Answer: “We have a big win coming up!” hehe .

I don’t normally do PPC but have been for my work with illuminea and a client, Traffix Systems, who came to them for web design who also was running AdWords ads… very badly.

Got any big win stories of your own in online marketing? I’m always looking for case studies to publish here! Contact me for details, or start by reading the guest post guidelines page.

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.

The kind folks at internet marketing company IM Ninjas (formerly We Build Pages) sent me some nice clothes including a tshirt, polo and sweater (can’t show pics since they went to my address in Canada and I’m living in Israel) and to Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO link tools and Receptional SEO for treating myself and a number of other SEOs to dinner during last week’s SMX Israel show.

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.

Charities have a unique SEO problem: there’s not a lot of people searching to give to them, which makes keyword discovery difficult. I saw that with Mada Center, a soup kitchen in Montreal that I tried to do PPC for but we failed for lack of keywords, and recently have come across a similar challenge for Achiya, an Israeli charity for learning disabled kids whom I work with via illuminea, a web agency in Jerusalem.

Without giving away the farm, what we’ve decided to do is produce content to brand them as the experts about their issue, and target terms related to learning disabilities.
For instance, we want to give parents tips about coping with ADHD kids, giving techniques on doing homework with the kids and so forth.

Some that sell products as a means of fund-raising have it easier, or participate in well known stuff like ‘adopt-a-child programs’ but it’s generally uncommon for people to be searching for charities to give to.

I’d be curious to hear if you guys ever did SEO for a charity?

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.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that provides a to do list application and, who also consults for a company that offers psd to html 5 service.

Google Analytics is great at collecting lots of data for your clients, but once you create a graph or a spreadsheet showing traffic and keyword trends, many customers will ask, “What’s next?” There is no shortage of website data available, but the hard part is figuring out how to create a useful SEO report that will help clients improve their return on investment and keep them happy.

Reports are an easy element of SEO marketing to overlook. While creating a report by itself does not magically lead to more hits on a client’s website, creating an actionable report is an essential tool that will make you more effective and help you retain clients.

How to Present an SEO Report

SEO reports force you to sit down with your clients and discuss the goals of their SEO strategy, measure their progress, and plan for future growth and effectiveness. As you look at the various reporting tools available, you’ll need to think of various ways to present data to different clients and different groups within larger organizations.

SEO expert Max Thomas suggests that a report to a marketing team should include more data and metrics as well as analysis that makes it easier for them to report to their superiors, while a report to a boss or board will need to be stripped of search jargon and focus on analysis that summarizes your findings in a way that shows your SEO work is contributing to brand awareness and the bottom line.

Sam Crocker of OMD UK, writes on the SEOMoz blog, “there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.” Different actions will be required by each segment of a company, and therefore be sure your reports target the specializations of each department—such as return on investment for the boss or keyword competition analysis for the marketing team.

Workbooks CRM

One of the most attractive tools for generating an SEO report is Workbooks CRM because of its price tag (free) and its powerful ability to track the conversions generated from keyword traffic.

Daniel Bianchini of SEOptimise writes in Search Engine Journal, “Workbooks is able to track from first touch all the way through to conversion from the site, and then on to completion of the buying cycle. With all this information you are then able to produce incredibly insightful reports and calculate ROI down to keyword level, allowing better analysis of SEO and PPC campaign effectiveness and improved efficiency in the allocation of budgets.”

Besides SEO effectiveness, you need to be able to present why the current ROI justifies maintaining the current strategy, adjusting it, or giving it a complete overhaul. In other words, the profitability of your marketing business and your clients rests on presenting a clear, easy-to-follow report tied to the ways your strategy is paying off.

Analytics Canvas

For a larger company’s SEO campaign, Analytics Canvas provides clear and simple SEO reports along with the added functionality of integrating data from the Google Analytics accounts for multiple websites. If you’ve ever been frustrated with managing multiple reports from a company’s various sites, this powerful tool will streamline your data into one report that allows you to capitalize on all of the data from your clients’ sites in order to create a complete picture of their market share and SEO success.

Analystics Canvas does not provide any unique data on its own. You’ll only be working with the data Google provides for queries, landing pages, and geography. It’s up to you to figure out how your brand is performing, but Analytics Canvas will allow you to integrate large data groups into charts that are easy to create so that you can present extremely broad trends and new opportunities to marketing teams and executives.

Recognized by Google as one of its top API developers, Analytics Canvas is not a free tool like Workbooks CRM. However, it should pay for itself with all of the time that it saves. If Analytics Canvas is a little too pricey for your budget, check out ShufflePoint.

Google Analytics Reports

As of October 2011, Google Analytics integrated Webmaster Tools data into reports, which SEO strategists had been clamoring for, but the data remains incomplete in the eyes of some reviewers.

SEO consultant Cyrus Shepherd writes, “The Landing Pages report shows how many times your top landing pages were shown in search results, again along with average position and CTR. Average position isn’t as useful in this report, as you don’t know the exact search query.”

In addition, the query report on the top 1000 terms presents the average position based on a metric that averages a page’s rank rather than simply presenting its highest position. While Google Analytics is easy to use and accessible, some of its tools will need refining before it receives a firm endorsement from many SEOs. Workbooks CRM provides a far more valuable insight into keyword tracking since it can tell you the exact return on investment for your keyword strategies rather than mere rankings. While Google Analytics provides helpful data for a marketing team, it still falls short of what you’d need for a report to a CEO or board.

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.

For all the people saying that you just need the social media to be a marketing success – 4/10 people are 100% inaccessible to you.

Measuring Use of Social Networking Sites.

Typically, these are older people, like those who still want to print the materials on your site and ask to be mailed brochures.

Like this? Get my latest posts by email or RSS to keep up with the latest news and tactics.

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.

Ever needed to send a link request but lacked anything better than “webmaster@site.com” as a contact address? I’ve been back to basics with a client recently, and of course this classic situation has come up. Here are a few tools/tricks I’m using to get more information to personalize the email/phone call and increase the success rate:

1) Whois data: For those who don’t know, “whois” refers to the registrant information and associated contacts for domain names. Often a person is listed in the whois data even though the site itself doesn’t give any names of people to contact.

2) Sometimes, Whois only lists a company name. In such a case, I’ll look up the company on both Bing/Google and LinkedIn. Maybe the company behind my link-target-site has a brochure site about themselves with contact info. Better yet, maybe they’re on LinkedIn and I can contact them there!

3) At times, you’ll find a site for the holding company via Google but because of server or other issues, the site’s not accessible. And that’s where search engines’ cache and preview can be really handy! In particular, try a site:example.com inurl:contact search to find a contact page on your target domain, then use cache or preview to see if there’s an email or phone number publicly visible.

4) Another valuable resource I just discovered is searching for a company by name – often yellow pages type directories come up in the results with valuable data.

Liked this post on link building? Get my latest posts by RSS or email!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

2011 was a beautiful year for guest posts on SEO ROI as more and more of the web’s top SEOs shared advanced ideas and original material, right here on this blog. I don’t publish rehash, and it shows in the unique tactics, case studies and tools reviewed.

If you want to guest post, read the guest posting guidelines then contact me. Benefits include links, the attention of 2600+ RSS subs, 1600+ emails subs and social love…

Guest Article Case Studies & Research

What Do CTRs Look Like By Position In 2011? – This excellent research piece by Phil Golobish (T: @saintphilip) of Slingshot SEO was a preview of their massive research piece featuring data from 170,000 visitors to their client websites.

Not to be outdone, a glorious case study on mobile web analytics and conversion optimization came to us from the skillful Stephan Croome, who sells ipads, talks about hair styles and dreams up marketing ideas like www.startupbeanbags.com.

Longtime contributor Everett Sizemore taught us about affiliate marketing, and specifically how an affiliate got merchants to promote him! Everett blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Ben Jackson wrote me a clever link request email that turned into a case study on his approach. As a result, Ben published his experience with broken-link link building (broken link building for short), where you look for dead pages or sites and go after the people who linked to them… Ben writes at SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with link building strategies, amonst other goodies.

We got another two case studies in a single article by Liz Krause, on how to reverse negative reviews. Liz writes for EtherSpeak, a company specializing in Unified Communications for internet phone service. They are a Microsoft SIP provider and also offer internet encryption for business class VOIP.

Guest Posts on Tactics:

Post-Panda, Here’s How To Beat Scrapers Outranking You With Stolen Content was a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.

How To Recover From A Wild Panda Attack: 3 Cheap Tools
This post was written by guest Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

4 Advanced Ecommerce Tactics

This guest article was by James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

Can you rank on page 1 for one-word keywords? Find out the inside details how in another great guest post by Brian S Patterson, partner at a Virginia SEO firm known as MangoCo. You can also follow Brian on Twitter!

How do you produce professional video for your blog? We learned all about angles, lighting, editing and more in a guest article by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

Guest Posts About Tools:
… Or Tools for Guest Posts: How to Use Scrapebox to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities/

This guest post came from Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services.

6 WordPress Plugins That Automate Your SEO was an experienced based guide by Pedro Cardoso who runs a site teaching folks to fix their slow @#!*% computers, as well as his blog, slices of life.

Found the content here interesting? You can be featured here in 2012! Read the guest post guidelines then contact me with your idea. Preference is obviously given to case studies, tactics and anything original you can share!

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.

Need A Free Ebook Directory? Here’s the Ebook Directory list….

Hat tip to Eric Ward for telling me about ebook publishing as a link building technique. It obviously helps more if those ebooks are free. Check out Eric’s link opportunity alert newsletter for more…

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.

Clients or leads with bad websites often acknowledge the problem but say that they’re redesigning anyways, so why implement conversion rate optimization work now when it will only last until the redesign?

If you liked this post, get my latest posts by email or by RSS.

Here’s a secret. That redesign? It’s coming, sure… it’ll be here around the time we achieve world peace. Or maybe a few days later, because the designer – unlike world peace – needs coffee breaks.

The reality is that web redesign projects are virtually never delivered on time. They suffer from many causes of delay, some of which include:

• while-we’re-at-it-itis: the propensity to toss in everything but the kitchen sink in the redesign, since all those extra features will each just take a few minutes to do and certainly won’t need to be tested for bugs
• budget shortfall: big briefs and little budgets make websites sad
• we-didn’t-really-know-what-we-got-ourselves-into-itis: the desire to close the deal commonly leads programmers, web shops and others to promise the world without understanding the true scope of the work. Sure we can duplicate Amazon.com for ya!
• HIPPOs: HIPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion and it’s one of the biggest time wasters and argument generators. These people often “know best” – after all, they started the business in 1999 so they’re still the expert in 2012.
• Design by committee: Having to please everyone not only creates aweful sites, but it also takes longer
• Knowledge-enough-to-be-dangerous-participants: They read some articles and sold their services to consult on the project, and now they’re trying to justify their fees. Problem is… those fees can’t be justified. But you’ll have to handhold them and teach them stuff from scratch and want to blow your brains out 10 times along the way.

So that redesign that’s 2 months away from launch? Double that.

What about the cost of lost revenue?

Calculate the revenue you’re losing per month. A 15% conversion rate lift is easily achieved, so if you’re doing say 100 conversions a month, you’re losing 15 conversions in your first month delay!

Q: If your new site goes live in 4 months, does that mean you’re losing 60 (4 months x 15 conversions) conversions in that time?
A: No, you’re actually losing more!

- You’re losing the repeat sales from those people, regardless of whether those sales would come in the next 4 months or not.
- You’re losing the added conversions of further rounds of testing. It goes without saying that in 4 months, you can run multiple tests. And that means compounding interest.

Without even counting repeat sales, from conversion rate optimization alone you would get an extra 99 conversions! That’s like you just made your year 1 month longer! Who said there were only 24 hours in a day?

If you liked this post, get my latest posts by email or by RSS.

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.

There’s an eternal debate amongst copywriters whether long copy or short copy is better, and the truth is that there’s no absolutely correct answer – the length of your copy depends on how much persuading your prospects need. Here’s the simple guide as to what factors influence how much copy you need.


If you like this post, get my latest posts by email or RSS.

Factors influencing choice of long copy vs short copy:

• Price: The more expensive a product, the more persuasion is necessary, and thus the longer the copy. Enterprise software needs longer copy than my free email or RSS subscriptions.
• Safety: What are the risks (other than financial) posed by the product? The fewer worries people have about safety, the less copy you need. For instance, you typically need long copy to sell travel to a dangerous or remote area requires copy assuaging fears of all the potential dangers, be it from the environment (dirty water), animals (think anacondas on Amazon treks) or people (war, crime).
• Familiarity / Complexity: The better known you are or the product is, the shorter your copy can be. Notice how there’s no copy explaining the benefits of bubble gum at the checkout counter, and there’s just a price sticker?
• Privacy: Short copy is just fine for those times where you’re requesting very little information. For instance, dating sites typically have a free signup form with under 5 fields on a page with a title and a few bullet points.
• Non-textual means of persuasion: Does your product have some kind of sample or demo available? Ice cream and cars sell at very different price points and have drastically different levels of complexity… but you can sample both, with a taster spoon or test drive. Steve Jobs did a great job demonstrating Apple products and tantalizing crowds. Video demonstrations and pictures portraying benefits are also often helpful. Letting someone’s senses persuade them is often more effective than talking yourself.
• Immediacy: If you have to get someone to take action now, you’ll need more copy. This typically applies with limited quantity availabilities.

Note: High price is a trump card that almost always requires long copy. The exception is for existing customers and especially reorders.

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 Everett Sizemore, who blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Today is Free Shipping Day and thousands of online stores are participating in what is going to be one of the largest online shopping holiday of the year. The title of a press release from comScore last year says it all:

Free Shipping Day Punctuates Heaviest Week of U.S. Online Spending in History as Four Individual Days Eclipse $900 Million

Gadgets rank at the top of the growing “computer hardware” category for the holiday season with purchases of handheld devices like the iPad, iPhone and Android phones driving sales. Mashable took note of this yesterday when the posted the Top 10 Tech Retailers Delivery in Time for Christmas, featuring Free Shipping Day as a reward for procrastinating tech junkies. But Mashable isn’t breaking any stories here. A search on Google News will reveal a flood of media coverage about this event.

With all the hype around Free Shipping Day, one would think that it is like any other similar shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But it’s not. The big difference here is that Free Shipping Day™ also happens to be a trademarked day that belongs to the affiliate website FreeShipping.org.

Luke Knowles is the “super affiliate” behind this $1-billion dollar day. When looking into marketing and retail stats he discovered that holiday shopping online peaked around December 10th because consumers were worried that they may not get their orders in time to wrap and put them under tree before Christmas if they ordered any later.

So Knowles, who was already an affiliate with thousands of online merchants via FreeShipping.org, had the idea to get stores to commit to guaranteed delivery by Christmas nearly a week after the December 10 peak. The extended shipping deadlines, combined with coupon offers, was an instant hit with consumers.

Merchants don’t typically like to help their affiliates with marketing efforts, and for good reasons. But this doesn’t seem to apply to the Free Shipping Day franchise (which is now growing in Canada and the UK as well). Below are some of the ways this affiliate manages to get merchants to help promote their site…

Vanity URLs

Every store gets their own URL to share with their brand evangelists and customers via email and social media channels. But having thousands of pages of thin content (i.e. a couple of coupon codes) isn’t a viable SEO strategy these days.

So instead of making these URLs pages the site appends a parameter to the URL that changes the sort order to show each different store’s coupon first. By having Google and Bing webmaster tools ignore that parameter, and by using a rel canonical tag, the site manages to funnel all of that pagerank into their home page.

Social Media Interaction

The next step is to get brands to share their vanity URLs. In addition to sending each merchant an email with their URL, the site encourages them to share it on social media channels (example). In addition to the custom link, they also provide the hashtag to use: #FreeShippingDay . Imagine hundreds of small, medium and huge brands tweeting a link to your affiliate site along with your own custom hashtag. #WouldBeNice

Badges

Every merchant also gets a badge with custom code that links to their vanity URL to display on their website, while badges with a link to the home page are available to all. Badges are nothing new, but it amazes me how often websites create badges, put them on a page and just expect people to use them. What’s the motivation? In this case, it is to show off that you are participating and to link shoppers directly to your vanity URL.

Sharing The Love

If you are an affiliate who is out hustling via guest posts, PR and social media to get traffic and build your own brand, it should be a no-brainer to let the merchants you work with know that you are benefiting them beyond just sending direct sales via affiliate links.

When the LA Times mentioned BestBuy and Toys R Us in an article about Free Shipping Day, an email quickly went out from FreeShippingDay.com to the marketing departments at each company to let them know about it.

Is this possible for all affiliates to add this kind of value? Probably not. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution to building links and traffic into an affiliate website. But this example should illustrate that it is still possible to compete with big brands with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of marketing sense. I’ve heard the masses predicting that affiliate marketing is dead, and with recent brand-boosting, affiliate-punishing changes from Google – not to mention stuff like this – you have to admit it is an uphill battle. The days of putting up some reviews on your blog, or publishing coupon feeds from LinkShare and raking in the dough while you sleep are long gone.

The moral of the story here is this: Add value for the merchants and treat your affiliate site like a brand and you may still stand a chance.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Search marketing fundamentally is a direct response mechanism, and ad agencies don’t get direct response. And that’s why books like Google’s ridonculous new-ish book about “ZMOT” – aka Zero Moment Of Truth – aka this brand new thing called… wait for it… the purchase decision – are going nowhere. The book basically aims to make brand advertisers into direct response afficionados.

Psst… Here’s a tip. The ad agencies don’t care. Here’s how ad agencies win awards that prove their value to clients.

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.

This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.

What the heck is ScrapeBox?

ScrapeBox is a powerful tool that’s popular with affiliate marketers and those who like to push the boundaries of automated blog commenting and trackback posting.

But don’t let that scare you away.

ScrapeBox can be used to speed up regular link building tasks too. I’ve found it particularly handy for uncovering good guest blogging opportunities.

How? ScrapeBox lets you harvest a list of blogs that accept guest posts, then gives you the ability to sort that list by PageRank to identify your strongest targets.

Let’s go through the step-by-step the process I use. This is a real example of how I used ScrapeBox to find guest blogging opportunities for Adwords articles I plan to write.

Find Guest Post Opportunities with ScrapeBox

1. From the main ScrapeBox screen, enter your keyword (adwords in this example) in the first box and “guest post” in the second box. Use quotation marks around guest post to make it an exact match search.

2. Select the search engines you want to scrape. In this example, I’ve used Google.com, but you also scrape Yahoo, Bing and AOL. You can also manually add the Google CCTLD of your choice, to help you focus on your target countries.

3. Click the “Start Harvesting” button and ScrapeBox starts to do its magic. Depending on the speed of your proxies (and you’ll want to use proxies to avoid getting blocked), the scrape can take a few seconds or a few minutes.

4. Now you have a big ole list of URL’s, 991 in this example, but you need to clean it up a bit. So using the Remove/Filter drop down in the Manage Lists options, we’ll remove Duplicate URLs.

5. Get the PageRank of the Domain using the Get Domain PageRank option in the Manage Lists section. I’m interested in the Domain PageRank, as opposed to the URL PageRank, as it’s a better gauge of the link value your site will receive from your guest post.

6. Click the Import/Export URL’s & PR Export drop-down and select CSV. This will export the URL list with PR values into Excel.

7. Open the Excel document. Filter out the N/A PageRank values, and then sort from largest to smallest PageRank. Now you have a list of blogs that accept guest posts (or have run guest posts in the past) that you can target, ranked by their PageRank.

Granted, not every URL will be a good guest posting opportunity. But with a few minutes of refining, you can identify dozens of high quality opportunities. Here’s a sample of the Adwords guest post sources I found:

This is just one example of how you can use ScrapeBox for link building. If you’re not using ScrapeBox now, I’d highly encourage you to try it out. Its $97, but you can easily find coupons for a $40 discount.

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:

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.

Did you know I used to rank #3 for SEO on Google.ca – without being logged in or anything – behind only two Wikipedia results? So de facto, I was the #1 top ranking SEO in the country .

I had taken screenshots at the time which I never got around to posting on the blog, and while visiting my parents (who have the computer I was using then), I found the proof pics and sent them to myself. Here ya go:

Incidentally, I also once dominated all of the top 3 results for link building on Google.ca . I couldn’t find that screenshot, but here’s one of me at #1.

Before somebody asks, no I didn’t edit these photos in Photoshop or the like. If I had, I wouldn’t write this post about it because some Photoshop pros could analyze things and show what a photoshop amateur (and general idiot) I am.

What do I attribute the rankings to? You mean, besides my good lucks, charm and humility?

Mostly efforts at building relationships and sharing attention with others, which they were courteous enough to reflect back on me . My Internal Link Building plugin (currently over 25,000 downloads) was a pretty sweet piece of linkbait, too.

Want to be #1 for your terms? Get my latest posts sent to you free by email or RSS and learn your way to the top.

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.