You can segment your email list by what page(s) they visited.

That means you can use your email marketing for “retargeting” aka “remarketing.”

Retargeting is an increasingly popular marketing tactic that targets prospects based on their having already visited your site (or a specific page, depending what pages include your retargeting-cookie-dropping code).

You know from the person’s previous visit that they’re interested in your product, so you use retargeting  to get a second chance at converting them.

Typically, retargeting is done via display ads. And this still is worthwhile for people who visited your site but aren’t on your email list.

The point of this blog post is to say that you don’t need to use display ads. You can just segment your email list by people who visited your site before. That way you don’t need to pay per click, and get more out of your existing email marketing dollars.

If you’re an Aweber email marketing customer (you can try it for $1 / 30 days) , this is super easy.

To set up a retargeting segment:

1. Browse to your Subscibers > Search area, then select Web Page viewed and enter the URL.

2. Click search.

3. Then enter a name for the segment and save it!

Some particular cases where email retargeting can be handy:

1. Need to liquidate your inventory?

Segment the list by people who visited the relevant pages on your site, and use your newfound remarketing savvy to let them know it’s now up to 50% off!

2. Over-deliver to customers who saw the thankyou page.

Did someone just donate to your charity? Buy your product? Don’t just say thanks – send them an email offering a free hat or sweater if they’ll give you their offline address. (Then you can use this for direct mail.)

3. Combine with local segmentation to set up meetings next time you’re in town.

Ex.: Did someone on your list see your enterprise B2B product but not convert? Let them know when your sales staff are in town next and offer to take ‘em out for lunch!

4. Download the segment and follow up personally via phone or social media.

Use this to understand the prospects’ objections and refine your persuasion process!

If you liked this post, you might also like my post Why Ecommerce SEO Is A NON-Profit Activity, which discusses using SEO for customer acquisition with minimal profit, and email for generating profit. Or try Aweber email service for $1.

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.

Content Marketing Cannon is a new WordPress SEO plugin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example scenario: Roof repair blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless you automate it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you get the plugin?

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

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

Sponsors we’d encourage you to patronize:

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

Get professional SEO services from SlingshotSEO.com.

Get VPS Hosting from Prohoster.gr.

Get search engine optimization from Stepforth.com .

Get local SEO from PoweredBySearch.com .

Get link building from CanadianSEO.com.

Use a analytics URL builder from WebStrategy360.com.

Use link tools and other goodies from SEOTools.net .

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

I love Twit Cleaner!

Some of my work recently has involved creating a follow policy as well as helping manage a Twitter account for a software protection company called Wibu, through my job with illuminea (they’re illuminea’s client, not my own).

Anyways, I was going through the people Wibu were following and realized loads of them were irrelevant – based on their bios/descriptions – but that checking for dead accounts, bots etc isn’t easy based on Twitter’s web interface alone.

The problem is that the web interface will only show you a person’s 3 most recent tweets, and that you often need to click through to see each account, one at a time, after seeing the initial three.

(The reason you need to see more is that you’d have to check if this is someone who is self-centered, only tweets based on RSS feeds or otherwise uses Twitter in a way that won’t allow you to build a relationship with them.)

Also, you have to remember to open the user profiles in new tabs. Otherwise, when you click back, you start at the top of your followers list, and may need to wait for the AJAX to load more followers when you scroll down (the “view more followers” function that loads their profiles when you get to the end but without loading a new page) .

So there’s lots of points where the web interface slows you down when trying to prune who you’re following.

Enter TwitCleaner which is a Twitter app that will check all these profiles for common patterns of anti-social behaviour and generate a report for you. From there you can just click user profiles to unfollow.

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.

UserTesting has a panel of mobile device users who have high-resolution webcams on stands. So you can watch them use their mobile device–iPhone, Android, or iPad–as they visit your mobile website or use your mobile app.

The good folks at UT, amongst them Dave Garr love SEO ROI (who doesn’t? , and are donating 100 free mobile tests to SEO ROI’s readers. To get your free test:

1. Go to http://www.usertesting.com/mobile
2. Click “Pricing & Sign Up”
3. Select “1 user” from the dropdown menu.
4. When you get to the second page, click the “gift code” link and enter: seoroi

Voila, magic!

Hope you enjoy trying out their service !

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.

WordPress 3.3 created a bug with my SEO plugin, Internal Link Building, such that the credits line normally found at the end of a page would appear in the middle of the post editor. Plugin developer Aaron of AahaCreative.com has coded an update that squashes the bug. The newest version is called 2.1 (I know, I had called a previous version v3, but I made a mistake then).

The ability to block automated internal linking from happening on either pages or posts is also now included, following popular demand. It’s useful to prevent traffic leaking from your sales oriented pages (e.g. a “Services” page on your SEO site) and thus increase conversions. To use this feature, simply go to the Settings page (labelled “Keywords”) and scroll past your list of keywords until you see this:

You can download it now – just get my latest posts by RSS or email and you’ll see the link in the posts’ footer (or next email you receive, if you subscribe by email).

If you prefer, you can tweet about the plugin using the following button to get a copy.
You are able to edit the tweet after clicking the button, or changing your mind and cancelling.

For those not familiar, Internal Link Building allows you to Wikipedia-fy your internal linking.
- You can automatically link a keyword (or group of keywords) you’re trying to rank for to a certain page or post
- Works to link to pages/posts on your site or off it (useful for affiliate links)
- Ehenever that keyword appears on your site.
- You can also choose how many times that keyword will link within a certain page, whether to use nofollow or not (ex.: for affiliate links) etc.
- Vary up anchor text by making it link with words before, in between or after your main keywords
- Bulk upload keywords and settings by CSV

Full details about how the plugin works on the main plugin page for Internal Link Building.

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.

It’s no secret that editorial links are typically relationship driven, but who has time to build relationships? That’s why we talk at each other in ephemeral tweets that last 140 characters … if you had that kind of lasting power in your relations with your wife, a divorce would not be long in coming!

So I want to share two little time-saver tools to building relationships by making more meaningful investments of time.

The Problem: People share links over Twitter and Facebook a lot more than they do via their blogs, because we’re lazy. Facebook and Twitter make it easy to do, with embedded widgets that let you share from any page on the web – not just when you’re logged in on their sites. That’s a lot nicer than having to go to your site, login, click new post and then finally create the link.

Turns out at some point in the dozens of version updates, WordPress snuck in a feature called Press This. It’s a bookmarklet – aka a button you can drag to your bookmarks bar in your browser – and when clicked from any page on the web will automatically take you to your New Post editor in WP and auto-insert and link the page you were on. Woohoo!

On a similar note, what if you’re collecting lots of URLs for a link roundup? It’s annoying having to edit the html to make each a link. Not to worry, there’s a plugin for that:

Auto-hyperlink URLs

Link out, make friends, watch them reciprocate. Win-win.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Usability Testing Works

Photo credit sxc

There are 5 steps to running a usability test.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: Deciding On And Writing Tasks For Users

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

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

Photo credit sxc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Task description

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

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

Step 2: Recruiting Users

(image credit Vintage Military Ads)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A word on “representative users”

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

Step 3: Running the Test

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

Test Preparation

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

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

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

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

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

What Your Instructions  Need To Cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Reviewing The Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 5: Implement The Changes

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

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

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

Miscellaneous Testing Tips and FAQ

How do I test…

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

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

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

See

Remote Testing vs In-Person Testing Pros and Cons

Remote testing is

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

In-Person testing is

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

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

Moderated testing:

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

Unmoderated testing:

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

Additional testing tools references:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

Review of testing service UserTesting.com
Sensible – Steve Krug’s site
Usability Post
RemoteUsability.com/tools

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

1) Show Most Popular Posts in Sidebar

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

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

2) Floating Social Share-bar

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

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

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

3) List SEO Search Terms After Post

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

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

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

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

4) WP Minify Code

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

5) Gzip Compression

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

6) Server Side Cache

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

I’m looking for feature sponsors to help cover the programming costs of a new WP plugin I’ve been working on. It’s not a competitor to All In One SEO Pack or Yoast’s WP SEO, but provides new functionality that so far hasn’t existed. It will be given away free to the web community once completed.

Read on for details on the plugin.

To sponsor, contact me. Cost is $150 per sponsorship (one-time, obviously; it’s for programming costs) and we’ve already got 6/15 sponsorships taken. You’ll get a credit on the plugin page including your logo and a link to wherever you choose, as well as advanced access to current and future betas. (Yes, the link is dofollow, no, you’re not buying a link. You’re covering programming costs. )

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

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

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

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

Problem is this demands a fair bit of manual work…

Unless you automated it.

Oh wait! That’s what the plugin does. Help you create authority articles from your smaller pieces and consolidate the content like Wikipedia, creating authority articles instead of stubs.

Some key features:

- Include any post in another with a simple shortcode.

- 301 redirect a post

- Add a right or left aligned table of contents, Wikipedia style

- Removes redirected articles from the homepage, category archives and sitemaps: PageRank concentrates across fewer links

If interested, contact me.

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 site was hacked for a few months now, in what was mostly a benign, but nevertheless annoying way. The hacker injected spam pages onto SEOROI.com about debt and financial products, which you can still see in Google’s cache. Only Vaultpress was able to remove the hack…

(To be 100% clear: there was no malware. Google detected none, McAffee detected none, CodeGuard detected none and so you weren’t at risk by visiting my site.)

The backstory…

Anyways, as I had once previously had a site hacked, I tried what worked last time – I hired someone from Odesk, for $100 one-time fee. The person in question successfully removed the injected pages… but the hacker outsmarted him and had a script that automatically replaced the injected pages within a day or two.

I then hired another person from Odesk, explaining what happened previously, but again this contractor could only delete the pages and not permanently remove the vulnerability.

In both cases, these contractors had previous experience and positive reviews in their Odesk profiles regarding site cleanups. But this hacker outsmarted them, and as we’ll see, Google too. (Not in terms of malware detection.)

The light at the end of the tnnel:

Finally, exasperated, I turned to the guys at Vaultpress. They offer a security service for WordPress whereby they

• Scan your site for vulnerabilities
• Recommend action to patch the vulnerabilities
• Remove hacks and other crap, including if it comes back
• Backup your site in 11 different places in the cloud, so accidental deletes or screwups aren’t fatal

And they delivered. I installed their plugin, gave them FTP access, and they cleaned up my site. (Also my sister the makeup artist Maya’s site.) Not only that, but they went above and beyond, doing miscellaneous stuff that wasn’t part of the official package, because I’m not tech-savvy enough to do it.

Their basic service including cleaning up your site starts at $15/month, but that doesn’t include security monitoring for the future, just a one-time cleanup. Ongoing security costs $40/month and it’s the plan I’m on, because it buys me peace of mind and stability for my business.

I highly recommend Vaultpress for WP security.

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.

Two reasons:

1) Some of the most popular contact form plugins, including Contact Form 7, don’t provide a thankyou page. That means that you can’t easily set up a simple ab-test in Google Website Optimizer (GWO) to increase conversions, because GWO requires a thankyou page. Doh! (I realize I’m running that plugin, but I’m not actively seeking new consulting clients, so it’s not a priority to fix that.)

2) Typically, the contact button says submit by default. It’s well known that you want to match the button to your headline, and people didn’t come to your contact page with servitude in mind and/or kinky S&M messaging. They came to contact you. So the default button should read “Contact Us” or “Send Contact Message” … Submit isn’t clear and cuts conversions.

Like this post on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and usability? Get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book, which offers tactics covering the overlap between CRO and SEO.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…

Email:

MailerLite: Was on Discount from MightyDeals (found via Yoast) for $49/year!! Up to 10K subs… Love this pricing!
Or MailChimp: Free for up to 2K subs, plus very impressive segment-upon-signup options so you can better tailor content and increase open rates. Starting $49/mo thereafter.

I currently have Aweber which so far has been good, and their support’s generally been good – which is very important. I’m mostly interested in switching due to price (mailerlite) and functionality (chimp). Paying $29/mo for service at my # of subs (over 500, under 2k), for the advanced SEO book.

Contact Management / Social Media Analytics

The first two here are relationship-measuring social analytics tools. The latter is a traffic measuring social analytics tool.

I currently have BuzzStream which is pretty sweet. It automatically finds contact info, can track all email contact and Twitter contact too (going forward, non-historical), plus has various link building metrics and social media functions built in too, though personally my orientation is more the link building side. Starting $19/mo.

ConnectedHQ: Contact Management with full historical data and integrations with various social services. Measure and strengthen your relationships so you get more exposure and traffic. $10/mo

The reason ConnectedHQ also appeals to me is because of more integrations (mostly FB, I’m not big on LinkedIn) and historical data for them. Plus it’s affordable, which is great! Strong contrast to so many tools out there where average monthly price for a non-feature-neutered package is $49…

Awe.sm: Traffic analytics focused on social sharing where links are shared via means besides the browser (outlook, tweetdeck etc) and accurately reporting on where Twitter/FB/LinkedIn traffic really originated from, down to the particular tweet! Valuable for optimizing social media campaigns focused on traffic / conversions. Starting $15/mo

VaultPress: Multiple cloud-based backups + security monitoring for WP, by the creators of WP at Automattic. $40/mo and + for service including security. $15 for cloud backups which is basically not worth paying for since existing WP plugins do that.

Or: CodeGuard: Roughly the same idea but not WP specific. Unclear if they provide human support for cleaning bugs and reinstalling. $15/mo — Update: Got CodeGuard!

VisualWebsiteOptimizer: Tempted by their easy WYSIWYG interface… for better CRO testing. GWO’s horrible, sprawling documentation and disorganized forums are also a massive pain to navigate. $49/mo + for a decent package.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

The problem with using Google Website Optimizer with WordPress:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A summary of this approach’s benefits:

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Have you been paying $29 and now $39 a head for usertesting.com?

Mashable has a list of free and commercial screencasting tools, including web-based/online ones.

(New to remote usability testing? – Read my user testing guide .)

The Screencasting Handbook has another list with certain other ones listed and describing relevant feature differences.

Finally, some generous soul gave Wikipedia a really comprehensive list of such tools, but without much detail on features.

You can use this plus the methodology in Rocket Science Made Easy (Steve Krug’s guide to usability testing) for really cheap tests, or even free ones.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out Russ’ tools.

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Paul May co-founded BuzzStream, a CRM for link building and PR/social media that allows online marketers to manage relationships and be more effective in getting results, be they links or press. He gave me the following two-part interview about the software creation and startup process.

I’d already interviewed Ann Smarty before about her creation of MyBlogGuest and her insights on iteration, usability and the startup process.

Have you used usability testing along the way? If so, what role has it played (share examples)?

I talk to at least two customers every day, so I’m always getting feedback…we conduct formal usability testing any time we launch a major feature. Our testing approach is based on Steve Krug’s usability testing methodology – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc.

Here’s how we did it when we launched the new prospecting tool:

• We had ten people test the product. Four of these were people at agencies dedicated to link building, two were at large SEO agencies, and four were in-house link builders.
• We break testing up into two phases.

  In our first phase we have the testers walk through a series of linked balsamiq mockups. The thing I love about using balsamiq mockups is that it’s great for identifying features you can cut before you get into code…when you see all the things that people stumble over and when they tell you which things they really care about, it makes it much easier to figure out the minimum viable feature-set.

  The downside to balsamiq mockups is that they force the user through a specific workflow, so your visibility into the true user experience is limited. Given this, we use mockups with three or four testers and then move to working code.

• When we’re testing, we give the tester control over our screen and ask them to complete specific tasks to see how easily they can accomplish them. For the prospecting tool, our scenarios were:
  1) Find prospects,
  2) Evaluate prospects,
  3) Add prospects to your account.

  As they go through each step, we have them say everything that they’re thinking. This helps us identify spots where our language is confusing, our workflow is cumbersome, etc.

Two of the big takeaways from the usability testing for the prospecting tool:

1. Using language like “keywords” confused people and led to poor selection of prospecting phrases (people thought they should just enter the same keywords they’re trying to rank on).

Just changing the language to “prospecting searches” significantly changed the way people used the product.

2. For the first release, people didn’t want or need a tool that automatically creates the prospecting phrases for them…
They just wanted to enter prospecting queries on their own and then let BuzzStream de-duplicate results and collect the data. This cut out a ton of development that we thought we needed in order to deliver a v1 product.

What lead you guys to integrate Twitter so tightly?

Initially because it scratched an itch that we had…we were engaging with people on twitter and people were talking about us there, but we had no way to leverage this. All these great things were happening there and if we had a history of it at our fingertips, we could build better outreach lists and engage more effectively…but it was as though the second after you tweeted someone or they tweeted about your company, the information would just scatter to the wind.

Do you have plans to integrate other social websites in the future? Digg? StumbleUpon? Facebook?

We’ve built a prototype for automatic discovery of blog comments, but we haven’t integrated it into the product yet….the truism with software is that you have to support anything you deliver and it’s much easier to add a feature than kill it, so we’re being careful here.

The next few months will be heavily weighted towards usability and UI features, and we’ll use that time to conduct some market research on social discovery features like this. I would love to hear thoughts from you and your readers about this. [Ed: I think this is valuable for the same reason as the Twitter integration, but also because it allows you to know who to work with when you need to promote something on those sites.]

Do you have grandfathered pricing?

Yes. We haven’t raised our prices, but we did change our pricing model.

In the past, each plan included a large number of users and a relatively small number of contacts and links. The overwhelming feedback we’ve gotten is that people needed more contacts and links. To meet the need we raised the number of contacts and links in each plan, but we also reduced the number of users in each plan.

For the vast majority of our current customers, this meant they got more links for the same price, but there were some customers that would have had to move to a more expensive plan to keep the same number of users. For them, we’ve grandfathered them into their current plan, but if they want to move to the new model, they’re able to do this at a significant discount.

Liked it? Check out Buzzstream today!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

In yet another fascinating case study, Mr Green’s blog shares a mobile marketing campaign aimed at recruiting panel members for a demographic research service.

What’s fascinating is the bit about optimizing the campaign by device, carrier etc. Some phone models convert better than others, and not always for reasons of usability. Shoemoney years ago shared a case study of targeting ringtone offers by carrier, and showed how he dug into the demographics of each carrier to find the demographic most likely to convert on his offer.

While that’s well and good for affiliate marketers, it’s another thing entirely for customers of panel measurement services. If you’re buying data, you want it to be representative of the audience you’re researching, for ex.: smart phone users in general.

But if the panel is disproportionately heavy on one particular model or carrier etc, relative to the general audience you’re researching, the data you’ll be buying will be skewed. Of course, you can then slice and dice the data to solve the problem, but that depends on the panel measurement service enabling that.

Another related issue is panel recruitment based on giving away freebies. That also attracts a skewed demographic that may exclude the wealthiest elements of the population.

If you liked this bit of critical thinking, then check out my advanced SEO book, which teaches Advanced SEOs’ 7 Rules of critical and creative thinking.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

If you’ve read about Panda, you’ll know that the quality of your writing and editing is a key notion targeted by Google’s update.

So why not try a tool that will evaluate your readability?

This is in a similar vein to Brian Patterson’s recent post suggesting a grammar checker, but the tool I just linked to evaluates what level your writing style is at. Are you writing for the plebeian masses or for the elite?

On a related note, I saw a sweet, original tip by my friend Ann Smarty on querying Google by author. Helpful for hiring writers, for example…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

The Google Panda Update hit many webmasters like a freight train, leaving a long line of quality websites as collateral damage.  While the Panda update did have the noble cause of weakening the grip that content farms had on the SERPs, many high-quality, content-rich websites were cleaned from Google in one fail swoop.  To address the outrage found across the blogosphere, Google has provided a list of questions to ask yourself if you want your rankings to return.

From the list of questions Google provided, I’d like to propose 3 cheap solutions that could help get you back in Google’s favor.

1.  Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

I think it is a little ridiculous of Google to even consider this as something to base rankings on, but I won’t get very far arguing with them (I’ll leave that to Aaron Wall).

The question is, what could we possibly do to have Google think the answer for this is ‘yes’ for our website?   Remember, they are doing this via algorithm, so it’d be pretty hard for them to analyze our design or look for other superficial indicators of trust.

However, there are ‘tangible’ items that they can check for to indicate trust, and  what makes the most sense to me is for Google to check for the ‘Verisign Verified’ seal.  It’d be pretty easy for Google to look for this, and if it is there, the website gets the box checked on this question.  At ~$19/month, its a minimal investment if your website was previously making a great deal of money but took a big Panda hit.

2.  Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

This question does have merit, but I really doubt Google’s sophistication to check for deep stylistic and grammar errors. While the built-in Microsoft Word grammar check is ok and probably on par with what Google would be able to do (my speculation), Apple’s built in grammar check is atrocious.

Rather than rely on these built-in tools, my preference of late has become a very comprehensive ‘cloud’ grammar check tool called Grammarly.  This tool grades the grammar of an article, performs comprehensive content reviews, and offers rich suggestions for improving the quality of an article.  At around $10/month, it is well worth the investment and I’m pretty confident it’s much more comprehensive in reviewing content than Google could ever be (because grammar isn’t the space Google operates in full-time).

3.  Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

The recent ranking correlation data gathered and analyzed by SEOmoz is nothing short of shocking. Of all of the metrics they track, Facebook Shares (not ‘Likes’) have the highest correlation to rankings.  Google’s question on ‘sharing’ here, plus this corellation data, leads me to believe that Facebook and other social shares could be a critical signal in the Panda algorithm.  There are hundreds of tools to help in this space, but I’d like to point out a few of my favorites… and the best part is, these are free!

• ShareThis – Put this button at the end of your article.  It’ll give people an opportunity to easily share your content across a number of social and bookmarking sites.
• fbShare.me –  Facebook is making it more difficult to do ‘sharing’ and instead favors their ‘Like’ button.  Sharing on Facebook means that it can show up in another users ‘Top News’, whereas just ‘Liking’ a piece of content will not show up in one of your friend’s ‘Top News’. This handy little widget does all of the work for you to get ‘Share’ on your site.

In addition to these two tools, increasing your overall engagement in social media will ensure that your content constantly stays in people’s various social streams.

So there you have it, 3 tools that can help you beat the Panda update.  Matt Cutts has indicated that the Panda algorithm is not run daily, so it could take some time to bounce back after implementing all of the various changes being suggested.

This is one of the most sweeping updates Google has performed, and sites caught in the cross-fire can expect numerous tweaks and adjustments by Google as time goes by. By focusing on what Google is saying publicly about the update, we can attempt to make educated guesses on how to satisfy the various pieces of the algorithm.

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.

It seems whenever BuzzStream send out an email with new product features for their link building CRM software, I’m highly impressed with the value they’ve added to their product. It’s a great competitive differentiation they’re building, and in my eyes, highly worth it for any link builder regularly building links manually.

Some of their latest integration collects all potential contact information, including social media accounts and phone numbers.

They’ve also added automated tracking of relationships with Twitter, and now you can share that between people working on a relationship. It used to be limited to whoever ran the Twitter account in contact with the particular lead.

Over and above that, they’ve automated link prospect queries and scraping the results, including de-duplication and adding in contact info plus other details.

Brilliant time-savers that make link building a lot less tedious for anyone involved, imho. Buzzstream is social media analytics.

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.