10/14/2016
I'd like to share 10 lessons I wish someone had taught me when I started out in SEO and conversion rate optimization. I recently celebrated 10 years in digital marketing and this is my way of giving back to the community. Thanks also to my fellow marketing consultants who shared illustrative anecdotes for this article.10) The details and technology change, but the principles...
7/2/2015
You likely recognize the value of usability testing, but it's the price of the most popular services that's holding you back. However, there's a way to do such testing at a reasonable cost and, most important, with no drop off in quality.For the sake of comparison, I'm looking at the pricing of two tools: UserTesting.com and...
10/15/2012
Take your split testing to the next level.
4/30/2012
A variety of smart SEOs have been debating why Google's unnatural link warnings prompt webmasters for details on the SEO services they...
4/12/2011
The Hacking Attack
My blog got hacked and injected with a folder containing 645 pages, all full of auto-generated content, loaded onto plagiarized templates and linking to about 1700 different websites - making it difficult to discern which are the spammers' own and which are legit. I asked about crawling these pages in the Pro Q&am...
3/18/2009
PPC gets 15% of the clicks and 85% of the search budget. SEO gets 85% of the clicks but just 15% of the budget. Rand called this a disconnect, I saw it as an opportunity - SEOs are cheap. But now, it appears to be shrinking. Aaron Wall pointed out that paid search spending is down and SEO is up.
1/26/2009
Everything you never cared about knowing about SEOmoz, and then some!
Pete Wailes recently asked where all the older members went. He picked up on a pattern of members who were long established here and had been reducing their comment frequency and becoming less involved. It's a pattern that's been going on since day 1, as my long hours spent digging through the archives suggest.
12/9/2008
With every tweak and change that Google brings to its search result pages, the "potential-ROI" balance on search tips ever more towards PPC and away from SEO. I realized this when I read Aaron Wall's Marketing Lessons from Google.
Search marketing leaders demand results, so it's irrelevant that the means of practicing SEO remain the same. What is relevant is that Google is decreasing the ability of SEO to provide stable, measurable results. As Aaron points out in his post, Google seeks to undermine competing business models.
11/17/2008
I recently shared a link building report template that simplifies our lives as SEOs. If you've looked at it closely though, you'd probably realize that a lot of the information doesn't take human eyes to see nor human hands to record. The romantic undead could do it quite easily.
10/27/2008
After having recently lost a client largely due to my oafish reporting - I was sending them the raw logs of my link building activities without any explanation as to the thought process behind it - I decided to get serious about communicating better.
9/10/2008
Did you know that my friend saw my sex tape on the web and messaged me about it on Facebook? Neither did I. The Blah is tracking and other garbage edited out to avoid helping out by sharing potentially useful variables. The f...
6/6/2008
I had the most ridiculous, useless, time-wasting conversation with a garbage "lead" the other day. What follows is how to shoot these jokers down like playing Duckhunt with a bazooka. But just before, here's the context.The lead and I are talking, and the "lead" mentions my being 20. I'm a young guy, he notes, and therefore I should be all the more excited by ...
5/21/2008
How does linkbait work, from 10,000 feet up? If you look at the big picture, linkbait works because of distribution. And email marketing can be just as great - if not greater - a vehicle for promoting linkbait than social media, because the distribution possibilities are superior, to say nothing of segmentation. (This post was inspired by Rebecca's non-search ...
5/9/2008
Barbara Ling of Ask Owlbert is a veteran webmaster. She recently commented at my site and as we were trading followup emails, I realized that she was someone with a lot of experience and great advice to share. Thus, this interview. Enjoy! 1) Tell readers how you got started as a webmaster. What was your first project? How did you build it...
4/21/2008
I recently struggled with using Google AdWords' broad match (not in connection with this) and decided to contact two of the people I respect most on Pay-Per-Click advertising: Andrew Goodman and Amy Konefal. My problem stemmed from the fact tha...
4/8/2008
Aaaaaaaaaaargh! Here's a conversation I've just had with a Google AdWords support person. It reflects how ridiculous the historical account factor can be in determining quality score. (But then again, Paul showed that the exact same campaign on two different accounts would be rated differently, in terms of...
4/4/2008
Tyler Shears is a bright search marketer working at Databanq, which specializes in the financial services game. We met at SMX West after my local panel (on which note you should read this fresh, enlightening and generally awesome interview with Brian Gil, of Yaho...
3/24/2008
If you dig your head out of the sands of content and linkbuilding for a minute to think about bigger ideas in search and marketing, what would you think of? Here are my questions and some answers I've collected.Atten-shun! 1. First of all, what is the best measure of attention equity? Until recently, I would have bet subscriber...
3/11/2008
How would you feel if all you'd ever been told about monitoring patent applications was a lie? What if the SEO experts told you all these lovely things ... because they themselves were fooled by Google's own patent marketing? Allow me to explain.This semester, I'm taking Industrial and Intellectual Property. Prof. Gold is ...
2/8/2008
SEOmoz has one of the best communities around and I want to invite my fellow Moz members to get together at SMX. Besides that, I've also got some cool things to share with you about your fellow members here. The calendar already has SMX West marked (albeit for a single day?), but only a few people seem to be attending besides the moz staff. So he...
1/31/2008
Here's a quick and dirty tip for those of you managing PPC campaigns - and even those of you who want to improve your organic campaigns. It illustrates my philosophy that by being willing and open to learn from everybody - especially blackhats and people sm...
1/14/2008
A lead came to me with a site that was using hidden keywords in the same colour as its background. He also stuffed other pages on his website full of keywords in the serious hope that this would enable him to rank for each of those keywords (i.e. a few hundred keywords per page). Imagine the blackhat spam circa 1997 and you would get an idea of the site I was looking at. Besides wanting to know...
1/3/2008
What do Dan Thies, Aaron Wall, Dave Naylor, Dave Davis and select others (*cough Hamlet Batista*) have in common? They think like search engineers.Dan Thies wrote an excellent piece at SEO Fast Start on the suppleme...
12/14/2007
The Attention Deficit Problem (That Isn't a Disorder)Michael Gray wrote recently that producing great content without pushing it to the community is like having Will Shakespeare writing alone in a closet. It's sad, but true: in blogging, it's not what you know, but who you know that makes a difference. In order to get that prized link from a major-league blog...
12/12/2007
Google's guidelines on one topic per page aside, I've got so much running through my tiny brain I need to get it all out or I'm gonna go nuts. This post is on several topics: Top Sphinners, A landing page contest I'd like to run here at Youmoz, An invitation to linkbait me (for what that's worth, lol), and participate in some linkbait research...
11/27/2007
Youmoz and Sphinn are some of the best social networking communities in search marketing today. From participating in these two communities and reading a lot, I've discovered a few excellent bloggers. All of you who want to succeed at search marketing need to add their blogs to your feed readers. The bloggers are, in no particular order, Hamlet Batista, Maki aka Dosh Doh, Igor Mordkovich, C...
11/20/2007
Mikkel deMib Svendsen and I had an interview in which we discussed PPC and SEO. At my site, you can read part 2 where we cover SEO business models. Below, we discuss PPC, I try to discuss arbitrage thinking that the father of blackhat PPC must do ...
11/19/2007
I was searching for "SEO" the other day and as I usually do, I had a look at who was advertising on the term. To my significant surprise, I saw a firm best known for domains advertising its SEO solutions. Network Solutions now sells SEO and guarantees top 10 results. They're playing it cute, legally, and guaranteeing their results "in one or more of 12 search engines w...
11/5/2007
As most of you likely know, Yahoo stopped updating Overture's inventory data in January 2007. Besides the issues this may cause for those relying on it for research on seasonal terms (that boxingdayspecials.com buy isn't looking so hot anymore, huh?), it means that search marketers have at best outdated information in the volume of searches carried out for a given keyword in a given mon...
10/29/2007
I wanted to learn about PPC arbitrage. I'm lazy though, and didn't want to bother with going to all the work Michael Gray suggested in his much more intelligent PPC arbitrage articles. My goal was to sit on my ass, set up a simply PPC campaign and make money off it. So I checked my parked domains f...
10/19/2007
PageRank is not about voting for websites or vouching for them. An incorrect metaphor is being propagated to the point where Google's own employees are confused as to what PageRank is supposed to be about, as per Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Anatomy of a Search Engine paper.Google's founders conceived of PageRank...
10/15/2007
Business growth can largely be attributed to the systematization of your business processes. For many of us starting out though, that can be fairly difficult. I recently sold a product that is time-intensive and it occurred to me that I was limited in selling these by how much time I have. That got me to thinking about business systems and about taking advantage of getting things organized and ...
10/10/2007
If you're selling text links on your site, you're going to need to protect yourself from Google deindexing/penalizing you. Why's that? Well for one, Google's battle against paid links is finally out in the open, with no more dickering: http://searchengineland.com/071007-173841.php. So here's my mini-...
10/3/2007
Is the A-list of bloggers a closed list?This is a question that has been bothering me for a while and that I'm blogging on Youmoz about because it needs the greatest audience possible - something that my non-A status can't provide. The A-list, as I define it, is that circle of experts and authorities that are most widely followed in any particular realm. In monetizing blogs, you ...
3/9/2007
Did you know Google ranks duplicate content? Reading SEO blogs and articles is nice and all, but when you practice SEO, that's when you really learn how Google works. Let me explain.A little while ago I was browsing around Overture's inventory to find some keywords to work on for my SEO blog. Apparently, there were tens of thousands of searches for Google sucks d...
