Linkbuilding

Luckily I get loads of spammy requests for link exchanges. Why lucky? because one of the big sites I look after is that prominent, its a magnet for link builders. 

And we got that way by having a great site, with content that is genuinely useful and then mixed it in with some ‘robust’, but sustainable linkbuilding practices. 

Anyhow this useful and comprehensive article echoes my views on linkbuilding…

http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/link-building-a-complete-walkthrough/

So for my UFO entertainment fix I have subscribed to Acebryan7ox.

Today I find he has been removed from youtube… and he is not the only one apparently

• acebryan,
• nightfallproject,
• rodneykingman,
• teabowbraine,
• realeducation,
• vormeggio,
• mayorofcydae,
• wildtonic
• heartofdrakn
• NafrikaKorps

These are only a portion of the 20 or so big names taken offline. And I must say how disappointed I am about this. I always figured youtube was a place where you could trust for allowing account holder to more or less do their thing (except for obscenity and copyright infringement)

Of course being part of Google (an evil company BTW) its going to be impossible to get straight answers. I do hope someone get an alternative site going so there is a counterpoint and a solid base from which ‘alternative’ views can be interacted with.

Bad, bad, bad

The general things to think about are a combination of ‘likeability’ and efficiency. When I speak of nice people, I assume that people, like people, like themselves.

And that being the case you get more done and have more goodwill to help you through any tough times you both may have.

The efficiency stuff: 

PPC agency requirements

• Cost per hour or day of service
  • How do they account for this
  • If there is more work involved than expected, then how would this be accounted for
• Invoicing terms
  • Monthly?
  • How big is their credit line?
  • Gap between being invoiced and being paid – making sure cashflow is managed
• Consistency in service standards
  • How will these agreed standards be maintained
    • What are the mechanisms to track this?
• Quality of the people administering the account
  • GAP qualified? (google adwords professional qualified)
  • Years experience
  • Interest in what we do?
• Flexibility of the company
  • Account management structure
    • Do the people between the account expect and us know what they are talking about?
    • Can they translate our wishes properly (We give a brief - do they understand it?))
    • Do we have clear access to the execs?
• Expertise in this sector
  • As a business have they managed accounts this size
  • What case studies can they present
• Assurances on consistency of personnel
  • What contractual elements can we have to make sure the personnel we ‘buy’ are the ones we keep on the account
  • If these people leave, what arrangements do we have to replace them with appropriate people
• Bid management / general technology they use
  • How do they see this tech working in our circumstances?
  • What will this cost be and what savings has this tech given with other clients
• Reporting
  • Examples of client reporting
    • What analysis
    • How robust is the data
    • Tags ? which ones?
• Access to accounts
  • Can we? – we don’t like ‘black box’ so access here is important
• Contractual stuff
  • How long?
  • What is its broken by us – penalties?
  • What liability on their part if they mess up? i.e. they mess up some max cost per click figures and burn a load of money
  • Can some of the things we want be incorporated? I.E. pick of certain execs?

As ever I’m constantly impressed with wordpress as a versatile and useful blog tool, but did you know it makes a great CMS?

In fact wordpress is now my cms of choice for static sites, simply becuse its so easy to install and to configure. And then you have the plugins!

This is a villa rental site I’ve done recently, its for rentals in Italy in an area called Piemonte.

The main features are the easy theming, the configurability and of course the plugins!

Main stars are:

• FLIR for the pretty fonts
• Flickr tag for making images embedding a whole lot easier ( my rationale: use services that do what they do really well. Flickr is genius on images and its free!
• All in one SEO pack
• and all the usual indispensable features like Akismet

Here is some intersting stuff on wordpress as a CMS

Its a huge area and of course very competitive, but in my experience if its a subject you understand well and you can really add value to the user, then you will find it easier to get links and so rank

One of the sites I work on http://betting.betfair.com has adopted this approach and has done really well as an  ‘affiliate’  and its performs a place where there is a lot of ££ - so its extremely competitive.

The other interesting disconnect is between sites that get tons of traffic and those that commercialize the traffic.

for traffic, typically you get a fan of a subject who starts a blog and it goes from there - or you get a company how produces content for puts out a website and because they know how to write, it gets traction a good example of this would be www.anorak.co.uk

Affiliates though typically don’t know how to write and end up just playing the SEO game, which is fine, but not really sustainable since users are more sophisticated now than of old and see these sites for what they are : crap.  An example of this is casinochoice.co.uk (do you really believe them?)

And of course search engines look at this kind of site as
a. not good for the user
b. taking money they could have in PPC

In respect to reading material… For SEO, I’ve always talked about Aaron Walls SEO book and of course SEOMoz

But the real trick with affiliate is to align your knowledge of a subject with something where there is plenty of money i.e. gambling - and be useful to the user and go hard on seo.

In respect to doing legwork on affiliate, its worth going though a few networks to get a feel for what right for you

http://www.reviewcentre.com/products129.html

And interestingly when you look at the numbers, revenue to you is typically 5% of user spend - except for gambling and money, but of course money is rather out of favor right now…

So in conclusion: affiliate is tough, but easy if you add value and help users to make a decision that is ultimately positive for them i.e. the best gambling company, the best TV and so on. If I were to show you the the best affiliate of all (in my opinion) - it would be www.moneysavingexpert.com and in gambling I think my (employers) site is good www.betting.betfair.com - study and learn!

The SEO moz article for your interest

I’m currently working on an international SEO project with 5 different countries, amongst them is a Chinese team. And before my time with the Chinese, I guess I had no real appreciation of how industrious they really are relative to everyone else I’m dealing with.

Once the budget had been decided upon, they got to work gathering a content team together in a matter of a few weeks they were writing good stuff. Finding a link building business was easy - and away we go… no messing about, no procrastination. Once they committed, they went for it. So in all I have been deeply impressed by the Chinese.

And in a broader context with the global financial crisis, I can only assume China will only come out stronger economically and that will translate into an even more powerful online presence and a bigger online market to go for.

So if you’re wondering about SEO for the next 10 years, maybe its time to learn Chinese and start studying baidu.com

Random thoguht: I wonder if there is a parallel universe in China where the big SEO’ers hang out as they do here…

I’ve been very interested in the whole human + connectivity, nature of the Internet and how it can be a great gatherer of collective application and a way for spreading ideas fast.

Te best book I know on collective consciousness and prediction outcome is probably the Wisdom of crowds. After about 1/2 way through the book, you get the main idea: People in a collective are very good at predicting outcome and being good judges.

This stuff is interesting and is written by Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams:
The Betfair Prof: “Question: How do you find a missing submarine? Answer: Ask the audience”
| Prediction Markets

On the theme of collective thinking, I work for a company called Betfair and we run a ’stock exchange’ for individuals who bet either on the positive or negative outcome of a sports event. Betfair sits in the middle as a custodian (similar to escrow services) and takes a small commission.

OK, so you may ask - whats that to do with SEO ? well not a lot really, other than search engines are very good collectors of ‘zeitgeist’ (that’s a word for collective consciousness of the moment)

Google run such a service : http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends# And from this you can get a sense of the collective currents in human thinking. The yearly one is worth looking at

I don’t know what the outcome of this is, other than if you are picking up an an affiliate idea and you want to SEO for it, by understanding the collective ‘pick up’ on an idea you can get a handle on whether the project is a good bet.

SES is a corporate thing these days, the sessions are’nt that in depth but despite that the big players in SEO go becasuse of the networking.

The catch for hard core SEO’ers is that next year there may not be a good reason to go and network.

This year there was no ‘meet the engineers’ - so if you wanted to speak with one, you had to look hard. I heard of one very respected seo guy at the Google Dance (who will remain nameless) who had to send ‘gofors’ to find engineers.  And I hear this is the last Google Dance…That’s bad.

The Key SEO’ers go to be closer to the root of their business - Google and its engineers. If they go, those further down the foodchain, the in house and agency SEO’ers will not have the same motivation to go to SES, since they wont be able get close to the key SEO’ers. And so on it goes.

My verdict: Great networking (I picked up several new suppliers for my SEO work)
Will I go again? it all depends on how much Google are tied in with the conference next year!

(Kevin is the ‘front guy’ for SES)

I’ve been on a cool trip to San Jose SES where i got to meet some really cool people and meet some suppliers I now plan to work with.

Below are a few pictures from the trip!

I had a post written about my presentation and mercifully its a positive review!

There was a very interesting discussion around SEO, on which I made some notes on this blog. The key message was to make sure your content is well written and interesting. There is still a lot for government to learn about this stuff, as Paul Canning often says - maybe we should call it findability or something, though.

More here

And this

Highlight presentations for me personally were Nick Garner from BetFair on SEO

More here

And this:

Aside from the tips on plugins, backups and content management systems, one line stood out for me “If you’re a web developer get to know a journalist. We need them. And they’re cheap.”

The quote came from Nick Garner, head of search marketing for Betfair. He was talking about search engine optimisation (SEO), in particular the practice of link building - increasing the number of links to your site through a range of activities including posting on forums and in blog comments, buying linked text ads on popular websites and blogs, and writing link-ridden articles which are then ‘given’ to popular websites and blogs.

More here

And a complete run down of the whole event here

As I said before - this was the first go at a presentation like this, so there is much room for improvement. Lets hope i can come back again and share some more at the next workcamp.

One thing I hope we can do next  year (if I’m invited back) is  to have some ‘interests’ streaming, where attendees specify their core interests and skill levels beforehand so speakers can gear their presentations better to the audience.

But all in all - its been great!

I felt I jumped around too much and didnt keep on a tight enough track with my powerpoint presentation, but it was bouncy and seemed to keep everyone interested.

The guy I went to this with, gave me a 7/10, so not bad for my 1st speaking engagement!

General thoughts

I think the most significant thing was the sense of common identity amongst us all…after all, were all wordpress people. And this ‘geekyness’ was cool.

it was this sense of community that really impressed me. It is why the internet is so special and in many ways it was a vivid manifestation of why the Internet is so powerful, i.e.

• the idea of collaborative working for a greater goal
• a sense of shared identity
• an interesting cross section of people from teccies to writers coming together
• a sense that in some way being part of the blogging community can make a difference to the world ( I really believe it can!)

I hope to be a part of forthcoming wordcamps, since this was a great ‘recharger’ and a good way to give back some of the knowledge and ‘good stuff’ I have enjoyed along the way.

So thanks to Tony Scott and all the others who helped make this happen. (thats Tony Below)

me!!!

The text:

SEO is complex!

(click on the image for the big version)

Its like baking a cake:

Complex way:

The easy way:

1. Take 4oz (about 100g) of butter, caster sugar, self raising flour and 2 eggs
2. Sieve the flour before adding to the mixture.
3. Whisk the butter and sugar together until the mixture is light and creamy,
4. Then beat the eggs together and
5. Add to the butter
6. And sugar mixture gradually with a little bit of the flour.
7. Fold in what remains of the flour
8. Then divide the mixture equally between two cake tins of about 6 inch diameter,
9. Then bake in the oven for about 20-25 minutes at a temperature of about 190?

The 7 easy steps to Wordpress SEO happiness!

1. Use wordpress! And get the necessary plugins.
2. What have you got, that others want?
3. Who do you want on your site?
4. Structure your content so its easy for engines…
5. Get analytics, see where you are going.
6. Work consistently for at least 6 months.
7. Socialise and get links into your site.

Step 1. Wordpress and Plugins.

• All in One SEO Pack Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Download now! Support | Version Hi Version 1.4.6.13 Updated 2008-7-17 Downloads 471,402 (the best place to start)
• Paginated Comments Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin ** developed with seo in mind ** that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of s … Version 1.0.2 | Updated 2008-5-12 |Downloads 658 (if you get loads of comments)
• WP-PageNavi 2.31 : Pagination on index and archive pages. Instead of of one huge page, break it up with this plugin. Google typically only indexes the 1st 100KB of html, so break up your pages
• WWW redirect : make sure the engine only see one version of your site i.e. http://www.mysite.com (and not the http://mysite.com
• Permalinks (wordpress core) Make Your content human friendly. Use this in permalink: /%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html (use a unique identifier so you can be picked up by Google news)
• Optimal Title Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.
• Categorisation of content. Don’t mark the same post under more than a single category if possible, so you don’t get too much duplicate content.
• Robots.txt Tell the engines where you want them to go
• Internal page redirections Manage error pages, or redirect search engines from old posts to new ones

Step 2. What’s on offer?

• Is your content useful or entertaining?
• Do you love writing it?
• Have you got a niche you are prominent in?
• Would you read your content?
• Will you keep going even if no one visits?

Step 3. Who do you want here?

• Is your site a PR device
• Do you want to make money from it?
• Is it just an ego thing?

Picture your reader and write for that person!

• A blog is a conversation, so write like you are directly speaking with that person. Visualise him or her.
• Remember, add in the words they would use to find you.

Step 4. Structure for Engines

Think like a librarian…

• Books need labelling correctly
• The correct title
• Other categorisation information
  • Duplication is annoying
  • Put the books in the right sections

Step 5. Google analytics
Get Google analytics and Google webmaster console

• Look out for these key performance indexes:
• Absolute unique visitors per month
• Returning Visitors / Visitor loyalty
• Time spent on site per user
• Pages viewed per user
• Number of keywords your site has been accessed by
• Which are your big traffic phrases
• Proportion of traffic from:
  • Engines (40-60%)
  • Direct (20%)
  • Referred from other sites (25%)

Step 6

It’s going to take time…

So I hope you love it.

Step 7. Get links

• Search engines love links.
• Rule of thumb: If the site is human managed and relevant, then its ok. (its why general directories are worthless to you)
• They look for signals that show is site is important = good relevant links
• Get commenting and contributing on relevant sites in your subject neighbourhood.
  Do the occasional link exchange
  Be remarkable, so people WANT to link to you.
  Put ‘signposts’ up on relevant sites (links pages)

Further Reading

• SEO for wordpress– the complete guide!
• www.seomoz.com Superb SEO education site
• Google Ranking factors 200+ SEO variables
• SEOdigger.com What keywords a site ranks for
• Google webmaster central blog
• Google keyword finder
• www.sepguy.com (my personal blog)

Go to a random page, paste this line of code into you browser address bar and begin to hack, copy , paste and delete stuff on the web page. (THIS DOES NOT HACK A REMOTE SITE, JUST THE ONE IN YOUR BROWSER)

It works on internet explorer and firefox
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0
google before:

google after

have fun!

Lifehacker as ever has a great post on backing up your google docs, email, notes calendar. As more and more of my digital life is in the custody o the big G, I have felt the need to get backed up, just in case.

I have always redirected my mail, so i have a local copy on my PC and also on my backup drive. Its a simple idea. Just set up a forwarder on your domain i.e. nick at nickgarner.co.uk and forward a copy to Googlemail. easy.

http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/back-up-your-google-apps-data-281635.php

and for google notebook, there is an export option in tools thats sends data to google docs and from there you can locally back it up, alternatively, you can take out a step, by saving the notebook as a html page, and then save the page locally.

Wikipedia:

Online, the use of the em measurement has become more common; with the development of Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), the W3C best practices recommendations within HTML and online markup now call for web pages to be based on scalable designs, using a relative unit of measurement (such as the em measurement), rather than a fixed one such as pixels (”px”) or points.

the EM calculator gives you the EM to pixel comparison

So you know , this is where a selected panel ‘out’ themselves on the best seo tricks they can come up with that they dare to give away. Interestingly there is a blogging blackout for 1 month. Then we can go ahead and talk about it all. The weird thing is that the blackout is done on an honor basis and once again this year, everyone has kept their promise.

Since i was privileged enough to be there, i thought I’d add a couple of comments to the excellent coverage on this give it up session…

My main overview comment was that there was a lot of blackhat stuff, which is great for getting laughs and applause, but realistically how would you actually use most of this stuff without getting busted by the big G?

key points for me:

Google does obfuscation in a BIG way� - (and yes they are getting more evil by the day) So a good example is their PPC quality score where they have been outed for completely misleading us on what they really look for when determining price per click and what were told.

the google guidelines:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas, the core components remain more or less the same. Below you’ll find a breakdown of each type of Quality Score.

For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid:

• The keyword’s historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Other relevance factors

the bit about landing page quality is most important here - so much so, it has a whole page to itself. Big points are Relevant and Original Content and Transparency.

Of course its all obfuscation in spadefulls since its got nothing to do with ‘being a good guy and doing it the google way’ - you pay relative to the authority of the site your ad points to.

Michel Grey and the truth:

Michael Gray was next at bat. Luckily his presentation was a lot more white hat.

Michael asks Google to stop trying to be our moral compass. Be truthful and honest and stop sidestepping the question. Amen.

Michael’s presentation is about how to beat the AdWords Quality Score.

Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it’s going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.

Everyone applauds and I giggle.

So what’s the difference?

• All campaigns were created in one account
• Ad copy identical
• Landing page identical

The only difference was the domain age. The domain that was created in 2006 had its ad jacked up to $10.00. The domain from 2008 was just $.75. It’s not just the domain age. They’re looking at the number of trusted links you get over a period of time. You need a certain number of links but you have to do it over a certain period of time.

Quality Score Gets Adjusted Just Like The Sandbox

Landing Page Quality Score has nothing to do with the actual landing page. To prove this, Michael creates a third ad going to the whitehouse.gov site. Any landing page algorithm that gives whitehouse.gov a good quality score for ringtones is really not looking at the landing page.

What is the Landing Page Quality Score really looking at? The main factor Google looks at is your site’s organic trust score. Trusted sites equal good low pricing. Non-trusted sites get bad pricing.

How do you beat the Landing Page Quality Score? Every few months Google updates their Landing Page score. If your Web site moves into a non-trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all your keywords over.

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data that you give them is going into their borg and being used in their algorithm. Every piece of data can and will be used against you. Think twice before you give it to them.

Interesting one if you’re in Europe / UK.  In essence its a loosely worded (as applied to online marketing) piece of European legislation that prohibits misrepresentation by law

Misrepresentation for us online marketing types is for instance where we say something good about a company, whilst in their pay, pretending to be a random person off the street.

The only unsettling part of this, is the remote possibility of prosecution or if there were an overzealous party intent on causing a PR nightmare for a big brand (motor insurance companies come to mind).

In reality of course there is far more serious mis-representaiton cases, but you never know…

Whilst at SMX Advanced there was a bit of a noise about black hat SEO having too much prominence. Since I was lucky enough to be there, I am adding my tuppence to this one.

There is a prevailing sense that Google is really getting it’s index un-spammed for the big money phrases. Apart form the army of site checkers (10-12 thousand of them) The algo is getting far better at understanding ‘quality’.

In the old days, a black hat SEO had a real chance of making good money from their trade. However now there is a sense of the net closing in. So back to SMX, well there was a dynamic there:

Audiences in need of SEO stunts to stay interested

Audiences advanced enough to feel pissed of by Big G’s massive dominance

Speakers who did walk the Black hat road, but who mostly now make their money consulting or working in agencies

all of this added together = loads of noise about black hat. I say noise, because none of the ideas were particularly amazing or potentially profitable in themselves. Obviously there are certain things… but if youre managing a big brand (as i am for SEO) you cannot afford to take chances on reckless SEO in the name of short term gain.

Of course if I followed every Google rule about buying links and so on, I would not have such success, but I do it carefully and sustainably.

SEO is changing and SMX advanced really demonstrated the frustrations of such a dominant player.

Black hat SEO Bloggers
SMX Advanced Goes To The Dark Side
They even got yahoo directories… no page rank on yahoo directories
SMX top 10 learnings

#1: Onside Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be History
#2: Searching will become more User-friendly
#3: More Personalized & Localized Results will Influence SEM
#4: Natural Language Reputation Algorithm will be a Great Factor
#5: Copying Themes will be punished by Near Duplicate Content Filter
#6: TrustRank will be Stronger than PageRank
#7: Online Social Media will kill Traffic from Search Engines
#8: Handheld Devices will Rule Future Traffic
#9: Email will be the Least Used for Personal Communication
#10: Personal Power to Influence Purchase will Increase
#11: Web-based Consumer Analytics will be Major Internet Marketing Process
#12: Web Cluster and Widgets will mean Businesses for Small Companies
#13: Future Internet Marketers will be Personal Helper

How can you tell a real SEO?

1. Real SEOs … Don’t wear hats in public
2. Real SEOs … Hate doing PPC
3. Real SEOs … Go to conferences to drink
4. Real SEOs … Don’t care about algorithm updates
5. Real SEOs … Have two or more search related T-shirts
6. Real SEOs … Don’t go to the forums
7. Real SEOs … Don’t care about rankings
8. Real SEOs … Have seen Danny Sullivan drunk
9. Real SEOs … Do SEO more than they write about it
10. Real SEOs … Don’t give a damn about PageRank
11. Real SEOs … Are Geeks (even if they don’t think so)
12. Real SEOs … Have Tamar on at least 2 friends’ lists
13. Real SEOs … Became an SEO by accident
14. Real SEOs … Don’t even try to explain what they do anymore
15. Real SEOs … Have the URL to the leaked SEO Sex Tape

Oh so true.

(usual excuses) I’ve been busy hence my dead looking blog, but I  have been bookmarking and here is about a months worth of links to things I really value.

Free word of mouth marketing PDF eBook Written by Dave Balter
(Recommended by Seth Godin) I’m a great fan of ‘word of mouth marketing’ - because I believe this is the real driver behind consumers making most of their important buying decisions. Of course ‘WOM’ isnt just asking your friend for advice, its also asking a search engine or looking at a website for information to help make a good decision. Its a good read.

Follwing on from above: The Ontology of Social Media
1st, whats ontology? It is a description of a Subject, Object and the Relationship that exists between the Subject and the Object…. Uh? There is an idea “markets are conversations”, where users confer to make discriminating decisions about something related to commercial intent (buying something). The Ontology of social media, is a way of making some sense of this set of ‘conversations’. Heavy article, but well worth a thorough read.

Facebook to be No1 UK site
My line about facebook is “I think it’s cool, I just don’t know how to make money directly fom it”. But you know, its not he direct monetization, its your engagement with this community and others like it, so when they are ready and trust you, they know where to go.

Google quality score algo (landing pages) added to
Page download time is now a factor on the Google adwords quality score…incidentally I was at SMX advanced recently and the subject of quality score came up. During the ‘give it up’ session, some very interesting stuff came to light about how erroneous the scoring mechanism is. Whilst I’m under a promise not to give the whole story away, I can say that there is some amazing mis-represetaiton going on here by the big G. I’ll add to this in a later post. G’s comments on the landing page score - the big clue ? You can’t really define quality algorithmically…

Google trends for websites
Old news now, but still very important. Why? Well its a means of finding ’super relevant’ links. Site trends shows you relative traffic volumes over time, where users have been in your site neighbourhood (which is cool) andit shows you sites also visited by that user base. Click on a relevant visited site and it shows you more relevant visited sites and so on. If G. is looking for a relevance indicator, this is going to be a great one! - so happy link hunting!

Google trust rank wierdness (webmaster world)
If you have heard of the idea of profiling, then this is what G is doing with your site. If it sees something out of the ordinary i.e. a super high page rank link or whatever, then it can react and penalise you as your site is behaving outsite of its ‘normal range’ of behaviour. I guess the moral here is not to go out and buy a 7 or 8 page rank link, if you have a crappy site that would never normally receive such links!

Bloging from your iPhone (movable type)
Yes, I do live my iPhone, despite the lack of copy, paste & file saving and the need to crack it to get it to behave a bit more normally. Anyway, I do a lot of wok with movabletype and it seems they have come out with a new app (iPhone 3g) that allow you to picture blog and blog straight from our little friend. Cool. ….Wordpress app anyone ?

100 SEO videos
There is bound to be some good stuff. ive linked to this because it is an epic piece of research….

Google adwords and freeing up competition on trademarks
The intersting part about this is not so much the allowing of competitors to advertise on competing brand phrases, its the slow march of Google on the monetization trail. here is another thing about their interest in the travel sector. Please comfort yourself in knowing it THEIR SITE AND THEY CAN DO AS THEY LIKE. If you you are making a profit from Google natural search, then at some point they want some of it….If its PPC, then bad luck as well!

200,000 - yes 200,000 servers to run the google data infrastructure.
if you like your teccie stuff then this will interest you. A long Cnet article about Google’s data infrastructure. I am always amazed by their cleverness.

Google Factory Tour
2 hour video of Google and its various operations. It won’t give you SEO insight per-se, but it gives you a sense of the scale of events there.

Need free images? Article about it
There is a new well organsied search engine, listing free images with no copyright hassles…hooray!

Multiple Gmail account access
This is a hassle for me, since I have loads of accounts i need to drop into to get info. But there are some nice workarounds, however none are 100% solid.

Advanced Yahoo search query strings
A really helpful guide to doing some cleaver link hunting query strings on Yahoo

Deep stuff on how spammers are tracked
Edel Garcia of IR thoughts has put together a useful summary of papers related to spam clean up on search indexes. Hardcore as ever and worth reading through.

Landing Pages: all you ever wanted to know about building them!
Copyblogger has amassed a really usful list of sites and articles to help you refine your landing pages. Bear in mind if it costs $100 dollars per conversion and you for instance go from a conversion rate of 1% to 1.2%, then thats $16 dollars saved per conversion and an extra 20% in the acquisition numbers.

“Both videos together offer one of the most simple marketing lessons that you can imagine … that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, just that you speak the right language.”

The SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
Stunt dubl does a mega post on all things seo and content focused. He is very good on linkbait / Social media content and this post digs right into the subject.

Google was a links-driven search engine
10-12,000 human reviewers working for google must make a difference. This post digs into the obvious arguements about why googlers are shaping the internet.

My Definition Of SEO and How The Death Will Play Out
Following on from the idea that things are changing for the SEO world, Shoemoney puts together a cohesive argument as to why SEO in its traditional sense is dying. In essence you can’t really game Google like you used to, so to get seen you have to align yourself towards online PR to succeed.

Yes Shoemoney SEO Does Have a Future
In response Greywolf has argued that the market for SEO’ers is buoyant (whicih is very true) and that for as long as site designers and corporates ignore the core mechanics of a well constructed promotional site, which aligns itself with being indexed efficiently by search engines, there will always be a demand for SEO.
Of course they are both right - from thier respective standpoints. Shoemoney has just not factored in the incapability of so many in the web building industry and his standpoint is that of gaming, not fixing.

OECD stats on broadband penetration
Useful stuff for some marketing work im doing. I’m doing a big international pust and extent of broadband access s a good ndicator as to market opportunity in these respective countries.

The future trends in blogging - problogger gives us his take
The main trends:
* Multiple Author Blogs
* Multi-Topic Blogs
* Blogs Converging with Other Types of Sites
* Portal-Like Design
* Indirect Monetization

In other words there is a convergence between traditional online newspapers being more personality driven and more aligned to the ‘i have an opinion’ culture of the internet.

Semantic SEO: Your Website is a Goldmine with On-Site SEO 2.0
Semantic web is something you will hear more and more about in the forthcoming years. In essence its the comprehension of text as opposed to simply the identification of text patterns.
Right now Google use something called ‘keyword ontology’ (read the gorank article for more understanding) but its problem is that fundamentally its just a way to look at patterns of words and their relative placement i.e. keywords ’seo’ usually go with ‘google’, therefore when google look at the relevance of a page for a search like ’seo’ they will give a greater weighting to a page about ’seo’ and ‘google’ than for ’seo’ and ‘bird watching’

A semantic search engine however, looks at the meaning of phrases. I would love to give you a fuller explanation, but i don’t really understand the full mechanisms behind this…but i will in time. Suffice to say, its where the internet is going and in the end you will be able to explore the internet with an ‘understanding’ guide who knows what YOU mean when you say ’stuff on blogs and seo’ i.e. articles on ‘how to rank on google using blogs’. exciting stuff.

The SEO Guide to Information Architecture
Superb article on how to structure a site for SEO. I will be using this to explain how it should really be done !

See a webpage like a SEO
Dave Naylor give us a nice post to follow on from the seo guide above. There is also a link to the tool use mentions in the article.

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?
If I were to go on a blog starvation diet - the only blog I would keep is Aaron Wall’ SEO Book. And thi article demonstrates why. It is a comprehensive analysis of all the factors you would need to build a comprehensive business case as to what ranking for a given phrase is worth to your business.

5 Tools for Keyword Brainstorming

But how to brainstorm for new unique keywords in your and neighboring niches? Recently there appeared a number of useful tools that can help you find more key terms to focus on:

The 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook
One of my projects is to understand what makes a facebook application or a facebook’er popular. know understanding these mechanisms will allow me to build better content sites and of course get into the facebook ring with intent. So I guess by understanding the common traits between these 25 on th list is a good start. Th bit I’ve picked up on is how each of these groups orbit around a strong sense of self image/tribal identity i.e. i’m a petrol head - ‘top gear’ or ‘im a lad’ - Chris moyles.

What’s the ROI on SEO? (Hint: SEO Experts Are Underpaid, Opportunity Abounds !)
Yes I know im underpaid compared to other sectors, but its because what I do is extremely speculative. When a mature business puts together a financial plan, it generally up weights channels where more money will equal more return. ROI is not that critically important since there is loads of budget, so more money = more overall numbers. The problem with SEO of course is that its not linear. i.e. you cant say this spend = that return, simply because there are too many factors you cannot put down onto a spreadsheet. Oh well - more life in penury.

34 Incredibly Strong Calls To Action To Make Your Visitors Click, Phone Or Buy
I love this kind of thing, especially because good calls to action do work. How about :
# See examples of our widget work with widget lovers.
# Buy this widget and start saving tomorrow.
# Contact us today for a free report on widget management.

111 of the Most Important Spinns on Sphinn

The importance of Sphinn can’t be stressed enough. Knowing how to successfully use Sphinn, whats going on in the Sphinn community and whats the hottest Sphinn news is can be the difference between success and failure in the internet marketing community today. To ensure that my colleagues are in the know I compiled the most important articles as judged by Sphinn about Sphinn.

Social proof: The key to success
I agree. Its another version of ‘my friend says…’ and when you can use this effectively, you will convert into $$$.

How to Get in Google News (And Receive 8,000 visitors for One Article)
Yes, don’t forget to put your site onto the news aggregators…

Why Consumer Data Isn’t Telling You What You Need
The catch with consumer intent i that you can’t turn it into simple analytical footprints. All you can do is look at users in aggregate and somehow make some sense of it. So often it is non-sense and conversion rates remain unoptimised. This is where the psychology of user intent becomes so important. And that is a whole treatise in iteself.

The 3 Philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing
I love viral / word of mouth of marketing,but understanding the complexities of this area is like trying to understand the specifics of a whole eco system. I have found that its more about applying certain ingredients in good measure and letting the reaction take place. I think its why so few businesses really understand and use this powerful mechanism.

Mozilla Stealth Data Project Could Be Just What The Internet Needs

Why word of mouth doesn’t happen

The Writing Process: Creating An Outline
“Outlining an article is one of the most productive things you can do to improve your workflow while blogging. Creating the outline for this article required only about two minutes to complete, and it will have saved me at least 15 minutes worth of editing time in the end on a typical article like this.”

SEO Plugins for Wordpress Part II
“Ever since my initial SEO plugins for wordpress post almost two years ago, I get asked for an updated list a few times a month. Well since we’re up to wordpress 2.5 I thought the time has come. I’ll also put some of my other favorite plugins at the end, they either enhance wordpress features or just make things easier.”

Official Google: Introduction to Google Search Quality
There seems to be a little bit of glasnost going on here in Google. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality has written a post giving a small look into how Google works when it comes to its search work. Apart from the sheer scale of things, it is the frequency in which they are amending the algo that is so remarkable. Like the link above, its well worth a read.

Bridging the Designer-User Gap (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
“If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “
The point? Never over estimate intelligence!

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites:
Get into the top 5 or you’re in the wilderness

Public Relations: The Other Important PR In Link Development
Yes for those of you who in the link building business, who have been hiding under a rock… its about PR these days (mixed in with good SEO) and link begging doesn’t work anymore. So this article goes into some basic ideas on PR’ing your link building

The ultimate open source SEO tool
Its good - perhaps not ultimate. I’ve asked my SEO crew to check it out and they didn’t go crazy. However for me the interesting bit is how they leverage the Yahoo API. I wantto initiate a project where we use the API to do help usget related pages ‘from a search engine perspective’

Microsoft Discovers You Are Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon
If you have read ‘6 degrees of separation’ then you will be into the whole social interconnectivity thing on the internet. In essence, the world is a small place and sites like linked in, facebook, bebo and so on demonstrate this well. Its use? probably in hiring well connected online PR guys to dig into their networks to get links !

15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks
Some good stuff here. I just go around in circles on this stuff. I don’t know how to make money out of it.The core issue is the lack of commercial intent with the vast majority of this traffic. I guess the relevant part for me is keeing in touch with the cultural shift this has initiated. Its all a little like cluretrain V2 playing out

12 Reputations Every Company Should Monitor Online
Reputation management is a growing tide on the internet. If you’re in a sector where online matters, then keeping your ear to the internet wire make sense. The problen with reputation management online is that there are very few filters between an idiot with a grudge and a well informed opinion. its easy for the idiot to make noise in the right place and BANG - you have a problem. And I haven’t touched on negative PR using SEO!

Study: 80-Percent Of Searches Are Informational, 10% Are Navigational
What does this mean commercially? well 80% of the time users are building a background picture of you. 10% of the time they want to transact once they are confidant about you. (the other 10% is where they know where they are going i.e. looking for a regularly visited site/brand search)

This is why a strategy I employ for my lovely employers works soooooo well. have a really good informational site, where there is no pressure to ‘CLICK HERE NOW, JOIN NOW, FREE MONEY NOW’ - you read, understand we care about what we do and when you’re ready, join and we will give you some free money. It works beautifully and this article endorses this principle.

Psychographically Targeted Web Advertising - ClickZ
Whats ‘psychographic’? (from wikipedia) psycho graphic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), and behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty).
I’m sure youve heard about demographic targeting? i.e. pick a social group and assume certain behavioral tendencies. its a nice idea for broadcast media, however for online its really difficult to do demographic targeting. hence this behavioral stuff. By building pathways around user behaviours, you are morelikly to get better conversion rates. Its a huge subject which I won’t get into here, but suffice to say this article gives a small insight into it.

Yahoo’s Quality Score Change Effective Next Week
So Yahoo are stepping in line with Google on PPC quality scoring on ads. Nice idea but I always wonder how you define the ‘quality’ in the scoring. I hate this subjectivity.

Your turn: Readers choose their 10 favorite Windows programs | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
Some old classics like winrar!

11 Tips For Recognizing A Bad SEO Firm | WebProNews
I get asked a lot about microsites…i.e. building them up and getting them to rank. For some reason the idea that they can work persists. So this article just goes through some of the idiocy people actually believe.

Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips
I agree - they are good. Written by a pro in the game, these tips are useful. I particularly like the nofollow comment!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
Another day and another interesting post from Rand. some good pointers on what really counts when it comes to anchor text

http://sphinn.com/story/36595
Yup DaveN keeping the internet clean! He picked up on a campaign by Dell I happen to have been following. I kind of figured it there would be tears in the end - an there were !

http://www.247wallst.com/2008/03/the-twenty-five.html
Does blogging pay? it seems so for a few. I hang out with a couple of big’ish bloggers and they are always moaning about how they can monetize their sites. Usually they default to advertising, which is ok, but inherently does not align well with users about 99.4% of the time. (the click through rate on an ad is about 0.06% typically) I’ve been trying to persuade them to look carefully at affiliate marketing, since in thory it pays better ten ads.

Logo Can Make You ‘Think Different’
evil laugh - HA HA HA HA HA
I’ve always felt that subliminal advertising was very powerful and shrouded in misinformation, so its great to see a useful report on the subject. Does it work? yes but not in the way you think.

YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
More stats to help you feel like you know whats going on.

Link Buying Replaced With Bartering
As this article points out, when you otlaw something and there is a desire to carry on the practice (alcoloh prohibition in the 30’s) all sorts of unforseen things happen. In this case Google’s PR assault on link buying as caused all sorts of interesting activities to emerge, amongst them is impersonating google ad sense ads !
The root of this is that if the liks are placed in the right part of a page (not in header / footer / sidebar) and in ‘context’ then the ‘Algo’ cant see them - so tis down to human judgement, hence this trick with adsense. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing linkbuilding.

18 Or Older To Use Google?
What do gambling porn and horror movies have in common with google? you guessed it - you have to be 18 and over. or in other words to use google, you have to be of an age where you can enter into a legally binding contract!

Hackers and Spammers, How will the industry survive
I have had the pleasure of dealing personally with DaveN and I found him charming and knowledgeable. However i do feel his skills at gaming the engines are becoming less and less effective as the engines get more capable at dealing with spammers. Still he has done well out of it and I hope he continues with his successes in this arena.

The assertion is that 80% of traffic to bingo, casino and poker sites are from blackhat efforts. I guess the 1st quesiton is what do you call black hat? Is that any deviation from the Google webmaster guidelines? If so, then thats a reasonable figure. But all things are relative as you would see if you read this real blackhat hard core approach to getting ranked. This level of activity probably gets about 30% bingo, casino, poker sites ranked for secondary terms.
What are secondary terms? In these areas (casino, poker bingo) there are very few keywords that make money, in other words they have a very short tail. So once you’re outsitde of (forinstance) casino, online casino, casino UK, then you are in the secondary and 3rd level keywords where spammers rule, but where the pickings are not great. The lack of economic incentive means a restriction in spammers efforts.

And since Google treat different verticles differently, it means they will probably hand pick those top sites for casino, poker and bingo. I believe the reason they do this, is to prevent a spam arms war which would go on to contaminate large chunks of the internet.

The reality is that black hat works, but not like it used to. The cleaver money is on building love of a site and being clever at optimising it efficiently. I know, since I’m lucky enough to be responsible for one of the great new affilaite success stories… and no I haven’t spammed, I’ve just helped things along. ;-) 

Link: Affiliates4u article

DigitalPoint Co-op, spammers heaven. Use these links to build the base for your spam network, but don’t get busted by the BOG G Blogstorm

Google releases benchmarking on analytics. Apart from the coolness of being able to match yourself against the industry norm, it also gives you an idea as to how Google are able to effectively segment the internet into specific verticals. (they also do this on their adwords console when you define which type of sites you want to advertise on when advertising banners etc)

When you mix this with the leaked google reviewers document you end up with a sense that they really do have a very solid handle on what sites are good for what subject and wether they are genuinely worthwhile to the user. It all comes back to the idea that content is king an