While googling around to help my sister Dahlia because her Gateway PC broke down (again … I think she got that 1/1,000,000 that makes it through QC when it’s a lemon), I saw the following search result. It’s entirely made up of forums, which is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing (at least, when not searching for forums or info about them).  Screenshot after the jump.

A few thoughts come to mind.

1) This is a response to longtail queries. Forums have traditionally been a great place to learn subjects in depth, online. The first social media I really got into were forums around 2002-2003, when I was really into hiphop and Counter-Strike. Both had some amazing forums around where you could soak up information to your heart’s content.

2) I think this is part of the May Day update. It’s interesting to see how effective the update probably is in some cases, as I explained in point 1.

It’s also interesting how ineffective it can be.

- I still have no idea what the hell a RAID access failure is, except that it’s something to do with the motherboard, graphics card, or hard drive. And that’s virtually the whole computer, so not narrowing things down much.

- I’m also not sure really how to fix it. I got some idea it’s to do with the drivers, so I had my sister get the latest ones, but the other points were about reconnecting SATA cables etc.

- All these forums are by techies – for techies.

It’s like expecting my mom to come here and understand this post.

I don’t blame the forums mind you – they claim to be for an advanced audience and that’s fine.

- Any search engine that directs a non-techie to them, however, has some important questions to ask.

“How technical is a particular page?”

“Does this query need a more technical or more generalist response?”

3) I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Nvidia’s #1 ranking is [mostly] because they have the most posts/authors and thus the richest discussion. By extension, that would often make it the most authoritative thread.

Two arguments suggest that other ranking factors may be predominant, here.

a. From reading other forums, I think this is something that specifically has to do with Nvidia hardware, so it may be some kind of brand association. I could be totally wrong on that – please correct me in the comments if I am wrong.

b. The PC Help Forum has more posts and authors than HP’s forum – yet it ranks lower.

(The counter argument to “b” is that HP.com has both a load of link juice and brand factors pulling for it, which overcomes the lower post/author count.)

3.2) Recency also does  not seem to be the driving factor in rankings here, though Google does seem to find it important enough to display.

My guess is because this is not a query that deserves freshness, though some people may have a slight preference for it.

Consider the low – and constant – search query numbers – a newsy item would have seen a spike in searches.

This also supports my earlier suggestion that this is to do with solving the constantly refreshing long tail …

Raid access failure doesn’t even chart on Google Trends…

What do you guys make of this search result?

Have you seen it before? If so, how long?

What explanations for it do you have, and do you think it ties into May Day?

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I recently spent $200+ testing out a text link ad broker who promised a big network of blogs, without footprints. This link broker sells on a monthly membership basis that ended up auto-renewing for a few months, partly because I was too busy to test immediately when I bought it. Lesson #1: Avoid buying on impulse.

This text link advertising network has a 3 step process.

1) Upload an article, and pick categories it fits under.
2) Add your text link in along with other innocent links.
3) Finally, the text link broker sends the article out to some blog they run.

When I finally got around to publishing some articles, I was in such a rush to see results already that I clean forgot step 2.

To keep itself discrete, this link broker doesn’t tell you what blogs the links are published on. So I couldn’t do a backlink lookup with a backlink research tool, nor could I get any reporting from this broker. (Except that the pieces were published, if memory serves.)

Forgetting to add in the links turned out to be a good thing, I saw later, because my article got posted on a wholly irrelevant blog. And not even an impressive one, that’s well maintained by humans etc. This was an obviously generic creation with no soul. “Take me to the Wizard for a new heart,” it whimpered tinnily.

(Lesson #2: If they sell text links based on automated distribution of articles, and you can’t see the broker’s inventory (to avoid Google smacking it all down), publish some articles with unique phrases in them.

Then Google it and see where it ended up.

Depending how relevant the resultant sites / pages are, you can decide whether to include your links in future articles.

[This is really just the grayhat parallel to the blackhat SEO's comment spam swing dance].)

Now, I know that my point about offtopic sites sounds contradictory to other advice I gave recently, about how it’s the page that matters. Isn’t it irrelevant what the site is about, and only the page relevance matters in determining the link’s value/relevance ?

It depends. It depends on some conditions. Imagine this as a spectrum of relevance.

- If the site is about nothing in particular, like a personal blog, news site or other generic publisher like About.com, then no, it doesn’t matter. The link counts if the page is topical.

- If the sites’ topics have 0 relation, but somehow the page manages to bridge that gap, it’s ok. SEO has no relation to dentistry, but it’s a clean link when I link to my dad’s dental related business from here, because he’s my dad – it’s normal and accepted that I should link to him. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this text link broker trial was for an affiliate site of mine, not my dad’s business.

- If your site topics overlap and the page is offtopic, it’s not grand (both in terms of traffic and link value), but it won’t hurt.

- If the sites’ topics overlap and the page is relevant, it’s better, simply because the traffic quality will be better. Traffic I get from my guest-posts at Wolf-Howl is pretty good, because our audiences are mostly interested in the same thing.

- If the sites are exactly on the same topic and the page is relevant, it’s money.

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) offtopic pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

- Also, (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

The latter type is what I encountered with the text link broker, and it’s why I cancelled the subscription. I dipped my pinky toe in, saw there was an oil slick in the water, and called the President got out.

Finally,

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) DO bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that DO count.

So yes, links from offtopic sites do count, including paid links from offtopic sites.

It just depends…

As they say, the devil is in the details.

Liked this post on text link brokers? Check the pros and cons of buying links, pre-published vs post-published text links, 101 tips on discretion in paid link purchases.

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I recently took my own endorsement advice and bought access to Spyfu for a PPC campaign I’m managing, which is having CTR trouble on some keywords.

Besides my use for my own campaign, the Spyfu membership – especially Domain Ad History tool – was useful in critically appraising this post from Epiphany, which discusses how Lego are apparently not buying keywords they’re targeting for SEO, an apparently obvious mistake. (Dofollow link because theirs was an honest mistake; I don’t think they deliberately made a silly mistake to linkbait.)

As I explained in a comment on that post, the problem with their criticism is that it’s based on their own searches for these terms. That ignores:

• Ads being run at different times of day, aka dayparting, because some times convert better than others
• Ads being run seasonally, for the same reason
• Geographic targeting that may have excluded their area

And those are just the PPC factors at play. Inventory levels, competing marketing priorities for budget and other business issues can also limit what people do with their PPC, in a way us consultants can never know.

Fortunately, at least the PPC factors can be clarified if you’re a member of Spyfu. While Spyfu’s main audience is people who need to find competitors’ keywords, they’re also useful for appraising PPC sales leads etc.

In the Lego case, I looked up Lego.com in Spyfu’s Domain Ad History tool. That shows you all the keywords and ads used by a particular website.

Here’s what it looks like for Lego.com, after I filtered by keyword phrases that include the word ‘educational. Click to enlarge, click back to return here.

Quick explanations of Spyfu charts:

1) When you click a keyword in the left-hand column, it brings up the window towards the bottom that shows you the ads run on that keyword.

2) Clicking any of the coloured boxes in the chart will also bring up that window.

3) The default sorting option is best keywords. Anyone with a brand will have these brand terms show up first; retailers who distribute merchants’ products can use these for inspiration. You can also sort by keyword, but then you get alphabetically-sorted data, as above.

4) Note the different options to export the data

5) The longer they bid on a keyword (e.g. the longer and more unbroken the row of coloured boxes), the more likely that keyword is profitable. Here are some broken and unbroken lines to compare what great keywords (brand terms, in this case) look like vs non-brand terms.

The problem is that there’s a cutoff after 50 keywords, and it looks like you can’t see more! What can do you?

Spyfu’s tech support pointed me in the right direction, with three options:

[...]

You: Oh, i have to keep clicking next?

Steve: Yes

Steve: We don’t have a good way to export the history yet

Steve: So you can export everything from spreadsheet view

Steve: Or click through the ad history … if there is a specific keyword you are wondering about … you can search for that in term ad history

Steve: And then scroll down to this domain again

[...]

Steve: The issue is that the gantt chart is a flash control … and we couldn’t have it keep going further and further down the page. It would cut off in the flash. So we had to make pages

Steve: Once you click “next” once …

Steve: Then you can see in the url num=50 or something like that

Steve: You can change that manually to jump down a few pages

Steve: For example num=500 … but that is more of a hack then a support way of using the UI

You: Ooooh neat – that’s valuable

You: it’s pleasant dealing with support staff who are knowledgeable !

Steve: sure thing, thanks for using SpyFu

Steve: have a good day, let us know if you have more questions

Notice the little text link that reads “Next,” above the upper-right corner of the chart, now? That’s how you see more.

So voila – take my advice and check out Spyfu for some valuable insights into competitors’ keywords, ad copy etc.

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Here are comments taken from my 4Q visitor surveys during the past 6 months, regarding how annoying these visitors find the immediate appearance of 4Q’s visitor survey. An exit popover would be a much better way of doing this, and here’s proof.

(An exit popover is a window that appears when someone clicks ‘close (x)’ or back or otherwise leaves the site. It marks the exit of a visitor from your site.)

15.02.2010 I wasn’t able to read the post because the survey popped up before I had a chance..

07.03.2010 Because the Survey Pops up as soon as I arrived at the website. How can I give you my honest opinion of the site before I have even looked at it? Have you considered a popunder?

13.03.2010 popup for survey initiated immediately upon site entry – all questions relate to experience on site and intent – it would be better to time this as an exit pop…

31.03.2010 I got this request to take your survey before! I had reached your site – just an FYI for you –

08.04.2010 ANSWERED QUESTIONS FIRST [SIC]

19.05.2010 questionnaire fired at the wrong time at the start of the visit

And these kinds of responses have been there ever since I first implemented this years ago. Come on iPerceptions – do what the people are asking for!

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Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation.

Seen in a Google AdWords account I manage:

Gotta love bloopers .

This is part of my Friday photos and fun categories. Like it? Get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.

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Jimmy writes,

“I saw someone write to be careful or use the ilb in moderation to avoid getting penalized or something like that.

What are your thoughts on best practices?”

I think penalization due to overuse of my WordPress plugin, Internal Link Building (ILB) is a mis-expression of a user design concern.

The consequences of overusing ILB is just that your audience may feel a bit overwhelmed if the same words are linked 5 times in one post. Bing and Google will not penalize you for that.

That said, you can have multiple different words linked in a single post.

Imagine you write about laptops. Your latest post is about a new laptop bag you bought.

‘Laptop accessories’ is mentioned and links to that category on your blog.
‘IBM laptop’ links to your review post
‘TigerDirect’ is an affiliate link
‘Add my rss feed to your reader‘ links to your feed.

Bang – 4 links, 1 post, and it’s just fine.

If you thought this SEO FAQ for using my internal link building plugin was useful, add my rss feed to your reader.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington !

I’ve been into web development since 1995. I started dabbling in high school and just couldn’t stop. I felt comforted, and challenged by the vast sea of knowledge that I could learn. Plus, since the languages, technologies, and trends were always changing – I knew I wouldn’t get bored with it.

In the year 1999 I scored my first real, full-time web development job for an audio company. My boss was a man named Tim Storm. I learned a LOT working for Tim. I went from dabbling and hacking, to actually producing and innovating. Tim started Fatwallet.com (a coupon site) as his hobby while we were still working together. I felt honored to be a part of its community development in the first couple years. Tim quit his day job and went full-time on Fatwallet.com shortly after.

Fast forward to 2006. I was a web developer for Fatwallet, on a team of 4 or 5. I had been dabbling in SEO on the side for the last two years, mainly for my wife’s [former] online scrapbook store. I was incredibly passionate about Fatwallet. Tim, and his company, had both done great things for my career. Knowing some SEO basics, and seeing the major SEO problems and HUGE search traffic potentials of the site, I went to Tim and told him that the company needs to spend some time on SEO.

Maybe I wasn’t clear with my intentions since Tim transitioned a different coworker to SEO. The next six months were miserable as I was the developer in charge of implementing the new SEO’s techniques. I watched and fought tooth and nail as the SEO spent countless hours on extinct techniques like meta keywords. After several arguments with the SEO, and whiny complaints to the man in charge, old SEO out, Troy in.

I was given 3 months to see if I could make an impact on traffic. Tim and I both agreed that we needed a kickass metric system for measuring the efforts and results – so I spent the next 2 months doing nothing but writing a new search traffic analytic tracking system. I used it to monitor the current search traffic, and find opportunities for easy optimization.  I quickly found terms like GoDaddy coupon that were driving some traffic to pages that were NOT optimized (and quite unfriendly to search engines).

I rewrote URLs throughout the site, changed paging systems, implemented dynamic cross linking systems, cleaned piles of dirty, messy, pathetic code (that I had written in years past). Once the site was search engine friendly, and KINDA optimized, we watched the traffic increase day after day. After a few months, search traffic had doubled. Hell yeah, I felt like a winner.

Then I met with Tim again. Tim wanted to know which terms were converting, and how much traffic has increased to the terms that are the highest converting. It took another couple of months to tweak the system and start producing metrics that prove ROI. And then I became the full-time, in-house SEO for FatWallet.

The next couple years were brutal, as I fought many challenges. FatWallet’s search traffic is incredibly long-tailed, with a million plus members in the forums, the site is loaded with rich user generated content – and we all know how search engines love UGC. However the terms I was expected to target were far from long-tail, and often far from reality. Most people in the company didn’t really know what I was doing, hell sometimes *I* didn’t really know what I was doing.

I kept trying and kept learning…and more importantly, I kept finding search traffic opportunities that could align with our content. My passion for the company, and now for the industry, fueled debates with sales managers, designers, developers, and sysadmins. In the end, our results have made it all totally worth it.

My responsibilities, and respect for what I do, are higher than ever at Fatwallet. I’m producing results, getting involved with big projects, and even driving big projects.

Tim continues to inspire us, and is currently a finalist in the Entrepreneur of the Year contest.

My career has been created by passion and a strong desire to learn and succeed. What drives you guys in your search careers?

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For those of you who don’t know, my name’s Gab Goldenberg and I run SEO ROI Services. There are a few practices that I’d like to share, which give me both pleasure and pride in running this business.

1) Donating 10% of profits to charity. While occasionally I have forgotten and missed a payment, by and large my track record is good in this regard.

Some charities I give to serve the needs of:

• The Jewish community
• The poor
• Those needing education
• Smokers trying to quit

2) Fair payment. I pay people I work with – regardless of their location around the world, in Europe, the Phillipines or here in Canada – fair wages. I also seek to recognize them for taking the initiative and also for being exceptionally reliable.

Some things I’ve done in this respect include sending [unsolicited] chocolates, and other times cash bonuses.

My experience with this has been that people appreciate you making the effort to think of them and it’s a positive cycle – you do extra for them, they do more for you. It also reduces turnover, which is a big time saver.

3) Overdelivering. I admit that in the past, I sometimes met deliverables late or exactly in quantity, the past few months have seen a big improvement.

These past few months, on link building deliverables, SEO ROI Services exceeded requirements by numbers varying between 15% and 60%! And on time as well as commitments for redesign and other projects, I’ve bitten the bullet when things took longer or cost more than anticipated. It’s my quote, and I’ll stick by it.

4) Our online reporting makes life hassle-free for everyone – clients, myself and my team.

Before, updates on link building projects were handled by email. Wanted to know where we’re at on deliverables? You’d email me.

What did I do next?

Email the bloggers or blog editors I work with.

- “How’re we doing?” I’d ask.

- “The editor’s been on a Caribbean cruise for a month,” my blogger would casually respond. “We’re waiting for his return to get the posts published.”

- “But I’m shvitzing this deadline and we still need 7 links to make quota,” I’d cry girlishly, paling light-green. “What’s he think he’s doing in the Caribbean??”

- “Continuing Castro’s Bolshevik revolution? [Vacation, duh, you idiot.]” came the languid reply.

- “Since when is he allowed on vacation?” I’d silently sigh to myself.

Next I’d unceremoniously inform the client that a tornado had tragically killed half our staff and made the rest homeless. Obviously, we’d need more time…

Nowadays, we handle it with BasecampHQ. Bloggers post the URLs as they go live. Clients and I can login to track progress any day, any time.

Around mid-month I can see where we’re at and make adjustments if we need to do more.

(I’ve also solved the problem of bloggers/editors going MIA by aiming to have more bloggers and blogs than strictly necessary to meet deliverables. Worst case, we meet exactly our promise. Best case we overdeliver. Hence #3 above.)

5) Because I love you guys too! Look at all the posts in my blogroll category and how much I link out .

Heck, I’m going to make this a meme. Those tagged have to write their own version with 5 reasons to love their company and pass it on!

(*Shouts:*) “Tag! You’re it:

Outspoken Media

San Diego SEO (Check out his great link tunnelling tip btw.)

Wiep / LinkBuilding.nl

Wordstream Internet Marketing Blog

Rimm Kaufmann

Red Fly Marketing

Tamar’s Social Media Marketing

RustyBrick / SERoundtable

Julien Smith

SEO Dojo / Dave Harry

Aimclear

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Brett Tabke n the gang at Pubcon just added me to a panel entitled, Post Click Marketing: Landing Page Optimization. Here’s what I plan to speak on, per my application:

SEO experts regularly say that pages need more content to rank. While this is often true, it sometimes leads to silly design decisions, such as having a paragraph of text above rows of merchandise on an ecommerce site.

Surprisingly, problems like that one or common. In the tunnel vision of driving traffic, the light at the end of the tunnel (or funnel?) gets forgotten. Will a local and toll-free number mess up Google local listings? Will content available via AJAX or Flash (for better user experience) be hard for search engines to index?

I’m hoping to discuss that and share a case study on the work I’ve been doing for my dad’s dental continuing education site, as well as my own. For my own site, you may have noticed I added some plain internal links to the “active window” area … while the data isn’t conclusive yet, I believe I’ve already identified one new customer, based in NY, whom that helped.

Anyways, you definitely should get a free chapter from my upcoming book if you’re the type who’d attend Pubcon, and especially this panel. Why? Because the usability-SEO intersect is a key theme in my book. Oh, and you might want to get my latest posts, too.

Lastly, will you be going to Pubcon? I definitely encourage it (I wouldn’t have pitched if the show sucked), and would love to see you there!

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Back when I used to do hotel SEO for the Hotel de Paris, one of the things that regularly came up in my competitive research was the importance of conference and convention hall facilities and networking in that field.

Why does having conference facilities help hotels with their SEO?

For the simple reason that convention organizers typically have a website. One trusted by search engines at that.

And therefore when those convention organizers mention the location of their event, they typically link to the hotel hosting their show.

Furthermore, they’re often encouraging attendees to book a room at the hotel.

Search engines ranks web pages in its search results based on the quality and quantity of links those pages have.

Guess what such a juicy endorsement tells Bing and Google?

“Rank this big, fancy hotel higher in the search results!”

Of course, there are solutions for smaller hotels to fight the rankings battle, too. Get my new posts by rss or email and find out more when I publish parts 2 and 3 of this series.

And for those more advanced SEOs among you, check out my advanced SEO book.

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Guides

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web
http://mashable.com/2009/11/26/mobile-web-design/
http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946338/Great-Mobile-Landing-Pages – A useful presentation for beginners. The authors created Movitas, which has the most affordable WYSIWYG mobile page creator I found. (Besides the free, uber-basic Movylo.)

Mobile Web Design Galleries
http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/mobile-web-resources/ – A blog and design gallery with useful resources linked
http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html – Another gallery

WYSIWYGs

https://movitas.com/Movitas/pricingComparison.aspx
http://www.tekora.com/en/ – Another mobile WYSIWYG
Very basic: http://www.movylo.com/
Really pricey: http://mobify.me/features/

Slice Shops Turn PSD and AI Graphics Into XHTML, WML etc

http://www.mobilizetoday.com/xhtml-conversion – Seemed to have pretty affordable pricing for slicing up graphics into mobile landers, but it wasn’t clear if they’d do WML either…
https://w3-markup.com/ – A site that will slice your graphics into a working lander, but they don’t do WML. Use them if your target is newer devices that can support 320px wide graphics etc.
http://www.zestadz.com/help/help_landing_page_tool – Unclear if you need to use Zestadz to get their tool, however.

If you liked this post on mobile tools and resources, add my rss feed to your reader!

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It’s a fairly well know tip amongst AdSense users that you want to integrate your ads appearance as closely as possible with the content. You want to give users visual cues to help visitors skim over the advertising disclosure.

Additionally, if you place pictures next to the ads as if they are related – e.g. like the pictures are bullets in a list – you boost your CTR.

It looks like Facebook is testing both of those strategies with its recent addition of thumbnails-and-content above the right-hand side advertising.

If you liked this post on PPC ads and Facebook, add my rss feed to your reader for more! You might also like these 16 Tips and Guides For the Google Content Network.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6) How about the next 3 years?

Not sure.

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Let’s start with some notes and free-association thoughts on the text of Ontolo’s link building book:

A – The first chapter got off to a good start with some clever tips.

1) See how building links can support various departments. Makes me think of the interaction between links and sales (e.g. rank the lead gen whitepaper page) or links and PR (linkbait, publicity stunts, contests…).

2) In large organizations, you may need sign-off from multiple departments. That slows the campaign. So keep your activity within the scope of a single department to speed things up.

B – One thing I disagreed with in the next chapter was:

“You’ll have little to no ability to guide the keyword impact of these kinds of links (unless you’re buying the links or you’ve developed clever campaigns).”

Garrett and Ben at Ontolo are experienced enough to know that the name you give your content impacts how it’ll be linked to. My Internal Link Building plugin got loads of links that mostly use the name as anchor text.

That’s probably what was meant by clever campaigns, but given that that’s the case, why say you’ll have ‘little to no ability’…? Perhaps because some existing internal linkable assets can’t have their names changed for political reasons?

Ontolo and I are probably thinking the same thing but in different words, but I think the book could be clearer here.

Update: Garrett followed up with me and recognized this was just a little oversight. They certainly do recognize that names play an important part in determining anchor text.

C – Back to positive things:

- The point in chapter 2 about links having a brand impact is very true – assuming you’re doing quality content distribution. E.g. Guest posts, expert interviews etc – as Ontolo advocate. Directory submissions may boost rankings, but they don’t build your brand and do leave you vulnerable to the next algo shift.

- I find chapter 3′s idea of considering staff members as linkable assets a fresh idea. Likewise the notion that inventorying your linkable assets leads to figuring what link opportunities are available …

D – Their link opportunities section introduced me to something new… I won’t share what because at this point I’d get to spoiling the book.

The bottom line is this:

1) Beginner and intermediate SEOs, and especially inhouse SEOs, will get A LOT of value from the book. There’s a lofty breadth to the book that means you can quickly learn a lot of what is essential to quality link building campaigns.
2) Advanced SEOs and advanced link builders will get less from the book, because you know a fair amount of what’s there. But there are still a large number of actionable nuggets! If you’re at this level, the links you can build are worth $100 – $1000 a pop… so the value of a single of these ideas is ridiculous. The ROI is definitely positive.
3) Inhouse SEOs in particular will benefit, as a lot of the book is written with them in mind. There are considerations of working with different teams, getting help from the C-level execs etc.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page?

This is true both in sales-driven businesses and in lead-driven businesses.

content-spinning-or-article-rewriting-or-madlibbing”>If you think laterally, there’s a simple workaround. Blackhat SEOs call it content spinning or article rewriting or madlibbing.

Content spinning or article rewriting works as follows. The spinning software takes your original article. You select words and phrases and type synonymous words and phrases. The article randomly selects amongst the synonyms to create a coherent – yet quite different – article.

You sell blue widgets and have 500 words of copy on blue widgets? Are they the same as your red widgets except for the paint job?

Take the blue widget copy, run it through an article rewriter program and voila – fresh new copy for the red widget page. Just do a find and replace afterwards to switch all instances of the word blue for red.

No need Less need to worry that the red widget copy will get the red widget page filtered by the engines.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as whitehat SEO or greyhat SEO. It’s different from what some blackhats use it for (at least, that I know), because:

1. Some blackhats aim to create massive amounts of rewritten articles for link building purposes. This is an onsite technique.
2. Blackhats who use this as an on-site technique just need it to bulk up crummy sites that will feed link juice upwards to moderately cleaner sites in a spam pyramid. Alternately, they’re used on made-for-adsense sites that only exist for search engines.

I doubt it’s entirely whitehat, however, because the main point of this is to avoid being filtered by search engine algorithms. But assuming you at least provide these various widgets, you’re at least saving visitors a click (e.g. the Adsense click).

If you liked this little bit on greyhat SEO, you should either add my RSS feed to your reader, or check out my SEO book for experienced search marketers.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button . Also, have a look at my advanced SEO book, featuring neat principles and tactics.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

When asking people to fill in the fields, be clear on the format of the answer you expect. Specify what characters can be used, and what characters can’t be used.

Don’t wait to correct people until after they’ve clicked continue, because you’ll be using up your visitor’s supply of patience. Advise them at the outset of the right process. Try combining this with AJAX error notifications that don’t wait until people click continue, in order to be more efficient.

The more you dip into that reservoir of patience, the fewer conversions you get.

If you require people to use both letters and numbers in their passwords, say so in the form. If you want it a certain length, say so.

Password must include numbers and letters – why didn’t you say so to begin with??

Similarly, how was I supposed to know that a field labelled “City / State / Country” would not accept forward-slashes?

You’re begging for slashes by naming the field like that – it suggests the format people should answer in.

Ironically, in the very same form, I saw the following very clear, and commendable instructions:

Fill in your name as it appears on your passport. Clear. Concise. Avoids nicknames, initials and other abbreviations. Effective!

If you liked this post on usability, add my rss feed to your reader and check out my book with 30 tactics for advanced SEOs.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Here’s a secret … I LOVE Aaron Wall’s Keyword List Generator Concatenator tool.

You take keywords, input them in a series of boxes, and it concatenates (glues) them together (with a space in between). If that sounds like gibberish, play with the tool. It’s super intuitive and you’ll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

In short, it’s a shortcut to building long keyword lists for exact or phrase matched ad groups.

Instead of typing out:

Adidas basketball shoes

Nike basketball shoes

Air Jordan basketball shoes

Kobe Bryant basketball shoes

point guard basketball shoes

You type out the modifiers in one group, with commas and no spaces: Adidas,Nike,Air Jordan,Kobe Bryant,point guard

And you type basketball shoes, once.

Then it sticks them together for you like with the list above. It can also add on quotation marks (” “) or square brackets ( [ ] ) for phrase or exact match purposes.

I was doing some of this myself in a local context and decided to save some time for the rest of you. Here’s a list of states, stuck together and only separated by commas, as you need them for Aaron’s tool. Note: I skipped the Marianas Islands (also some other islands I deleted, I think) and turned District of Columbia into Washington DC.

Alabama,Alaska,Arizona,Arkansas,California,Colorado,Connecticut,Delaware,Washington DC,Florida,Georgia,Guam,Hawaii,Idaho,Illinois,Indiana,Iowa,Kansas,Kentucky,Louisiana,Maine,Maryland,Massachusetts,Michigan,Minnesota,Mississippi,Missouri,Montana,Nebraska,Nevada,New Hampshire,New Jersey,New Mexico,New York,North Carolina,North Dakota,Ohio,Oklahoma,Oregon,Pennsylvania,Puerto Rico,Rhode Island,South Carolina,South Dakota,Tennessee,Texas,Utah,Vermont,Virginia,Virgin Islands,Washington,West Virginia,Wisconsin,Wyoming

If you liked this bit on keyword research , add my RSS feed to your reader.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Find out in this great, interactive linkbait piece by Vertical Measures.

Those of you who are subscribers know that you can always download my link reporting/scoring spreadsheet. [And have been able to download it for almost 2 years!]

The spreadsheet features the various factors that go into scoring etc in detail. Full details in my original SEOmoz post.

So… what are you waiting for? Add my rss feed to your reader, you link building lovers!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Just saw this piece via the ever-industrious Bill Slawski: Google’s Acquisition of MetaWeb & its Named Entities technology.

Myself and others have noted how exact match domain names were getting impressive boosts just for being exact matches.

I asked Aaron Wall about it, and apparently their SEO Book private forum’s got some good discussions on it. One idea Aaron favoured from those discussions was the idea that Google has trouble distinguishing between legit brands and entities with generic names. Hence boosting exact matches, to help small brands out.

From what I understood of Bill Slawski’s overview, a Named Entity is basically a proper noun.

Remember Grade 2 English class? Yep, the interweb’s g33k3d out proper nouns with full-on algos to better index data about them and so forth. Check out Bill’s post for more, and share your thoughts there or here on what this acquisition means for future ranking fluctuations.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data