This is a guest post by Brandon Hopkins, a freelance Fresno website designer who blogs at Brandon-Hopkins.com

The most common way to buy links is to find a site that shows up in Google’s index, then contact the owner asking them to add your link in exchange for monetary compensation. What is often not considered is that published pages don’t change very often. (more…)

My friend Marios Alexandrou, an advanced SEO who loves to test ranking factors, worked with my programmer to update the popular Wordpress plugin I had built, Internal Link Building. (more…)

Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities. (more…)

Competitive intelligence provides entertainment, an inside-track on industry trend-spotting, and the potential to develop tangential business opportunities before others, or at least catch up quickly. I gluttonously consume information, and thought I’d share some parts of my diet with other competitive intelligence collectors with hearty appetites. (more…)

Let’s face it – you’re only worth as much as it costs to replace you. Most businesses are going through budget cuts and lay-offs, or have at some point in the last two years, which makes it more important than ever to prove your value to your company or client.

They could hire another SEO for your salary… but they can’t hire another SEO; and a merchandising analyst; and a marketplace analyst; and a PR firm; and a blogger; and a customer service rep for your salary. Yet, a good SEO will be ALL of these things! (more…)

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!

This is a guest post by Arnold Zafra for TopHost.gr, a hosting company offering shared web hosting plans as well as dedicated servers. The English is a little awkward at points, but Arnold still shares some valuable tips.

So, you just snagged a deal with a client. Everything seems to flow smoothly and according to plan. You’re able to deliver the goods, but somewhere along the way, you client become restless and starts playing hardball.

And you wonder what could you be possibly doing wrong? Why is the deal running not so smoothly, where in fact you’re doing everything that you promised to do. How can you re-establish rapport with your client especially when your SEO deal is still ongoing? (more…)

Time and date based navigation offer terrible usability and even worse SEO. Have you ever heard of mystery meat navigation? Maybe not, but you’ve probably seen archive navigation that meets the following description: (more…)

To visitors coming via my 101 Advanced Text Link Buying Tips article on Search Engine Journal, welcome. Here’s an overview of my link buying services. (To my regular readers, check out the article and link to it or link here if you like it . )

The main benefits of using my text link buying services are that I

• Reduce your risk,
• Get you the most value for money, and
• Maximize your ROI.

To buy text links effectively, I follow a few principles:

- Minimize risk by making paid links indistinguishable from unpaid links. This also maximizes effectiveness.
- Purchase links for rankings, but also for branding and community building. Brands and communities are valuable assets that drive traffic and revenue.
- If it can send traffic that converts, the link is worth buying. This is why demographic targeting is a valid approach to buying links.

My rates start at $1000 for every $1000 in paid link spend, which is based on the average amount of time involved in managing such a budget. For link purchases beyond $8,000/month, we can negotiate better rates. The rates are also negotiable for long-term commitments of 9 months+.

If you’d like discrete text link buying services, contact me.

It may not be possible to automate all of SEO (or other business processes) with software, but that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid the chores in SEO. If you can document the processes, you can delegate them to virtual assistants (VA). (more…)

I’m working on an absolutely massive text link buying piece for SEJ. To keep your appetites whetted, here’s a little sneak preview. (more…)

What are the pros and cons of buying links? What risks and rewards should I consider in a cost-benefit analysis of a strategy of paying for backlinks?

(more…)

…Hacked websites are really no big deal. Sit back, kick your feet up on the desk, grab your coffee and let me tell you a story about Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch and I. (more…)

Card sorting is a technique from usability, whereby usability pros ask others to arrange a set of cards in the most coherent groups possible. Usability experts use card sorting to organize the information architecture of a website, but it’s also valuable for SEO.

Today I had two consultations over the phone that dealt with the navigation of a website, so I thought I’d touch on how you can use card sorting for SEO. I’m currently writing what I hope will be a small book on advanced SEO, and one of my themes is that SEO and usability fit closely together – improving one often improves the other. This is one of those cases. (more…)

Is PPC necessary? Why is PPC necessary or not? If so, when do I need to do it? (more…)

Problem: FutureNow requires Javascript to see the content in the some of its tabs (see “How it Works” and “Details” in the image below), which hides this content from 5% of its visitors. According to studies, (more…)

Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have been nice to enough to give me a speaking spot doing an “Advanced Search Marketing (more…)

… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.

(more…)

See here for details: #Iran Election: “Mousavi likely winner” – Google Trends.

Does the legal team or your boss absolutely insist on having a splash page? Here’s a tip to SEO the homepage in the search engines despite the splash. It’s untested as of yet, but I feel it’s good enough to be worth a try.

Are you ready?
(more…)

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.) (more…)

by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post: (more…)

Normally, a 404 Not Found error is shown to visitors when they try to visit a non-existent page. But what about when there is a page there, only it doesn’t have what they want – what do you do then? One solution is to offer them a link to the right page, duh! Sounds simple, but it can actually be a bit tricky. Another is to update the page and answer people’s question. (more…)

Aha! I finally realized why measuring relationships is the best way to measure social media results! Two words: Opportunity Cost. (more…)

For all you internet marketing pros out there, here’s the only brand building guide you’ll ever need. I’ll begin with some brief introductory notes, then get into meaty examples you can sink your teeth into. (more…)

I’m accumulating a list of beefs I have with the current iteration of the site and am already at over 20 grievances. I would love to hear your problems with the site. Nothing is too small or too big or too trivial or too stupid. Often the ’stupid’ ideas are the million dollar “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas.

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

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

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

No, you shouldn’t buy GenericKeyword.ExoticExtension domain names. The only people making money there are ICANN and the registrars responsible for those extensions. This includes extensins like .pro, .aero, .travel, .asia, .me etc. Watch my new video for more. The production quality isn’t tremendous, but I’m slowly getting the hang of this.

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

Link buying advice often sounds something like, “Get links from relevant sites and pages for the greatest boost to your rankings.” Link buying advice is often wrong.

According to everyone’s favourite content network guru, keyword selection on the content network needs to be based on demographics. That’s why I saw the following weight loss ads on a page that had nothing to do with weight loss, and nor did the site hosting the page. (more…)

Standard conversion advice says remove navigation from the landing page (at least for lead generation landers). Standard SEO says use links. The next best thing would be to put the navigation out of sight, in the footer, and have your calls to action above that so visitors won’t use your navigation to leave your page.

But if you put the nav in the footer, it might get less search engine trust, precisely because folks don’t use footer navigation. What’s a conversion minded SEO to do? Here are 4 options to play navigation peekaboo with search engines and humans to convert your SEO traffic better. Blackhats use some forms of this, but I think I’ve also thought of original twists too. (more…)

I just got turned down for an extension on a paper that I had hoped to extend from the 15th of December to the 25th. My prof was good for it, but apparently faculty policy is no extensions except for medical reasons. Meaning I need to bust my chops to get this done. I apologize in advance if this blog gets a little quiet, but if you look around the seo blogs and other quality material I’ve linked to here, you shouldn’t want for content. I messed up my time management this term and it’s time to pay the price .

The video with my thoughts and questions is after the jump. Please give me some feedback on this – what can I do for you guys? (more…)

Pepperjam Network, you’re really, really useless. I have proof that you’re stealing commissions from affiliates and not paying them for all the sales they generate. I have proof that when a merchant’s tracking screws up, you do nothing to solve the issue for affiliates, let alone pay (more…)

What is crowd clout? It’s a trend identified by Trend Watching whereby consumers congregate at a given merchant’s store and get a discount for buying in bulk. As I was reading Inc magazine’s article on a restaurant saving money and again when I dropped by Cesar Serna’s blog , I was reminded of this idea I had to adapt the restaurant’s technique and crowd clout to online marketing. (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.

What do Google’s search-within-search, the Google Affiliate Network, and Google Suggest have to do with each other? It’s all about Google’s transformation from being a bridge and toll-gate on the information superhighway to being bridge, toll-gate and destination! (more…)

Here’s the dream team of folks that I outsource work to and recommend. Get in touch with them if you need search marketing services, be it SEO, PPC, reputation management, etc. You should also consider the editors working with me on Best of the Z List, who are a terrific bunch of experts. (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).

Are domain names the internet’s real estate? Can keyword research be considered intellectual property? I put these and other questions to Eric Goldman and Mark J Rosenberg, both of whom are speaking on SES San Jose’s legal panel. (Clarification: This is an interview, not coverage of an SES session.)
(more…)

Twitter is a platform (with etiquette, but still a platform). It is home to a number of broad and niche communities. Ditto Facebook. They both provide users with a set of tools and things they can do.

Digg is both a platform and a community, but Pligg (more…)

A few of you have been kind enough to report bugs and issues with the internal link building plugin. I’m currently aware of the following issues. They’re on the to-do-list to be fixed and/or improved. I wasn’t sure whether or not to hide these bugs or be upfront about it, but I figure it’s better to fess up and be transparent than whatever might happen in the alternative.

Keep in mind, however, that some problems will be specific to you personally. Try de-activating other plugins before you come to report a problem. If that doesn’t work, then please, I really, really want to hear from you!

Also, if you’re on version 1 of the plugin rather than version 2, get version 2
now as it fixes a common bug (see 2 below) and may address yours. You don’t need to worry about losing saved keywords; they’ll be there when you install the new version. This is per my testing on a 2.5x WP install on this site.

1) Apostrophes are not being accepted (more…)

25) 25 Tips on writing good titles. (more…)

Update: Welcome Sphinn, StumbleUpon users . How can you rank for competitive keywords like “Mortgage Calculator”? I don’t know about SEOBook, since he’s always talking about it, but here’s how Google would rank for a bigshot mortgage term like that.

(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…)

In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, (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…)

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

David Mihm – web designer and local seo extraordinaire – recently asked me to participate in his local SEO ranking factors survey. And it got me thinking as to how a search engineer might consider the usefulness in ranking sites of any particular factor. Let’s see what the thought process in this part of a search engineer’s workday is like. (more…)

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency – most people place it around 7 times – for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have! (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…)

At SMX West, one of the most interesting things I learned was that an advertiser who spent $30,000 on banners saw a 20% lift in branded search. When you consider how well branded search converts, that’s good news, especially if that demand lasts (for the caveats on measuring true branded search ROI see “What Every SEO Needs to Know About Branded Search“). This post is going to explain how you can use the link graph to get similar lifts in your branded search, (more…)

Quick note to let you guys know that the click counting script I was using has broken – all the links seem to have deleted. The script has known issues with corrupted databases, but those were apparently at 5 figures in clicks, not 4… Oh well. FYI – last I checked, I had about 2500 total clicks on subscription links. This is after ClickAudit went parked briefly.

So: If you want to subscribe, click the link in the sidebar, not in post links.

p.s. I’ve got an original post love on building branded search volume, and another on seo and usability, coming up. Stay tuned.

Update: Check out this “How to forecast SEO ROI” article if calculating the ROI on SEO is the info you want.

What follows is an editorial / research article showing that SEO is valuable – but not explaining how to calculate it.

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer). (more…)

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…)

At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google – which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search – makes the rules.

This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”… (more…)

Want to find out competitors’ keywords? Here’s how to find what keywords competitors use on their sites – and protect your own!

(more…)

I’ve been asked the question recently in connection to business blogs: Should I blog on the company’s official site/domain name, or should I blog on on a fresh domain name? Each approach has its advantages, but with current search engine algorithms, my advice is to have the blog on (more…)

Welcome Search Newz visitors! It seems that Search Newz’s syndicated version of my article, “If You Listened When Google Announced Submarine Crawling,” which follows up the one you’re seeing now, forgot to link to an important Matt Cutts video. So there’s the link to help you out. Anyways, on with the show – here’s what submarine crawling is all about, as interpreted from Matt Cutts’ explanations.

Matt Cutts’ post and this Webmaster Central post recently explained that “high quality” sites are being given special treatment – submarine crawling.

We all know that links from high quality sites are more valuable than those from average or mediocre sites. Now, Matt and Google have given us a new measurement for finding high quality sites – submarine crawling – and thus high quality link prospects.

Russian Submarine courtesy of Orpheus Grey.

So WHAT is Submarine Crawling? (more…)

If you live in Montreal, you’ve probably seen Silver Star print ads. But you’d be a lot less likely to see them in search results on any major search engine because their search marketing effort is nonexistent (well OK, maybe MSN might return them). Not only is their SEO (What is SEO?) non-existent, it’s a near-100% duplicate of Mercedes-Benz Canada’s site!

If you’re Google and some random Canadian searches for “Buy Mercedes Benz car,” would you rather return the more authoritative Mercedes-Benz website or a total copy on a subdomain?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. (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…)

I’m in a crap situation, and I need to learn to say no. First, because saying yes is eating into my own time and second because I’m embarassed to admit that I voted for friends’ submissions that were average and not really deserving of votes. (more…)

I recently topped 200 subscribers to my RSS feed! Thanks to all of you who subscribed . Update: Make that 300 !

Now, I need to qualify that statement. Over 200 people have clicked on a subscribe link, in the past weeks, be it in a post or in my sidebar. But I’m concerned about the confidence I can place in my data, which idea came to me from reading Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics An Hour A Day.

My problem is that because I feel Google has enough power and enough data, I’m using ClickAudit click counter/meter to measure how many people click individual subscription links. Tracking is at the post, widget and sidebar level.

The problem is that, since I’m not on Feedburner, I don’t have access/usage stats. And at the same time, as I’ve recently experienced a surge in traffic (10,000 visitors last month), it’s very difficult/tedious to just look at my logs and see how much of that is referred from feedreaders. Even if I went that route, I’d be unlikely to find all my subscribers visiting on any given day.

All of which has left me wondering what you guys were expecting when they clicked my subscribe links! Were you expecting the feed itself? A page with more information about subscribing, like these 20 reasons why you should subscribe, possibly with an email form as well? A Feedburner page?

So I’m inviting all of you who’ve recently clicked subscribe (as well as those of you clicked a while ago) to give me some feedback and vote on this poll:

1) When you clicked subscribe, you were expecting to go to the feed.

- Yes, I expected the link’s destination to go to your feed.

- No, I didn’t expect the link’s destination was your feed.

2) For those who were expecting something else, what did you think the link would take you to?

- A Feedburner page.

- A page about the newsletter/subscription.

- Something else. (If this is your answer, please tell me what that something else is.)

3) Still for those who answered “No,” what did you do once you realized that the link had opened up the feed? Why?

- Subscribed anyways.

- Didn’t subscribe.

Thanks for helping me figure this out! And please, if you hadn’t subscribed prior to reading this, don’t answer the poll. But do subscribe to my RSS feed .

p.s. I apologize to my readers for the cutting off in feedreaders due to using the ‘more’ tag for excerpts on the main blog page and the SEO ROI homepage (where you’ll now only find the best/most important posts I write). I’m trying to figure out a way around that, while still showing excerpts. Please bear with me while I try and figure out how to get you all full feeds.

Google Analytics is broken (like PageRank is broken), and leaking my data into the index. All the site searches here on SEO ROI are resulting in site-SERPs pages getting into G’s index. How is this happening?

Final Update: This has been disproven as being the source of the site-search-results appearing in Google’s search results. I had good reason to believe that Google Analytics was the source of this (you can see below for my original thoughts on the matter), but there’s now a clarification. My apologies to Google and to my readers for the mistake.

A while back I saw a video about using Google Analytics to (more…)

Aaron Wall is a teacher, SEO, marketing expert and generally a very bright guy [obviously, he agreed to do an interview with me ]. Beyond the site we all know and love, he’s also the man behind Search Engine History, Blackhat SEO and a variety of others. Most of you reading this probably know these things, so let’s just move on with the interview. As always, there’ll be free dofollow links in updates to the post for intelligent comments and particularly if you find the source for some of these questions…

1) Where do you think are the most promising areas for testing and experimenting, as far as discovering new, actionable SEO insights?

• I think studying psychology and sociology are key areas for growth. (more…)

Ever see that classic gag of a couple of people standing around staring upwards at nothing and pointing in the same direction? A crowd grows around them, and gets gradually bigger. The point is just to see how many people they can attract into their crowd of starers (more…)

Here’s another Greyhat SEO idea for you, ladies and gents. The sneakiest text link ad disguise ever! It’s a true Sherlock Holmes who’ll see through this disguise. If you enjoy this post, there’s plenty more where it came from (i.e. the greyhat, idea and linkbuilding archives), so do subscribe . Update: Many people reading this want to hide their link destination using javascript. See here.

Google AdSense unit image courtesy of Frank O’Dwyer.

Steps:

1. Put Adsense on the page from which you want to sell/buy a text link.
2. Take a screenshot (more…)

Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to (more…)

Here’s my effort to share original resources that haven’t received wide attention/link love on other blogs. Hence I haven’t shared Aaron Wall’s tools (how useful would one more mention be?), Xenu Link Sleuth or SEOmoz’s tools (though I had to put them in the Friends section). Here is search marketing’s BIGGEST, BADDEST, RESOURCE BONANZA BAR NONE! (If you enjoy it, subscribe – there’s lots more where this came from .)

The SEO Business

What makes Web sites credible?

Proposal layout and design

Five Simple Ways to Make Your Proposal More Competitive

Canada Business – Starting a Consulting Business – Interesting item for my fellow SEO consultants here (more…)

• If knowledge is power;
• If information is knowledge;
• And if Google is organizing – and, more importantly, distributing – the world’s information;

Then isn’t Google the single most powerful organization in the world?

(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’m headed to see my brother out in BC, and from there, onwards to SMX in California. I’m not sure whether I’ll be blogging or not during the conference, but if I do, I’ll do my best to make it original stuff rather than session summaries or roundups, though I may do that as well. Bottom line: Don’t get your hopes up for fresh content this week; it’s my turn to learn from others. If you need to satisfy your hunger for SEO knowledge, look at these nice recent posts…

3 SEO Strategies (Not Tactics) To Make You Think

Online Community Moderation: Interview with Kat French 

Winston Churchill Would Have Been a Greyhat SEO

How I Made $3000 This Week And You Can Too! (Spoiler: I didn’t make 3K in a week and that’s the point of the post.)

On Motivation and Influence (or Be Nice to the Loner Kid Lest He Destroy Your Reputation)

3 New Metrics To Waste 30 More Hours A Week On

A/B Testing vs Multivariate Testing

–> You’ll notice that many of these didn’t appear on the frontpage. I publish content that you can only see if you regularly check out my category pages or if you subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Subscribe already and get the goodies! If you really need more convincing, here are 20 blockbuster reasons to subscribe .

Actually, I didn’t. And that’s why this post matters. (more…)

I’m a Bookworm. Really. So I’d say I’m reasonably well-placed to give out some Charity Awards for for Search Education. The way it’s going to work is that everyone who wins an award gets a shiny badge and has their name added to the donation I’m making to the Africa Is Real charity. They’re a Montreal group started by some friends I met at the OWN conference. (more…)

I was emailing a prospect recently who mentioned that a competing firm had proposed doing A/B multivariate testing. If you’re familiar with the jargon of testing different ads/landing pages, you would know that A/B testing is different from multivariate testing. I can’t blame the prospect or my competition however, because ours is an industry enamoured with jargon and it sometimes gets me confused too! In any case, let’s see what A/B testing (more…)

Last month, I attended StartupCamp Montreal and Yulbiz, and I’ll be discussing the people from Montreal’s business community whom I met below. You’ll recall that I spoke at FacebookCamp Montreal. Now, most of you reading this are not in Montreal (though considering the attention my competitors pay this blog, perhaps that’s not quite so) – so why should you care? Well, two reasons. (more…)

Here’s a refreshing interview with Kat French, well known in the SEOmoz and Sphinn community and certainly a person to keep an eye out for in search marketing. We cover online community moderation, the strength of social media and of personal networks, and much more. (more…)

Do you know your SEO consultants? Read this through for your guide to the good, the rad and the sexy of internet marketing’s most in demand professional – the SEO consultant. (more…)

Duncan Watts claims that the Influentials theory is nonsense, yet if he were to think critically about his own work, he’d see that there are many flaws to it. (Hat tip to Maki for sphinning the Fast Company piece on Watts.) Influence still matters.

Was Mass Marketing Effective Or Was It Personal Networks Operating? (more…)

I’ve guest-posted at Dave Harris’ Huomah, sharing some linkbait ideas I had lying around for linkbait pieces which you’re welcome to develop! If you like it, also please do Sphinn the post. It also ties in to guest-writing I did at Pandia on succesful linkbait’s characteristics. And speaking of influencing people to link to you and/or sphinn your stuff, check out my most recent article, On Motivation and Influence. If you like it, a sphinn would also be appreciated. I put about a dozen hours into it and am really proud of that, so it would mean a lot if you could help it go hot.

Besides all that, I’m going to make the traditional invitation for you to Read Comments (0)