is interesting to notice that the site search department choices are MUCH more limited than the department list on the left side.

3) Which popular shopping cart currently available makes it easiest to get IA right?

The fundamental job of the Information Architect should be done BEFORE the shopping cart is set up and products entered. That job boils down to two steps. They may sound deceptively simple, but they can hold a world of pain.

1. How should all the bits of this content inventory be grouped?
2. What should we call each group?

As you can see, those two sets of decisions need to be made prior to any technology choice. Most so-called “shopping carts” are a lot more than just a shopping cart. They are also a kind of CMS or content management system. Because they are hoping to be useful for many kinds of end users, they have grown in flexibility and complexity over the years. However, they still tend to embed various problems for both the Information Architect and the SEO.

My favorite third party shopping cart has no pretension of being a CMS – and that’s Americart. The code runs on a third party server and it is therefore platform independent. All you need to do is understand their tagging system and then tag your buy buttons. The entire structure of your site and all its pages is completely up to you. You can generate the entire cart with a spreadsheet.

When it comes to the vast array of self-hosted carts that are available, I’d suggest that the Information Architecture be established first, along with other need. Then the various choices can be assessed according to how well they match up.

Most of the shopping cart challenges I see are SEO related rather than IA related. But a website should never be designed to accommodate the shortcomings of any tool.

4) Jakob Nielsen argues that rollover/dropdown navigation annoys users. Yet dropdowns (when not used as a crutch) can help flatten a site’s architecture, thus improving indexing of deep pages. What guidance can you give people to get this right?

If a deep page needs more frequent indexing or link equity (pretty much the same thing) that does not mean that page changes its position in the information architecture. There are many other ways to drive the spiders besides getting shifty with the main menu – including links within the content, secondary call-out boxes, most popular lists and so on.

Nielsen is right. Changing the navigation means shifting the visible Information Architecture.* That is extremely disorienting. Imagine a highway that doesn’t standardize its road signs. Think of a hospital that uses inconsistent signage. That is a big problem for hospital signage because the IA of a hospital building needs to serve many different audiences: basic staff, professional staff, visitors, patients, and even investors.

Solving such a challenge is not easy. It often requires a trade-off or three. But we should always trade in the direction of simplicity and stability, rather than doing what seems opportunistic. Otherwise we confuse the visitor and they abandon our site. And well they should – we are messing with them!
There are a lot of tools in the toolkit. So don’t try to throw every possibility at every possible application. Let your visitors calm down and breathe a bit so they feel welcome and at ease.

*) I don’t see how dropdown menus are like inconsistent navigation. I’d say a better analogy is the digital signage you increasingly see to explain upcoming road construction’s location and alternative routes to the now-blocked destination, in that they add more detail to the main message. Can you clarify your view?

In either case, whether it’s inconsitent navigation or dropdown/hover menus, visitors cannot easily compare their possibilities side by side – they are only seeing one at a time. This violates Steve Krug’s “don’t make me think” principle.

One of the challenges in any Information Architecture discussion is that the principles are highly abstracted – and they need to be applied in very concrete situations to have any hope of reaching consensus. Real differences between web team members are extremely common, just as you and I are having differences in how we see these principles right now. And we don’t even have a real web development project in front of us!

I don’t really understand your detour metaphor, for instance. As I said earlier, people do not all build categories the same way, even though we all build categories. If you and I were working together on a project, we would need to explore the mismatch between our thinking styles. That discussion could be difficult, and that’s why IA is so often abandoned – people want to avoid the feeling of conflict between team members so they buy into some agreement or other.

The end result of persevering through those difficult spots to arrrive at a real agreement is the creation of a great website, rather than just another standard website. The last IA project I worked on took 8 weeks of almost daily meetings before we arrived at a stable place.

5) It was common to see a site’s main navigation being largely ignored by users, who focus instead on the active window. Is that still the case today? Or is the ever-increasing familiarity with the web making that a moot point?

Yes, it’s still common to see visitors not clicking on the main navigation. But just because they don’t click a lot doesn’t mean they are ignoring it. It’s a quality signal, a grounding influence that they depend on if they should ever become lost as they browse.

Focusing on the active window is natural – and it means that you’ve actually engaged the visitor. They caught the “information scent” and are at ease. You’ve done your job. On a great website, the main navigation is a kind of “In Case of Emergency” sign.

There is such a thing as navigation blindness, too – something like banner blindness. That can often be the result of a design flaw. If the navigation looks or reads like and ad, then it wasn’t created with the visitor as top priority, but rather with some mistaken idea of SEO or boosting sales.

The best way to boost sales is to keep the visitor comfortable. Every visitor needs to learn a new interface every time they go to a new website. Don’t make them work too hard. A comfortable visitor is more likely to become a customer or client.

6) It is increasingly popular in ecommerce to use dynamic slideshows in the homepage’s active window, instead of offering various links to main product categories (which solves the problem of users ignoring the main navigation). What experience do you have with this? What’s theoretically the best solution? Does that differ from reality?

I’m currently working with a website that recently introduced a jquery slideshow approach so I can see the numbers for a present time implementation. The slide show certainly made the home page look snazzy as hell. The problem is, it isn’t improving sales – it seems to have hurt them.* Even worse, several home page rankings have also slipped since the slideshow’s introduction.

So the current debate is about dropping the whole thing and going with the old-fashioned approach again. That is what I would have predicted had they run the idea past me first. It’s good to experiment as long as you watch the metrics and make quite changes if the metrics show a problem.

It looks to me like this particular experiment had a negative result. As long as we don’t fall in love with our ideas, almost anything is worth a try. My friend at Converseon, Mike Moran, wrote a business book called “Do It Wrong Quickly.” That title just sums it up.

As a general rule, I’d say that slideshows are like any other dynamic navigation – even hover menus. The challenge is that visitors cannot see the possible selections side-by-side and compare them. And with any eye candy approach, you risk distracting the visitor from even noticing what your full offering is. I know that’s what happens to me, and I don’t like it. In fact, I get quite impatient with it.

*) Regarding the slideshow, is it the case that categories that are later on in the slide-deck are getting lower CTR than previously? Have you guys tested a slideshow that used previews like Yahoo.com’s news section?

In the case I’m currently looking at, it’s actually the first slide that’s getting the lowest CTR – no matter which option they put first.

Sorry, I’m not familiar with slideshow previews in the Yahoo news section – and I couldn’t find an example to make an informed answer.

7) How can someone get a deeper understanding of Information Architecture?
There are painfully few resources available, even after all these years of ecommerce. IA is hard work and most people would rather go into avoidance. There are a few resources I do recommend:

1. O’Reilly has a solid book – the best source book I know of, now in its third edition. It’s called “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web“. See

2. If you want to go the free route, Webmonkey has a long-standing IA tutorial. It offers you least a top-level survey view of what IA is all about.

3. And finally – come to PubCon in Austin TX this March, just before SXSW. I’ll be offering an “Expert Spotlight Session” on Information Architecture, expanded from the most recent Las Vegas session. For more on that see http://www.pubcon.com/austin2011-expertspotlight-conference.htm.

Converseon‘s been working with enterprise clients since 2001 and offering a unified approach to all things web. They were recently featured in the Forrester Wave report as having one of the top social listening technologies in the world. We are one of only a very few agencies to have access to the full Twitter Firehose rather than just an API.

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Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO

Fastcase is a new legal research tool that is bringing cool lateral thinking to the traditional problem of serving up legal search results. The results are some highly impressive innovations both in the algorithms that sort and rank the results, as well as in how the results are presented.

Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, gave me an interview to describe their process.

1) You found that legal research has a three way tension between cases with the most citations, cases from the highest courts, and recency of the decision. How does your algorithm solve that problem?

For me, the problem with traditional approaches has been almost the opposite – there was no tension in results. They were always served up in a one-size-fits-all order, usually highest court first, then most recent case to oldest. That ordering makes sense sometimes, but more often it doesn’t. One size fits almost nobody.

So we did two things. First, starting way back in 2003, we gave users the tools to order results in the way that was most useful to them – more than a dozen options. We don’t resolve the tension, we let users resolve it for themselves, depending on the type of research they’re doing. We’re big believers in empowering people with smarter tools.

And some of these options were the first of their kind – like integrated citation analysis. We show the number of citations to each case in the search results – it’s like Shepardizing each case automatically, and no other service does that, even today. You can sort the most cited case to the top, and when the first case has been cited 4,000 times and the second has been cited 8 times, that tells you something very important that you wouldn’t know without Shepardizing every case in the list.

Second, we resolved the tension by building an Interactive Timeline view of results – a 4D map of all of the results plotted over time. You can see at a glance how the results plot over time, which ones are the most relevant, decided by the highest court, most cited anywhere else.

You have to see it to believe it – when you see search results represented graphically, you can see how they score on each metric instantly [emphasis added] – so the tension between the different measures is resolved, and the right answer literally jumps off the page.

2) The idea of using citations the same way search engines use links – as a key ranking factor – is simple, yet the devil with any programming project is always in the details. What obstacles have you overcome so far in developing the software?

One of the biggest challenges was to give context and meaning to the citation analysis. When you run a search about a standard of review, you might get a case like Brown v. Board of Education in the search results, and if you sort by how often cases are cited, Brown would be at the top of the list. But Brown is a desegregation case, not a case about the standard of review.

So we built a tool that shows how many times each case has been cited only within the set of super-relevant search results. “Cited Within” shows with a click which case is most cited within your specific topic (and on your point of law). Again, this kind of citation analysis is only available on Fastcase.

The super-relevant set of results is basically the search results returned by the user’s search. When the user runs a keyword search, he or she gets back a set of search results (say, for example, 408 cases). We show how many times those 408 cases are cited anywhere else in the database in general – but some of those cases may be frequently cited for a different point of law. (Therefore) We also show how many times they’ve been cited by the other 407 search results – and most often that’s what the user cares about.

It’s a heuristic – that tells you not only which case has been cited most, but also which case has been cited most by the other cases you care about. And it’s custom-built into each search.

3) How do your visual search results make life easier for researchers?

Fastcase logo

Some people are just visual learners – for them, long lists of text results don’t tell the same story that an elegant data visualization does. Instead of viewing 20 or 100 results at a time, you can see all of the results on a single map that you can customize, zoom, and craft.

It’s beautiful – it’s also a ruthlessly efficient way to find what’s most important. For a visual learner, there’s really no way to be happy with text-based search results after viewing results on a visualized Interactive Timeline map.

4) Free legal research sites like CanLII give you the option to sort by most-cited or most recent. How does your search engine provide greater value (imagining you offered it in Canada)?

I love CanLII and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute – they’re terrific services and leaders in the field. We share a common goal of democratizing the law. But where the goal of an LII is to make the law accessible to everyone, at Fastcase we’re really trying to build the smartest, most powerful tools for lawyers (although there are nonlawyer subscribers, the vast majority of our more than 500,000 paid subscribers are lawyers).

So we focus on things that are more important to lawyers, like our Authority Check that shows later-citing cases, powerful search syntax that works whether you use traditional Boolean-style keywords or free-form Google-like searches. We focus on things like dual-column printing in PDF, Rich Text Format, and Word *.doc format, batch printing for multiple documents at once, customizable search histories and libraries for saving documents, and of course, data visualization and integrated citation analysis.

I’m really excited about Forecite, a feature we just rolled out, as an example of smarter tools for research. When you run a search, Forecite automatically reads all the cases in a search result and builds a table of all the cases that are cited. If a case is frequently cited by the search results – but doesn’t appear in the search results – Forecite automatically suggests it.

Forecite only suggests additional resources where the citation analysis says there’s something important that you’d otherwise miss – but you’d be surprised at how often that happens. If the seminal case is outside your jurisdiction, or uses older terminology than your more modern keyword search, Forecite acts as a safety net and delivers the seminal case you’d otherwise miss. It’s like magic – you can see more at www.fastcase.com/forecite.

5) When you started the company, how did you keep up your motivation? What were the hardest parts of building the business?

The biggest challenge has been assembling the legal information – from thousands of sources in many different formats. That’s why we’ve worked hard in the Law.gov effort, working in 2008 with Public.Resource.org to create the world’s first public archive of U.S. Supreme Court cases and cases from the Circuit Courts of Appeal. In 2011, we’ll launch the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) with Public Resource, which is a weekly collection of cases decided in federal and state Supreme Courts and Courts of Appeal.

Getting access to public domain law shouldn’t be the hard part of this process – everyone should have that. Publishers should be competing on who can build the smartest tools, deliver the best service, and at the highest value. That’s a competition that we’ve geared up to win, and we’re proud to work with the Law.gov effort to make that a reality.

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Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place. Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry, Bob Gladstein, Bill Hartzer and Wiep Knol.

Tadeusz Szewcyk, aka Tad Chef for short, does German SEO and writes the longstanding and successful SEO 2.0 blog.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

A name and reputation in the global SEO industry. Ability to discuss virtually with industry leaders. Being bookmarked, stumbled and mixxed by people who notice me on Sphinn. Getting authority, topical links. Ego massage.

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

Avatar, networking with other Sphinn users on many different platforms, catchy titles, being provocative without harming people, voting for others.

3) What other social networks do you participate in? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

StumbleUpon – onreact-com, Mixx – onreact.com, Pownce, Blogcatalog

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

Submissions and votes per URL view, report shady SEO directly to Matt Cutts, Sphinn member of the day Entrecard like rotation on Search Engine Land.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [A weak attempt at playing on 'social media' that no one I asked this of understood. = bad joke]

Both

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto, except Tad got this hehe.]
I don’t like postmodern puns. Done them when postmodernism was en vogue and I wanted to be a linguist 15 years ago.

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Focusing on quantity not quality. Focusing on traffic not people. Focusing on traffic not reputation. Being too much about business.

8 ) Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

Art, design, politics.

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

Reciprocation, liking, authority: I had a really tough time on Sphinn to get noticed, none of my first 20 posts went hot.

Only after getting linked, stumbled and being voted for by me people started noticing me. Then they liked me so much I was submitted and voted up on Sphinn with everything, even stuff that was mediocre.

Now this phase is over but I already gained the authority to make people read my stuff at least. So if my submission rocks it will still get hot.

10) What is the future of social media?

Social media will go mainstream for real while the audiences will get scattered around many interconnected platforms.

[Ed: Astonishingly accurate prediction!]

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Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place. Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry, Bob Gladstein and Wiep Knol.

Bill Hartzer is an expert SEO who also engages in corporate B2B website marketing.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

As an online marketer, it’s important to have a presence in the industry. I believe that by participating on a regular basis in sites like Sphinn you’re building a brand for yourself and your business. It’s not just about getting links or promoting certain blog posts or articles that you feel are important (although that helps, too).

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

The main “element of success” is to participate on a regular basis; it could be either a minute a day, 5 minutes a day, for 5 minutes a week. Just getting into a regular schedule of participating helps a great deal.

3) What other social networks do you participate in? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

There are a lot of other social networks that I participate in, perhaps even hundreds of them.

I believe it’s important to use the same username on all the sites you participate in because you’re not just participating: you’re actually building a brand and an online reputation. I usually use the username bhartzer, and a search at Google will give you some hints about the sites that I participate in on a regular basis.

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

I believe they’ve already taken care of the major issue that I had, which was an ability to report it as spam.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [A weak attempt at playing on 'social media' that no one I asked this of understood. = bad joke]

Huh?

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto, though Bill's answer acutally makes sense!]

Sphinn doctor=Sphammer. No, not really, but if you’re a sphinn doctor then you’re participating quite a bit–which is a good thing.

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes  people make with social media?

The most common mistake that people make with social media I would say is to not use it to get the marketshare of links quickly to an article or blog post. I’ve talked about this before, but it makes a huge difference (organically) if you are the first to get the “marketshare of links” on a subject or topic. The second mistake is most likely submitting your own stuff to social networks; at least if you’re going to do that don’t use a username that’s the same or nearly identical to your domain name or the name of your blog. Sheesh!

8 ) Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

Three non-Sphinn items about me? Well the first would be that I own 32 chickens and 2 roosters. Well, okay that’s not really something that people could use to catch my eye on Sphinn.

I personally don’t mind, though, if someone contacts me and points out a great story on Sphinn. That doesn’t mean I’ll Sphinn it, but if it’s important to you it might be important to me.

Something else that would catch my eye would be if you Sphinn everything that I submit. Oops! Am I allowed to say that here? LOL

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

Who is Cialdini? Just kidding.

Personally, I don’t think that there’s any need to go after those priciples. If you’re honest, you participate regularly in social media, and you point out stories or links that are good, then your friends will trust you by default. Use social media like it’s intended, we all can see right past the spam.

10) What is the future of social media?

There is definitely a big future in social media.

It’s easier now to see it because even the traditional media is beginning (finally) to accept it. We have CNN getting ready to launch iReport.com after having bought that domain name recently.

I find myself using the social media sites not only as marketing tools but to keep up with what’s important in the news. I use Sphinn not only as a marketing tool but also as a way of keeping up with what’s important right now in the online marketing industry.?

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Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place, as well as Twitter not being mentioned). Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Bob Gladstein, Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry.

Wiep runs the popular Link Building Blog aka Wiep.net, and co-founded LinkBuilding.nl which you’ll agree is pretty self-explanatory. (It’s part of the inspiration for me to get off my ass and do something with linkbuilding.ca …)

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

Sphinn turned out to be not only a great networking tool, but also the perfect place to find outstanding SEO related info. I subscribed to at least a few dozen RSS feeds from blogs that I came across on Sphinn since the launch in July last year.

The direct traffic to my own blog is a great side effect.

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

I guess that would be passion, dedication and a strange urgent need to
share stuff…

3) What other social networks do you participate in? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

While I try to use as many social media websites as possible, I always find myself struggling to find enough time to do this sufficiently.

I do participate on Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and a few Dutch social websites on a regular basis, though.

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

I’d love to see a “follow this user” option, or something similar. Lots of members submit nothing but excellent stuff, and subscribing to their submissions would make sure that I don’t miss anything of it.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [A weak attempt at playing on 'social media' that no one I asked this of understood. = bad joke]

Not sure what to answer here, could you elaborate a bit more?

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto]

You mean this guy (http://sphinn.com/user/view/profile/login/sphinndr)?

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Submitting stuff that’s not relevant to the community. For example, submitting a serious post about the latest fashion trends in France probably isn’t very interesting for the average Digg community member.

People will consider something that’s not relevant for them to be SPAM quite easily.

Because there are lots of communities that DO like stuff about French fashion trends, I’d recommend focusing on those communities in stead of just submitting your stuff everywhere.

8 ) Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

Do something with guerrilla marketing, graffiti art or football (soccer), and you have my full attention instantly. (Oh, and I hate to disappoint you, but unlike you mentioned in your YOUmoz post, I’m not a big fan of former Spurs player Davids… I’m a big fan of Dennis Bergkamp and Robin van Persie in stead, who happen to play for the Spurs’ rival Arsenal.)

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

That would definitely be Commitment. Participate with passion on a regular basis, and you will get noticed.

10) What is the future of social media?

The future is what you want it to be, since you have influence on social media yourself.

p.s. I pre-scheduled this and am currently on vacation. For more pre-scheduled awesome posts, add my rss feed to your reader!

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Recently, Sphinn has changed from a vote-driven (read:clique) system to editor-driven (read:non-social) system. This explains any things that seem out of place. Besides that, this continues our Sphinn Interview series, which previously featured Pat Altoft, Sebastian, and Dave Harry.

Bob Gladstein is the chief boss man (my words) at Raise My Rank, which offers SEO services in Somerville, MA. To thank him for his kindness with this interview, I’ve hotlinked the picture on his about page. ;D

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

It’s gotten me a decent amount of traffic on the rare occasion that I blog about search marketing and submit those posts. For the most part, though, I find that it works well as a news aggregator. If I don’t have time to go through all of the search feeds I subscribe to (which seems to be the case at least half the time), I can at least scan through what’s going on at Sphinn.

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

I’m not sure you can say that I’ve been a success with Sphinn. For one thing, I haven’t been in the top 20 in some time. On top of that, I don’t really use it with personal success as a goal. I see Sphinn for the most part as a place to share and discuss industry news. If it’s a question of getting posts to go hot, I generally only submit stories that I think will be of interest to a lot of people. Often, that’s largely a function of the piece’s author, and I want to stress that I don’t submit those stories with the goal of getting them to go hot. I just think they’ll be interesting to the community at large.

3) What other social networks do you participate in (Digg/clones, Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace, Ning-type sites, forums, specific blogs you comment on a lot)? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

I’m a moderator at the High Rankings forum, where I go by qwerty, on StumbleUpon I’m robertik, I’m Gladstein at SEOmoz, on LinkedIn and Facebook I’m Bob Gladstein, and on reddit I’m rgladstein. I’m also rgladstein on Digg, but I rarely log in over there.

High Rankings is really the only place I “work” and that’s only to the extent that I’ve done a lot for my reputation by helping out there.

I don’t really use any of these sites to promote content. I’ve tried that a couple of times on Digg, but that hasn’t worked out too well. For example, a client of mine published a fairly large study a few months ago. I submitted it to Digg, and it was almost completely ignored — maybe two or three diggs. About a month later, Guy Kawasaki wrote about the study (which of course got us a pretty good jump in traffic), so I tried submitting his post to Digg, hoping people would digg it just for name recognition, and that those who clicked through to his site would then follow his link to my client’s. I think that got about five diggs.

Reddit is where I discuss the stuff you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company: religion, politics, etc. (although I often write about that stuff on my blog, too).

LinkedIn has been fairly useful to me, but mostly just in getting in touch with people. An old friend from college joined a couple of weeks ago, so I invited her to join my network. That led to a couple of emails, and it turns out she’s going to be in town for business next week, so we’re going to get together for drinks. Up until the LinkedIn invitation, we hadn’t had any contact at all in over twenty years.

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

I’d like to see who voted a comment up or down.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [A weak attempt at playing on 'social media' that no one I asked this of understood. = bad joke]

Are you asking about my politics and my method for contacting the dead? Can’t I be both?

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto]

I’d say that’s someone who’s skilled at working the system, by building a list of friends they can count on to sphinn their content, writing the kind of content that they know people will jump on, either out of respect, support, or controversy. Basically, it’s someone who is good at using the site as a tool for self-promotion. You could call that gaming the system rather than working it, but I think that would unnecessarily inject the concept of ethics and the question of what the real purpose of Sphinn is. In any case, I would not call myself a Sphinn doctor.

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

I think some people are just too mercenary on social media sites, or they assume that everyone else is as mercenary as they are. I don’t personally see the value in becoming “buddies” with anyone and everyone I see.

Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

Well, non-Sphinn items about myself would probably be deleted from Sphinn if anyone submitted them, but I’m very interested in politics and the arts, particularly film (even though I never find time to go to the theatre anymore).

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

What, do you think I’ve got a marketing degree? I studied English Lit and the History of World Cinema. But I did some quick research on this Cialdini fellow (he didn’t really have an office under the seats of a stadium, did he?), and I’d have to say that, at least in my experience, reciprocation and authority seem to work for me. However, without having read Cialdini’s book, I’m looking at the definitions of the principles in a few different places, and they’re not all the same, so when I say that reciprocation and authority are most important, I’m referring to the definitions of the terms that can be found at http://www.marketingaprivatepractice.com/2006/04/what_it_takes_t.html and not the definitions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#Six_.E2.80.9CWeapons_of_Influence.22.

10) What is the future of social media?

I don’t pretend to know, but it’s big. And I find that curious, since for most users, the internet began with walled-in communities like AOL, which disappeared over the years as search grew in importance. Now, those communities are making a comeback. I imagine there’s a growing number of users who rarely venture outside of MySpace of Facebook.

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Mixergy.com is one of my new faourite sites, because it’s got a huge archive of high quality interviews with fascinating people! The guy making it happen first and foremost is Andrew Warner, whom I got to interview. Here’s what we discussed.

1) Which interview have you most enjoyed doing and why?

I knew I wanted to do interviews with entrepreneurs after I interviewed my friend Rosalind Resnick. She built a company from her house with no outside money and took it public. It was an inspiring story about what could be done in business. Even though I knew her for years, it wasn’t until I interviewed her that I learned the full story. I learned that interviewing will make me aware of just how much I don’t know and help me fill in those knowledge gaps.

2) What feedback have people given you in terms of the value they get from you site?

In many of my interviews, I say, “I’m doing this so you, the listener, could learn how to build a business from those who’ve done it. My goal is for you to take as much as you can from these programs and go out there and build something incredible. Then, hopefully, you’ll come back and do an interview with me and teach others.” I’m finally starting to see that happen. If you listen to many of my latest interviews with successful entrepreneurs, you’ll hear them say that they’ve been listening and now want to give back by helping others.

3) If you could improve 2 things about Mixergy, what would they be?

A. I’d like to find a way to have the audience pull out the key points from each interview. Hidden in those hour-long interviews are simple, usable insights. I need help highlighting them, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

B. I’d like to write better headlines. Each interview is thousands of words long, but the 7 to 10 words in the headline will decide if all those others will get noticed.

4) You’re really energetic in videos and engaging; is that a TV personality that you find necessary to keep people’s attention, or do you interact with people like that normally?

I’m more energetic in real life. I haven’t figured out how to bring my personal energy to the interviews and make it feel natural. In my old videos, when I tried being my high-energy-self, I sounded like a mental patient who had too much Red Bull. So I’ve slowed down.

5) What’s your vision for what you’d like to be doing over the next 12 months?

I’d like to pull out more key ideas from my interviews and make each one more useful.

6) How about the next 3 years?

Not sure.

7) I’ve noticed you have various collaborators who help with the site; how do you draw talented people to work with you and motivate them to keep working with you?

They’re all volunteers who’ve heard my work and offered to help. I’m very lucky to have their support and do whatever I can to make sure they get more value from the work than they put into it.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Patrick Altoft directs search for Branded3, a Leeds-based full service digital agency. He also runs the popular Blogstorm SEO blog and is a pretty interesting guy to chat to overall! Hit him up if you’re looking for search services in the UK!

We’re continuing a series of interviews I conducted in 2008 with active Sphinners. You might also like to read the interviews with David ‘theGypsy’ Harry and ‘Sebastian‘.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

I use my real name and people now associate my Sphinn profile with my blog. Any bit of publicity helps on the web.

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

1. Use your face as your avatar
2. Use your real name
3. Only submit great stuff

3) What other social networks do you participate in? (E.g. Digg/clones, Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace, Ning-type sites, forums, specific blogs you comment on a lot) Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

I use Digg and StumbleUpon and used to be active on Digital Point until it was overrun by to much noise.

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

I would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that tells me when my blog posts get sphunn so I can go vote for them too.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [A weak attempt at humour playing on 'social media'....]

Neither.

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto]

Somebody who can get to the front page of sphinn.

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Submitting content that is blatantly linkbait or content that is full of adverts.

Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

a. Mention my name or blog
b. Write something I’ve never read before
c. Give a real life example of making money from the web

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

I have never heard of Cialdini I’m afraid.

10) What is the future of social media?

Sites will try harder and harder to become spam free and probably ruin themselves while doing it. One persons spam is another persons clever marketing and it is a very tight balance.

Like I said, you might also like to read the interviews with David ‘theGypsy’ Harry and ‘Sebastian‘.

If you want to keep up with future interviews from this series, add my rss feed to your reader. You may also like my advanced SEO book.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Sebastian is the technical genius and SEO behind Sebastian’s Pamphlets. This warm fellow’s well-known avatar is rather ironic – a crab! We’re continuing the Sphinner interview series that began with Dave ‘theGypsy’ Harry.

1) What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn?

Sphinn is the best aggregator for SEM stuff (stories, links, discussions), ever. Despite the noise on the upcoming pages, Sphinn has all the news that matter. In other words Sphinn is a great time saver, although I didn’t dump my feedreader yet. Also I’ve met nice folks at Sphinn, people I wouldn’t know otherwise. Joining Sphinn was this decade’s best decision (besides moving my WebDev/SEO-pamphlets away from blogspot).

2) Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

Define success. I’m just a user, taking more than I can give back. Thanks to great Sphinners I’m pointed to interesting stuff, bookmark (sphinn) it, and every once in a while I submit a pamphlet and my fellow sphinners honor that with very nicely targeted traffic, thoughtful comments, and sometimes even links. I’ve no sphinny world SEM community domination plans.

3) What other social networks do you participate in (Digg/clones, Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace, Ning-type sites, forums, specific blogs you comment on a lot)? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

I’ve spread my red-crab.ico under the “SebastianX” label everywhere, but besides Sphinn I use only Delicious and StumbleUpon as bookmarking tools, and Twitter for gossip and communication. Of course I vote elsewhere for a tiny fee when nicely asked, provided I like the content. I’m not in the social media game. I just use those services when they make sense for me. In my spare time I help out Google with Webmaster support.

4) What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

On the submission form I miss the “bypass the new list” checkbox. Sometimes sphinn+save is not enough to praise an awesome piece, hence an easy way to manage a few dozens user profiles for power-voting would make sense.

5) Are you a socialist or a medium? [Me trying to be witty and failing miserably.]

I’m an anarchist. My code rules the chaos.

6) Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [Ditto.]

All sphinners properly feeding my ego deserve this title. Seriously, I nominate Michelle who keeps things running and makes Sphinn an even better hangout with every update. Having so many attention whores and probloggers in the community we tend to forget the seabees.

7) Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Taking it too seriously.

Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

I won’t sphinn “how to get raped by aliens” items like “new version of MS Visual Studio is out” and crap like that. Titles like “Why TrustRank is way sexier than plain old PageRank”, “Increasing index penetration without abrading link condoms” or “Automating unpenalized paid link gangbangs” get my vote for sure, provided the article is geeky enough and makes sense. You see, sex sells, even to old farts crabs like me.

9) Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

Social Proof. It might be wishful thinking, but I hope that applying a brutal zero-bullshit tolerance in combination with sharing knowledge and experiences can influence people and prevent them from crappy decisions.

10) What is the future of social media?

Getting plastered with so many ads that one can’t find the contents any more.

Thanks Gab!

Like I wrote above – this is part of a series of interviews with Sphinners. They were actually conducted years ago then left to rot in my inbox. Time to get ‘em out!

If you liked this, check out the interview with  Dave ‘theGypsy’ Harry, or get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

A long, long time ago… almost 2 years to the month… I asked a bunch of cool Sphinners I was getting to know for their advice and insights on that great search marketing network we know as Sphinn. For various reasons, I never published those interviews – until now! (SEOptimise reminded me.) In light of Twitter and Facebook‘s exponential growth in the past 2 years, the changes in the link graph this has engendered, and related developments, these answers are pretty interesting.

Dave runs the seo training center known as the Dojo. He’s got some remarkable testimonials, not least of which because of who is giving them. I recognized 4-5 names.

“Well sheee-it there monsieur Gabs, not sure what use this will be but I said I would give ‘er a go and I shall…. Right away I just wanted to say that while I appreciate your kind words and invitation to get social, I spend as much time playing the devil’s advocate in the world of Social Media Marketing as I do supporting it. I am certainly not a social media darling ( almost a Social Media Ninja though….)

Without further ado… let’s get into it;

What benefits have you seen from your activity at Sphinn ?

Well, I suppose the real benefits have been;

1. Making new friends
2. Padding my address book
3. Maxing out my reader
4. Some increased visibility
5. And of course access to learning something new every day

I am old school Social Networking 1.0 also known as being a forum hound. I really look at Sphinn as more of a place to exchange knowledge and talk shop. I haven’t actually benefited financially, as don’t look to it for revenue or promotion, just a place to hang out.

Share 3 – 5 key elements of your success with Sphinn.

Well, there’s the rub eh? I am not so sure what one measures ‘success’ with as far as the Sphinn-o-sphere is concerned. If it is measured by the dweeb with way too much time on his hands that likes hanging around the fringes of the campfire… then man, I am kicking ass. I am not so sure I am actually all that successful (or not). Seriously, I didn’t even come close to even being a runner up in the Sphinn Awards (wink); though I did once devise a plan to dominate the place.

What other social networks do you participate in (Digg/clones, Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace, Ning-type sites, forums, specific blogs you comment on a lot)? Can you share your usernames there, and what type of content you’d consider sharing with the other members of those sites as well what you wouldn’t pass on?

Well G I don’t really get out much. I spend much of my time running around swatting imaginary flies from the air while puffing on a pipe and singing ‘Everything is Coming Up Roses’. Or in simpler terms, I don’t really have a ton of time for the social spaces.

If not at Sphinn, I hang out at some forums (time permitting) and that’s the extent of it. I doubt I could manage more than one Digg/Pligg clone at a time anyways. I do enjoy Stumbling now and again though. I can easily be found by a search for my nic; theGypsy.

What features (besides those announced, like “Mark as spam/Bury”) would you like to see on Sphinn?

Wow, I have never really thought about that one. I suppose if I had to dream one up I would have the option of being updated about new comments for discussions you’re involved in. That would certainly increase the community involvement aspect I would think.

Are you a socialist or a medium? [Note: This was me trying to be witty by playing on social media, but I think it was too vague an allusion for anyone to catch...]

While I think some of the tenets of socialism have merit, I am far more drawn to talking to the dead. Really, imagine the parties? Heck, I could have a few glasses of cognac with Karl Marx and have the best of both worlds. Erm…… did I miss a memo on this one? I am guessing my answer wasn’t what you were after huh? Then I shall defer and go with; enigma.

Define the term: “Sphinn doctor.” [More awful wordplay.]

Sure, that’s the guy you call when the little blue button ain’t working on your site. Can you define the term ‘smart ass’?

I think folks that you might think of as a Sphinn Doctor may from time to time become Sphinn-addicts in need of said doctor themselves. It really is a circular course one can travel.

I am waiting until ‘social media burnout’ works it’s way into the medical profession and then maybe Danny can get some in house ‘Sphinn Doctors’ the heal their ills. Man, there is a comedy bit; Sphinn-a-holics Anonymous with Doctor Dan.

Besides only submitting their own stuff or only sphinning their own stuff, what are some common mistakes people make with social media?

Taking it too seriously. I have seen a lot of emotional moments amongst the socialites that feel unreciprocated and have suffered a few lapses in sanity myself along the way.

I go back to my outlook as far as having somewhere to play with others in my industry. If the most I expect from the exercise is some good times and shared knowledge, it is easier not to be distracted by the trappings. If you aren’t enjoying yourself any longer it will be very hard to participate productively. Forget the 15 minutes of fame or traffic spikes. Enjoy yourself.

Tell us a minimum 3 non-Sphinn items about yourself that people could use to catch your eye on Sphinn (i.e. to Sphinnbait you).

1. Anything to do with geeky SEO such as; Patents, Algorithms, Data, White Papers, Behavioural Metrics, I like that kind of gobble-d-goop. I started life off as a business planner/accountant.
2. Humor is an area I have an affinity for and so anything that lightens the mood or has me spitting my brew all over the keyboard is a great idea.
3. Ranting is another cathartic exercise in my world and so any good rant is going to catch my attention.

Which of Cialdini’s 6 principles do you feel most important to gaining influence and why? Can you share some anecdotes?

Sorry Gab, but influence peddling is not my area once more. I am but a humble bean counting business building by the numbers kind of guy. My favourite way to influence people is to make them money or to otherwise create a beneficial component to the relationship. Influence is a fickle mistress best left to sheep herders not bean counters.

What is the future of social media?

I am not really sure; I am not much of a prognosticator to be honest.

But if you look larger than the usual suspects to folks like CNN, you can see a greater role for user generated content in the media world. I marvel at the folks scrambling to be an ‘iReporter’ and larger media outlets cashing in on these financially feasible contractors. What happens should the media outlets start to compensate these content generators? Is it still social? I wonder where the lines of social get crossed with commerce what the ultimate storyline will be. I embrace with my capitalist arms the website owners making a killing from these fine folks, but how long the sheep continue to follow may dictate the ultimate evolution of ‘social’ media.

And something to get to know me better?

That’s easy; I love animals… here’s my collection;

1 Cat

3 Dogs

2 Lizards

2 Snakes

2 Tarantulas

2 Hermit Frogs

Thanks for caring Gabs… I told ya I wasn’t much for the Social Media world. I hope it is usable brother :0)

Dave

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

- A bunch of links to a thin site (e.g. without valuable content) doesn’t make that site a positive user experience. So don’t guest post at the expense/neglect of your own site.
- Google is getting better at detecting quality content (and presumably differentiating it from junk).
- More in depth sites are favoured for now.

You can probably come up with your own. In any event, it’s clear that this is a whitehat tactic, and Google’s John Mueller was just pointing out that new sites need good content.

Bottom line: When a well-intentioned but perhaps sensational SEO bloggers says something, don’t take it for granted – check the source yourself. It turns out that the following [conveniently ignored] quotations were also part of the interview:

“Q 12. What’s your take on articles submission websites? I do a lot of article marketing & distribution for my clients. These are original articles written and distributed through sites like eZineArticles and iSnare. Obviously besides the exposure my clients get as experts, I am also looking at the SEO benefit of earning backlinks from these posts. How do you treat multiple copies of the same article spread over different sites?

“John Mueller: As mentioned in an earlier question, it generally makes much more sense to create great content for your own site, instead of giving it to a large number of other sites to publish.

“Personally, I would recommend not looking at it with regard to the links; think about how users will view the content and the people who created it. Having high-quality content on your own site will make it stand out much more than if that content is posted all over the web. If the content is unique and compelling, it will generally attract links naturally over time.”

Furthermore, there’s this goodie:

“Q 23. I know that inbound links will help my site’s ranking in Google search results but is that true for outbound links as well? I always link to quality websites from my articles where my visitors can read more about that topic but do these outbound links aid search rankings as well?

“Kaspar Szymanski: No, they don’t contribute directly towards your site’s rankings; however they add value for your readership and they contribute to the community, so feel free to continue this good practice. On the other hand, being selective and preferring quality sites to link to might help in how Google perceives your site.”

Linking out is a good practice for users, so long as the links go to quality sites. If their content is good enough for your site, doesn’t that make their site good enough for a link?

I note also that question 11, which Rhys cites to support his view, is in reference to new sites. This supports my reading about not sending visitors to thin sites:

“Q 11. I have launched a new blog and it obviously won’t rank in Google because none of the reputable blogs are currently linking to it. Therefore, I am actively writing guest posts on other blogs as that gives me a chance to get a link from them. Is Google fine with guest blogging and do links ‘earned’ from writing guest blogs matter?

“John Mueller: Making and promoting a new site takes time and effort. In general I would recommend putting that work into your own site, instead of creating content for other people’s sites.

“It’s much better to create great content for your blog and to let other sites refer visitors to your site on their own. Good luck!”

@Rhys: you’re a bright fellow who I’m sure is already having plenty of success and will see more in the future – no need to get a little extra attention at the risk of misleading a LOT of folks.

“Proving to be a huge traffic source actually. Sent me around 100 visitors already today.

Ironcially they don’t do pingbacks, but must’ve got about 50 or 60 scraped links from it O_o ” – [Rhys' comment on Problogger.com]

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I recently had the opportunity to discuss some information retrieval theory with Dr Edel Garcia, who is a researcher and professor in the field, as well as a longtime SEW Forum moderator (aka Orion). He helped me understand what Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) is, and what it has been used for in the information retrieval field. Dr. Garcia generously agreed to let me publish our conversations on this blog.

(Update: Apparently Dr. Garcia is no longer active at SEW as a moderator.)

Inverse Document Frequency isn’t a measure of a page’s relevance, but can [potentially] be valuable for keyword research. However, Dr. Garcia recently presented a paper suggesting that an adaptation of IDF may be more valuable to keyword research.

Any grammar, spelling or other mistakes are my own.

Dr Garcia:

“Thank your for taking the time to email me. I hope this helps.

1. “I recall a point you made about keyword density being a silly metric, since it’s only valuable relative to the total index.” [Citing my email]

The first part of this statement is correct, but I don’t recall ever claimed the second part; i.e., that KWD is valuable relative to the total index.

KWD is not a collection-wide statistic, but a local one and at the level of individual documents only.

2. “I was just thinking – suppose you looked at the keyword density of pages outside the top 100, on non-competitive terms.

That is, scraping results 100 – 200 and then measuring the keyword density across all those pages, as your representative sample.

(The reason for going outside the top 100, and on a non-competitive term, is to find non-SEOed content, because it [SEOed content] would have more keywords than average.)”

Sure you can try to find collection-wide statistical averages of any kind … but why use a metric that is not used in IR for trying things [that are IR related], and on top of which does not attenuate term frequencies or lacks of relevance information?

It makes more sense to use one of the many local weight IR models for this purpose, like

1 + log(f)
[or]
log(1 + f)

etc. Or use normalized versions of these or entropy-based versions of these. [Ed: Entropy is a measure of how uncertainty a piece of information is, per Wiki.]

These models have the effect of scoring local weights and dampening down term repetition abuses (keyword spam).

Better, by using these your results are closer to what is measured by an IR system. These can then be combined with collection-wide weights in the presence and absence of relevance information (IDF, IDFP, entropy, RSJ-PM, OKAPI, etc)

3. “That would then give you an idea of the average keyword density across
the ‘index’, which you could perhaps apply to your own site? Or else you
could look at the median number of times a keyword appeared in these
non-optimized, “natural” pages and use that?”

It is hard to see a statistical justification for doing this at all.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
site: http://www.miislita.com [Features a lot of valuable research, for those who can handle the technical jargon.]
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Gab:

Hi Dr Garcia,

That helps broadly, but as with most of the content on your site, the jargon is way over my head so you lost me at point 2.

What I meant about KWD being valuable relative to the index is perhaps what you refer to as inverse document frequency.

In plain English, I understand IDF to mean that the less a word is used (up to a point), the more likely it helps describe that document’s content. And so, terms that are infrequently used across the collection are probably keywords (as opposed to stop words), and therefore worth paying attention to if you’re a search engine.

My point being that if you can figure out what range is “infrequent use” in a search engine’s collection, then you can edit your content to ‘infrequently use’ the keywords. Am I making sense?

Besides that, as a friendly tip, your content is evidently very erudite and researched, but it’s quite inaccessible to laymen. As you claim to want to help bust SEO myths and other silliness, you might be more effective (both directly in your communication and indirectly by gaining more links…) if you translated your material into simple English.

Best,
Gab

Dr Garcia:

Thank you again for taking the time to email me.

1. KWD is not IDF. KWD is just the frequency or number of times a term is present in a document divided by total number of words in that document.

This is why it is a local weight [i.e. as opposed to "global," which in information retrieval refers to your whole index aka collection of documents]. It is also not a log.

2. IDF is the log of total numbers of documents in a collection divided by number of documents containing a particular term, regardless of how many times
it appears in a document.; ie. IDF = log (D/di), where D is the total number of
documents and di is the number of documents containing a given term, ‘i’ [counting each document only once, even if a keyword appears in it multiple times].

[Emphasis added.]

3. IDF and KWD do not incorporate relevance information.

So, for all of the above, KWD is not IDF. They also measure different things. IDF is a measure of the discriminatory power of a term in a collection.

IDF was useful with early search engines and IR systems. But because large size search engines on the Web are too generic, it has been slowly phased out by models that incorporate relevance information and more stable as the size of the collection grows.

In the early IR literature, IDF was mistaken for a measure of term importance. Terms important to average users tend to have high search volume, regardless of their IDF values.

By contrast, very rare terms might have high IDF, but this not necessarily makes these important.

In fact, very rare terms are more likely to have low search volume simply because they are rare. Average users are not prone to query very rare terms at all.

If you want to find useful terms from past the top 100 or 200 results, I would suggest to identify those within that window containing high search volume instead. If you do that, you don’t need to worry about KWD or IDF.

With regard to my writing style, my target audience are graduate students and faculty colleagues, more than marketers.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Gab:

Hi Dr. Garcia,

Heehee, I like your tips and explanation on why it works. Matter of fact, I have used that technique before and continue to advocate it, as I did at SMX West as a Q&A mod on the KW research panel .

Cheers
Gab

Dr. Garcia:

Hi, there:

Here is a simple procedure for mining the Web for useful terms:

1. Query a search engine for a specific topic. This query can be of x number of terms or a single term.
2. Collect top N ranked titles (or entire documents).
3. Remove stop terms.
4. Remove dupe terms.
5. Evaluate with query tools their search volumes.
6. Sort these in decreasing order of search volumes.

(Try also by sorting combination of terms; i.e. phrases).

Note: The top N should belong to a topic in common (the so-called Cluster Hypothesis). [I didn't follow up on what that is.]

However, at times, if you use too ambiguous terms in your initial query, as you moves down N values it might be possible you will find that past the initial top N there will be topic transitions.

[Translation: If you use ambiguous keywords to start with, the further you go into the search results, the greater the chances you'll find keywords on a variety of topics.]

This also occurs when queries consist of combinations of too semantically disconnected terms are used (e.g., try with “aloha hawaii” versus “aloha anystate”, where anystate is any state of the Nation). I believe I covered this in an old Search Engine Watch Forum [post?] back in 2004-2006 or so.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com

Gab:

Thank YOU for taking the time to respond.

Also, I appreciate you keeping things at a level I can understand, since I’m sure that is an extra effort, given your main target audience.

Actually I found that very helpful, and was wondering if you’d mind my sharing that as a post on my blog?

Cheers
Gab

Dr. Garcia:

Hi, there:

1. Feel free to publish.

2. Glad you have figured that out. I spoke on that at SES NY 2005 in a remote presentation on co-occurrence theory.

3. I no longer speak at those events, although they were a lot of fun. To be honest, I realized those conferences are full of speakers promoting a lot of non-sense and SEO myths/hearsays/own crappy ideas, etc., which is a real shame. I have ever since concentrated on academic research events.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Dr. Garcia:

“Bit of a shame you no longer attend search shows just cuz some goofs DN what they’re saying. Doesn’t the free debate of ideas lead to the truth?

I’m thinking your presence would help minimize the spread of said crappy ideas, hehe!” [Citing my email]

My speaking engagement policies are clearly outlined in my site; i.e., I speak for free at non-for-profit events.

However, I don’t speak for free at for profit events. The only three for-profit marketing conferences I attended outside Puerto Rico were because the organizers generously supported my presentations (travel & hotel). These were Jupitermedia’s SES (NY 2005 and San Jose, 2005) and OJOBuscador Congress, Madrid, Spain 2007.

I prefer to spend the limited time I have to teach graduate courses on IR, and mentoring graduate students and their thesis work.

With these duties, writing my IR Newsletter, acting as peer reviewers of scientific journals and serving as program committee member of W3C’s AIRWeb Workshops, I simply don’t have the time for marketing conferences, nor do I like these when presenting “experts” are not so.

As for debating ideas in the open, that’s why I have the IR Thoughts blog: to debunk SEO Snakeoil. The blog is also used to contact students taking my graduate courses.

BTW: I am teaching a new graduate course on Web Spam wherein SEO Snakeoil Myths and case studies of these will be dissected. The syllabus is announced at
http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/airweb-course-announcement/

Talking about SEO Snakeoil, recently I have had to expose some flawed arguments from a Stompernet video regarding LSI.

They tried to debunk LSI, but the arguments used were completely flawed and did more harm than the myth they tried to debunk.

As mentioned to the creator of the video, before trying to debunk something at least we need to know (understand) what exactly is that we’re trying to debunk. We cannot just debunk hearsay with more hearsay as they did. Now, that is a shame. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Check here:

http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/finally-seos-are-getting-the-lsi-myth/

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

[My next email to Dr. Garcia just had some questions.]

Dr. Garcia: Questions 1 and 3 are related so I will answer both now. After that, I will
answer question 2.

“1) Why is a log function used for calculating IDF?

“3) Would it be accurate to describe IDF as ‘the ratio of documents in a collection to documents in that collection with a given term’? I’m guessing your answer would be, IDF is the [LOG of " the ratio of documents in a collection to documents in that collection with a given term"]? Which brings us back to question 1, I guess? hehe”

These are recurrent questions students have asked me before. The reason for using logs is due to two assumptions frequently made in most IR models;

i.e.

I. Scoring functions are additive.
II. Terms are independent.

While in some models II might not be present, both (I and II) play well with logs since these also are additive.

These functions and ‘why the use of logs?’ is explained in the recent RSJ-PM Tutorial:

http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/information-retrieval-probabilistic-model-tutorial.pdf

Document Frequency (DF) is defined as d/D, where d is number of documents containing a given term and D is the size of the collection of documents. If we take logs we obtain log(d/D).

But since often D > d the log of d/D, that is log(d/D) gives a negative value. To get rid off the negative sign, we simply invert the ratio inside the log expression.

Essentially we are compressing the scale of values so that very large or very small quantities are smoothly compared.

Now log(D/d) is conveniently called Inverse Document Frequency.

Now going back to d/D, this is a probability estimate p that a given event has occurred. Let the presence of a term in a document be that event. If terms are independent, it must follows that for any two events, A and B

p(AB) = p(A)p(B).

Taking logs we can write

log[p(AB)] = log[p(A)]+ log[p(B)]

It is easy to show that for two terms

log(d12/D) = log(d1/d) + log(d2/D)

[Ed: This isn't 12 in the sense of 6x2. See the explanation just below, marked as an update.]

Inverting and using the definition of IDF we end up with

IDF12 = IDF1 + IDF2

validating assumption I; that IDF as a scoring function is additive.

That, is the IDF of a two term query is the sum of individual IDF values. However, this is only valid if terms are independent from one another. If terms are not independent we would have two possibilities; i.e.,

p(AB) > p(A) + p(B)

or

p(AB) < p(A) + p(B)

and we cannot say that the IDF of a two term query (e.g, a phrase) is the sum of individual IDF values. Assuming the contrary as many SEOs think is plain snakeoil.

Update/Clarification: I asked for a clarification on all this, and Dr Garcia again generously shared his knowledge:

“The “1″, “2″, and “12″ above are mere subscripts, not values.

So IDF1 stands for the IDF of term 1, IDF2 for the IDF of term 2, and IDF12 for the IDF of terms 1 and 2. An example follows.

A collection conssists of 100 docs (D =100)

20 docs mention t1=search, so IDF1 = log(100/20) or about 0.7
40 docs mention t2=marketing, so IDF2 = log(100/40) or about 0.4

What would be the IDF of a combination of terms like search marketing?

If we assume that terms are independent IDF12 should be the sum. I.e. IDF12= IDF1 + IDF2 = 0.7 + 0.4 or about 1.1.

This sum corresponds to 8 documents of the 100 documenst mentioning both terms.

If we find out that more than 8 docs of the 100 docs, mention both terms, these are not independent from one another, but actually positively correlated.

For example if 15 docs mention both terms, the IDF12 will not be 1.1 but actually log(100/15) or about 0.8

The reverse scenario, if less than 8 docs of the 100 docs actually mentioned both terms is an example of terms negatively correlated, still not being independent.

Consequently, the exercise made by SEO keyword researchers of adding individual terms IDFs to come up with some sort of IDFs for phrases is flawed by all accounts.

[Ed: It just occurred to me that at any rate, you'd need to know the total size of the index in order to calculate IDF. AFAIK, that # isn’t public.]

2) What do you mean by ‘discriminatory power’ in the phrase “IDF is a measure of the discriminatory power of a term in a collection.”

This is legacy idea from Robertson and Sparck Jones. The discriminatory power of a term (aka term specificity) implies that terms too frequently used are not good discriminators between documents.

If a term is used in too many documents its use to discriminate between documents is poor. By contrast, rare terms are assumed to be good discriminators since they appear in few documents.

One particular research project I am working on contradicts the whole notion of defining the discriminatory power of a term using IDF. I cannot comment too much on it, however I presented preliminary results last month at a local scientific conference. The abstract is at

http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/sidim-xxiv-conference/

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Gab: p.s. Read also Dr Garcia’s post recapping the SIDIM conference and sharing an explanation of IDF and “vector space models.”

p.p.s. If you liked this post, you’ll likely enjoy some of the other interviews in my related posts section, especially this one with Ruud Hein: “How I Stay Ahead of the SEO Pack”. It’s probably also a good idea to add my rss feed to your reader!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Ruud Hein and I conducted this interview by email, which is why some of the tantalizing bits he leaves off on don’t see a followup – it was a preset bunch of questions. In any case, the interview is about business, but gets personal too – all of which makes for a great read, imho. Enjoy! -Gab

You’re known as a technically savvy SEO, as seen via your Search Explained series. Does that interest come from your programming background? Either way, can you share some detail?

Sure.

I think the programming and the analytical approach of SEO come from the same source; it’s me freaking around with something, following a rabbit trail and before I know it I’m reading, digesting, analyzing, trying, playing…

I don’t know how much time you have — we could easily go back to my LEGO phase… But no, seriously; I don’t like black box stuff. I like to know how something really works.

My first computer was a Sinclair/Timex ZX81. 1KB RAM. One measly kilobyte… TWO if you counted the “video RAM” and didn’t mind black dots randomly appearing on screen.

I wasn’t sure why I wanted that computer, just that I did. Like, these vector based video games consoles, right, they were powered by computers, they said, so I would have something like that — only instead of being stuck with one game you buy, I could do anything with it. Anything!

I remember sitting down with the thing. It had the most used commands of the programming language BASIC printed on its keys.

And I was wondering just which one of these would make a nice graphic, right?

I mean, you weren’t going to tell me someone was drawing all that … Had to come out of the computer… automatically.

After manually entering a couple of hundred lines of BASIC code which caused an exclamation mark to chase a question mark Centipede-style I realized that, no, these things didn’t happen automatically; there was no magic “insert cool 3D image” command.

So … how did they do that then? And how did collision detection work? If I change these IF – THEN lines, what happens?

From that comes machine language, assembly stuff, a jump to client-side scripting, then server-side scripting and, yeah, one day you find you’re “into SEO” and the whole thing starts again. How does search really work?

I rolled into the whole game because I tried some basic stuff. Basically keyword repetition, looking back. And … I was amazed this stuff worked … I was ranking better for, hold on, “download free virtual pet” and people actually came in droves. Like wow, man! So then…

Well, yes, then what? H1, title, meta – but how did these people know that?

Ah OK, they test. So then it’s just randomly coming up with stuff? There has to be some kind of logic to this thing, no?

And that’s where you find yourself on another rabbit trail; how is information collected, how is a web page broken up and how is that information stored then, etcetera, etcetera.

What are the advantages and drawbacks of developing this technical savvy? Based on those, should we conclude that one needs such savvy to be a competent SEO?

The advantage is of course that you can work on what works, not just on what appears to work today.

You can do great SEO with just a bit of knowledge but then you’re bound to be a follower, bound to be second rate. You’re always walking behind the facts; you work on what works today until the whole thing collapses. Then you spend time listening to others what might be wrong, what might be needed to fix it. And there you go off into another SEO bubble…

[gets more coffee] Look, it’s a lot like working on Wall Street in the early 2000′s and saying “folks, this thing is going to blow up” based on what you know about how economics work.

Meanwhile, year after year huge profits are made — and you look sillier and sillier. Careful folks are fired or simply don’t get promoted; risky ones promote up until the choir on top sings the same song and there’s no-one to say “are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

Then one day, when the whole thing blows up, you get to jump in to get it fixed now.

Technical SEO is like that.

Technical SEO is saying years ago clients should blog, because that is what social was all about back then, and you have to wait for a huge link game to get devalued before the thing gets implemented — while they could have been first.

It’s pushing widgets and gadgets before Google’s directory is filled with thousands upon thousands of them.

It’s saying someone should be on Twitter and they wait until the whole world is there and Dell, Zappos and Oprah have stolen their thunder.

It’s saying that links can be the self-reinforcing result of “being out there”, of “great content, well marketed”; that it can be a pull technique instead of a push job.

And that’s the disadvantage then: the irritation of advice not acted upon because it’s too early, followed by the frustration of explaining that why, now that it is finally implemented, everything is much, much harder.

Because, see, that’s the other side. If you come to the game at the right time – that is: before you read your SEO guru and hundreds like her advising it – you reap extra award. The game is easier, simpler, faster – the payback is better once it starts to snowball. To make it into a verb; it Googles, it YouTubes, it Flickrs, it Zappos. It’s first. You don’t get that same boost by being an “also ran”.

Read “filthy linking rich” again and then imagine you’re one of the first to pursue great links before everyone else was doing it. See the strength and payback that gives? See how much smarter you work then and how much harder you would have to work now to get the same kind of payback?

[sips more coffee] And competence? I don’t know… I think you’re putting that question out there in a very black-and-white fashion .

No, you don’t need to know about information retrieval or how stuff is stored and accessed by search engines to be competent at what you do.

We’re all skating on thin ice here but to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been, you need to do more than just show up.

You don’t need to be a geek. [Emphasis added.]

If you want to assess your own competence, imagine that the tactic you rely on most to rank is 100% devalued tomorrow. What would you do instead? What would you do different? Would you still be able to rank? If not, would you know how to figure out how to rank? [Emphasis added.]

You take a lot of pictures for your Flickr account and seem to be a well rounded individual, judging by the information you’ve put out there in the Ruud Hein search results. What are your passions besides search?

Oh, I like the “seems” in there, hahahaha.

I’m passionate about my family. They are the real thing; they’re what I’m about. Without them my life would be very different. Their presence and lack thereof colors a lot of what I do, think, feel, say. We’re now with the last, the youngest, and I’m drinking in every moment because I miss the day-to-day presence of the other two so, so much.

My wife, my kids; they are my reason.

Yeah, so, anyway; Flickr… I use it kind of like an online backup for our photos. A couple of hundred photos show public but I have over 17 thousand photos there. So I guess you can easily call that a passion: taking photos. Here in Quebec we call someone like me, the “Kid Kodak” of the family.

Whenever I leave the house I usually carry a camera on me. I’m not into fancy stuff, just point and shoot with some creativity. Looking at the world differently.

The preview screen of my camera is quite small so it’s always a real surprise to see what turned out how. I love it!

Oh and I really like my camera! It’s a Pentax Optio MX from 2004. Because of the form of the camera it can have a lot of lens movement which means it sports 10 x optical zoom. 100 x zoom if you add in digital zoom but, no, that doesn’t count.

Besides great photos the thing takes really good 640×480 MPEG video.

I love that little camera so much that when my first one fell this Christmas, I didn’t trust it to last and got myself another one on eBay, just in case. It’s a shame they stopped this line of development.

I love reading.

I’m Dutch but I’ve been reading in English since I was 12. When I got to French Quebec getting affordable English books was a bit of a challenge.

I’m in a small town and back then we didn’t have an English bookstore or a lot of second hand places to dig up some treasures. I got myself a Palm IIIxe on eBay and have been carrying it, and nowadays an IPAQ pocket PC, on me at all times ever since.

I have it loaded all the time with at least 3 to 5 books. A stolen moment while waiting in line, a few pages while waiting for the water to boil, etcetera, etcetera.

Coffee! I love coffee. I drink it all day round in various strengths, using various brewing methods and various kinds of coffee. Different mugs too. Love it.

And, oh man… there’s so much I’m wildly excited about, excited like a kid.

Blue skies with sunshine cause an energy burst in me; the light is one of the things I appreciate from winter here versus winter in Amsterdam.

A good tune to which I can do some moves – private only! – which make me resemble someone wearing CPR pads, full time.

Seriously, although I love it, no-one can accuse me of having any sense of rhythm.

So many great tracks, you know? Born Slippy, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Papa’s Got A Brand New Pig Bag, Where The Streets Have No Name – to me the existence of music is God’s way of saying “I rock!”

Oh, and good comedy of course! It’s my preferred movie genre too.

Comedy, laughter, is an amazing thing. It’s a real, freaking miracle. You don’t see ants roll on their back from sheer laughter… I suspect dogs smile though…

Anyway, comedy. I grew up with Tom & Jerry, the real Tom & Jerry, Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin. Colors my life: I have a cartoon mind. Look at one of those old Tom & Jerry’s — that’s how I see a lot of stuff around me. … John Pinette, John Candy, George Carlin, Steven Wright, Bill Cosby, Michel Courtemanche, Rowan Atkinson; so many others.

And Christmas! Love Christmas, adore it. And.. oh, ah… many more things. But well, hey, you got a limit to your patience too, right? Hahahaha!

Let’s talk some more about passions. What typically leads you to become passionate about something? How does that emotional/rational drive get started, and how does one keep fueling it?

Oi… You’ve got some serious stuff lined up here, don’t you?

Cripes… how does it get started… I like something that is new or makes something new. I can lose myself in setting up a new site or getting a new process in place. Once there, it’s sometimes harder to keep that focus, right?

I love breaking through the barrier. It’s easy to become complacent and not do, not create, not learn, but when you break through that and push yourself, the payback is learning and enthusiasm. And I say “you” but mean “I.”

You fuel it by changing around, mixing it up, stepping out of it and coming back from another angle.

So much of our time is spent setting up processes and routines; it’s like we’re preparing to set up camp for the rest of eternity. Well, we’re not, right? It’s a couple of years and then it’s done so for crying out loud, let’s not pretend we can pin the thing down and put it in “set it and forget it” mode. [Emphasis added.]

So that’s how I fuel it. When using this tool that got me so excited becomes boring and a drag, I explore some other options. When doing the same thing over and over again, I make sure that the “again” is different this time around.

This week I went outside to draw with chalk on the road and sidewalk together with my youngest daughter. I traced my steps and then the footsteps of my wife from the corner of our house to the side door.

That’s how you fuel it

You’re also a savvy analyst of the search industry, as your Search Wiki analysis showed. How does one develop such analytical skills?

With the kind of praise you’re bestowing on me I keep expecting you to jump out of your seat, hold out your hand and go “oh, and could I borrow $100 bucks please?” [Ed: I was actually lining him up for $1000 and some free links... guess he's not such a savvy analyst after all.]

I don’t know, Gab. You label it “analytical”; to me it’s also a lot of “what if…” That “What if…” is the typical last born in me. A lot of years passed before I was dropped on the planet so there’s a bit of Only Child in me as well; list maker, scholarly, logic, organized, loving facts and ideas.

Or maybe it’s the Melancholic in me. Same deal; organized, analytical, long term goals…

I don’t really believe you develop analytical skills, the same way you don’t develop singing skills. It’s there or not, and when it’s there, it’s something that’s like this it’s you, it’s intertwined with you; it’s how you are, how you live.

Oh sure, you can teach it to anyone just like you could teach me how to have rhythm and how to dance – but it won’t make me Fred Astaire.

So to me the books I’ve read, the thinking I love to do, the “what if A is part of B?” ideas, are more the effect of something analytical inside than the other way around.

Also, how do you glue together the disparate bits of info to make a coherent whole (or at least, an educated guess at the whole)?

Oh dude… Now you’re getting me on my hobby horse. I’m going to need much more coffee!

It’s a whole Hercule Poirot thing; a detective game. Somebody says something. Fine. Someone else says something unrelated. Neat. Now a third person makes a statement and you think “Hey… that connects A and B!”

The biggest issue there is what we all encounter when we know we saw a specific page last week but for the life of it can’t make Google or our browser history give it back to us: recall.

It’s there that I spend a lot of time on two tools: Evernote and PersonalBrain. Those are the two places where information can live here in my office.

When I see a statement of interest I highlight it, copy, CTRL+ALT+V and it’s a new note in Evernote, source URL automatically included.

What did Matt say about Expo Markers? How many servers does it take to run Google Calendar? Having #1 Adwords position is comparable to which organic position? Did you know that we know only since 10 years ago that the brain grows new cells? On a day to day basis? You can’t use ini_set() to turn register_globals off – so how do you fake it?

All that is in my Evernote. I add about 200 notes per month ranging from “where did I put the Christmas gift for mom” to “why IDF is expressed as logs”

So when I hear or read something and something goes “hey, but wait!”, I often can pull up a specific piece of information about it.

I also use PersonalBrain. A unique program and one that causes a lot of amusement at my home. PersonalBrain users have this way of talking that’s just… odd, geeky; fun. “How large is your brain?”, “I’ve added 20 thoughts to my brain”… Heck, you can even right-click an entry, a “thought”, and select “forget” … which is still one step away from Delete…

Think of it as an application where you can map relations: parent, child, and sideways or jumps.

To me it serves as a visual knowledge management tool and it acts, to quote another user, as a hard drive of my mind.

A lot of information that goes in Evernote also goes into my brain. There it gets linked to parent or child thoughts … and that sometimes shows relations to information that I’ve sheer forgotten about or wouldn’t consciously think of to connect.

PersonalBrain is a very powerful, very broad scope application. Over the years it has increasingly grown to be my second desktop. It contains files, applications, shortcuts, bookmarks…

Some kind of marriage between these apps could be awesome but I’m really very, very happy about the setup as-is. Passionate, you could say

Anyway, that’s how it goes; I read tons, pick out the interesting tidbits and use data tools to help me with recall and data visualization.

Do you read Matt Cutts’ blog? Why/not? What do you get out of it, and what could be better?

Not often.

A lot of the gold dust and nuggets has moved to the forum, first Google Groups. The information there is often very actionable and can provide real value. Some of those things you can easily test for yourself but it’s nice to be able to point to someone and say “see, he said so too.”

[Ed.: I've found SEM 2.0 to be one such nice group started by the always-quality Andrew Goodman. I also recommend the Google Webmaster Forum.]

And it’s not that his blog is bad or whatever but he’s a webspam guy and I’m not on the flipside of that coin.

I know what’s spammy and don’t work that way myself; I’m not into trying to make it look natural, I’m into causing it to be natural – so this whole “can I link 20 of my sites in the footer and …”-whatever debate is not mine.

I’d love for someone like Matt to communicate his idea about quality much more efficiently. Go beyond “make a good site” and preach, man! Because, seriously, that’s where the money is.

Doing things the right way is simply much, much more effective. Take something stupid like clean coding and lite, fast loading pages. Boring! Well… yeah… sure… so now go pay and build a mobile site because your table based, broadband clogging web page doesn’t load on a mobile phone. To quote Holmes on Homes: make it right.

If you’re thinking a bit sane you know very well when you’re preparing your own Wall Street crash.

If I sit down with you and you can tell me one reason why you rank the way you do, that right there is your weak spot.

There should be no singular reason why you rank. [Ed: Emphasis added, because relying on a single point makes you easy to reverse-engineer and means you have no barrier to entry...]

It shouldn’t be your directory submissions or press releases, it shouldn’t be your strong titles or themed site structure – it should be all of it. And as soon as any one of those becomes important and talked about a lot in the industry, it’s time to move on to new, green pastures.

So, I wouldn’t mind some help from mister Cutts in that area, in saying; look, if you do it smart you can make it right the first time and it pays back for itself.

As SEP’s blog editor-in-chief, what responsibility challenges you the most?

Meeting the content deadlines.

I run both SEP’s native blog and our community blog SEO Scoop. Between those two there are about 16-18 contributors, each with their own posting schedule and frequency. On top of that there are guest appearances and interviews.

Managing all that in a way that posts go out in a consistent manner is much more hands-on involved than I had initially thought.

I love the challenge though.

How do you balance the desire to use SEP’s blog to promote SEP with the desire to attract high quality writers and posts (eg. Jordan Kasteler on Thankyou Pages, Cindy Alvarez on getting customers talking about you )? And what is your company philosophy in that respect?

There is no balance there at all: we come down 100% at the side of stellar content. If that means that someone needs to link to their own site or company go for it; we’re all for it.

There’s no danger from where we’re looking. What’s the worst that can happen? That someone gets exposure, picks up an extra client? Well, that’s not something scary; that’s great! The butterfly effect in a pay it forward kind of way. [Ed: Damn that's a good answer!]

I simply believe that good people write great posts.

It’s only happened once that a post was submitted which was intentionally crippled and instead had links going out to the writer’s web site at every point. I edited the post quite a bit in half day, hopefully staying true to the writer’s own style, and posted it under his (or her…) name. No harm done.

Our philosophy is, like I said earlier, exceptional, solid, stellar content.

Thanks for the interview, Gab – real nice to be talking with you!

Ruud Hein is an SEO consultant and web publisher employed with Toronto’s Top SEO and Internet Marketing Firm. They recently released The Blog Link & Traffic Analysis plugin for WP.[Ed: Anchor text my own; Ruud was going to have Ruud Hein and Search Engine People in the anchor text. He's not being an 'icky self-promoter' for all you namby-pants "I hate other SEOs doing SEO" out there .

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Bruce, how did you make the transition from being an SEO consultant to an SEO agency?

Photo credit: Jon Hochman of Hochman Internet Marketing Consultants

I first got an education:

• Got a bachelor’s in science and math
• Next was an  MBA from Pepperdine

Then, I was in the programming business for 20 years. That made me realize, when I was preparing to go into business for myself, that I wanted something software driven.

[At another point in the interview, Bruce clarified that he ran the national US office for one of the world's largest tech companies, which is how he acquired business management skills.]

I also wanted it to be in the marketing industry, and at a high level.

As to my objective with all this, it was to “work” with a notebook computer and a Corona on a beach.

So I built my own site first, practiced SEO and got ranked. This got me calls.

Demand was greater than supply, so I raised prices. Next, I compensated by bringing in employees.

We first worked out of a large area in my house, and then moved to an office. We now have 6 suites! [Ed: For the US office alone!]

From there, I grew [successfully] because I knew how to set things up. If I was going international, I knew we had to have a local office with local managers, wherever we established an office.

That’s the formula we’ve used to expand to the UK, Australia, Japan and Italy. And our international business is doing well!

The managers of the local offices are motivated at least partly by equity in their local offices. Note that each office is separately incorporated. We licence the Bruce Clay name to the foreign offices.

I also keep an equity interest in each of these foreign branches – they’re not franchises. This was done intentionally, because franchises are a big hassle. There are issues with:

• Royalties
• Licensing
• Requirements for education

Additionally, our existing setup is better for tax purposes than a franchising arrangement would be.

[At this point we digressed into some discussion about Matt wanting to fight international spam more this coming year, and something to do with foreign language blacklists...]

How did you handle hiring employees for Bruce Clay, and what are some of the struggles entrepreneurs have with this?

The hardest bit is delegation.

The best employees:

• Know the voice of the corporation,
• Know intuitively what’s right and what’s wrong.
• Need to share your values and voice so you can trust them.

[Ed: Update: The "what's wrong" link is link love for Lisa Barone's piece on Google Profiles. It's not saying that she was a bad employee or anything like that. Thought I'd clarify for the Tweeple who didn't catch what I meant on the first go-round.]

That’s how you avoid micromanagement!

You need to watch new hires at first. This is easier for a 1-person shop, where you can hire and wait, because the growth is slow.

For a business like Bruce Clay Inc, it’s a little different. [You don't have the privilege of waiting and supervising too closely. The way it plays out is as follows:

- School teaches micromanaging, via collective grading.

- Specifically, if you feel your way is the only way, you're gonna redo everyone else's work.

- This lowers satisfaction - both yours and the clients.

- Additionally, quality drops and timelines are missed.

As a result, Bruce Clay always hires and trains [from scratch], rather than risk having a blackhat [SEO] inhouse who will revert to bad habits.

Personally, I’ve been thinking of hiring some family to help me grow SEO ROI Services. But I’ve seen the problems this can cause. What tips would you have for such a situation?

The first two employees I hired were my girlfriend and her brother. I quickly had to make some ground rules.

1) At the office, it’s my company. So things are going to be done right. I have the ability to [pen died, Bruce went on and somehow I didn't fill this in... ??] [guesses: Protect the business? Fire them?]

2) I make employees take the Bruce Clay training – twice!

3) They also have a 6 month period of mentorship [under a more senior employee].

- We’ll bend over to make people work [that is, to help them overcome their initial challenges].

- If you hire right, this isn’t a problem.

What about the financial arrangements involved? What if business is bad for a stretch and I don’t have enough work for them?

Some practical advice I can give on working with family members is to:

• Hire them first as consultants.
• Do NOT carry them on your accounting books as employees.
• Tell them something like:

“I don’t know what business will be like, so I may have ongoing work for you or not.

I’m going to go in X direction – do you have the desire and motivation to go there with me?

~3.5) But be careful if they’re not the right match for the technology and what you want, relative to business considerations.

4) Always deal with them as consultants. Business is about business, not family.

You have to remember: “My ability to be paid is if clients will pay them [the family members].

To do SEO right is important, and get lots of sales.”

5) When dealing with family, you have staff you need to make sure the corporation survives. Since you can’t cut technology, you might need to cut administrative expenses.

5.5) There are different ways to reduce expenses. You can cut salaries and give people a day off. And the two can be mixed, e.g. a 10% pay cut and 1 day off a week to achieve something like a 30% total cut.

My point is that there are different ways to manage expenses.

6) Another tip is to follow news that affects your industry closely. For example, Edmunds has been affected by the auto industry’s issues.

This sort of knowledge can help you forecast how you will be affected and how to adjust finances.

We next discussed some of Bruce’s current and recent projects.

Part of being successful in this business is getting clients to implement. We told one media client to push their website via the print edition, by putting each article’s URL at the end of the printed version. They ignored that and haven’t seen much improvement in their traffic.

By contrast, we did a 96-page assessment for CNN. They wanted to rank #1 for the keyword “News”. Ahead of Google.

They ranked, and that got them 5 times their prior traffic.

CNN ranks on Google for News, and even has Sitelinks on that keyword!

[I'm not sure if Bruce meant 5 times what they got from ranking lower down for "News" or what their site got in total, prior to that. Both are plausible, considering News has an average 100M monthly searches, per Google's AdWords Tool.]

We also have the only comprehensive toolset in China. We had to redesign everything to compensate for language issues.

The rate we’re going to charge is $10/month. [For the whole toolset or the toolbar? Is the toolbar included in the toolset? This was a bit confusing TBH.]

The way our toolbar differentiates from Aaron Wall’s is that it’s going to be marketing oriented, and less tech-oriented.

Finally, we’ll be implementing a wide open reporting format called Crystal Reports. [This seemed oriented to agencies who want to whitelabel Bruce Clay's tool-generated reports.]

Thanks a lot Bruce!

If you enjoyed this interview with internet marketing pioneer Bruce Clay, you should (i) Check out the Bruce Clay blog and (ii) Add my rss feed to your reader!

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Susan Gunelius recently published her third book, Google Blogger For Dummies (aff). Susan’s a friend, expert copywriter and marketing consultant, business and personal blogger (and About.com weblogs guide), and she has graciously granted me this interview. You can download some free sample chapters she has courteously provided, with Wiley Publishing’s approval (and encouragement!).

1) Why should anyone choose to use the Google Blogger system as opposed to the WordPress blog system?
Google’s Blogger is a great option for a novice blogger. It’s completely free and allows monetization whereas the free version of WordPress does not allow monetization. Also, Google is investing time, resources and money in re-energizing Blogger with new tools and functionality to make it more competitive with WordPress. With that in mind, it’s a great way to get your feet wet with blogging, and as more and more new features are being added, fewer users are finding a need to switch to WordPress.

2) Why did you pick this topic to write about?
The publisher approached me directly and asked me to write it.

3) What was the most surprising thing you learned about Blogger?
I was most surprised to learn about how much Google is working to integrate Blogger with their other applications (e.g., AdSense, Feedburner, Picasa, YouTube, etc.). There is no doubt that the enhancements will continue.

4) What was the most unusual thing you learned about Blogger?
I’m not sure if it’s unusual but certainly a unique thing about Blogger is the wonderful and loyal user base that supports it. Also, I was surprised to learn how accessible Google’s Blogger team is to help users.

5) Describe your process in writing this book from the time you started the project till completion.
I was approached over the summer of 2008 and began writing in September. The Dummies writing process is fairly stringent in terms of following the basic structure of all Dummies books. They have to be written primarily for beginners and each chapter must be modular, meaning a person can pick and choose the chapters of relevance to them to read and each chapter will stand on its own. I began with a table of contents. Once that was approved by the publisher, Wiley, I began writing. The rest is history.

6) Did you start with a publishing house asking you to write on a topic or did you have a manuscript and then go to the publishers?

I have worked both ways. This book started with an acquisitions editor from Wiley approaching me directly.

7) What did you do to stay motivated when you were in the middle of the project and the initial euphoria had worn off but completion was not yet in sight?

That always happens with any book I write. I think most authors could say that’s true for them, too. There’s always the initial excitement of starting a new book, researching, getting organized and diving in. However, writing a book takes time, and as with anything you have to do for a long time, you do end up getting a bit bored with the topic and ready to move onto the next. At least that’s how I am. I’m always ready for whatever comes next! I stay motivated by trying to remember my initial excitement and by remembering what a reader would feel like when he or she picks up the book. I always try to keep the reader in mind and that keeps me motivated.

Share some expert-level tips for using the full power of Google Blogger.
I think the biggest tip I can give would apply to any Blogger user and that is to keep your eyes and ears open for new enhancements. Read the Blogger Buzz blog (www.bloggerbuzz.com) and don’t think you’ve got it all figured out, because Google is working hard to take Blogger to the next level. There is always something new in the pipeline. The rest you’ll have to read in the book.

9) What is your book’s target audience? Are there subsets within that audience that would particularly benefit? Why would they benefit most?
The target audience is beginner Blogger users or beginner bloggers in general. However, I did include entire parts that are dedicated to more advanced topics like monetization, promoting and growing a blog, and advanced Blogger functions, so there is a broader audience of existing bloggers who can learn a lot from the book, too.

10) Tell us about some of the lighter times you had writing this book, some amusing anecdotes .
Well, my 4-year old son (actually, he’s one of a set of triplets) is obsessed with Dummies books for some reason. I have no idea why, but he sits and flips through the pages of any Dummies book he can get his hands on all the time. Mind you, he can’t read, but that doesn’t deter him. Anyway, when I was writing Google Blogger for Dummies, I had a big stack of at least ten Dummies books that I used to make references to whenever possible in my book. Well, being as enamored as he is with Dummies books, my son kept coming into my office and taking them. I’d find them here and there around the house. Sometimes, I’d be in the middle of writing and want to make a reference to another book, but it was nowhere to be found. Needless to say, he could never remember where he left the missing book when I needed it. I can laugh about it now, but I remember on more than one occasion searching for a Dummies book amongst the mine field of toys that litters my house.

That’s the story, now go get the book!

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It’s not secret that Canadian businesses are strongly affected by how the Canadian dollar fares against the US dollar. Search marketing businesses are like others in this respect, and here are some of the responses I got over Twitter when asking some Canadian and international friends about how they dealt with international currency fluctuations.

From @neyne Branko Rihtman, SEO Scientist & Tens Online Marketing (Israel): “All of our clients pay us in US$. Since the exchange rate is all over the place now, we just adjusted our prices a bit and we hope that the gains will balance the losses over time.”

From @Nick Wilsdon e3 Internet Marketing (Russia/Ukraine): “We charge according to the client’s preferred currency and similar to @Neyne have had to increase some of our USD charges. It’s worth noting that some industries work exclusively in USD, for example casino/online gaming.”

From @Will Critchlow, Distilled Reputation Management (UK) – “We have exposure in both directions. Exposed to the € and $. Clients pay in both of above. Considering [a US]$ bank account.”

From @Dev Basu, Dev SEO & PubliPages SEO (Canada): My current base of clients is entirely Canadian. I suspect we’d either use a fixed rate or hedge the foreign currency risk. [I assume he means carry a certain amount of both currencies.]

From Martin Perron (@mperron), Bloom Search Marketing (Canada) –
Most of the time, US clients pay in USD, and Canadian clients pay in CAD, etc. [It] Depends on how the client settles their media. However, we do expose ourselves to a currency exchange gain/loss. Rather we take the risk than expose clients to the fluctuation. Sometimes it evens out; the CAD was high most of 2008, [meaning we had an] exchange rate loss, but with current rates, [it looks like we'll have an] exchange rate gain in the books. Hope this helps!

From @Ruud Hein, Search Engine People SEO (Canada):

As to myself, I get paid in USD where possible. Not as an issue of policy, but because I haven’t given it much thought frankly. With the Canadian dollar dropping so rapidly recently, it could mean some extra profit .

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.

Stephen Shankland blogs for CNet on Digital Media, and he’s a reporter who learns fast and understands search marketing pretty well, especially for someone who’s not immersed in it 24/7 like many of us search geeks. Yesterday, he wrote a post highlighting some of the recent controversies about Google’s guideliness, featuring quotations from yours truly and Matt Inman, amongst others.

Check it out: Want top search results? Tread Carefully.

For me, this is a nice feather in the cap and certainly something to highlight on my credibility and recognition page.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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