If you’re designing a custom landing page, chances are that you’re using a PSD to HTML chop shop, like my friends at PSD to HTML/CSS. The problem is that things you may obviously require won’t be obvious to the coders.

Here’s a checklist of things to specify in your PSD to html landing page order in your order to minimize revisions and save time.

1) Editable text.

If you have a button on the page, or fancy headers, you’ll probably want to test them.

If you don’t specify to the coders that the text must be editable , you may just get an image of text, instead of a button image with editable text positioned over it (the positioning is done using CSS). That will make testing harder, as you’ll need to get the graphic artist to design new buttons, headers etc for each test.

2) CSS that enables flexible width page and buttons.

The corollary to having editable text is that you’ll need the page width to be flexible, and likewise your button width. Otherwise you’ll find that the positioning of the page elements will overlap and look aweful.

3) Flexible borders on images.

You don’t want your hero shot to get overlapped by a border, so ensure the border will adjust to the image size. Otherwise you’ll constantly need to crop, and get things pixel perfect.

4) Form submissions lead from the landing page to a thankyou page.

Most conversion tracking requires placing javascript code on a thankyou page. If your form executes with AJAX, your conversion tracking becomes a lot more complex for nothing.

5) Easy to comment out sections of the html.

You won’t know whether an element’s presence helps or distracts until you test it. For that reason, you want arguably distracting elements to be coded in such a way that you can easily comment them out. The end result should still look good, and not have overlapping or ‘broken-looking’ elements.

6) The logo should not be wrapped in html tags reading “h1″.

This seems obvious, but sometimes things get coded this way. If you ever want to rank the page, or use the template for another page you want to rank, this is something to check over.

7) Test the landing page ASAP.

Most providers provide a time-specific support guarantee, like 30 days free support. If you buy a design but then delay launching the campaign for too long, you may find bugs after the guarantee period.

At that point, you’re at the mercy of the provider whether or not they’ll fix the bug.

Partly, it’s an accounting thing – they need to know when the revenue is fully “earned” for accrual accounting purposes.

Partly it’s also a memory thing. When the code is recent, the coder can edit and proofread more easily than if he has to re-read the whole thing from scratch.

So once you get your code, put in your various texts and images etc and see how it performs.

Pay attention especially to longer vs shorter text, and functionality of buttons and forms. How are errors handled? Can users correct the mistake easily? Is the error message clear and not insulting ([You entered incorrect information [you idiot]” vs “We had trouble understanding your phone # because…”)?

If you liked this, add my rss feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

An increasingly popular question in attribution management and in advertising measurement is what effect ads – that were viewed but not clicked on – have. These ads are known in the lingo as ‘View-Thrus’ or ‘View-Throughs.’ The related question people usually have is what percentage of credit to give view-thrus for conversions that came via multiple touchpoints (e.g. the customer saw and/or clicked several ads, before buying).

I’ve come up with an idea for an experiment to measure the effect of such “view-thru” ads on conversion, as well as on acquisition costs. (An acquisition cost is the cost-per-action of acquiring the lead/customer.)

1. First, get a control group and an experimental group.

2. Second, instruct the groups to read and browse a few websites you control, and provide you with feedback on some [non-ad-related] issues with the sites.

The control group will view ads unrelated to what they’re about to search for. The experimental group will view ads by companies also advertising on the terms they’re about to look up.

Why are they browsing around and giving feedback?

The point of asking the groups to read and browse a few websites is twofold. One purpose – for the experimental group alone – is for them to ‘see’ the ads – defined here as causing an impression to be registered by loading the ad along with the rest of the page.

The second purpose – the request for feedback – is to mislead all the users about what the purpose of the experiment is. You don’t want to accidentally induce either group to to look more/less closely at the ads or otherwise behave strangely, but just browse around normally. Scientists have a name for this effect, but I forget what it’s called

At this point, the only difference between the groups should be the display ads they’ve viewed. So any differences between the groups subsequently should be attributable to the ads they’ve seen (even and especially if they haven’t clicked them).

Next, have the groups search for a few specific items and click whatever suits their fancy. The former searches are again to mislead the test subjects about the purpose of the experiment. The latter searches will be about products carried by companies whose display ads they just viewed.

Results and Interpretation

Q1: Is there a difference in conversion between the groups? That difference is attributable to the view-thrus. For attribution-management purposes, you can credit the display ads with the difference in percentage.

So if you convert the control group at 10% and the experimental group at 15%, then display gets 1/3 or 33% credit for the experimental group’s conversions.

(Not ½ or 50% because the denominator is 15, not 10. It’s 33% of 15%, or 1/3 of 15%. You already had 10% conversion rate (CR), so saying display deserves 50% credit would mean that display drove 7.5% conversion rate and the other marketing drove 7.5%. This is false since we know the other marketing, without display, converted at 10% on the control group.)

Note: This higher conversion rate again lowers your cost-per-action, reducing your costs for PPC.

Q2: Is there a difference in CTR between the groups? Supposing view-thrus raise CTR, the higher CTR should lift QS and lower CPC, effectively earning a lower cost-per-action.

So as a fun side-effect of such an experiment, you might find yourself with cost savings in your search budget from both the higher conversion rate and the lower CPC. (You might also find the opposite, such that display ads lowered your CTR and CR, in which case you need to ask whether the branding is worth it for the lower immediate cash flow.) But they came at the cost of a display ad campaign.

Next Steps After Attributing Credit

What should you do, then?

You need to see if the PPC savings with the experimental group were either equal to or greater than the display spend. If you saved on PPC more than you spent on display, you should obviously continue with display. If you saved an equal amount, you probably should still continue with display anyways because you also get a branding benefit.

If you saved less than you spent on display, it’s a question of degree. Are you willing to incur the additional expense for branding benefits? Is the branding a shield for shady SEO tactics? How much higher of a conversion rate did you get?

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.

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.

For those who don’t know, Internal Link Building automates your internal linking, so you can rank like Wikipedia without being Wikipedia. Ever notice how Wikipedia always links keywords in its articles to the relevant Wikipedia pages? This plugin does that for you.

What’s popular?

- 9000 downloads – without being in the WordPress codex!
- Worldwide attention with coverage in: the US, Canada, Russia, France, Japan, Romania, Brazil, the UK, Belgium
- Favorable mentions from SEOs in competitive industries like gambling and pills, as well as the mainstream trade sites like SEO Book
- Translations into Russian and other East-European languages (I think there’s one in Japanese somewhere, too?)
- Ported to another CMS

And now, the plugin’s set to be even better with Marios’ updates which allow you to make the anchor text be more natural / links to occur without you typing the exact phrase.

Here’s what’s new.

Benefits:

In Marios’ words: “The features are primarily to increase the number of link matches on a page while also increasing the variability of the anchor text. The plugin is going to let me test across multiple sites without having to do a lot of work .

“Features:

1. Specify the number of words that can appear in between the keywords you provided and still have a match found

2. Specify the number of words before the match that will also be linked

3. Specify the number of words after the match that will also be linked

4. Specify the number of total links that will be inserted into a page

Note: Matching won’t cross punctuation like a period or exclamation point, but will cross commas.

Bug Fixes:

- Updated to work with WP 2.9.1

- Exact matching wasn’t working quite right

- Removing Custom Post Keywords left data in the DB

Other Changes:

- The plugin settings page is now in the Settings section rather than in the Posts section. I didn’t ask for this one, so I guess Aaron did it.

- The menu option is now called Keyword Links instead of Keywords

- Update the version to 2.0. I figured the changes were significant enough to go to 2.0.”

Marios is going to handle bug fixes / updates to this new version on his site. Marios’ Internal Link Building comments page . You should also definitely check out Marios’ blog, All Things SEM / SEO Blog, and add his RSS feed to your reader – it’s definitely in mine, because he tests and blogs about original ideas instead of rehashing like other people.

That said, as with previous versions of the plugin, you need to add my RSS feed to your reader (or subscribe to get new posts (free) by email) to download it. Why? So that you’ll find out about any future updates by myself or others. Besides, there’s also other free downloads when you subscribe to my RSS feed (or get my new posts by email), like a SEO ROI calculator spreadsheet – so you can forecast SEO ROI before tackling a keyword/niche.

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.

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.

1) Affiliate networks.

Ever wonder what a competitor’s margins are like?

What countries they focus on? What KPIs they use?

What verticals they’re in?

Get the answers to all these questions and many others by joining multiple networks.

2) Email newsletters. I recently got a newsletter disclosing [indirectly] the profitability of certain market segments. For newbies struggling to find their affiliate niche, this is valuable info!

Consumer-facing email newsletter are also valuable, although I admit that I’m slack in monitoring these. Some things you can pick up:

- Benefits emphasized – to model your copy on

- Profitable or high volume products or otherwise desirable goals

- Tone of voice for branding purposes

3) Corporate HQ websites.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular company that I highly respect, where they openly share corporate strategy. It’s pretty impressive seeing the massive, fast-turning gears turning in these people’s heads, but it’s also inspirational here and there.

If you’re a fast-food restaurant owner, you can probably pay attention to McDonald’s, Harvey’s, Wendy’s, KFC and other press releases to see where they’re going in a broad sense. The same is broadly true of many industries.

4) Alerts and keyword trackers.

Think these tools just serve to measure how much brand discussion is happening in social media? Guess again.

If new, as-yet-unknown competitors are linkbaiting, you can’t subscribe to their RSS feed.

You can set up trackers to look for particular keywords linkbait might target, or roll your own solution to monitor Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

Similarly, if the approach is more traditional, why not monitor press-release sites for your industry keywords?

Find ‘em while they’re fresh to the industry and buy those sites out…securely.

5) Mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines.

This week’s edition of Maclean’s (a popular Canadian newsmagazine) has an excellent piece on the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and paywalls.

There are some fantastic nuggets to pick up in there, which I haven’t seen on places like Search Engine Land (despite Danny Sullivan’s thorough coverage of the issue!).

During SMX Advanced, I picked up the local Seattle paper and saw a piece about Google taking on Amazon for ebooks. Now, Slightly Shady SEO imagined that almost 2 years ago! And I had similar feelings and predictions on Google’s move into ecommerce and the implications about 7 months before SMX Advanced.

Since I love saying I told you so, here’s a little gem from my now 1+ year old post.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.” If you haven’t seen Google base practically become the default spot 3 on commercial searches, you’re sleeping:

Oh, and have any of you read Aaron Wall’s interview with eBay’s head of SEO?

Here’s an excerpt:

“[Millions of listings] end up cradle to grave quickly. What are some of the keys to helping search engines understand the structure and importance of content in such a fast changing environment?

[...]

“We have invested a good amount of resources in our data-feed technology & analytics. The Sitemaps protocol plays an important role here. As eBay has so many new listings every day, over the course of the day, you can almost update the sitemaps on a continuous basis.

“However, the effort to source the items from the database, generate the sitemap files, submission and pick up, takes decent amount of time. We have made good headway tuning our feeds in way to get more efficiency out of the items we send. We started optimizing based on probability of conversion. We can make these assumptions based on predictive modeling and data. Predictive modeling on large datasets will become even more important when it comes to scaling the projects. As a company, we are putting lots of efforts in building out a competitive advantage based on analytics, predictive modeling and scaling the technology to handling even larger datasets.”

If that isn’t the integration of merchandising and SEO, what is?

Well, here’s one of 5 calls I’d made about Google shifting more and more into ecommerce:

<“Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

“As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

And if you go to eBay, you’ll see that cruises abundantly listed there, for example, are of the cheap and generic variety. Where something is advertised in abundance, you know the ads work…
[I know about the cruises in particular because my dad combines dental CE seminars with upscale cruises and travel. Our eBay test yielded folks looking for bargains...]

Bottom line? Read, read and read some more! Add my rss feed to your reader, then check out these 30 other advanced search blogs.

Oh, and you might also like some recent guest posts of mine at Search Engine Land, Wolf Howl and Search Engine Journal. (Links go to my author profiles.)

p.p.s. I’m booked on a flight to Israel for tomorrow night. If I’ve been blogging slowly lately (or in the next little bit), that’s why!

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.

… posted at Search Engine Journal: Landing Pages On A SMB Budget.

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.

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?

Drumroll please…

Get links!

Ok seriously, you knew that. What I want to suggest is a way to have both a splash page and a separate, properly optimized homepage.

And no, it’s not cloaking.

I call this the double homepage technique.

Have you ever been to a site like Ralph Wilson’s famous Web Marketing Today? He uses a dhtml rollover (or at least I think it’s coded in dhtml?) to get more newsletter subscribers. It looks like this:

Well, why not make a full-size rollover that replaces your splash page? Ask people for their age, location or whatever else you’re currently using the splash page to segment visitors by.

Similarly, my sister Maya, a Montreal make-up artist, uses a lightbox effect when people click on her pictures. The pregnant lady’s thumbnail (not shown), when clicked, shows her in full size with the rest of the site darkened in the background.

You can use the lightbox effect to present splash page stuff automatically when the page loads, and then have a normal optimized homepage.

There’s a slight catch with the Lightbox approach. It depends on javascript, and about 5% of the web population has javascript disabled. So nothing will happen for them. So if legal absolutely needs 100% of people to confirm their age, then this isn’t ideal.

But if it’s just a boss who insists on some geo or language segmentation, then it’s probably OK. Just make sure you still have another way on the homepage and throughout the site for people to pick their language.

Boom – two homepages, no cloaking, legal gets the splash, SEO brings in the cash. Everybody’s happy! If you liked this, add my rss feed to your reader for more advanced whitehat SEO ideas and techniques.

Update from the comments section:

Benj Arriola of SEO Consulting Firm Business Online tells me that their firm has presented this solution to a client and are waiting for the go-ahead.

Dr. Pete of Usability shop User Effect has suggested a valuable variation on this technique. The good doctor suggests you cookie visitors’ selection so that you don’t need to show them the splash page on subsequent visits.

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.

I want to flip the tables and this time ask you, my dear readers, for some advice. What can I do to sell more one-hour consultations? It’s my favourite service to provide, typically clarifies a lot of stuff for the client and provides them with great value, and it’s quite convenient as far as overhead/organization goes. I’m open to anything, so don’t be intimidated or feel like it’s a “stupid” suggestion or “too obvious.”

Prizes for good suggestions include:

- Dofollow links added to this post, featuring your desired anchor text, as well as a line or two of copy around it. Linking to deep pages is fine too.

- Hourly consultations with yours truly, for the really great suggestions.

First link is to Jeromy, who offers internet business how to tips

I’ve added some in the comments below too, but regardless, check out Jeremy Knauff’s web design company.

Rob Kingston‘s also had some nice tips. Likewise Vinh Nguyen (of Chom Chom Advertising Agency) and Michael G (who sells Greek Apparel ) ‘s conference call/webinar idea. You both win an hour. Willy Franzen, who writes up Entry Level Jobs, knocked me off my socks. There’s another hour won.

My friend Brian Hawkins who blogs 140 characters daily at www.Twitter.com/BrianHawkins and is an affiliate marketing manager for Pingo.com, which provides International calling cards, had the following tips to share by email as to how to go about it.

“Sure your SEO consulting time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour. When I used to sell SEO service, it bugged me that my plumber charges $150 an hour to fix my toilet. Plus he would round up to the next hour, even when he worked an hour and fifteen minutes. Yet I was having a difficult time convincing potential clients that are experienced SEO consultants were worth the same as my plumber.

“However when we tried packaging the SEO services, it created a high perceived value. Which was a lot easier to sell as opposed to the sticker shook of seeing that high hourly fee which can prevent marketing folks from hitting the Paypal button.

“So I’d suggest providing value added services, something that you can’t find online that has real value. Such as:

- A list of action items for the client to walk away with as a training guide

- A special link building list or access to your rolodex to help them network to achieve their online ranking goals.

- Fancy excel sheet to help them get organized.

- An ebook that is filled with real valuable advice vs. those bogus “make money online” re-written ebook articles.

“Try to tailor your pitch to offer a packaged service of advice that really relates to a certain industry or type of solution a customer is looking for answers on. This will customize your hourly consulting call time to be specific to a certain industry or niche advice that they potentially can’t find elsewhere.”

Thanks a bunch Brian!

My friend Keri Morgret of Morgret Web Designs shared the following ideas:

“On Craiglist, I see pleas for SEO/SEM/Website help in the gigs section. They’re often poorly defined (don’t give industry they’re in, how many pages on the site, etc.) and sometimes really don’t know what they’re looking for. This post is an example: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/cpg/1051526983.html. The person is looking for a”programmer who can make our sites the top sites that appear when various industry related searches are done on yahoo and google. ” Nothing is said about anything offsite, keywords, etc.

“I’m wondering if you could pitch some of those people with doing an initial site review and giving them a realistic picture of what their site really needs, the time involved, the skills they should be looking for in a contractor, and a ballpark of what they can expect to pay. It’s not going to work for everyone, there are a lot of posts out there that expect miracles for $15/hour, but Craigslist is a big enough place that there should be some candidates out there for this type of thing.”

Let’s keep the thoughts coming, folks .

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.

I’ve long had All In One SEO, but I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with it. It only handles posts, not pages, it won’t auto-301 posts when you change the permalink, and doesn’t let you mass-edit titles/descriptions. Not that I’m ungrateful, as it’s been good to me, but it’s kind of annoying having an All In One tool that isn’t all in one.

Platinum SEO has some of these features, so I was happy to find and install it. The thing is, I don’t recall which of my posts are already making use of All In One…

Which sucks, because Platinum SEO Pack conflicts with All In One SEO Pack. When I enable Platinum, it makes special titles configured with All In One SEO Pack revert to my homepage’s default title. Obviously that’s not my goal.

This one needs more testing and tweaking, to figure out the exact mechanics, but it’s going to be a chore transitioning from one plugin to the other. Chalk up another redesign task… Also @SemperFiDesign – Please consider this a support request .

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.

Survey Gizmo have powered my contact and quote forms for as long as I can remember. Recently, I upgraded to pro and thought I’d share my thoughts with you guys on what I like about their software. Full disclosure – I have dealt with Survey Gizmo, but am getting no money for this nor was I required or even asked to link as part of our business.

Anyways, first of all, SG’ve got some cool features such as avoiding duplicate participation in quizzes you create. If you’re trying to survey a group for serious purposes, their dupe-vote blocking based on either cookies, milk or chocolate is terrific. I’m also a fan of IP-based blocking, having used IP-based bans as a moderator on forums and can speak to how effective the technology is.

Second, and this will be appreciated by anyone who likes to segment their data to get a better feel for who they’re dealing with, you can get reports and export them with geographic information attached. That means actionable intelligence, like if you’re doing a survey on winter tires and are getting a surprisingly high amount of “don’t use” in your national survey, you may want to check that the question is clear or that you’re targeting northern states as well.

Another thing that comes in handy is Survey Gizmo’s templates for its various form types. Whether you’re doing lead generation, a contact page or a poll on whether Presidents should auction their earwax for charity, these simplify and speed things up.

On the flip side of all this, Survey Gizmo’s integration with WordPress often leaves to be desired. It’ll break a page faster than you can blink, and it often takes several tries to get it displaying just right, not overlapping anything or busting up your site. However, given the advantages of the system over all, I’d say it’s worth it for the ease it brings to making contact forms. Also, if you’re short on funds, WordPress has various contact form plugins that can do the trick as well, or you can just use Survey Gizmo’s free, basic version.

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.

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.

1. Buy a ‘make your free website’ WYSIWIG-and-template based website, a la Geocities. Augment with a whackload of cheap hosting across different C blocks and IP ranges. For domains you can use subdomains or include them free (compare that to the cost of buying a link…).

2. Have a bunch of graphic templates made focused on the real estate sector. Pictures of houses, happy families and dogs, simple layouts, obvious email address/phone number etc.

3. Hire students to cold-call real estate agents and offer them free websites, and some resources on where to promote them (i.e. a basic how to do linkbuilding guide and quality directory list). If they ask what the catch is, be honest and tell them that there are links to your mortgage calculator webpage from their own sites.

Presto, you have:

• Themortgage.com
• TDCanadaTrust.com
• RBCRoyalBank.com

[My SERPs look like this:]

			Sponsored Links
			Free Mortgage Calculators Easy to Use Mortgage Calculators. Check Payments and Mortgage Rates. InternetMortgageCalculators.com

Mortgage Calculator — How Much Can You Afford? | CMHC

RBC Royal Bank – Mortgage Payment Calculator

TD Canada Trust – Products and Services – Mortgages

Mortgage Calculators

In fairness, the last two also carry a pretty big brand imprint which gets lots of free, juicy editorial links. But who the hell has ever head of ‘themortgage.com’ (unless you’re in the market, obviously).

What’s especially sweet about this is that it’s endorsed by Google. Ever seen those ‘Powered by Blogger” badges? On blogspot subdomains… Templated … And links to a mortgage calculator site from a real estate broker – that’s standard in the industry anyways, so it’s not like offtopic links from something else.

If you liked this post on link building, get my rss feed.

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.

Note: If you download this, please link to this page from your blog or Tweet it. Also, you’ll probably like a free chapter from my advanced SEO book.

Update 1 : The plugin has been downloaded 22,000 + times! And many webmasters use it on multiple sites, so it’s probably being used on closer to 25-30,000 sites!

(Click to enlarge)

Update 2 : To download the plugin, you need to add my RSS feed to your reader. The download link is now in my RSS feed’s footer . That is to say you can find a link to download below any post, but only if you read via RSS.

Some folks have complained about the need to subscribe. And I understand where you’re coming from – it feels a little pushy and you probably already have a bunch of subscriptions.

But there are good reasons to subscribe to my rss feed (besides it being free):

1) To hear about updates to the plugin or new plugins and SEO tools I release.

2) To learn new SEO techniques. If you like my plugin, aren’t my other SEO ideas worth your attention?

Key info on Internal Link Building:

Internal Link Building gives you an admin panel to assign keywords to given destination URLs. The point being that your website will link within itself a la Wikipedia – every time a keyword occurs, it links to the page you defined.

So: You can rank like Wikipedia, without being Wikipedia. Ok, that’s exaggeration, but the tool improves your internal navigation / link structure a lot.

I got the idea from Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas, which includes a similar tool.

Also note: Marios Alexandrou of All Thing SEM updated the plugin for WP 2.9+ and currently handles tech support.

Functionality Specifics:

To use the plugin, the settings page is under the Posts menu -> Keywords in 2.7+. It’s under Manage -> Keywords, in older versions of WP (up to 2.5 or 2.6) .

1. This plugin allows you to mass-upload keywords. So you just need to prepare a CSV file in Excel and then copy-paste it into the mass-upload box in your admin panel and then click upload! This is great for larger sites targeting multiple keywords that want to speed things up.

2. It’s up to you whether you make cAsE ReLeVaNT to your links. Check the “Exact Match” checkbox for it to only match when the case is the same as you typed the word into the admin panel. Leave it unchecked to have all cases link to your selected page.

3. Post-level overrides of globally-assigned keywords. Maki, of Dosh Dosh Internet Marketing, pointed out that similar plugins exist. True, but they don’t allow post-level overriding of a given keyword. This plugin does. So if I can link to my homepage every time the words SEO or internet marketing appear, but then link to, Tad Chef’s SEO 2.0 blog with the word SEO, or Joy’s internet marketing.

4. Link to sources or affiliate links whom you reference a lot. That, for me, would be useful so I could cite Maki, SEOmoz, XMCP, and others more easily.

5. Build internal links automatically to pages you regularly reference. For instance, I can just say add my rss feed to your reader and the phrase gets linked on its own.

6. Make a link nofollow. For example, if you link to particular Wikipedia pages a lot then set the nofollow to be automatic.

Click to expand:

Add multiple keywords to one page, or one keyword to multiple pages, have it nofollow, have it link numerous instances on the page, use exact matching or not etc.

7. Link multiple keywords to a single URL. Target all a page’s keywords at once! Just put a space, a  pipe (eg |) and a space between the multiple keywords. E.g. affiliate | affiliate marketing. More efficiency! More time savings!

8. Link a single keyword to multiple URLs. I’m not quite sure why you’d want to do this, but some people asked for it, so there you go!

9. Pick the number of times a keyword will link to a particular URL. If you only want the words social media to link to your social media category once, you can do that. Notice that social gets linked next, since I also have that keyword assigned to link to the same page.

FAQ:

1. Will this plugin overwrite links in older posts using keywords I set to link to particular pages?

- Where a post already links out using given keywords, the plugin will NOT overwrite it.

2. Can we make this link out in a post only a set number of times?

- Yes, this is possible with the new version of the plugin.

3. Can we make a set of URLs to link to, and have it link at random?

- Yes, this is possible. The plugin has been updated, so if you downloaded it on the first or second day it was live, you might want to get the new one. You just need to separate the URLs with | symbols in the URL field.

4. How is this plugin different from other similar plugins?

- They do not have the post-level override functionality. They also don’t have mass upload through a CSV copy-paste functionality. A third difference is that multiple keywords can link to a given URL, or one keyword can link to multiple URLs (see #6 and #7 for more).

6. Where is the post-level override?

- It’s in a box below the main content area in /wp-admin/post.php (or post-new.php). I.e. When you write/edit individual posts, scroll down and you’ll see it.

7. How do I link multiple keywords to URL, or one keyword to multiple URLs?

- Type the different keywords or URLs out with a pipe symbol ( | ) in between them. It’s found just above the enter key on most qwerty keyboards; you press shift+| to make it appear (without shift you’ll get a backslash: \ ) .

8. How do I install this?

- Download the file. Upload it to the wp-content/plugins/ . Login to WordPress. Activate it within the plugins admin page.

Like this plugin idea? Be the first to hear about future releases: Get my RSS feed.

Plugin Bug Fixes

1) Apostrophes within keywords can now be used. So if your friend O’harra is always getting links from you, just set up O’harra and don’t worry about it.

2) URLs that are just being shown, e.g. http://seoroi.com/seo-consulting-services/ are no longer having keywords within them linking out. E.g. services won’t link to a page you’ve set.

3) Posts and pages that are set as link-love destinations won’t link to themselves. Yay! Better aesthetics .

4) Blockquotes and lists can now feature links within them. So go ahead and cite this:

Internal Link Building is awesome!

5) Simple Tags can now work with ILB, with a little ‘child’s play’ hacking on your part, per my awesome developer Aaron.

7) Image tags with keywords in them (e.g. in the alt or title) are no longer breaking.

8 ) Jeff and John of SEO Design Solutions got the plugin up to date for WP 2.7 and removed the bug on the new post / post editing admin panels.

9) Chris Balicki of Web Systems helped out earlier as did Matt Longley of Site Source 101.

Bonus Advantage of Internal Link Building

This is something I’ve noticed since installing the plugin: My average pageviews seen per visitor has gone up from 1.4-1.5 to 1.9-2.0. Woohoo! Go extra frequency/repetition and brand recall!

Like this plugin idea? Be the first to hear about future releases: Get my RSS feed.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

When you and a busload of friends have had several long hours of championship partying in the club where you gave 110%, and you’re still so pumped for overtime that you go over the top for the win – you’re a Hall of Fame member of the Pro Partying Association.

If you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with internet marketing, my friends at NVI are doing a viral campaign for Molson. Nick Cossette tagged me and apparently is the master creative genius behind the campaign.

Note: If ever you’re in Israel, ask to be driven by Izak “Itsik” Shaulov – naumas a-circle-sign netvision dot net dot il . He made it so much better, I can’t even begin to tell you. From keeping us supplied with fresh bottled water to pulling over for us to visit the cemetery where many of the country’s founders are buried, to treating us to yummy Baklava at a special place he knew to turning the lights on-n-off like it was a discotheque on our drive home and pumping the music loud, to pointing out wildlife alond the side of the road, Itsik was an awesome driver.

I ran into him in Jerusalem a few weeks after my organized trip was done. I was close to finishing my water bottle and had hardly eaten that day because I was running out of money. It was to the point I had to save my last shekels for the busride back to Ashdod, where I’d left the rest of my money . He had no food on him but gave me a fresh bottle of water to keep me up and help me out. When you’re kinda hungry and low on water in a hot country like Israel, that was pure kindness. Itsik’s a real class act.

If you liked this post, get my RSS feed. If not, rest assured that I’ll be back with more educational content later this week, as well as my first tool release!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Here’s 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

SEM Pricing Models

Top 10 Business Mistakes Search Marketing Firms Make

The Secret Motivations that Drive Your Customers

The Freelancer’s Guide to Setting Perfect Deadlines

Small Business B2B Marketing: How to Monetize Your Expertise

Blogging

How to use WordPress to Run a Magazine Or News Website

Creating An Authority RSS Count + Secret RSS Booster Tip

99 Headline Techniques Revealed

How to Make Every Word You Write Unputdownable

Contact Form WordPress Plugins

46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network

Get your internal linking straight: Blog Navigation WordPress Plugins: Related, Recent, Most Popular Posts and More

10 Techniques I Used To Go From 0 To 12,000 RSS Subscribers In Seven Months – With No Ads Or Leverage

34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog

Category Base Removal Plugin Finally! Remove /category/ from your WP permalinks.

Keywords

Buy Branded Keywords? A Case Study on Traffic, Conversion and RPV

Keyword Inspiration – Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com shares his secrets

Keyword Scrubbing Get the gunk out of your list!

Content

FullBooks.com – Thousands of Full-Text Free Books – Did anyone say free inspiration? Or for the shadier folks…

In a similar vein, try Creative Commons Search

8 Great Places to Find Interview Subjects

Marketing Trends: 21+ Websites for Finding What’s Hot

Link Building and Buying

30 Link Buying Tips – Brian Chappell shares the secret sauce and yours truly chips in with some extras in the comments.

New link tool to find your competitors most linked pages

Michael Gray Interview: Advanced Link Strategies

How to Get More Bookmarks and Better Links – He knows that of which he speaks. This is being written using my bookmarks!

Link Attraction Factors Keyword Tool Holy sheeeeet that’s impressive and original, Dan!

LAF Title Check

102 Ways To Make Your Site A Back-Link Superstar

Video and Social Media

The Definitive List of French-Canadian Social Media – Kinda sad that I found out about what’s going on here from a Toronto firm lol. Great post anyways!

How To Do YouTube Video View Optimization Part 1

User Contributed-Making Money With A Video Blog

Guide to Video Marketing on YouTube

The Drupal SEO Tutorial

50+ Resources for Utilizing StumbleUpon Effectively

Sphinn, Mixx and other social sites’ credibility – Voting for vapor.

Social Network Ad Spending and Return on Investment

Technical and Miscellaneous

Competitor Analysis

How to fuck up click tracking with the JavaScript onclick trigger

Controlling Your Referer, and Hiding Your Traffic Sources : Slightly Shady SEO

Www.domain.com v straight domain.com? Enforce www. Preference

Interview of Eli from Blue Hat SEO.com

Earl Grey – The co-creater of Syndk8 BlackHat Seo Forums

11 Tips for Appearing at Google Definitions

Portrait of an INTP Apparently this is me. Some parallels, but to be taken with a grain of salt. Interesting for the sake of making personas; possibly useful as a template.

EEE Spectrum: The Gray Areas of Search-Engine Law

50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website

Online Reputation Management: What You Need to Know

Garr Reynolds/Presentations

Advancing Advanced Search – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

Advanced free tell-a-friend script with popup code

Create your Google Sitemap Online – XML Sitemaps

Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

PPC

SpeedPPC – Pay Per Click Marketing at Warp Speed

Paid Search Campaign Tools and Analytics

Free eBook from Google: AdWords Textbook

Clix Marketing’s Favorite PPC Blogs David Szetela knows his PPC, so this list of his is high praise for those that are on it.

70 Quick Tests to Get More Conversions Out of AdWords – My friend James Zol knows his conversion rate optimization he does!

* Coming soon: What I learned from SMX’s PPC sessions.

Security

Spamproof Your Site

ha.ckers.org Web Application Security Lab

The Unsuspecting Recruit: Why every SEO MUST learn Internet security

reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books Blogs are good too .

Guarding Your WordPress Blog

Domains

Top 3 (Free!) Domain Name Generator Decent stuff, have used ‘em myself to an extent. I find the following more useful though:

Bulk Domain Appraisal and Keyword Research Tool by EstiBot.com

Making It In The Domain Industry -2007 Edition but still current

Namepros – I love this community for its generosity in teaching me.

Landing Pages and Affiliate Stuff

Custom Capture Pages

Should I Launch My Website With an Affiliate Program?

Landing Page Optimization

Landing Page Design Services

Landing Page Design for Pay Per Click PPC – Useful Links to Research

Keeb’s Landing Pages

10 tips for sign-up forms

How to Hide My Identity

Landing Page Optimization Video: Keep Readers Moving Down the Sales Funnel

Camouflage Your Links First place I heard about the technique.

How to Scale a Campaign

How to: Build an Affiliate Site You Can Sell for $1M — Tropical SEO

Google AdWords Landing Pages – how to build a page that won’t get banned, with examples

Membership

WordPress Membership Plugin at WPBOARD.Com

WordPress Plug-In to sell subscriptions

Member Benefits | FAST Membership Sites

Membership Academy: Membership site software comparisons, reviews, forums and videos, start-up guide.

How to Change the World: The Art of Creating a Community

How To Build A Community Of Brand Enthusiasts

Friends

Rand, Rebecca, Jane, Scott, Jeff, Sarah et co. – SEOmoz (I owe them so much! Hard to put in words how much I appreciate these guys and their site!)

Ann Smarty – SEO Smarty and Social Ninja

Bill Hilton – Copywriting

Susan Gunelius – Branding

Sebastian X – SEO techie

Peter Meyers – Usability Expert

Critchlows n a Riley – Distilled Reputation Management Pros

Linda Bustos – Ecommerce Maven

Hamlet Batista – SEO Expert

Sean Maguire – Search Matters

Vinny Goldsmith – Real Estate SEO Pro

Avinash Kaushik – Analytics Guru

XMCP – Slightly blackhat SEO and general nice guy

Michelle Blanc – Montreal Marketing Guru

Sylvain Carle – Frog in the Valley (started when he was in Silicon Valley)

Claude Malaison – Quebec’s Danny Sullivan; organizes Webcom

Nicolas Cossette, Guillaume Bouchard – Montreal Social Media and NVI SEO

Muriel Ide, Guillaume Brunet et co. – Association de Marketing de Montreal

Jean-Fran̤ois Renaud РAdviso SEO

Jim Hedger – SEO Author and Veteran

SugarRae – Veteran Affiliate & SEO

Todd Malicoat – Superstar SEO Consultant

Li Evans – SEO Guru

Marty Weintraub – SEO Pros and Facebook case studies

Andrew Shotland – Local SEO Expert

Gyutae Park – Money Makin’ Blogger

Chris Winfield – SEO & Press Darling

Jeff Quipp – Bright Search Engine People (& Press Darlings)

Tamar Weinberg – Power Socialite

Barry Welford – SEO formerly in the snow, now in the rain

Christine O’Kelly – Self Made Chick Copywriting

Lindsey Walsh – PPC Management Expert

Per Koch – SEO Vet

Damian Finlay – Epiar Keyword Champs

Lisa Williams – Florida SEM and SMX Buddy

Jordan Kasteler – “Young Gun of SEO” W000T.

John Carcutt – Applied SEO

Amy Konefal, Sandra Niehaus – PPC and landing page buddies from SMX. Plus Sandy co-wrote Web Design 4 ROI with Lance Loveday, their CEO at Closed Loop Marketing

Harrison Gevirtz – Young Gun Super Affiliate & PPC Expert

Chris Silver Smith – SEO Strategist

Andy Beal – SEO Business Coaching and SMX Connection

Like I mentioned earlier – if you liked this post, subscribe.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

This post is a little like a long march through the desert. Visually it’s pretty repetitive and it’s easy to just focus on the mountain peaks (subheaders/scannable content). But if you survive it to the end, your mind will be the stronger for it and you will be rewarded in more ways than one. And you’ll have a new SEO blog feed in your feedreader.

(Image courtesy of Ojaipatrick.)

20. You should subscribe to my RSS feed because reading the original headlines I write will make you a better writer, if nothing else. In turn, you can leverage what you learn and replicate my techniques in your own niche. Besides, my topics are different…

19. The topics I’m writing about aren’t being covered by other search and search marketing bloggers. Simply put, the material is more original, more edgy, more ahead of the game. Who else is teaching you about cloning expired sites? How about using n grams to make your anchor text profile more natural? No one else is sharing ideas like that, and if you don’t subscribe, you’ll get left behind by the SEOs that do. This relates to points 15 and 06, below.

18. My regular use of case studies sets me apart and gives you practical examples whose tactics you can apply in your own situation. Other people will talk to you about how to do your reputation management. I wrote about Facebook’s reputation management efforts. Others will say “be good to your clients and they’ll become brand evangelists.” I wrote about Adviso and Dreamhost generating brand evangelists by proactive reputation management. And I contrasted them with 1and1 and Network Solutions. This blog is more than just what’s going on in the here and now, though.

17. This SEO blog covers the leading strategies and tactics that are set to make their mark in the near-future. Want to find out about Google Maps’ latest changes to their SERPs? I wrote about it first. What about when I’m second?

16. It’s exceptionally rare for me to be second, because I strive to be different and original, but when I am, I add something unique. I covered the Google BlogSearch search engine’s ranking algorithms, based on distilling the gems of other people’s analysis into an easy-to-follow guide. But my guide improved on their explanations by adding how my own blogs had been impacted by Google’s ranking factors, both positively (a Blog Search Onebox inclusion) and negatively (another blog getting flagged as potential spam). Like I said at point 18 – this blog is practical. Like that picture of a wrench there. I know practically that more of you will subscribe if I use pictures. See? I’m practical because I put a picture of a wrench on this page.

Subscribe to my RSS feed – It’s fresh and different.

15. My personal philosophy about learning is that everybody can teach you something, which is essentially what Brian Clark explains here. By now I’ve probably taught most people that reading promotional copy for RSS feeds is a waste of their time and that they should be clicking ‘back’ to avoid further mental decay. More seriously, my approach to learning means that take blackhat ideas and adapt them into whitehat processes. By reading this SEO blog, you get the benefit of learning what works without the risk of getting banned.

14. Speaking of learning, some questions are asked more frequently than others. I’m aiming to develop the single largest, most comprehensive SEO FAQ around. Subscribing will likely result in you finding answers to your questions just as they arise. Such as the difference between a/b testing and multivariate testing, or how to write a robots.txt file. You’ll also see other issues discussed here as they arise:

13. I’ve been the first with the news here repeatedly, in a short time. I polled Facebook users about their shopping habits and about whether they were aware of the Facebook blog’s existence. Likewise for the silent murder of Facebook Flyers. Plus you’ll find a lot more here than Facebook.

12. The ideas you’ll find me writing are thought-provoking. Literally – I wrote a how-to Think Like A Search Engineer post. And I asked whether aggressive ad publishing decreases your Page Rank. Certainly it’ll decrease your mindshare, and it’s not a great business model in any event. And if you care about SEO as a business, I’ve got another juicy reason for you to subscribe.

(Image courtesy of Norby.)

11. That reason is my meaty content and knowledge of SEO as a business. I’ve interviewed Mikkel deMib Svendsen – one of the most experienced SEOs around, who’s been in the business since the mid-late 90s – on SEO business models. And I’ve chatted with Rand Fishkin and Rebecca Kelley about it in SEOmoz‘s Premium Members section (see closing the sale, a search marketer’s priorities, and how to stand out in the SEO blogosphere). So you can see that if you want to get into the search business, following this search blog will help you get a head start.

Add me to your feedreader to get those mental juices flowing!

10. Subscribing is a great step to establishing a relationship with me. Big deal, right? Well, it is a big deal when you consider that I write around a fair bit, tend to get my content ranking and generously link out to people whom I have relationships with. Fellow bloggers, former clients, people who’ve had me guest-post … all have benefited from such links. And I’ve written for the best of em: SEOmoz‘s blog, Sitepoint, BrandCurve, Pandia’s search engine blog, ISEdb, the Huomah SEO blog etc. Not to mention what I’ve done at Sphinn.

09. My in-depth posts have been averaging 40 Sphinns. In other words, fellow search marketers are impressed at what I write. At the time of this writing, this one on motivation had 40 Sphinns. This piece on MSN’s share of the search market has 40. Another 40 for this post on resurrecting sites from the internet graveyard. 56 for the Top 20 Little Known Sphinners. To be fair my “Hey guys, I’m speaking at SMX West and I’m only 20!” post only did 27. Hey, at least it got a link from Search Engine Land (see the Conferences section of the post).

08. I have variety in length, content and niche. Want a medium size post on analytics? Got it. Long piece on algorithms? Done it. Credibility? Check. Variety of case studies? In stock. Informal writing your thing? Bingo! You won’t get bored by one type of content all the time. This relates to #03 below (though the Scratchpads discussed there might be long or short, depending how much I have to say).

07. In the short-to-medium-term I’ll be launching the best damn premium content you could find anywhere. Better than SEOmoz, better than Jim’s Ninja Videos, better than Aaron Wall’s upcoming membership/subscription site. Anyways, I will be restricting access to the premium section to 100 people or less, and you’ll need to be a subscriber to find out how to apply for access.

06. Occasionally, subscribers will get access to content that non-subscribers won’t have. I’m currently editing a 30 page report on getting the attention of the Sphinn crowd. The top Sphinners have graciously been granting me interviews, and I’ve been conducting my own personal research on the site. I’ve compiled their answers and my research into the Authoritative Guide To Sphinn: Everything You Needed To Know Plus The Colour of Danny’s Skateboard.

Other things coming in the near future are a tools page (password available in the feed) and certain wordpress plugins, whose download pages’ access password will only be in the feed.

Get my SEO blog’s RSS feed and start building a relationship with me.

05. If you want to belong to any industry’s thought-elite, you need to read the same material the elite are reading. (Not think the same, mind you, but definitely read the same). It’s like that saying, “Show me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Search marketing’s influential people are already paying attention to this blog and to yours truly. Besides Danny Sullivan and the people from SMX, Maki of the money-making Dosh Dosh has repeatedly Stumbled and Sphunn my material. The same can be said of Jeff Quipp, from Search Engine People. Likewise Sebastian, the famous shellfish behind Sebastians’ Pamphlets.

Does the name Rand Fishkin ring a bell? He’s stumbled my content. Ditto Bill “Patent Guru” Slawski. How about Dan Thies?

Tamar “Techipedia” Weinberg, Chris “10e20″ Winfield, Shana “Social Desire” Albert, Ralph “Fantomaster” Tegtmeier, Tad “SEO 2.0″ Chef, Marty “aimClear” Weintraub, “XMCP” of Slightly Shady SEO, Ann “SEO Smarty” Smarty, Dave “Red Fly Marketing” Davis, Chris “North Rock Publishing” Dohman, Andrew “Local SEO Guide” Shotland, David “Huomah” Harry, Todd “SEM Portland” Mintz, Bob “Raise My Rank/Qwerty” Gladstein, Hamlet “Ranksense” Batista, Kim “SEO For Newbs” Bock, Barry “RustyBrick” Schwartz and veteran SEO Bill Hartzer are just a few of the industry’s big names who have been known to pay attention. To the right is a matrix of my readers, compiled using their Sphinn avatars.

04. As opposed to subscribing to an email search marketing newsletter, this will allow you to keep control over your inbox and only check things out when you feel like seeing them. You have control over the volume and speed at which you learn. Granted, you’ll likely get addicted to this content and read it all as soon as it’s published, but at least you can easily ubsubscribe at your leisure (no reply with ‘unsubscribe’ subject lines or counting on others really removing you from lists), if ever you decide to kick the habit.

03. Content is going to be concise and to the point. That’s largely what my Scratchpad column is going to be good for – getting out ideas quickly and informally without additional fluff. Just the bare bones essentials of the idea, and perhaps a couple of applications. Mostly just the idea(s) though. Yummy content that’s easily digestible.

02. My volume of posts is very apt for a feedreader – subscribing by feed will save you time instead of checking back daily. I don’t post daily, but I don’t post fewer than twice a week either. The only exception is if I’ve guest-posted elsewhere, in which case there’s at least a post notifying you where to find the guest-post.

01. The most original, iron-clad satisfaction guarantee you can get! I’ll PAY YOU $20 US by Paypal if you find yourself less than totally satisfied at having subscribed, provided you give me valid constructive criticism on how I failed to make it worthwhile and how I can improve. These 20 reasons show that I know what makes a feed worth reading, and you better believe I’ve done my homework on why people unsubscribe. I guarantee your satisfaction.

Subscribe to become a search marketing thought leader.

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.

Just as Google loves data, so should SEOs. I love country code domain names and domaining (NamePros is a great community to learn, if you’re interested). As I was conducting some keyword research to buy new .ca domains, it occurred to me that I could use Google Trends (notice the nofollow on that link ) data to help me with my selection. There are also other uses for Trends data in SEO that are equally interesting.

Google Trends shows you data on which countries’ people are the biggest searchers for any particular keyword. They’ll also show you what cities are the volume users. There’s a few uses for this data. The title promises only one tip, but I’m going to share some more to see if underpromising and overdelivering really works, or if it’s just a popular idea with no juice to back it.

First, you can usually pick up a keyword domain with the ccTLD of the country that does the most searches. For example, if you’re targeting “calgary hotels,” the calgaryhotels.ca domain is likely to still be available once the .com is gone (and if you’re a typo domainer, you look for sites exclusively hosted on ccTLD domains and get the .com ).

The reason you want to get the ccTLD is because you’ll get the edge in Google.ccTLD results, which are often defaulted to in foreign countries. I’ll frequently type a search into my browser (like calgary hotels) and find that I’ve ended up at a Google.ca results page.

As an aside, this post originally recommended that you host locally; I personally don’t think that’s necessary nor a particular advantage. Just because you do business with a local company, doesn’t make you local. By that reasoning, everyone who’s hosted with Dreamhost should have a boost wherever Dreamhost is situated. But, though I’d like to be neighbours with Aaron Wall (that way I could bug him for tips in person ;D), we’re not. Yet we both use Dreamhost.

Then again, most people do business with people in their neighbourhood. This is especially true with regards to smaller hosting companies. In that respect, it makes more sense if this is used as perhaps a counterweight to when big directory type sites try and rank for lots of local terms against smaller folks.

Second, continuing on the theme of SEO uses for trends data, you can figure out what [keyword] direction to expand your site in. If you’re succeeding with selling a product to a particular country or city, then look at related products and see how much demand there is for them in the market you’ve already conquered. This can make upselling (aka add-on sales) a lot easier to current clients. The tip comes courtesy of Julinho (with a bit more detail and practical application added by yours truly).

A few people pointed out that Google Trends is also useful for seasonal data. It doesn’t take a genius to see Christmas is a great keyword in December. But are there any keywords that could get your sales volume on March 23rd up to the same level? I’d bet that gag gifts keywords go hot as April approaches (April fools) and that certain brand modifiers become more important at different times of year. Think TV channels promoting at sweeps time.

And sometimes, Google Trends is just good for a laugh at MSN. I know, I know, I’m in MSN’s corner and want them to boost their share of search, so I’d be better off keeping this one to myself. But returning Google blogsearch’s robots.txt file in the SERPs? Come on! Then again, maybe I should be laughing because Google blogsearch is so full of spam (another great source of data, as per Smaxor). I can’t do screenshots with my HP laptop (or not as easily as I used to with the desktop anyways) so here’s a copy-paste of the SERPs (the Google mail one had me thinking privacy issues – like David, whose Gmail was hacked and caused him to lose his domain! (which he’s since gotten back) – but it’s just some innocuous Google Trends data page):

Web results 1-10 of 3,180,000

See also:

• Images,
• News,
• Maps,
• Sympatico / MSN,
• • More â–¼
  • • AcademicBeta
    • FeedsBeta
    • Spaces
    • Edit Macros
    • Find Macros

Results

• www.google.com

  That Ron Paul Google Trends Chart It Uses a Mis Spelling To Hide the Real Results

  • www.google.com/trends?q=ron+paul%2C+rudy+giuliani%2C+mitt+romney% 2C+john+mccain%2C+fred+th…

• Google Trends · Computers

  Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of …

  • www.google.com/intl/en/ trends/about.html
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• Many uses of Google Trends

  Let us discuss how to put g-trends to some good use many uses of google trends … Many uses of Google Trends Let us discuss how to put G-Trends to some good use

  • www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34280.htm

• Andrew Urquhart’s Miscellany : WebTech : Archive : Flawed BBC …

  The BBC Newsonline article: Birmingham tops web porn search uses Google Trends to make claims about what end-users in specific cities are searching for most often based on a flawed …

  • andrewu.co.uk/webtech/archive/?flawed_bbc_ reporting_on_google_ trends
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• blogsearch.google.com

  Disallow: /trends? Disallow: /trends/music? Disallow: /notebook/search? Disallow: /music. Disallow: /browsersync. Disallow: /call. Disallow: /archivesearch?

  • blogsearch.google.com/ robots.txt
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• BHIP – Natural Health Trends Corp. – Google Finance

  Get the latest on Natural Health Trends Corp. (BHIP … date news, high quality discussion groups and more on Google … to an independent distributor network that either uses the …

  • finance.google.com/finance?q= NASDAQ:BHIP
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• Google Trends: amazon kindle, Nov 19, 2007

  Like the recently upgraded Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle uses E-Ink, a new type of … Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are …

  • mail.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=amazon+kindle& amp;date=2007-11-19&sa= X
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• Google Trends: orchard bank, Nov 9, 2007

  Household Bank uses the information from cookies to provide services that are. … Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are …

  • news.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=orchard+bank& amp;date=2007-11-9&sa= X
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• google by the numbers at mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m …

  About mobile media lifestyle trends. … Google by the Numbers : “ Google (GOOG) uses its network as a competitive weapon.

  • www.m-trends.org/2005/02/ google-by-numbers-google-goog-uses-its.html
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• Google Code FAQ – Who uses KML?

  KML in Google Earth Home; Docs; FAQ; Group … Who uses KML? … provide detailed mappings of resources, models, and trends …

  • code.google.com/support/bin/ answer.py?answer=56550&topic= 10032
  • · 19/12/2007
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