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.

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.

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.

Want to make a $20 commission promoting the first book on advanced SEO, a book readers love?

My advanced SEO book gives you exactly that opportunity, so
join the affiliate program today! (at E-Junkie)

There are unique benefits for affiliates in the program:

• 5.5% conversion rate. That’s over $1 earnings per click, so for 100 clicks sent, you can expect 5.5 conversions and at $20/conversion, you’re making $100 for 100 visitors sent…
• That high commission rate is due to two rounds of usability testing on the site – so far- and more are planned)!
• Active support for productive affiliates, including custom landing pages, banners, higher tiers and white labels (commensurate to volume)
• Long cookie life – 6 months- ensure you get credit for the sale.!
• Reliable third party tracking via e-junkie
• No leaks – only way to purchase is the site; no phone or chat purchasing options
• A trusted brand – I’ve spoken at numerous trade shows like SMX, Affiliate Summit, Pubcon etc, been cited or written for numerous popular blogs including SEL, SEW, SEOBook.com and SEOmoz – plus created one of the most popular SEO plugins with 25,000+ downloads.

Terms:

Commissions will NOT be paid for:

- Traffic generated via paid search for Trademark terms, including the book name, site name, domain name, author name, editor name etc. Use your common sense.
- Traffic generated via any form of spam. Email lists that are not DOUBLE opt-in are considered spam, as are fake reviews (e.g. you haven’t read the book but are raving about it) etc. Use your common sense.
- Traffic generated wholly or in part via any illegal means, be it hacking sites, cookie stuffing etc.
- Any other form of traffic that would be reasonably objectionable on legal or ethical grounds.

Payment:
- The book price varies between $90 to $130 (I’m running pricing split tests to see which increases overall revenue most), and the commission is technically 20%. So some commissions may be for $18… but the upside is that others are for as much as $26, so in fact you’re even making money on my shipping costs! (That’s just the way e-Junkie run affiliate programs work – one flat rate for everything.)
- Commissions will be paid out at a minimum threshold of $50, for the first time an affiliate earns commission. You get $20 just for joining the program, so it takes 2 commissions to get paid (one can be on your own book). The extra $20 has to be manually entered, because e-Junkie doesn’t allow it be default, so don’t be worried if you don’t see it immediately upon logging in.
- Payments will be made via Paypal .
- For affiliates getting their first payments, the payment will be sent 31 days after the second commission is earned. This is to guard against paying commissions on returned items.
- No payment will be made on sales that result in a refund request.

Linkspam either manual or automated will result in non-payment of commissions and expulsion from the program.

Join at e-Junkie

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Two reasons:

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

The problem with using Google Website Optimizer with WordPress:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A summary of this approach’s benefits:

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

This is a guest post by John McElborough, who runs an SEO consultancy and Brighton web design company in the UK

In my last post here I shared some tactics for how you can cash in on long tail keywords using various content generation strategies. There’s no doubt that the long tail is where the traffic’s at but today I want to talk about the mid-tail which in many sectors is where the moneys at!

What’s this mid-tail then?

Well basically it’s the bit between the head and the long tail or to bastardise a graph from SEOmoz…

Mid-tail's where the money's at!

Mid-tail keywords are those terms which you want to rank for, you pro-actively optimise for but which don’t usually get your boss or clients all hot under the collar like a head term does. They’re the unsung hero’s of many SEO campaigns. Here are a few examples…

……….

Head: “Car insurance”

Mid tail: “Compare car insurance quotes”

Long tail: “What’s the best car insurance for a green Ford Mondeo 2002″

……….

Head: “Hotels”

Mid tail: “Brighton hotel deals”

Long tail: “Best price on Kings hotel Brighton in June 2011″

……….

Head: “SEO”

Mid tail: “SEO agency brighton”

Long tail: “Best brighton SEO agency under 500 pounds per month”

……….

Why target the mid-tail?

There’s a few reasons I think the mid-tail should be where you’re spending most of your SEO time…

The mid-tail converts in most cases far higher than the head or long-tail. Most purchase decision keywords like ‘compare’ or ‘buy’ keywords fall into the mid-tail category and most mid-tail phrases will be made up of 3-4 keywords, which statistically convert the best- again this SEOmoz graph paints the picture nicely

Mid-tail keywords are far, far easier to optimise for than head terms and more practical for small sites to target than the long tail. Just look at the drop in the sort of link numbers required to rank from head to mid-tail:

“Hotels” – about 2000 linking domains

“Brighton hotel deals” – about 70 linking domains

This puts these terms within the grasp of SME’s, new websites and local businesses who don’t have the budget to take on the big players for head terms.

[Ed: Check out my advanced SEO book for some chapters on converting homepage [e.g. head] traffic better and likewise for the long tail.]

Optimising for the mid-tail

There’s a few tactics and techniques which I use to optimise for these mid-tail terms beyond the standard SEO stuff which you already know about.

Clustering keywords

When you target head terms there’s usually very few keyword variations you can use but when you move down to mid-tail terms you can take on 5-10 variations of each keyword in what I like to call a cluster which might look like:

• Brighton hotel deals
• Hotel deals brighton
• Cheap brighton hotel deals
• Find brighton hotel deals
• Deals on brighton hotels

To manage these keywords I tag up each of these clusters in Raven or Advanced Web Ranking so I can look at ranking reports across a whole cluster rather than just for individual keywords. The thing about the mid-tail is the traffic on individual keywords often isn’t that impressive, but when you look at the total traffic for a cluster of 5 or 10 related keywords the total can often be greater than what you’d get off a single head term. It also makes sense to look at your rankings in aggregate across the cluster of mid-tail terms rather than looking at the rankings of individual keywords, which will fluctuate from month to month. here’s the type of reporting view I look at in Raven to analyse the performance of each cluster.

Here's an example of an aggregate traffic and ranking report for a cluster of keywords. The cool thing about Raven is it will also display your competitors average rank for the same cluster head to head.

Onpage optimisation

I try to take on one mid-tail keyword cluster per page with the main term from the cluster being the page name then the different variations scattered through the page title, H1 and body. In most cases it doesn’t matter if the exact keyword variation is written on the page or not because these keywords are very closely related and hopefully not uber-competitive.

Internal linking

This is absolutely the key to succeeding with the mid-tail for me. The trick here is to vary the anchor text used to link to your mid-tail targeting pages rather than using a fixed anchor in the navigation across the whole site.

The traditional internal linking model- all internal links use the same anchor text

The dynamic internal linking model- internal links use alternating anchor text from across a keyword cluster

By mixing the anchor text and cycling through the different keyword variations from the cluster your internal linking will be helping that page to rank for 5 variations instead of one. You can either dynamically vary the link anchor text in your menu system or if you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla you can use a plugin like Gab’s excellent wordpress internal linking plugin or JV content links for Joomla. You may also enjoy this post on anchor text variation.

Link building

Assuming your mid-tail keywords are likely to be moderately competitive you’re going to need some external link building to these pages to get them to rank.

What I like about optimizing for mid-tail keywords is that you can accurately predict the amount of link building effort, number and quality of links required to rank; something which is hard to do with very competitive head terms these days. Factors like brand strength and domain trust are less of an issue at this level of keyword and most of the time you’ll find the pages with the most anchor text links and best PageRank occupying the top few positions.

Therefore the best strategy for link building to these pages is to be quite methodical about your link building and work to a number target. Just like your internal links cycle through your cluster to vary the anchor text you use to link back to the page. Again I’ll reference Raven Tools here as it makes tracking your clusters of links really easy using tags (Buzzstream also does this just as well)

Assign a tag for each of your clusters and tag each link to that cluster page with it.

I won’t go into details about how to actually get these links as that will vary from industry to industry but to me it makes sense that a mid-tail term should have a medium quality link, one which is permanent and not rented- so you might want to check out the SEO ROI link building services

I hope this post will make you rethink your keyword strategy and question whether going after those fat head terms is really the best use of your time and money. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

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.

Internal Link Building is a plugin I created to help SEOs by letting them auto-link internally like Wikipedia does, so you can rank like Wikipedia.

It’s since been adopted by affiliates to auto-link to affiliate products and by bloggers looking to auto-link to their RSS feeds and popular posts, as well.
(Read on for details on new functionality, FAQ etc. For those who just want the latest version, add my RSS feed to your reader and download it from there.

If you like this plugin, please link to this page or stumble it.)

I recently sent people interested in my advanced SEO book a second free sample chapter about more natural anchor text. The updates to ILB do just that. In the words of the programmer…

New functionality:

Words Between means that more words can be in the anchor text. So, you can match “google search” to “google cat search” if this is set 1 or “google the best engine to use for search” if set higher. The setting is the maximum not the minimum.

Words Before is similiar but will just grab the X number of words before a link. This will always grab the set number of words, but will not cross sentences. Mainly, this is used to make the links look more natural in the website and vary the anchor text slightly.

Words After does the same thing but afterwards.

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

Max Links specifies the max amount of links ILB will insert onto the page, covering all keywords/links set in the plugin.

“Open links in new tab” can now be set as a default. This is really useful for those of you running the plugin for affiliate links and want the visitor to remain on your site after clicking.

Existing features:

Keyword and page sets: Tie one or more keywords to one or more pages.

Keyword repetition max: Limit the number of times a keyword will link to a given page.

Nofollow: Want to link to your RSS feed or affiliate links automatically? Don’t waste link juice on them.

Case-sensitive-option: Use proper nouns that you don’t want linked? Avoid Mike’s Dog Food linking to your ‘dog page by setting dog to. “exact match”

Post-level-overrides: Want a given keyword to auto-link but just for a specific post? Scroll down below the post editor and adapt settings for that post.

Mass upload: Got a looong list of keywords and URLs you want to set up? No problem. Just a CSV file in Excel, then copy-paste it into the mass-upload box in your admin panel. Click upload and you’re done! (Each field needs to be separated by a tab.)

To use the plugin:

Go to Settings, rather than the Posts section, to modify things.

The menu option is now called Keyword Links instead of Keywords

FAQ

1. Will this plugin overwrite links in older posts?

- Where a post already links out using keywords used in Internal Link Building, the plugin will NOT overwrite it.

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

- You can both limit individual keywords number of links per post, and the total links inserted by ILB across all keywords.

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

- Yes, just separate the keywords or URLs with | symbols in the keyword or URL field (see #6 and #7 for more).

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

- This plugin has the most functionality: Post-level overrides, mass upload, keyword and URL sets, words before/after/in between keywords being linked, new tabs etc.

5. Where is the post-level override?

- It’s in a box below the main content area the post creator/editor.

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

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

7. How do I install this?

i. Add my RSS feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email. The download link can be found below any post in a standard RSS or email feedreader.

(Is it worth subscribing? A) You can hear about updates. B) You get cutting-edge SEO tips, like those in my advanced SEO book.

ii. Download the file. Upload it to the wp-content/plugins/ folder.

iii. Login to WordPress. Activate it within the plugins admin page.

Contributors list:

Thomas Voullemier runs a whitelabel dating affiliate program.

Marios Alexandrou writes All Things SEM / SEO blog.

Jeff and John sell their services via SEO Design Solutions.

Chris Balicki does similar stuff in Poland via Web Systems.

Matt Longley of Site Source 101 was essential to getting things going initially.

Lane Lester whose sites helps you find the best information and reviews on the internet.

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 30 advanced tactics you can use now?

Get a free chapter from my book!

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.

Those of you familiar with my scratchpad articles know that this is informal, braindump writing.

Yes, the formatting and grammar sucks and it’s in note form.

But the substance will kick your ass across the Channel, Matilda.

Social

Wayne Liew explained that he’s now more focused on using Twitter to build relationships. He noticed a sub 1% CTR on his links, which lead him partly to realize that his follower count was pretty meaningless. It’s engaged followers that matter.

To the same effect, a recent blog post about tweeting = speaking in a void:

It’s unsurprising then that TwitterBFFs (Best Friends Forever) recently came out, showing who you tweet with most. I expect that within 18 months, we’ll have the first true social media analytics.

Selling

“Always be selling” doesn’t mean always be asking 4 the sale. Depends where u are in the funnel.

Socializing, mentioning what u do=selling

Hence Tweeting can = selling. And hence the need for true social media analytics.

These will take TwitterBFFs type technology and help you measure the strength of your relationships and need for followup.

Plugins

Based on some WordPress and Ecommerce SEO strategy I shared, I had a new plugin idea.

Make a plugin that takes selected posts and copies their content into another post, 301s the selected posts URLs, and adds a table of contents and subheaders with the appropriate titles.
You end up with
- an authoritative, in-depth topic page a la Wikipedia; aka linkbait
- more content combinations for SEs to send you longtail traffic on,
- linkjuice being more concentrated in fewer pages, so you rank better as explained here

Another plugin idea: Integrate commenting with facebook and add a little ’3 Benefits of registering’ box – see wireframe sent to indians

Ads

Google’s Display Ad Strategy – From The Horse’s Mouth

http://google360.client.shareholder.com/eventdetail.cfm?eventid=75613

Notes on this.
Majority of publishers in Google Content have opted into running display ads; majority are serving those, not text ads. Unclear if by choice or based on yield optimization.

Need to watch the whole thing…

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.

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.

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 was reading this post by Ann Smarty on SalesForce’s brilliant WP plugin, and it reminded of recent news from BuzzStream. BuzzStream are like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, but for link prospects. And they just added Twitter functionality.

Any link builder worth his salt knows that the best links are about repeatability.
And relationships are a big part of making links repeatable.
Twitter builds relationships.
Ergo, Twitter makes repeatable links possible.

It used to be the case that you had to copy-paste or do manual data entry if you were building relationships for clients on Twitter and using BuzzStream as your link prospect manager.
Now you can just synchronize Twitter and BuzzStream and your efforts will be pulled in directly.

Win!

Longtime readers will recall that human resource managers should be measuring social media for your company. This also ties in to using Twitter as a community, which imho is more efficient than seeing it as a broadcast platform.

If you like this post on tools/social/link building, check out my advanced SEO book and get a free chapter.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

What’s popular?

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

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

Here’s what’s new.

Benefits:

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

“Features:

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

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

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

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

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

Bug Fixes:

- Updated to work with WP 2.9.1

- Exact matching wasn’t working quite right

- Removing Custom Post Keywords left data in the DB

Other Changes:

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

1) Affiliate networks.

Ever wonder what a competitor’s margins are like?

What countries they focus on? What KPIs they use?

What verticals they’re in?

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

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

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

- Benefits emphasized – to model your copy on

- Profitable or high volume products or otherwise desirable goals

- Tone of voice for branding purposes

3) Corporate HQ websites.

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

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

4) Alerts and keyword trackers.

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

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

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

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

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

5) Mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an excerpt:

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

“Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined by usability expert Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are.

“The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons [...]”

Now, just because the typical forms of mystery meat navigation are unrevealing icons, that doesn’t mean people can’t get creative and find other ways to make crummy navigation.

Here’s one particular example that still exists on a number of blogs.

What will I go to if I click on 2? Or 3? Or 11? Or 17? To the best of my knowledge, there’s no difference between them except the date they were published. So I may as well click on any of those links! Or none, because they don’t look especially compelling…

For similar reasons, such mystery meat navigation is bad for SEO. Rather than linking internally using valuable anchor text that will help other pages rank higher, you use some useless anchor text that won’t get you a single extra visitor.

Similarly, it’s also bad usability if you have archive navigation organized by month.

We’ve all seen that kind of navigation:

There’s hardly any reason for anyone to navigate an archive by month, unless they’re doing historical research. For example, if you wanted to find out when Yahoo announced the end of paid inclusion, and you had a hunch it was in July 09, you might visit a search blog and go to their July archives.

That’s not how most people browse content though. Most users are interested in a topic, like link building, or link buying from news sites in particular.

That’s why my own archive navigation in the sidebar is organized by topic, and not by month.

Now, there is an exception to this:  if you write about ‘royds. Not hemorrhoids, you creeps .  The Refuge of Delayed Souls, at http://roydss.blogspot.com

That site makes unique use of the blog format of reverse-chronological posting to tell a story. Each new post furthers the story.

Obviously, not everyone has been with it from day 1.

So the author [her name isn't on the site] has organized her archive navigation so that people can start at Part 1 (eg the first chapter). And they can stop at, say, Part 5 and return the next day and go from there. Kind of like placing a bookmark to keep your place in a book.

So if you’re writing a story or some other content that follows a logical chronological order, time and date based navigation make sense for usability.

They’re still not all you should have, however.

Consider someone who loved a particular romantic scene. Do they have to memorize what Part of the story it was in? Wouldn’t it make more sense to offer some thematic navigation too, based on your story arcs?

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Least I Could Do, a popular webcomic. And they get this storyline navigation just right:

If you liked this post on usability, add my rss feed to your reader to get more quality posts like this regularly. If you’re looking for usability consulting, then email me.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Question: Does it matter for my site’s SEO in Google or other search engines if I use www in the domain name? For example, do I need to use http://www.example.com or can i use http://example.com ?

Answer: It doesn’t matter at all to your SEO in Google or Bing whether you use www. in your domain name or not… with one big exception

Search engines don’t consider the use of www or not as a ranking factor, because it has no value in improving the relevance of their search results or improving the user experience.

There is one exception, however. You don’t want to use both a www version of the site and a non-www version.

If you do use both www and non-www, then you’ll have duplicate content problems, also known as “canonicalization” problems. The heart of the matter is that your content will be found in two separate locations.

(The word “canon” is used in religious terms to mean the “official set of holy writings.” That’s been adapted to other fields. So you can have the canonical set of Harry Potter books, which are the official books, and you can have the “canonical” version of a web page, which is the official one you want search engines to rank in their search results.)

What I mean is that if you have two identical versions of a page, one found at http://www.example.com and another found at http://example.com, and both show up fine to search engine spiders, you will have duplicate content.

This is problematic because a) It confuses search engines as to what is the canonical, or official, page. b) You will sometimes get links to one version and sometimes to another, such that you compete with yourself.

How do you do SEO successfully then, if you currently have such www vs non-www duplicate content problems?

You have two options.

1) Redirect either version to the other one using “301 permanent” redirects. There are numerous tutorials on this online, for DIY people, but you can also get a decent freelance programmer to do it for you. Personally, I get my hosting from Dreamhost and they give you an option to 301 redirect one version to the other.

I have a $50 off discount code at Dreamhost off any annual hosting package (or a $25 off discount on a monthly hosting package) if you need to set up a new site: Just enter GabSavesYou50 when you sign up for Dreamhost hosting.

(Full disclosure: It’s an affiliate link, but I’d endorse Dreamhost personally anyways, as I have in the past. Their tech support is super responsive and they have numerous tools to make things very easy, like one-click WordPress installs.)

2) Use the “canonical” tag to indicate to search engines which version is the official one. For those of you using WordPress, Yoast has a plugin to automate some canonicalization, but I’m not sure it’s applicable to this situation.

(3) Update: Malcolm Coles has a related article with examples of www vs non www that’s a valuable read on this topic.

If you liked this post, you might want to get my latest posts sent to you regularly, for free, by rss or by email.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

“Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay[...]“

“In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.”

Actually, it appears from the Seattle Times story that I was wrong on the margins point, because Google will allow publishers to set their own retail price, while apparently Amazon is already selling e-books at a slight loss. Presumably, Google will take a commission on each sale. But Google is trying to steal market share…

This fits in with what I was saying about Google’s affiliate network and how they are going to become the biggest affiliate around in the next little while.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products. [...] Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide.”

Replace Google Base with Google Books – whose rapid rise to prominence I noted at SEO Book – and you get today’s announcement [Ed: It actually was in Monday's paper, but I didn't have time to edit this post].

This isn’t the first time I’ve been ahead of the mainstream seo community.

Longtime readers will recall how, I picked up on Google’s new submarine crawling, 4 months before the announcement that they were querying site search forms.

Others will remember my presentation of how to use trusts to buy sites at SMX Advanced last year – which also came months after I shared the technique on this blog…

And my SMX Advanced presentation was based partly on a year-old post! Yet people loved it…

So if you want to stay ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage, you should add my rss feed to your reader.

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.

Ruud Hein and I conducted this interview by email, which is why some of the tantalizing bits he leaves off on don’t see a followup – it was a preset bunch of questions. In any case, the interview is about business, but gets personal too – all of which makes for a great read, imho. Enjoy! -Gab

You’re known as a technically savvy SEO, as seen via your Search Explained series. Does that interest come from your programming background? Either way, can you share some detail?

Sure.

I think the programming and the analytical approach of SEO come from the same source; it’s me freaking around with something, following a rabbit trail and before I know it I’m reading, digesting, analyzing, trying, playing…

I don’t know how much time you have — we could easily go back to my LEGO phase… But no, seriously; I don’t like black box stuff. I like to know how something really works.

My first computer was a Sinclair/Timex ZX81. 1KB RAM. One measly kilobyte… TWO if you counted the “video RAM” and didn’t mind black dots randomly appearing on screen.

I wasn’t sure why I wanted that computer, just that I did. Like, these vector based video games consoles, right, they were powered by computers, they said, so I would have something like that — only instead of being stuck with one game you buy, I could do anything with it. Anything!

I remember sitting down with the thing. It had the most used commands of the programming language BASIC printed on its keys.

And I was wondering just which one of these would make a nice graphic, right?

I mean, you weren’t going to tell me someone was drawing all that … Had to come out of the computer… automatically.

After manually entering a couple of hundred lines of BASIC code which caused an exclamation mark to chase a question mark Centipede-style I realized that, no, these things didn’t happen automatically; there was no magic “insert cool 3D image” command.

So … how did they do that then? And how did collision detection work? If I change these IF – THEN lines, what happens?

From that comes machine language, assembly stuff, a jump to client-side scripting, then server-side scripting and, yeah, one day you find you’re “into SEO” and the whole thing starts again. How does search really work?

I rolled into the whole game because I tried some basic stuff. Basically keyword repetition, looking back. And … I was amazed this stuff worked … I was ranking better for, hold on, “download free virtual pet” and people actually came in droves. Like wow, man! So then…

Well, yes, then what? H1, title, meta – but how did these people know that?

Ah OK, they test. So then it’s just randomly coming up with stuff? There has to be some kind of logic to this thing, no?

And that’s where you find yourself on another rabbit trail; how is information collected, how is a web page broken up and how is that information stored then, etcetera, etcetera.

What are the advantages and drawbacks of developing this technical savvy? Based on those, should we conclude that one needs such savvy to be a competent SEO?

The advantage is of course that you can work on what works, not just on what appears to work today.

You can do great SEO with just a bit of knowledge but then you’re bound to be a follower, bound to be second rate. You’re always walking behind the facts; you work on what works today until the whole thing collapses. Then you spend time listening to others what might be wrong, what might be needed to fix it. And there you go off into another SEO bubble…

[gets more coffee] Look, it’s a lot like working on Wall Street in the early 2000′s and saying “folks, this thing is going to blow up” based on what you know about how economics work.

Meanwhile, year after year huge profits are made — and you look sillier and sillier. Careful folks are fired or simply don’t get promoted; risky ones promote up until the choir on top sings the same song and there’s no-one to say “are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

Then one day, when the whole thing blows up, you get to jump in to get it fixed now.

Technical SEO is like that.

Technical SEO is saying years ago clients should blog, because that is what social was all about back then, and you have to wait for a huge link game to get devalued before the thing gets implemented — while they could have been first.

It’s pushing widgets and gadgets before Google’s directory is filled with thousands upon thousands of them.

It’s saying someone should be on Twitter and they wait until the whole world is there and Dell, Zappos and Oprah have stolen their thunder.

It’s saying that links can be the self-reinforcing result of “being out there”, of “great content, well marketed”; that it can be a pull technique instead of a push job.

And that’s the disadvantage then: the irritation of advice not acted upon because it’s too early, followed by the frustration of explaining that why, now that it is finally implemented, everything is much, much harder.

Because, see, that’s the other side. If you come to the game at the right time – that is: before you read your SEO guru and hundreds like her advising it – you reap extra award. The game is easier, simpler, faster – the payback is better once it starts to snowball. To make it into a verb; it Googles, it YouTubes, it Flickrs, it Zappos. It’s first. You don’t get that same boost by being an “also ran”.

Read “filthy linking rich” again and then imagine you’re one of the first to pursue great links before everyone else was doing it. See the strength and payback that gives? See how much smarter you work then and how much harder you would have to work now to get the same kind of payback?

[sips more coffee] And competence? I don’t know… I think you’re putting that question out there in a very black-and-white fashion .

No, you don’t need to know about information retrieval or how stuff is stored and accessed by search engines to be competent at what you do.

We’re all skating on thin ice here but to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been, you need to do more than just show up.

You don’t need to be a geek. [Emphasis added.]

If you want to assess your own competence, imagine that the tactic you rely on most to rank is 100% devalued tomorrow. What would you do instead? What would you do different? Would you still be able to rank? If not, would you know how to figure out how to rank? [Emphasis added.]

You take a lot of pictures for your Flickr account and seem to be a well rounded individual, judging by the information you’ve put out there in the Ruud Hein search results. What are your passions besides search?

Oh, I like the “seems” in there, hahahaha.

I’m passionate about my family. They are the real thing; they’re what I’m about. Without them my life would be very different. Their presence and lack thereof colors a lot of what I do, think, feel, say. We’re now with the last, the youngest, and I’m drinking in every moment because I miss the day-to-day presence of the other two so, so much.

My wife, my kids; they are my reason.

Yeah, so, anyway; Flickr… I use it kind of like an online backup for our photos. A couple of hundred photos show public but I have over 17 thousand photos there. So I guess you can easily call that a passion: taking photos. Here in Quebec we call someone like me, the “Kid Kodak” of the family.

Whenever I leave the house I usually carry a camera on me. I’m not into fancy stuff, just point and shoot with some creativity. Looking at the world differently.

The preview screen of my camera is quite small so it’s always a real surprise to see what turned out how. I love it!

Oh and I really like my camera! It’s a Pentax Optio MX from 2004. Because of the form of the camera it can have a lot of lens movement which means it sports 10 x optical zoom. 100 x zoom if you add in digital zoom but, no, that doesn’t count.

Besides great photos the thing takes really good 640×480 MPEG video.

I love that little camera so much that when my first one fell this Christmas, I didn’t trust it to last and got myself another one on eBay, just in case. It’s a shame they stopped this line of development.

I love reading.

I’m Dutch but I’ve been reading in English since I was 12. When I got to French Quebec getting affordable English books was a bit of a challenge.

I’m in a small town and back then we didn’t have an English bookstore or a lot of second hand places to dig up some treasures. I got myself a Palm IIIxe on eBay and have been carrying it, and nowadays an IPAQ pocket PC, on me at all times ever since.

I have it loaded all the time with at least 3 to 5 books. A stolen moment while waiting in line, a few pages while waiting for the water to boil, etcetera, etcetera.

Coffee! I love coffee. I drink it all day round in various strengths, using various brewing methods and various kinds of coffee. Different mugs too. Love it.

And, oh man… there’s so much I’m wildly excited about, excited like a kid.

Blue skies with sunshine cause an energy burst in me; the light is one of the things I appreciate from winter here versus winter in Amsterdam.

A good tune to which I can do some moves – private only! – which make me resemble someone wearing CPR pads, full time.

Seriously, although I love it, no-one can accuse me of having any sense of rhythm.

So many great tracks, you know? Born Slippy, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Papa’s Got A Brand New Pig Bag, Where The Streets Have No Name – to me the existence of music is God’s way of saying “I rock!”

Oh, and good comedy of course! It’s my preferred movie genre too.

Comedy, laughter, is an amazing thing. It’s a real, freaking miracle. You don’t see ants roll on their back from sheer laughter… I suspect dogs smile though…

Anyway, comedy. I grew up with Tom & Jerry, the real Tom & Jerry, Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin. Colors my life: I have a cartoon mind. Look at one of those old Tom & Jerry’s — that’s how I see a lot of stuff around me. … John Pinette, John Candy, George Carlin, Steven Wright, Bill Cosby, Michel Courtemanche, Rowan Atkinson; so many others.

And Christmas! Love Christmas, adore it. And.. oh, ah… many more things. But well, hey, you got a limit to your patience too, right? Hahahaha!

Let’s talk some more about passions. What typically leads you to become passionate about something? How does that emotional/rational drive get started, and how does one keep fueling it?

Oi… You’ve got some serious stuff lined up here, don’t you?

Cripes… how does it get started… I like something that is new or makes something new. I can lose myself in setting up a new site or getting a new process in place. Once there, it’s sometimes harder to keep that focus, right?

I love breaking through the barrier. It’s easy to become complacent and not do, not create, not learn, but when you break through that and push yourself, the payback is learning and enthusiasm. And I say “you” but mean “I.”

You fuel it by changing around, mixing it up, stepping out of it and coming back from another angle.

So much of our time is spent setting up processes and routines; it’s like we’re preparing to set up camp for the rest of eternity. Well, we’re not, right? It’s a couple of years and then it’s done so for crying out loud, let’s not pretend we can pin the thing down and put it in “set it and forget it” mode. [Emphasis added.]

So that’s how I fuel it. When using this tool that got me so excited becomes boring and a drag, I explore some other options. When doing the same thing over and over again, I make sure that the “again” is different this time around.

This week I went outside to draw with chalk on the road and sidewalk together with my youngest daughter. I traced my steps and then the footsteps of my wife from the corner of our house to the side door.

That’s how you fuel it

You’re also a savvy analyst of the search industry, as your Search Wiki analysis showed. How does one develop such analytical skills?

With the kind of praise you’re bestowing on me I keep expecting you to jump out of your seat, hold out your hand and go “oh, and could I borrow $100 bucks please?” [Ed: I was actually lining him up for $1000 and some free links... guess he's not such a savvy analyst after all.]

I don’t know, Gab. You label it “analytical”; to me it’s also a lot of “what if…” That “What if…” is the typical last born in me. A lot of years passed before I was dropped on the planet so there’s a bit of Only Child in me as well; list maker, scholarly, logic, organized, loving facts and ideas.

Or maybe it’s the Melancholic in me. Same deal; organized, analytical, long term goals…

I don’t really believe you develop analytical skills, the same way you don’t develop singing skills. It’s there or not, and when it’s there, it’s something that’s like this it’s you, it’s intertwined with you; it’s how you are, how you live.

Oh sure, you can teach it to anyone just like you could teach me how to have rhythm and how to dance – but it won’t make me Fred Astaire.

So to me the books I’ve read, the thinking I love to do, the “what if A is part of B?” ideas, are more the effect of something analytical inside than the other way around.

Also, how do you glue together the disparate bits of info to make a coherent whole (or at least, an educated guess at the whole)?

Oh dude… Now you’re getting me on my hobby horse. I’m going to need much more coffee!

It’s a whole Hercule Poirot thing; a detective game. Somebody says something. Fine. Someone else says something unrelated. Neat. Now a third person makes a statement and you think “Hey… that connects A and B!”

The biggest issue there is what we all encounter when we know we saw a specific page last week but for the life of it can’t make Google or our browser history give it back to us: recall.

It’s there that I spend a lot of time on two tools: Evernote and PersonalBrain. Those are the two places where information can live here in my office.

When I see a statement of interest I highlight it, copy, CTRL+ALT+V and it’s a new note in Evernote, source URL automatically included.

What did Matt say about Expo Markers? How many servers does it take to run Google Calendar? Having #1 Adwords position is comparable to which organic position? Did you know that we know only since 10 years ago that the brain grows new cells? On a day to day basis? You can’t use ini_set() to turn register_globals off – so how do you fake it?

All that is in my Evernote. I add about 200 notes per month ranging from “where did I put the Christmas gift for mom” to “why IDF is expressed as logs”

So when I hear or read something and something goes “hey, but wait!”, I often can pull up a specific piece of information about it.

I also use PersonalBrain. A unique program and one that causes a lot of amusement at my home. PersonalBrain users have this way of talking that’s just… odd, geeky; fun. “How large is your brain?”, “I’ve added 20 thoughts to my brain”… Heck, you can even right-click an entry, a “thought”, and select “forget” … which is still one step away from Delete…

Think of it as an application where you can map relations: parent, child, and sideways or jumps.

To me it serves as a visual knowledge management tool and it acts, to quote another user, as a hard drive of my mind.

A lot of information that goes in Evernote also goes into my brain. There it gets linked to parent or child thoughts … and that sometimes shows relations to information that I’ve sheer forgotten about or wouldn’t consciously think of to connect.

PersonalBrain is a very powerful, very broad scope application. Over the years it has increasingly grown to be my second desktop. It contains files, applications, shortcuts, bookmarks…

Some kind of marriage between these apps could be awesome but I’m really very, very happy about the setup as-is. Passionate, you could say

Anyway, that’s how it goes; I read tons, pick out the interesting tidbits and use data tools to help me with recall and data visualization.

Do you read Matt Cutts’ blog? Why/not? What do you get out of it, and what could be better?

Not often.

A lot of the gold dust and nuggets has moved to the forum, first Google Groups. The information there is often very actionable and can provide real value. Some of those things you can easily test for yourself but it’s nice to be able to point to someone and say “see, he said so too.”

[Ed.: I've found SEM 2.0 to be one such nice group started by the always-quality Andrew Goodman. I also recommend the Google Webmaster Forum.]

And it’s not that his blog is bad or whatever but he’s a webspam guy and I’m not on the flipside of that coin.

I know what’s spammy and don’t work that way myself; I’m not into trying to make it look natural, I’m into causing it to be natural – so this whole “can I link 20 of my sites in the footer and …”-whatever debate is not mine.

I’d love for someone like Matt to communicate his idea about quality much more efficiently. Go beyond “make a good site” and preach, man! Because, seriously, that’s where the money is.

Doing things the right way is simply much, much more effective. Take something stupid like clean coding and lite, fast loading pages. Boring! Well… yeah… sure… so now go pay and build a mobile site because your table based, broadband clogging web page doesn’t load on a mobile phone. To quote Holmes on Homes: make it right.

If you’re thinking a bit sane you know very well when you’re preparing your own Wall Street crash.

If I sit down with you and you can tell me one reason why you rank the way you do, that right there is your weak spot.

There should be no singular reason why you rank. [Ed: Emphasis added, because relying on a single point makes you easy to reverse-engineer and means you have no barrier to entry...]

It shouldn’t be your directory submissions or press releases, it shouldn’t be your strong titles or themed site structure – it should be all of it. And as soon as any one of those becomes important and talked about a lot in the industry, it’s time to move on to new, green pastures.

So, I wouldn’t mind some help from mister Cutts in that area, in saying; look, if you do it smart you can make it right the first time and it pays back for itself.

As SEP’s blog editor-in-chief, what responsibility challenges you the most?

Meeting the content deadlines.

I run both SEP’s native blog and our community blog SEO Scoop. Between those two there are about 16-18 contributors, each with their own posting schedule and frequency. On top of that there are guest appearances and interviews.

Managing all that in a way that posts go out in a consistent manner is much more hands-on involved than I had initially thought.

I love the challenge though.

How do you balance the desire to use SEP’s blog to promote SEP with the desire to attract high quality writers and posts (eg. Jordan Kasteler on Thankyou Pages, Cindy Alvarez on getting customers talking about you )? And what is your company philosophy in that respect?

There is no balance there at all: we come down 100% at the side of stellar content. If that means that someone needs to link to their own site or company go for it; we’re all for it.

There’s no danger from where we’re looking. What’s the worst that can happen? That someone gets exposure, picks up an extra client? Well, that’s not something scary; that’s great! The butterfly effect in a pay it forward kind of way. [Ed: Damn that's a good answer!]

I simply believe that good people write great posts.

It’s only happened once that a post was submitted which was intentionally crippled and instead had links going out to the writer’s web site at every point. I edited the post quite a bit in half day, hopefully staying true to the writer’s own style, and posted it under his (or her…) name. No harm done.

Our philosophy is, like I said earlier, exceptional, solid, stellar content.

Thanks for the interview, Gab – real nice to be talking with you!

Ruud Hein is an SEO consultant and web publisher employed with Toronto’s Top SEO and Internet Marketing Firm. They recently released The Blog Link & Traffic Analysis plugin for WP.[Ed: Anchor text my own; Ruud was going to have Ruud Hein and Search Engine People in the anchor text. He's not being an 'icky self-promoter' for all you namby-pants "I hate other SEOs doing SEO" out there .

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.

Actually, this post should be titled: “How did I cloak my way to lower rankings?!” Because the truth is that it was completely unintentional – as evidenced by it causing my traffic to drop like a rock.

I had been working with the awesome folks at Slingshot SEO (kudos to SEO moz for the connection) on creating a new plugin for WordPress SEO, to add functionality not existent in other plugins (including my own Internal Link Building plugin).

I also had All In One SEO Pack running on this site, and the clash between that plugin and the one we’re developing was terrible. Here’s what happened:

Notice the different URLs? So even though my pages had the links and power to rank … this accidental cloaking of all my titles killed my search traffic.

I’m not sure whether I was still ranking for all the phrases I had been (since the title obviously matters), or whether these irrelevant titles ‘just’ killed my CTR, but one way or another, my organic traffic was shot to hell.

Perhaps the funniest thing is that I didn’t realize that I was cloaking until John Mu – a Google employee – pointed it out lol! [Me: "Uhm... Oops?"]

Thanks to all the great folks, like John and Autocrat, who make the Google Webmaster Help Forum a useful place to hang out! (Kudos also to Barry from SE Roundtable for not running the story before I fixed the problem.)

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader.

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 a long time, I resisted using Feedburner for my rss feed analytics, but I’ve finally given in. Ok, fine, Borgle – you can have another data point on me. For now. Until a non-Google entity provides comparable analytics.

To my readers, rather than keep visiting every few days or every week, why not save yourself the typing and loading time? So…

Add my RSS feed to your reader !

(I recommend NetVibes, for its usefulness as a Blogger relationship dashboard) and just check for updates to it simultaneously with checking for updates on the other blogs you like!

P.S. Fun fact on how to break your tracking:

I mistagged my What Would Seth Godin Do-”add my rss feed to your reader“-link with the tracking code for my big orange RSS Feed icon in the box on the upper left. As a result, I’ve been miscounting the number of folks clicking the box and miscounting the number clicking the auto-inserted text and erroneously giving it more credit than it deserves! Whoops!

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.