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

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

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

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

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

You all know how strong of a critic I am towards Google, but I thought this user research and testing was pretty unique, cutting edge, and can potentially lead to some great benefits for Sub-Saharan Africans (like finding health info, as mentioned…). http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/designing-useful-mobile-services-for.html

Until about December 22nd. In the meantime, 2803.fr brings us news on one of the first information products for the iPhone: A consumer reports guide that uses the iPhone camera to scan barcodes and report back its product rating accordingly. (Post is in French, fyi.)

And that means tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings (more…)

You NEED to attend SMX Advanced. It’s that simple. The single best investment you can make in your search education and professional life this year will be happening in Seattle, June 2-3, 2009. Here are 5 sweet reasons to attend. (more…)

For school, work and taxes. Therefore, posting will be light or nonexistent for the next two weeks. When I return, I’ve got some massively juicy content for you, including interviews I did at SMX West with Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Internet Marketing and Gillian Fishkin of SEOmoz. (more…)

This post is about search… but first, a little anecdote. I was playing poker with some buddies this weekend, and it reminded me of a thought I have often had about my friend Jon’s bluffs: he’s very succesful at finding that threshold “pain level” above which our other friend Will and I are hesitant to call the bluff. That is, he knows what the minimum raise is that he needs to make to intimidate us out of the pot. Typically it’s about 3-4 times the big blind. (more…)

I’ve had this site for about a year now and feel it’s time for a redesign. I think that there are improvements to be made in terms of usability and conversion rates, but most importantly, I’d love to hear what you think needs to be fixed/improved. How can I make my site better?

Some goals I have for the coming year:

Develop my audience and reach. I’d like to have 20,000 + subscribers a year from now. I don’t know how realistic that is, considering that I don’t blog about web design or beginner topics that seem to generate subscription volume for most sites, but it’s something I hope to achieve anyways.

Finally launch Original Monetization. My developer’s gone AWOL with my money and code, and is not answering emails, which is quite frustrating. This site would likely be used to cross-promote it.

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 (more…)

If you do, let me know in the comments or by email and you’ll be given access to test things out as well as a free copy of both plugins when they’re publicly released. One of them helps make minisites in wordpress for PPC landers, and the other lets you figure out when jerks steal your content and which of your members said jerks are, so you can kick em out.

On a related note, I’m preparing several feature-quality posts, as well as guest posting and contributing to other posts, and they take time. So please be patient – I assure you it’ll be worth it. And if you haven’t seen them yet, check out my best posts and ideas.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the posts I’m working on to get you salivating:

Internal Link Building – PageView & Time On Site Booster
Sitepoint SEO Forum: A Study on Moderator Behaviour And Its Effects On Membership
PPC Panel Uber-Coverage (Multiple Conference, multiple panel notes)
Growing Online Business Trend: Commoditization of Data
Sue The Bastards! How Porn Sites Could Be The Next Frontier In Class Action Lawsuits

So… get my rss feed. You’re going to come back anyways when they all make the frontpage of Sphinn (maybe not the ppc panel, depends how comprehensive it is and thus worthy of being promoted or not).

Per Sitemeter’s blog:

“The most disconcerting initiative is the one being proposed by the FTC, which seeks to restrict ‘tracking activity.’ This means internet consumers can decline to allow you (and us) to track visit activity on your website. (more…)

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=AsF7s1pRZXQjk6M7mHIy99bal8kF?p=http%3A%2F%2Fseoroi.com%2Fspecialty-services%2Fnew-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-internal-link-building%2F

Try and find http://www.pokeraffiliateprograms.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-discussion/17456-new-plugin-wordpress-internal-link-building.html

(Updated with new link as Yahoo changed its results and included other links I’d gained.)

Hint: It’s not (more…)

You heard it here first folks: Google has recently updated its keyword tool to share precise volume numbers. Whereas the tool only returned relative numbers before, it now shows the precise amount of monthly search that occurred last month, as well as an average amount of monthly searches. (more…)

You often hear best practices saying that Google won’t index your pages if they force Googlebot to take a sessionId. Is that really true?

How does Googlebot treat session IDs?

(more…)

Some of you might have noticed that I recently picked up Ice.com and Diamond.com as clients. Well, for any of you interested in working with me and with the other great people here, I have good news: Ice.com’s recruiting SEO experts, SEM specialists, analytics smartiepants, and web developers / coders / programmers (particularly if you’ve done ecommerce work before)! If you’re looking for a job in search marketing and/or analytics, write to Shmuel at ice, or send me your cv/cover letter and I’ll forward them.

Update: In response to some questions – the work requires people to be in Montreal, Canada. There may be monetary assistance for you to move (emphasis on may because I don’t know), but the bottom line is that Ice.com wants people working in their physical offices. As to the job being full/part-time, I’ll ask and update. I’d lean towards saying it’s full time work though.

In addition, (more…)

Ok, I’ve actually been to SMX Advanced, where I spoke, celebrated my 21st birthday, during which I devoured delicious homemade cake (thanks mom!), been helping Ice.com Jewelry fix their SEO issues, which meant auditing and now planning implementation, and handling other stuff too besides!

After regaling you all with the wonderfully exciting tale of what I’ve been up to for the past week and change, I feel I should also clarify that Google maps guide Jen has suggested a solution (more…)

See here for how to get links from Google by spamming:

In Google’s defense, looking at the source code those links appear to be generated clientside – I couldn’t find the string ‘vox’ (as in searchenginemarketingvox.com) in the page’s source code. So the links don’t count for SEO (yes, yes it’s anticlimactic, I know). Still funny that 3 spammers are getting links that human visitors can follow from an official Google blog. Hmm, maybe the Gmail team are part of a bad neighbourhood and they’re trying to hide it…

My reaction was a loud WTF when I tried logging in to check my click stats. Click Audit, the link/click tracking tool I was using until very recently to track subscriber count to SEO ROI has just been turned into a parked domain! In other words, it just features a bunch of useless ads. It may be a temporary thing, because the site likely didn’t make the owner(s) much money, but I’m not waiting around to find out. (Updates below; I found another click counter, and Click Audit is back online.) (more…)

Google killed former SEOmoz CTO Matt Inman’s widgetbait because some Guardian reporter didn’t like it and wrote his negative opinion up. Then Aaron Wall was unlucky enough to trust a jerk who asked Matt Cutts about Aaron’s affiliate program based linkbuilding.

The question is: Will Amazon get a beat-down too? For their (more…)

Things have been absolutely incredible here lately, as I’ve achieved a variety of milestones.

1. Matt Cutts complimented me and SEOROI.com by recognizing that I was one of the first two people (with Mike VanDeMar of the Smackdown blog) to notice Google indexing site searches. (more…)

And it isn’t Google Analytics, as I mistakenly thought. So I need to apologize to Google (and to you, my readers) for the error/false accusation and getting people worried for nothing.
Even more humbling, both Matt Cutts and the official Google Webmaster Central blog have called yours truly’s site “high quality.” So let’s see … (more…)

Hey gang,

I’m back from SMX West – the best three days of my life EVER – and have got some great material to share with you guys. Here are some highlights of what’s coming: (more…)

I ran a poll on Facebook targeting Facebook users 18-24 to find out whether they were aware of the existence of the Facebook Blog. 83% of them were not. This was following up on what Jane wrote at SEOmoz, regarding how she would make the Facebook blog more visible and certain other changes she’d make. After the jump, the precise details of the poll data. (more…)

Update: I messed up. Rich Schefren’s alright, and I apologize. Rich Schefren, of Attention Age, has turned loose a bunch of kool-aid drinkers on Sphinn. (more…)

A Further 26% Shop Online and Make Their Purchases Offline

Facebook Polling has discovered that 55% of Facebook users aged 35-49 have shopped and bought at least a couple of things online this year. Those who said that they shop and buy online regularly comprised the largest group of poll respondents, at 31%. This new data reveals a trend away from the scepticism about ecommerce that was more prevalent in past years.

The poll, conducted through Facebook by search engine optimization and internet marketing firm SEO ROI, reveals growing comfort with ecommerce amongst consumers. (more…)

Net Neutrality has added another formidable opponent to its already large list, with the US Justice department issuing a filing with the Federal Communications Commission against Net Neutrality. This could potentially be big news for bloggers, Search Engine Optimization consultants and all those in the internet marketing industry.

Net Neutrality is the principle that all web sites be accessible to surfers for the same cost. The telecommunications industry is lobbying the US government to enact legislation allowing it to charge more for people to surf certain websites, or even certain forms of content.

There are two main reasons why Net Neutrality matters, and why this filing is bad news for the internet marketing industry. (more…)