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Saturday, February 19, 2011

SEO for WordPress

SEO for WordpressWordPress is without question the most popular stand-alone blog platform. It is flexible and customizable; there are lots of useful plugins providing any functionality a blogger can think of. However, a fresh installation of a WordPress blogs leaves a lot for improvement. For instance, search engine optimization and duplicate content proofing.

Below is a rundown of useful tips that can help improving your blog’s position in search engines as well as providing some additional benefits to your readers.

By default URLs to WordPress posts look like this: http://yourblog.com/?p=321. This URL calls the PHP engine to show a post or a page identified by its number, in this case 321.

This is a totally valid URL and search engines (at least the major ones: Google, Yahoo and MSN) no longer have problems with indexing dynamic content. However, a wise webmaster is aware that having keywords in URL is an advantage over meaningless parameter values. Keywords in URL are in fact one of the biggest factors determining the relevancy of a page to a specific search query.The permalinks feature of WordPress allows creating meaningful URLs easily. Just go to Options page of your blog’s control panel and click the menu item ‘permalinks’. Here you can choose, for example, date based permalinks, which include the title of your post, as well as the month and the day of posting. While definitely an improvement over the post-id based URL, it is still not perfect. What the use of these month-and-day? Let’s get rid of it and click the ‘Custom’ option and type /%postname%.html in. Now your URL will look like http://yourblog.com/post-title.html. You can further customize the post URL by providing a different ‘post slug’ when writing your posts. The post-slug option you can find in the right sidebar of your post editing page.

More info on customizing the permalinks structure.

Page title is another important factor influencing the relevancy score of a page in search engine index. Besides, title is what will be shown in a search engine results page as a link to your post. Again, the default WordPress setting for this feature is far from ideal. The fresh install of a WP blog shows page titles as The Name of Your Blog » Post Title. Considering that this structure is propagated to every page in your blog you might suffer from duplicate content penalty (see a more detailed description of duplicate problem here). This can be sorted out by editing the header file of your current WordPress theme. In fact, many theme authors are aware of this problem and publish their themes with this problem already fixed.

In your dashboard go to presentation page and click theme editor menu item. Then locate and click header link in the right sidebar. This will open the text editor with the upper part of the source code shared by all the posts and pages in your blog.

Take a look at this piece of code:

PHP code excerpt

So let’s delete all but the last one:

PHP code excerpt

No wait! What about the home page? This will leave it without the title! Change the code as follows:

PHP code excerpt

Now this will check, if it is a home page and assign your blog name as its title, using the post title otherwise.

A clear headings structure is beneficial both for users, as it improves readability, and for search engines, as it describes the content of the page. Generally it is advised to have one h1 tag per page – at best containing your post title, a few h2 for subtopics of your post and a few h3 whenever necessary to emphasize or give a title to a paragraph in your subtopics. This is just guidelines; you are not required to create h2 and h3 headings in every post you write, for example in a one consisting of two paragraphs. But keep in mind that longer posts should be logically divided into subtopics to make users stop at headings while skimming the page (a common reading pattern in the Web).

Do not overuse headings! Once webmasters had realized the weight the keywords in headings had in relevancy scores, headings became often abused. Numerous headings sometimes disguised with CSS as text of normal height and weight were filled with target keywords to manipulate the relevancy algorithms of search engines. This practice, however, now is detectable by SEs, and you might get punished for using it.

Changing headings structure requires a little bit more advanced skills and some knowledge of PHP and CSS. Do always backup your current theme before editing it!

Whenever you insert an image into your post take your time and add a meaningful description of in as an alt tag. There are two basic advantages of doing so. First, there are a lot of your potential readers browsing the Net with images turned off. In this case, instead of an empty box, they will see the description. Or a visually impaired user can benefit from the description when his text-to-voice software recites it for him. Another advantage is that your page can be discovered by users doing image search by keywords you provided in the alt description.

Tags are a relatively new and powerful feature in website promotion. Not just page title and the content of headings determine the relevancy of content. To even greater degree it’s the job of links pointing to the page. Keywords in link anchor and URL are the most important factor that determines which pages will be shown to a given query.

Linked tags you place in your post have far less power than those ones linking to your page. But they still help search engine to determine to which topic your post belongs, thus increasing your topical score.

Here are some popular tagging plugins for WordPress:

This is one of the most powerful features for blog promotion. It helps users discover similar posts they’ve just read. This is much more convenient than browsing through archives or searching for a keyword. In fact, this is one of the factors that made YouTube so successful: links to similar videos made user stay at YouTube and spend in average 30 minutes a day there.

In SEO terms such links help building tight topical linking structures, again to the benefit of your blog.

This functionality can be added to your blog by installing this extension plugin to Jerome Keywords

Continued: SEO for WordPress Part II

Largely based on article SEO für WordPress – die besten Tipps – Teil 1 with some new input by me.

Digg!

View the original article here

How Much Blog Spam? A Study of a Ping Dataset

How much blog spam is produced in 5 minutes in a quiet Sunday evening? What is the ratio of spam blogs in the most popular blog services? To answer this question I present you the results of an experiment analyzing ping data and manually reviewing blogs.

The relative ease of creating and maintaining blogs makes them ideal tools for spamming search engines. Spam blogs or splogs serve two basic purposes: making money from advertising and affiliate programs, and participating in link farms. But making money from AdSense and providing nepotistic links are not what it takes to call a blog splog. Otherwise we would have to classify all blogs showing ads or promoting a business as spam; and there are thousands popular, quality blogs that would fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a splog, however, is that it has no use for its visitors. Should Google ban a splog from AdSense and prevent its links from passing on authority – such a splog would have no more value or purpose of existence. So my definition of a splog would be “a blog with the only purpose of showing contextual or affiliate ads, or boosting link popularity of certain target sites”.

How active are these splogs? This question calls for a little experiment; similar to one described by P. Kolari, A. Java and T. Finn in their paper “Characterizing the Splogosphere”. They did their experiment in early 2006, and I am going to repeat it at a smaller scale now, in the early 2007.

Every time a blog is updated it sends a ping to one of many ping servers in order to invite search engine crawlers to index the new post. I am going to use ping data provided by one of the most popular ping servers – Weblogs.com. Due to the limited scale of the experiment I will be using the smaller dataset covering the last 5 minutes of pings. It’s pretty big though: 8117 pings. I’ve written a simple Java application to parse the XML file and extract URLs and names of the blogs in the dataset. Also some of the blogs were classified by blog platform: Blogspot (Blogger), MySpace, Spaces.Live.com etc. I have discovered a number of popular blog services, that I haven’t come across yet, such as a popular Taiwanese site Wretch.cc, or Italian Libero.it and Splinder.com. I was surprised to see how few pings came from some other popular blog services; Livejournal for instance had only 6 pings! Obviously LJ doesn’t rely much on Weblogs.com, but LJ has little to do with my experiment, as it is known to have very small percentage of splogs.

So below is a break down of blogs by platform, according to a ping dataset retrieved on a Sunday evening, Feb. 11. Do not mix blogs under Wordpress.com category with blogs using WP as a blog engine. Only those blogs hosted by Wordpress.com are included into this category.

Fig. 1 Popular Blog Services in the Sunday Weblogs Dataset

The huge ‘Rest’ category consists of standalone blogs and blogs hosted by minor blog services.
A few words on the blogs in the dataset: a lot of blogs were not in English, I think as much as 70% of them. For instance, all Wretch.cc blogs and many Spaces.Live.com ones are in Chinese, there are also a lot of blogs in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and German.

Once dataset was downloaded and processed I started manually reviewing the blogs and discovering spam. Of course I couldn’t visit all the 8117 blogs, so I randomly selected 20 blogs from each category.

How did I classify spam blogs? While blogs with automatically generated content or dictionary dumps are easily classified as spam, those with plagiarized content or in foreign languages required a bit more of effort. Nepotistic links with keyword stuffed anchors were a good indicator of spam. Copyscape.com helped much discovering plagiarized posts. And finally, affiliate and contextual ads were the final complement in the spam classification problem. It has to be noted that very few blogs in languages other than English were classified as spam. I can be sure about my judgment of German and Russian blogs, since I know these languages, but when dealing with others I relied only on excessive advertising and nepotistic links as spam indicators. I skipped Wretch.cc and Explog.jp samples as I was totally unable to judge Chinese and Japanese blogs. In total of 177 reviewed blogs 36 were classified as spam.

Below you can see two charts, one indicating a ratio of spam within a sample, and another showing how much each blog platform contributes to the total amount of spam.

Fig 2. Percentage of Spam Blogs in 20-blogs Samples

Fig 3. Contribution of Each Category to the Total Blog Spam

With the notable exception of Blogspot, the majority of blogs hosted by popular blog services are spam free. Of course one can question their quality, as many of them are of little value to others. But let’s not forget that most of those blogs are private diaries or personal playgrounds never intended to have big audiences; and as long as they have value to the author and his/her close circle of friends we can’t call them spam.

Thus, according to my reviews blogs hosted by beon.ru, Libero.it, Spaces.Live.com, Livejournal.com, splinder.com, and typepad.com showed no instances of blog spam in 20 blogs samples. Among 20 MySpace blogs I have discovered 1 splog, and Wordpress.com sample contained 2. The popular Google’s service Blogspot has confirmed its unofficial name of Splogspot with 50% spam ratio. ‘The Rest’ category comprised by standalone blogs and blogs attached to commercial sites showed even bigger proportion of blog spam: 23 blogs of 27 reviewed were classified as spam. The relatively low number of splogs hosted by public services can be explained by anti-spam actions taken by the administration of such services. The standalone splogs, however, are not subject to such moderation, which allows them to thrive producing tons of junk content for SE crawlers and overloading ping servers with spam pings.

As you might have noticed I used the same style of charts introduced by the famous blog ModernLifeIsRubbish.co.uk, which has an excellent tutorial on how to create pretty pie charts in Adobe Illustrator. Highly recommended!

If anybody is interested, here is the dataset I used: Dataset


View the original article here

How Much Blog Spam? A Study of a Ping Dataset

How much blog spam is produced in 5 minutes in a quiet Sunday evening? What is the ratio of spam blogs in the most popular blog services? To answer this question I present you the results of an experiment analyzing ping data and manually reviewing blogs.

The relative ease of creating and maintaining blogs makes them ideal tools for spamming search engines. Spam blogs or splogs serve two basic purposes: making money from advertising and affiliate programs, and participating in link farms. But making money from AdSense and providing nepotistic links are not what it takes to call a blog splog. Otherwise we would have to classify all blogs showing ads or promoting a business as spam; and there are thousands popular, quality blogs that would fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a splog, however, is that it has no use for its visitors. Should Google ban a splog from AdSense and prevent its links from passing on authority – such a splog would have no more value or purpose of existence. So my definition of a splog would be “a blog with the only purpose of showing contextual or affiliate ads, or boosting link popularity of certain target sites”.

How active are these splogs? This question calls for a little experiment; similar to one described by P. Kolari, A. Java and T. Finn in their paper “Characterizing the Splogosphere”. They did their experiment in early 2006, and I am going to repeat it at a smaller scale now, in the early 2007.

Every time a blog is updated it sends a ping to one of many ping servers in order to invite search engine crawlers to index the new post. I am going to use ping data provided by one of the most popular ping servers – Weblogs.com. Due to the limited scale of the experiment I will be using the smaller dataset covering the last 5 minutes of pings. It’s pretty big though: 8117 pings. I’ve written a simple Java application to parse the XML file and extract URLs and names of the blogs in the dataset. Also some of the blogs were classified by blog platform: Blogspot (Blogger), MySpace, Spaces.Live.com etc. I have discovered a number of popular blog services, that I haven’t come across yet, such as a popular Taiwanese site Wretch.cc, or Italian Libero.it and Splinder.com. I was surprised to see how few pings came from some other popular blog services; Livejournal for instance had only 6 pings! Obviously LJ doesn’t rely much on Weblogs.com, but LJ has little to do with my experiment, as it is known to have very small percentage of splogs.

So below is a break down of blogs by platform, according to a ping dataset retrieved on a Sunday evening, Feb. 11. Do not mix blogs under Wordpress.com category with blogs using WP as a blog engine. Only those blogs hosted by Wordpress.com are included into this category.

Fig. 1 Popular Blog Services in the Sunday Weblogs Dataset

The huge ‘Rest’ category consists of standalone blogs and blogs hosted by minor blog services.
A few words on the blogs in the dataset: a lot of blogs were not in English, I think as much as 70% of them. For instance, all Wretch.cc blogs and many Spaces.Live.com ones are in Chinese, there are also a lot of blogs in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and German.

Once dataset was downloaded and processed I started manually reviewing the blogs and discovering spam. Of course I couldn’t visit all the 8117 blogs, so I randomly selected 20 blogs from each category.

How did I classify spam blogs? While blogs with automatically generated content or dictionary dumps are easily classified as spam, those with plagiarized content or in foreign languages required a bit more of effort. Nepotistic links with keyword stuffed anchors were a good indicator of spam. Copyscape.com helped much discovering plagiarized posts. And finally, affiliate and contextual ads were the final complement in the spam classification problem. It has to be noted that very few blogs in languages other than English were classified as spam. I can be sure about my judgment of German and Russian blogs, since I know these languages, but when dealing with others I relied only on excessive advertising and nepotistic links as spam indicators. I skipped Wretch.cc and Explog.jp samples as I was totally unable to judge Chinese and Japanese blogs. In total of 177 reviewed blogs 36 were classified as spam.

Below you can see two charts, one indicating a ratio of spam within a sample, and another showing how much each blog platform contributes to the total amount of spam.

Fig 2. Percentage of Spam Blogs in 20-blogs Samples

Fig 3. Contribution of Each Category to the Total Blog Spam

With the notable exception of Blogspot, the majority of blogs hosted by popular blog services are spam free. Of course one can question their quality, as many of them are of little value to others. But let’s not forget that most of those blogs are private diaries or personal playgrounds never intended to have big audiences; and as long as they have value to the author and his/her close circle of friends we can’t call them spam.

Thus, according to my reviews blogs hosted by beon.ru, Libero.it, Spaces.Live.com, Livejournal.com, splinder.com, and typepad.com showed no instances of blog spam in 20 blogs samples. Among 20 MySpace blogs I have discovered 1 splog, and Wordpress.com sample contained 2. The popular Google’s service Blogspot has confirmed its unofficial name of Splogspot with 50% spam ratio. ‘The Rest’ category comprised by standalone blogs and blogs attached to commercial sites showed even bigger proportion of blog spam: 23 blogs of 27 reviewed were classified as spam. The relatively low number of splogs hosted by public services can be explained by anti-spam actions taken by the administration of such services. The standalone splogs, however, are not subject to such moderation, which allows them to thrive producing tons of junk content for SE crawlers and overloading ping servers with spam pings.

As you might have noticed I used the same style of charts introduced by the famous blog ModernLifeIsRubbish.co.uk, which has an excellent tutorial on how to create pretty pie charts in Adobe Illustrator. Highly recommended!

If anybody is interested, here is the dataset I used: Dataset


View the original article here

Articles Directories List: Ordered by Alexa Rating

Are article submissions worth the time? When doing manual submissions it takes me 10 to 15 minutes in average to login, format and submit an article to an article directory. I have to make at least 10 submissions to get a feasible exposure for my articles. So this process can take more than two hours a day! To make the most of my time I have to make sure that the article directories I am submitting to, are able to bring me as many visitors and backlinks as possible. I can name top five directories: EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, GoArticles.com, ArticlesFactory.com and WebProNews.com. Submitting to these is a must! EzineArticles.com and Buzzle.com can bring you a lot of traffic, GoArticles.com brings you backlinks, and ArticlesFactory.com – PageRank (my profile page there now is PR5 – with only 12 submitted articles).

But five top directories are not enough. As I said above, I usually do at least 10 manual submissions, so I have to choose my directories wisely. The only two ratings easily available to web users to judge the quality of websites and webpages are Alexa Rating and Google PageRank. Both are flawed and often do not reflect the real authority or traffic of a page. But since there is nothing better I have to stick to these two when deciding if a directory is worth submitting to. Of course, one must not forget the power of themed sites. Whenever I have a choice between a general directory and a directory focusing on my topic – I choose the latter.

To make the choosing process easier I have obtained a list of article directories, their names and URLs. Yesterday, I downloaded Eclipse and wrote a simple Java application that queries Alexa Web Service for rating data, and makes PageRank lookups. I’ve run this application on my list this morning and here are the top results with Alexa rating < 100,000 sorted ascending:

http://www.articledashboard.comhttp://www.topica.com/lists/free_articleshttp://articles.easywordpress.comDirectoryGold Article Directoryhttp://articles.directorygold.comAfro Articles – Article Marketing Directoryhttp://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/InfoWizards Free Content Articleshttp://content.infowizards.comhttp://www.articlefriendly.comhttp://www.top-affiliate.com/articleshttp://www.submityournewarticle.comhttp://www.your-free-satellite.com/index-2.htmlhttp://www.abcarticledirectory.com/http://www.earticlesonline.comhttp://www.earticlesonline.comArticleSnatch – The Best Place to Grab ArticlesTalkin Mince Article DirectoryArticle-Buzz – Free Article Directory

The complete table has over 550 directories and can be downloaded as a tab delimited text file or as an Excel sheet.

Digg!reddit_url='http://www.seoresearcher.com/articles-directories-list-alexa-rating-ordered.htm'

View the original article here

Friday, February 18, 2011

Interesting statistic on in-store food sampling

I was just reading the latest issue of Food Entrepreneur Magazine, and read a surprising statistic.

An independent study by research firm Knowledge Networks-PDI shows that in-store sampling substantially increases sales the day of sampling AND influences a 75% increase in sales even at 20 weeks after the sampling.

Wow! I wonder if we’ll start to see more in-store sampling. I know that when I’m at Costco, I’ve used the samples to try out new products. Many of those products are now in my freezer.


View the original article here

Guidelines to a Perfect Link Exchange Scam

Reciprocal link exchangeReciprocal link exchange still is an important strategy of link popularity building despite all the measures taken by the search engines to diminish its effect. Back in 1999-2001 obtaining a quality link exchange was not difficult, and webmasters used to respond more willingly to an e-mail request. But as more people became aware of this strategy so the reciprocal linking scam started to be a common practice.

Sometimes I check my old ‘link exchange’ e-mail account I used to build link popularity for my very first website. There are lots of people contacting me daily with exchange proposals. Well, not actually people – they are mostly bots.

Probably one of the reasons I still maintain that e-mail is that those requests are a source of a persistent amusement for me. One example: a request in pink letters with images of dancing puppies and bouncing hearts written by a ‘blond chick’ (picture attached) asking me to link to her pharmacy site! Or maybe I just enjoy reading the admiring comments on the outlook and content of my site that precede every exchange proposal?

Link exchange scam is an interesting theme for a study per se and still awaits its researchers. But in the meanwhile the SEO community is being successful in summarizing the guidelines for the most perfect link exchange scam.

Send an automated e-mail request or use a bot to submit it via an online contact form. Combining the both methods is preferred whenever possible.Use a free e-mail account such as Gmail, or better yet, some foreign free e-mail service to send your message. Sending a duplicate request from your company account is also beneficial.Do send follow up e-mails. Sooner or later your victim will give up and read one of them.Send minimum 100-300 automated requests every day. Push your mail server’s spam detection to the limits.Make sure that the website you are trying to contact is absolutely unrelated to your field.Send your request to every e-mail address you can find on the target site. Let the sales or customer support guys forward them to the webmaster.Address properly. No names required. Best thing is to use the website’s title or at least the URL: “Dear Blue Cheap Online Widgets”, or “Hello www.bluewidgets.com”Kiss ass. Tell your victims how much you adore their websites. Do use superlatives.Inform. Let your recipients know how important PageRank and incoming links are. Go in depth with the mysteries and magnificence of the PageRank and how the high PageRank will ensure them the first positions in Google.Scare. Notify them that their link popularity is low, and their positions in search engines are threatened.Share a secret. Tell them that the three-way linking is more effective, since search engines detect and ignore two-way links.Threaten. Notify them that their link will be removed from your high quality directory if they do not provide a link back in the specified number of days.Show your scale. Make your message easily detectable as a bulk sending by setting a different font size and color for the recipient’s address and site name.Be unofficial. Use the Internet argot in your e-mail. Like ‘u r’ instead of ‘you are’. This is the Internet – formalism is unacceptable.Threaten them again. With hundreds of reminder e-mails.Use a girl’s name. Most webmasters are male and should not resist a lady asking for a favor.Your link page must have at least 100 outgoing links, preferably uncategorized. Make sure that minimum 50% point to pharmacy and gambling websites.Your proposed links page has to be deeply buried in a keyword-rich URL like: http://www.yoursite.com/widgets/cheap-widgets/amazingly-cheap-widgets/widgets-links/Make sure the links page URL contains at least one poison keyword like ‘links’, ‘partners’, ‘directory’, or ‘exchanges’.Alternatively provide a dynamic URL with a minimum of 100 characters of meaningless parameter values.Choose links pages that are in Google’s supplementary index.The PageRank for your page has to be between 0 and 3 with 0 being the best.Make your page look more credible by putting AdSense ads on it. “Well, if Google approves this page, then it is worth having a link from it”.Disguise your low PR links pages by opening them in a high PR frame.Orphan pages are the best.Link to your partners using one of the following options: ‘nofollow’ attributejavascript links302 ‘Found’ redirectsEdit robots.txt to restrict spiders from indexing your links pages.Double protect your links pages from indexing by adding meta ‘noindex,nofollow’ tags.

The above guidelines are compiled from my own experience and the hilarious thread ‘SEO Link Exchange’ from the WebMasterWorld forum.

The list can be continued. Any suggestions?

reddit_url='http://www.seoresearcher.com/guidelines-to-a-perfect-link-exchange-scam.htm'

View the original article here

Guidelines to a Perfect Link Exchange Scam

Reciprocal link exchangeReciprocal link exchange still is an important strategy of link popularity building despite all the measures taken by the search engines to diminish its effect. Back in 1999-2001 obtaining a quality link exchange was not difficult, and webmasters used to respond more willingly to an e-mail request. But as more people became aware of this strategy so the reciprocal linking scam started to be a common practice.

Sometimes I check my old ‘link exchange’ e-mail account I used to build link popularity for my very first website. There are lots of people contacting me daily with exchange proposals. Well, not actually people – they are mostly bots.

Probably one of the reasons I still maintain that e-mail is that those requests are a source of a persistent amusement for me. One example: a request in pink letters with images of dancing puppies and bouncing hearts written by a ‘blond chick’ (picture attached) asking me to link to her pharmacy site! Or maybe I just enjoy reading the admiring comments on the outlook and content of my site that precede every exchange proposal?

Link exchange scam is an interesting theme for a study per se and still awaits its researchers. But in the meanwhile the SEO community is being successful in summarizing the guidelines for the most perfect link exchange scam.

Send an automated e-mail request or use a bot to submit it via an online contact form. Combining the both methods is preferred whenever possible.Use a free e-mail account such as Gmail, or better yet, some foreign free e-mail service to send your message. Sending a duplicate request from your company account is also beneficial.Do send follow up e-mails. Sooner or later your victim will give up and read one of them.Send minimum 100-300 automated requests every day. Push your mail server’s spam detection to the limits.Make sure that the website you are trying to contact is absolutely unrelated to your field.Send your request to every e-mail address you can find on the target site. Let the sales or customer support guys forward them to the webmaster.Address properly. No names required. Best thing is to use the website’s title or at least the URL: “Dear Blue Cheap Online Widgets”, or “Hello www.bluewidgets.com”Kiss ass. Tell your victims how much you adore their websites. Do use superlatives.Inform. Let your recipients know how important PageRank and incoming links are. Go in depth with the mysteries and magnificence of the PageRank and how the high PageRank will ensure them the first positions in Google.Scare. Notify them that their link popularity is low, and their positions in search engines are threatened.Share a secret. Tell them that the three-way linking is more effective, since search engines detect and ignore two-way links.Threaten. Notify them that their link will be removed from your high quality directory if they do not provide a link back in the specified number of days.Show your scale. Make your message easily detectable as a bulk sending by setting a different font size and color for the recipient’s address and site name.Be unofficial. Use the Internet argot in your e-mail. Like ‘u r’ instead of ‘you are’. This is the Internet – formalism is unacceptable.Threaten them again. With hundreds of reminder e-mails.Use a girl’s name. Most webmasters are male and should not resist a lady asking for a favor.Your link page must have at least 100 outgoing links, preferably uncategorized. Make sure that minimum 50% point to pharmacy and gambling websites.Your proposed links page has to be deeply buried in a keyword-rich URL like: http://www.yoursite.com/widgets/cheap-widgets/amazingly-cheap-widgets/widgets-links/Make sure the links page URL contains at least one poison keyword like ‘links’, ‘partners’, ‘directory’, or ‘exchanges’.Alternatively provide a dynamic URL with a minimum of 100 characters of meaningless parameter values.Choose links pages that are in Google’s supplementary index.The PageRank for your page has to be between 0 and 3 with 0 being the best.Make your page look more credible by putting AdSense ads on it. “Well, if Google approves this page, then it is worth having a link from it”.Disguise your low PR links pages by opening them in a high PR frame.Orphan pages are the best.Link to your partners using one of the following options: ‘nofollow’ attributejavascript links302 ‘Found’ redirectsEdit robots.txt to restrict spiders from indexing your links pages.Double protect your links pages from indexing by adding meta ‘noindex,nofollow’ tags.

The above guidelines are compiled from my own experience and the hilarious thread ‘SEO Link Exchange’ from the WebMasterWorld forum.

The list can be continued. Any suggestions?

reddit_url='http://www.seoresearcher.com/guidelines-to-a-perfect-link-exchange-scam.htm'

View the original article here

Emerging SEM Markets: Portugal

Recently I was approached by a colleauge from Portugal who offered me the following article on SEO and online advertising market in his country. I am gladly publishing this report by Nuno Hipólito here.

Portuguese online advertising in 2005According to SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, the investment in SEM in the US will reach $11 billion in 2011.

Let’s face it. When it comes to new technologies and adjusting to new technology, no one can bet the US. It’s a very big market and there is an infrastructure built to progress new ideas and specially investment in new industries.

The “start up” never works that well outside the US, and most of the time it’s not even because of financial matters. Americans think “future”, always, even if when they vote conservatively.

So SEM seemed a logical thing when search engines gained importance in the sales process. People research things online – people will shop more and more online or at least will make decisions based on web research.

But that’s easy.

Let’s talk SEM in emerging markets.

When should one begin to think about SEO and PPC? Does it really pay to advertise online, when most of the country you are targeting does not use the Internet for shopping? Or when parents there are hesitant to discover the online world, because they still look at the tv remote with suspicion?

When you talk about the UK, France or Germany the problem isn’t the same. But let’s consider much smaller and underdeveloped markets: Portugal, Greece, etc…

I can speak about the Portuguese market because our company is Portuguese. We are considering other markets, but for now we have to stay within the confines of Portugal.

When we have a meeting with a potential client, imagine a hotel manager, we try to make him realize the benefits of investing online. He can attract costumers at a very low cost, his website should work 24/7 in that task and he should be proactive in influencing people’s minds when they search for hotels near his.

He immediately looks at us and asks the killer question: “do people search for hotels online?”.

We nod yes with a nervous smile. Sure they do.

Maybe not a lot of them, but some do. We can even tell you roughly how many. And you can think about attracting foreign costumers at a low cost. And we can provide estimates; promise certain results, concrete objectives. Do other marketing campaigns give you that? As a cool side effect, your brand image will get a makeover.

Hum… he looks interested, but unconvinced.

To give you an idea, the online advertising investment in Portugal was a mere 30 million euros in 2005 (23 million dollars). 5 million euros (3.8 million dollars) in PPC ads.

No wonder the hotel manager is reluctant. No one invests in online marketing!

So why should he?

Two words: “Low, Low cost”. Ok, three words. Sure, our market is small, but that means you can have a dominant position with a smaller investment. And if you look forward, the market will grow, and your company will be prepared. If you play your online cards right, you will be a leader.

The risk is very small too. PPC can be done with very low budgets, as low as 1 euro a day (3.8 dollars). Yes, that’s for the entire daily budget, not just a keyword. That’s emergent markets for you…

Low cost = big results. That’s our pitch.

And even if the costs are low, we, as an SEM company will make sure they will get even lower. And that the right keywords are researched, contents created, new costumers attracted.

In 2006 the growth of online adverting in Portugal will be 26%. That’s massive. Above European average.

Did he know that people that research for the keyword “holidays in Lisbon” could be interested in hotels? He didn’t. But they are. We recommend a landing page with info about the city, interesting tourist routes, where to eat, what shows to see…

He likes the idea.

We have experience doing SEO and PPC in the Portuguese market. We even do Spanish PPC. So rest assure – we tell him – we’ll deliver you results, measurable results in a short time and we have a long term plan for your online future.

He finally looks convinced and smiles.

The nervous smile comes off our faces and we shake hands. It’s difficult to get clients for SEM in Portugal, but it will only get easier in the future.

As for all emergent markets, the difficulty local SEM companies go through are not that different. First educate your potential costumer and he will understand your pitch. He should, because you give added value to his business, that’s your role.

At the end of the day, he will have a smile on his face.

Slowly he will gain more costumers online. And when the market is mature, he will think in disbelief how he didn’t see how important online adverting would become.
Nuno Hipólito
SEO consultant.
www.searchmarketing.pt

If you speak Portuguese, check out this site about SEO: http://esquilloseocontest.home.sapo.pt/


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Making Money From Your Blog’s RSS Feed

RSS FeedvertisingSome blog for fun, some blog for money, some blog for both. There are numerous options to monetize a blog. AdSense ads, affiliate links, paid reviews, links to your products – you name it. If your blog receives enough visitors you can start making living online. To make the most of your visitors you must keep in mind where do they come from. Those who arrive to your blog from search engine results or directed to you by links from other websites can see your pages fully. But your revenue-generating ads and links are hidden for those who read your RSS feeds. This means that your online money-machine loses click from a substantial portion of your most loyal visitors. Is there a way to make money in RSS feeds? Yes, try ‘feedvertising’

Feedvertising is a technology that enables bloggers to run text ads in their RSS feeds. One service I discovered lately that provides such technology is Text Links Ads. If you have a Wordpress blog you can join the network, which already features such popular blogs as TechCrunch or Problogger. See an example of feedvertising: this is how an affiliate link looks like in Problogger’s RSS:

feedverising screenshot

Feedvertising is very flexible. You can choose your advertisers (your affiliate links, your own products or advertisers suggested by Text Link Ads), provide your own custom prefix to the ad, such as ‘sponsored by’, ‘thanks to our sponsor’ or whatever you like, you can write your own text after the link to express your opinion about the advertised product or service. You can also let Text Links Ads to run paid links not only in your RSS but also across your entire blog.Text Links Ads provides you with a plugin customized to your blog which is easily installed and managed just as any other WordPress plugin. Unfortunately this also means that if you have a Blogger account you are not able to use this service.

Feedvertising is not a contextual ads provider so you can keep running your AdSense ads without violating the TOS. Your payouts depend on the popularity of your blog, which is measured as a combination of Technorati and Alexa rankings, and can be up to $250 per month per link for the top publishers or $40-70 for moderately popular blogs.

For more information on creating an account in Feedvertising as well as the instruction on setting up the plugin please refer to the excellent video by TubeTutorial.

Check this out: .


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Avoiding Keyword Stuffing Ban

When deciding upon keyword placement we all try to get the most out of our target keywords saturation. In the same time no one wants to get penalized by accidentally inserting too many keywords in the page copy, or by including too many words between H1 tags. Since search engines would never publish the exact numbers for maximally alowed keyword frequency or keyword prominence, all we can do is just study top pages in SEPRs and make more or less informed guesses. Or we can conduct an experiment, and calculate the average numbers for top pages in the results of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. For the tables below I used data provided by WebPosition software, which calculates the average scores of the top 5 positions for dozens of keyword searches conducted by WebTrends Inc.

Of course aligning your parameters to the top averages will not guarantee you the high rankings, but it can ensure that your keyword saturation stays within the allowed boundaries.

Partial matching enabled, Non-Exact Search, Non-Case Sensitive

.

MSN Averages: Partial matching disabled, Non-Exact Search, Non-Case Sensitive.

.

Partial matching disabled, Non-Exact Search, Non-Case Sensitive.

Head – words between HEAD tags, this includes TITLE

Body – words between BODY tags including:

Headings – words in H1, H2 and H3 tagsLink Text – anchor text of outgoing linksHyperlink URL – words in URL of the outgoing linksBody Text – words in your page copy , excluding the content of ALT and COMMENT tags

When defining keyword/key-phrase frequency we distinguish between exact, non-exact and partial matching. Exact matching means looking for the exact matches of a key-phrase. Exact matching is possible when user performs a search with quotation marks around the search terms. For example if the content of an H1 tag is “Bahamian Paradise. Bahamas Islands: All inclusive Atlantis Bahamas Deals” then the frequency of “Atlantis Bahamas” by exact match is 1 (one occurence). By non-exact matching the frequency for the same phrase is 1.5: 1 for one occurrence of ‘Atlantis’, plus 2 for two occurrences of ‘Bahamas’ divided by 2 – the number of words in the search phrase. Partial matching or keyword stemming also considers keyword modifications as matches. In this case the frequency for “Atlantis Bahamas” will be 2 – word ‘Bahamian’ is considered as a match to ‘Bahamas’.

This is simply the total number of words in the analyzed area. Be careful not to put too many words between H1 or H2 tags, or in link text, since it might be considered as spam.

This parameter determines the degree to which a specific keyword or phrase dominates in any given area. This parameter is calculated by multiplying number of words in the key-phrase by its frequency and dividing it by the total number of words in the area.

This parameter shows how close are your keyword or phrase to the start of the area. Most of the search algorithms assign more weight to more prominent keywords, and therefore it is beneficial to have your targeted keywords in the top of the page or in the beginning of the page copy. However in order to avoid spam penalties the keyword distribution must be as natural as possible, and you might find it necessary to put a keyword in the middle or at the end of your page. Prominence calculation is:

If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be 100%.If a keyword appears in the middle of an area, its prominence will be around 50%.If the keyword appears at the beginning of the area, then another repetition appears at the end of the area, the prominence would be 50%.If the keyword appears at the end of the area, prominence would be 0%.If the area consists of multiple parts (like having 3 heading tags on the page) then all three areas are treated as a single contiguous area when prominence is calculated.reddit_url='http://www.seoresearcher.com/average-keyword-saturation-google-msn-yahoo.htm'

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How to Make a WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe

Supplementary indexIn one of my recent posts I wrote about the duplicate content issue. This topic is especially important to me since my blog uses the WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic – a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the ‘next/previous entries’ pages – those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.

Feeds. Search engine spiders crawl all the content they can reach and of course this includes RSS feeds too. The additional problem with them is that Google may choose to display your RSS URL in the search results over the link to the original post. In this case the user who clicks this result will see an XML formatted page which is not ‘human-friendly’.

Trackback URLs. Many WordPress templates add trackback links after posts. This links enable authors to track who links to their posts. Usually, if your post URL looks like ‘www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/’ its trackback URL will be ‘www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/trackback/’.

Identical meta-description. By default WordPress doesn’t provide a tool to add unique meta description tags to your posts, and they either have none or share a single site-wide description. Having no meta description at all is a disadvantage, as a properly written one can make your snippet stand out in a SERP. Having an identical description for all your pages is a threat, as Google might get them filtered out as too similar. (see a thread here)

Because of the duplicate content Google search can return less desired URLs (such as feeds or archives instead of original posts); your pages can be moved out of their index, or placed into the supplemental results, which are rarely displayed to users.

What can you do to avoid this problem? You can tell the search engines what URL to index by using ‘noindex, follow’ meta tag, robots.txt exclusions or 301 redirects. Let’s say you want Google to index your front page, posts, single pages and category pages and forbid the spiders from crawling the content of archives, feeds and ‘next entries’ pages – page/2, /3, … To do this you have to add to your header.php the following code:

if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){echo '';} else {echo '';}

For those not familiar with editing templates in WordPress: in your dashboard click Presentation menu item and after the new page is opened – click Theme Editor. In the Theme Editor choose ‘header.php’ and then paste the above code into the editor form. This code has to be inserted anywhere between head tags .

Here the tag is added to the home page but not the ‘next entries’ page (is_home() and ($paged<2)), to your posts (is_single()); to solo pages, like ‘About me’, if you created any (is_page()); and to category pages (is_category()). If you don’t want your categories to be indexed just delete || is_category(). All the other pages will get . They will not be indexed, but this will not prevent crawlers from following their outgoing links.

For this purpose I use Head Meta Description plugin. This plugin can be configured to use an excerpt of your post as a meta description – this is especially useful if you have to add this tag to hundreds of existing pages. Or you can add your own manually as a custom field, which is my personal preference.

By using this tag you tell WordPress to display only the first few lines of your post. This greatly reduces the similarity of home page and your articles. If you have too many existing posts to edit, you can use an ‘excerpt’ plugin, such as this one from Semiologic

You should edit your .htaccess file to perform 301 redirects. Non-www addresses like yoursite.com should be redirected to www.yoursite.com. URL without trailing slashes like www.yoursite.com/category should be rewritten to include it: www.yoursite.com/category/ This can be done by inserting the following code into your .htaccess file:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

For more details I advise you to read this: the process or rewriting the URL layout.

For this purpose you should edit your robots.txt file by inserting the following code

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/trackback/$

Some people find it useful to restrict the number of posts displayed in your home page to 4-5, as less posts are duplicated.

A great article on customizing the more tag in Wordpress.

To avoid the duplicate content issue in WordPress include you should do:Add ‘noindex, follow’ meta tag to your monthly/weekly/daily archives, ‘next entries’, and if necessary, category pagesEnsure that all your pages have unique meta-description tagsSet up 301 redirects for your non-www URL and URLs without trailing slashesRestrict search engine crawlers from indexing your feeds and trackbacksUse more tag to show excerpts in your home page instead of full postsRestrict the number of posts displayed in your home pagereddit_url='http://www.seoresearcher.com/how-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-duplicate-content-safe.htm'

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

10 reasons you're not an 'advanced' SEO


I’m warning everyone: I’m blogging angry. I waited 24 hours. I’m still angry. So here it is.


jackass-advanced.jpg


I am @#$)(* sick and tired of people telling me they’re “advanced” SEO’s, sitting on “advanced” SEO panels and speaking at “advanced” SEO conferences after three years of screwing up people’s web sites with a nofollow tag.


Here are all the bits of knowledge that do not make you an advanced SEO:


So, you know what robots.txt is. You’ve even figured out how to not bury someone’s website with it.


Do you know how the different search engines treat robots.txt?


Do you know how it compares to the way search engines use the meta ROBOTS tag?


You do? Congratulations. That’s not advanced either.


Knowing robots.txt in SEO is like knowing not to pour sugar in your gas tank: It doesn’t make you mechanic. It makes you not a moron.


You know what makes you advanced? Knowing how unhelpful robots.txt is if you have 999999 duplicate pages on your web site. It’s a start, anyway.


Nofollow does not help SEO. At best, it prevents you from getting banned if you sell links on your site.


This is not a news flash. It’s been true for a while. If that surprises you, you’re not advanced.


Now, if you know how to design a site’s architecture to funnel authority around to the pages that need it, that could make you advanced. If you know why it works – not just the fact that it does, but the math behind it – that makes you an advanced SEO.


There are plenty of lousy black hat SEO’s, too. Downloading Billy Bob’s Blogomatic Spammerizer does not suddenly put you on equal footing with the Fantomasters and Dave Naylors of the world.


Advanced black hattery is highly technical. If you don’t know what a reverse proxy is, and can’t figure out how to deliver different content to user agents from specific IP addresses, you are not even in the ball park.


If that last sentence made your eyes cross, guess what? You’re not advanced.


If you’ve successfully cloaked content for more than 2 days, you might be advanced. If you’ve constructed your own link farm and it still works, you’re probably advanced. If Matt Cutts crosses himself when he hears your name, then you’re definitely advanced.


You know how to use the META HTTP-EQUIV tag. That’s good. And I mean that – I’m not being sarcastic.


It’s also basic HTML.


If you can double your rates by saying “I’m sorry, but you don’t have the right doctype declaration in your pages” I’m really happy for you. But do not try to tell me you’re a leader in the industry. You’re just someone who knows how to click ‘new from template >> HTML’ in Textmate.


If you understand which HTML tags matter to SEO and which don’t, you’ve moved from preschool to Kindergarten.


If you know how to make a page load faster with smart HTML, you’re in grade school.


Learn how to render javascript last, optimize for mobile crawlers and pull together pages that are blindingly fast, look good and are SEO-friendly, and you’ve made it to SEO grad school.


Oh god.


Links are not advanced. Link building is not advanced.


Knowing that air is important for human life doesn’t make you a surgeon.


Knowing that links are important for SEO doesn’t make you an expert. Nor does:

Knowing new and creative ways to grub for links;Writing posts with f-bombs in them in an attempt to accumulate links;Posting images of scantily clad men/women to accumulate links;Regurgitating what you read on SEOMOZ. Those guys are advanced. You are not;Putting 45 links in the footer of your site. I’ll actually punch you if you suggest it.

Here’s advanced. If you know:

How links pass authority, and why;The effect of adding a link to a page;The known math behind PageRank;The Rational Surfer model;Why PageRank is an iterative model;What makes some links better than others;How to turn a great article into a great link generator;How to encourage folks to link to you in subtle, smart ways.

Then I tip my hat – you’re an advanced SEO.


Does. Not. Make. You. Advanced.


I’ve heard some of the worst stupidity in the industry spouted at SEO conferences. I love conferences, and I’ve learned a ton there. But for every great, well-informed speaker, there are at least three who have no business on stage.


If you are:

Using the slide deck from 2 years ago;Presenting on ‘title tag optimization’ for the 12th time;Telling the audience that creating an XML site map equals SEO;Having to pelt your audience with erasers to keep them awake.

…you may have good stuff to say, but you’re not in the ‘advanced’ category. Nor are you a ninja, a rock star or a guru.


If you can give your audience something they haven’t heard before, help them really improve their rankings and have them leave your session still scribbling notes frantically, then you might just be an advanced SEO.


I’m repeating myself a bit. But knowing how to generate an XML sitemap is not exactly mind-boggling SEO trickery. Anyone can download Xenu Link Sleuth, run it, and export an XML sitemap in about 10 minutes.


‘XML’ made people in suspenders sound experienced back in 1998. Give it up and move on.


Learn crawl budget, and how to evaluate your site’s crawl budget (Thanks Tom - link to article now in place) and you’ve got a decent start.


You may not need be an advanced SEO. Not being ‘advanced’ doesn’t make you a bad person. But declaring yourself an expert and then ripping off clients and misleading audiences all because you’ve got self-esteem issues is pathetic, and it hurts our industry. So cut it out.



View the original article here

Everything I ever learned about marketing I learned from Dungeons and Dragons


I gave a talk today at Emerging Media Conference about marketing and Dungeons & Dragons. I'm hoping to have it as a video pretty soon, but for now, I took a big chunk of it and turned it into a blog post. This is basically a transcript, so it may not make total sense at times. I've inserted the slides as images in relevant places. Here it is:

I try hard to make things ‘fit’. I see people act a certain way, I figure there has to be a reason. Something in us explains why we hate public restrooms, or crumple up straw wrappers, or hate people who stand too close in line. Something makes it make sense.


It might even be an irrational reason. But there’s gotta be something. I pick and pick and pick at things until either they bleed to death, become necrotic and fall off, or I understand what makes ‘em tick, all the time certain that I’ll find something.


Yeah. And folks wonder why I’m a Jew who believes in Karma, animism and the spaghetti monster.


So I became a marketer. I figured that one place where I could put this drive to make things fit was in marketing. Marketing has to make sense, right? (cough)


I wanted to create a ‘system’ – a set of rules – that took advantage of how it all fits together, and turn that into my Magical Marketing Method.


For years I chased all sorts of random ideas around. I went from reading David Ogilvy to John Caples to Dan Kennedy. I studied JFK, Ayn Rand and Thoreau. I tested all sorts of theories about marketing, society and how people communicate.


You know what? Nothing ‘fits’. It sucks, but there’s no principle, or law, or system you can make up and apply that’ll just make marketing and communications work.


The problem, as it turns out, is that we’re basically well-educated monkeys, not computers. So we tend to do random stuff.


jackass-two.jpg


You’d think I would’ve understood that by the time I was 27, but it didn't. Reality set for me: You can't create The Great Marketing System, because humans aren't systematic.


That got me depressed for a little while. Maybe 8 years.


stick-figure-sad.gif


Then, a few years ago, it hit me:


It’s not about creating rules for marketing. It’s not about finding "a new paradigm".


It’s about finding human impulses that are already there and honestly appealing to them.


This all hit me in a flash while I was playing Dungeons and Dragons.


In case you don’t know what Dungeons and Dragons is: Basically, you get some dice, some paper and pencil, a rulebook and a few friends, and you run around in an imaginary world, smiting and pillaging.


level-32-nerd.jpg


I know. You’re already freaked out at the idea that I’m even more of a nerd than you thought. But wait! There’s more!


I’ve played this game for 31 years.


That’s a lot of notches in the old sword belt, lemme tell you.


I’d love to tell you I play because I love the opportunity to play a character in an adventure, live the drama and do stuff in a fictional world that’s impossible in a real one.


But that’s utter bunk.


I like to slay monsters, take their treasure, and talk about how we all came THIS CLOSE to dying afterward.


When I realized that – that was the lightbulb. Those are basic human impulses: Defeat something bad; get a reward; tell the tale. They fit – they’ve been there all along. They’re visceral. And they translate to effectiveness in all human communications, including marketing.


That’s what I want to show you: How you can give your communications efforts more power if you help your audience slay monsters, take their stuff, and then tell the story after.


Let’s break this down:


standing-behind-me.jpg


Now that I've come come out of the nerd closet, you may as well know more:


I’ve played with the same group of people for nearly 20 years. We usually play good guys, but occasionally in D&D my friends and I used to try to play evil characters for a while. We thought it’d be fun - it felt kinda, you know, dirty.


It sucked. It just isn’t that much fun.


Even in games like World of Warcraft, when you TRY to play an evil character, you end up ‘good’ from your perspective. The nastiest, gooiest, drippiest bad guys you can play, as it turns out, are just… misunderstood.


Did you cheer for the Emperor? For Darth Vader?


Of course you didn’t. You cheered for Luke Skywalker. And Darth Vader, when it turned out that, in spite of the whole destroying planets and wiping out the Jedi thing, he was actually a good guy, too.


Even the TERMINATOR turns into a good guy.


It’s because we can’t handle rooting for a bad guy. It doesn’t compute. It’ll shock my friends to hear me say this, since it sounds downright optimistic, but: Most want the bad guy to lose. The folks who don’t, but still believe the bad guys are bad, I’d suggest, are the sociopaths.


If you can give people a chance to do that – to beat up the bad guy, rout evil, whatever – you’ve given them a kind of currency that sticks with them. They remember you for it.


I've blogged for 10 years. I’m not saying that to brag. I’m trying to lend a sense of scale when I say that I’ve only written one blog post that made it to the front page of Digg. Ever.


Know what it was? How to destroy a plagiarist’s blog. It made it to Digg, onto Cracked and has 28 root domains linking to it. It got 50,000 clicks from StumbleUpon. 105 comments.


Why? All my other posts were better thought-out, better written and had better teaching content. Frankly, it kind of pisses me off that the one thing I ever wrote that got the Digg treatment involved pasting pictures of poop onto other people’s sites. It’s simple: I’d just shown a lot of people how to slay monsters (plagiarists), and everyone loves to slay the monster. Of course they loved it.


The tendency to monster slaying is already at work in marketing. It has been for a while: Anyone remember the ads Alaska Airlines did in the 1980s? A whole series of funny ads talking about how other airlines abuse you, but Alaska doesn’t.


Alaska said “We are not the monsters - the other airlines are, though. Fly us and you slay the monster. Or at least deny it a meal.”


It works in politics: Republicans have held a decided advantage over the last 40 years. Why? They have a clear bad guy: Big Government Waste. It’s their monster.


reps-dems-seats-won.gif


Democrats try to take a nuanced approach: They will say “Well, we oppose wasteful programs like such and such. Here’s a spreadsheet explaining it all.” It's hard to vote for someone who promises to create better spreadsheets. It’s easy to vote for someone who Opposes Big Government Waste.


That’s why Democrats only take over when everyone’s sick of the Republicans.


Everyone wants to slay a monster. I mean this figuratively, of course. And you can’t just demonize people and things. You have to point out what’s already there.


Help your audience Defeat Evil, and they love you for it. They remember it as if you’ve given them something precious – and you have, because you’ve helped fulfill a part of our brains we’ve had since we could bang rocks together.


You know the most common 4 words a D&D player asks?


What. Do. We. Get.?


look-at-all-this-stuff.jpg


After a fight. At the end of a gaming session. After pizza arrives. Doesn’t matter. We want our stuff.


So does everyone else.


‘Stuff’ doesn’t have to be something material. It can be almost anything. And, if you get stuff because you beat up the bad guys, you realllly feel good about it.


In D&D, ’stuff’ means gold and magic items.


I did a calculation. I’ve played an average of 211 hours of D&D per year for 31 years. That’s 4 hours/week, or, if you really want to get picky, 34 minutes a day. Or, a total of 6136 hours of D&D.


Hey, it beats watching American Idol, OK?


On average I’ve earned 1 gp (that’s a gold piece, for you posers out there) per hour. That’s 6136 gold pieces. Assume they’re each 1/3 of an ounce. (Sadly, there are people out there who've figured this out.) Current gold price is around $1300 an ounce.


That means I’ve earned $2,650,000. W00T!!!!


That ignores all the magic items, of course. Assume I got one really cool sword or the equivalent per 40 hours of gaming. Subtract out any cursed items (those suck) and we’ll say one cool item every 50 hours. So I’ve accumulated 122 swords, wands, etc. that I can sell for even more.


So, I’m rich. Filthy, stinking rich.


But I’m not. It’s all make-believe. I can’t even sell it on eBay.


Yet I still get a little thrill every time we find something on an adventure. I’m 42 years old, and I still like finding make-believe shiny things in make-believe chests.


Is this about ‘social capital’? Maybe. But I have the social skills and drive of a feral chipmunk. And most people can’t spell ‘capital’. So I really doubt that social capital is what got me addicted to make-believe loot, or that it alone gets folks onto Facebook, etc..


There’s something more visceral at work: Everyone likes getting stuff. Even make-believe stuff. That’s the pleasure thing Jesse Schell talked about yesterday or, as I call it, the warm tinglies..


Remember the guy who saved up the Pepsi points for a Harrier jump jet? He’s the freak in all this. Did you know he ended up suing Pepsi? He did. He sued Pepsi because they didn’t give him a Harrier after he bought $700k worth of Pepsi.

harrier-park-office.jpg

The judge ruled against him: “No objective person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial actually offered consumers a Harrier jet”.


Translation: You. Are. A. Loon. A. Tick.


The guy who did want it was either crazy or hungry for attention. Most people bought Pepsi and looked at the points they got, but never collected anything at all. And that was enough for them.


The judge understood this: No one should expect to win a Harrier. They should expect to get stuff in the form of points, which may or may not lead to other stuff.


Everyone likes to get stuff. And, if you can give them stuff while they stick it to the bad guys, even better:


Toyota’s Prius – which I own, by the way, so it worked on me – is a pretty dicey proposition as a money-saver. The car costs around $30k. I could get a similarly-equipped non-hybrid for about $20k. Am I going to save $10k in gas?


No. What I’m going to do is burn less oil. I get to watch the little mileage thingy and cheer when I break 50 mpg. That is my stuff. And I get to take a chunk out of Exxon’s profits. That just increases the warm tinglies: SCREW YOU Exxon. Your janitors may make more than I do, but I just stuck it to you, big-time.


The Prius targets the exact people who WOULD do the same analysis I just did. And we buy them anyway.


Toyota is giving me stuff and letting me participate in the slaying of a monster: oil companies. No one likes an oil company. Not even the oil company’s mom likes the oil company. It’s not even real (come on) and it still works on me.


You know the only car Toyota sells that posted gains over 2009? The Prius. In spite of all the sudden acceleration insanity. It's also the only car that let people get stuff (by burning less gas) and figuratively slay the monster by slapping oil companies around. Even though it really doesn’t.


Everyone likes to get stuff. Everyone’s always liked getting stuff, and that doesn’t have to be tangible.


Give something to your audience – even warm tingles, and they’re one step closer to being happy customers. Give them something and let them beat the bad guy, and they’re yours for life.


You’d think that, when all of us aging gamers with kids and jobs and lives sit down to play D&D, we’d get right to the game. None of us can spend a 10-hour day gaming any more. You know what we spend 1/2 our time doing?


Telling stories of previous crazy exploits. You know – the exploits that never happened, where you earned treasure you can’t use, against villains that don’t exist. That time you were facing utter doom and the only way you could survive was to roll a 20 AND YOU DID.


tell-the-tale.jpg


And, since we’ve known each other at least 10+ years, we’ve heard them all before. We were there when every story happened!!!! But we keep telling them anyway.


We love to tell the tale. Turns out, normal people (can I call them muggles? I’ve always wanted to do that) do too.


Seth Godin wrote a great book that sold a bazillion copies called All Marketers Are Liars. In it, he talked about the value of telling a powerful (true) story about your brand.


That’s an awesome first step. But if you really want to win, give your customers a tale to tell, and put them in it.


You get the idea. Everyone wants to have stories to tell.


If they’re in the stories, they tell them better.


And more often.


This storytelling/folklore is the best part of the whole equation, because your audience loves you for making them part of the story, and they help you get the word out at the same time.


If beating the bad guys and taking their stuff is the incentive that gets people involved with you, then telling stories is how you can get existing customers to indoctrinate new people into the club and keep them there.


How many people here run businesses that live and die on referrals?


What’s a referral?


Uh-huh. It’s someone telling others how smart they were to choose you. They’re telling the tale of how they conquered the Great Black Beast of Q1 Sales Goals.


Did Google do any marketing when they launched? No? Then how did anyone hear about them?


I’ll tell you how: Nerd A found something really cool that no one else could find. She went around telling everyone else about this massively cool piece of information she found. When her worshipful nerd admirers asked her ‘how did you find that?!’ she said ‘Oh, using this Google thing’.


“I Googled you.”


They’ve become a freaking verb you can use to tell stories. Egads.


One of the greatest print ads ever literally puts you into a story:


john-caples-ad.gif


This ad by John Caples is written in the first person. It puts you in the place of this person, wowing your friends with your newfound piano prowess. It’s telling you what it’ll feel like to tell the tale.


Everyone wants to tell the tale. Particularly a tale of how they slew the monster and took the monster’s stuff.


You have to make it so that they can.


You can take this all as some kind of cynical message – a sneaky way to trick people and ‘get ahead’. I don’t, though.


You can try to manipulate people around these impulses. But that’s when it all goes horribly wrong.


Know who Joe McCarthy is? He built up anti-Communist hysteria and set of a series of hearings in front of the House on Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). He was a bastard. He ruined lives by making up a monster’the American Communist Party was about as threatening to the US then as it is now.


Know what? He pushed too far, and he got found out. And the backlash destroyed him and his career.


So try to manipulate if you really want to, but remember: The more you try to scam society’s psyche, the bigger the backlash when they figure it out.


There you go. Ian’s Three Principles of D&D Marketing. Help your audience:


Slay monsters
Take their treasure
Tell the tale


Learn how marketers appeal to these basic impulses, and you can help grow your business and get your message out.


To me, though, this is about a lot more than marketing. This is about communications.


Communications drive the really big stuff we accomplish:


We wouldn't have gone to the moon except that: JFK promised us stuff (the achievement); we had a monster to slay (the Soviet space program); there was a great tale to tell.


Big things people never would’ve tried without leadership that knew how to frame the challenges for society or for themselves.


That’s what this is really about: Helping people find what motivates them, and then delivering it. And by doing that, making us all a little cooler.


Or nerdier, as the case may be.



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6 copywriting tips - Latest Search Engine Land column


My latest Search Engine Land column just went live. I listed out 6 ideas for stuff to write when you've got no idea what to write:


6 content tips: How to write when you have nothing to write about



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Marketing principle #1: Everyone needs a Gluten


My wife has me trying to eat gluten-free for a few weeks.


That means no bread, cookies, pizza, pasta. It's like I've been told, "Ian, from now on, food will suck".


But I'm doing it. Voluntarily.


If Dawn had simply told me, "Eat less starch, eat more veggies, and reduce caloric intake," I'd totally fail.


What's the difference? I need an opponent: Gluten is the bad guy. Tell me to eat smarter and I'm the bad guy. I'm not a bad guy! The result of me having gluten as a focus: I'm eating less starch, eating more veggies and taking in fewer calories. Sound familiar?


The greatest marketing campaigns in history created a focal point: An opponent, harmless or not, that we can focus on as we adjust our behavior.


Why'd we go to the moon? The USSR launched Sputnik. If you don't think JFK's speech launched one of the most ambitious marketing campaigns in history, well, better think again.


Why did 1 in 11 American adults do the Atkins Diet? Because we all decided we need to lose weight? Noooo. Because it turns out that the enemy is carbohydrates. It was easy to focus on a single opponent. It'd make a lot more sense to just reduce fat intake and exercise more. But there's no focus. It's a lot easier to sell a concept if there's a single bad guy.


This isn't a cynical statement on my part. I'm not saying we have to create enemies to do great marketing. Great marketing, though:

Looks at the change in behavior we want to create;Finds an element that can inspire people to make that change;Focuses messaging on that element.So yeah—every marketing campaign needs a gluten.


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Lessons in Twitter community building, by Kevin Hillstrom


Kevin Hillstrom is my analytical idol. So, when I bought a copy of his e-book, Twitter Hashtag Analysis a few weeks back, I was mostly looking for hashtag analysis techniques. But I got a huge bonus: This great e-book is a blueprint for Twitter community building.


Hillstrom based his e-book on analysis of activity in the #blogchat community. He slices and dices the data 99 ways, as I've come to expect, so you to read it for yourself.


I have no business or other connection here, by the way. It's just a great book that you need to read. And I think I might earn $.10 from Amazon if you buy one.

I'm still working my way through the data, but here are the biggest lessons I've picked up so far:


Everyone wants a little love. Reply to those who retweet you. In Hillstrom's analysis, folks who retweet you and then get a reply from you will become engaged members of your little community 60% of the time. If you don't reply? They return 6% of the time.


As Hillstrom succinctly put it: OMG.


Just a little 'thanks' could have huge implications for your community-building efforts.


Even answering someone's tweet makes them more likely to participate. Folks who get their tweets answered will engage—participate again—41% of the time.


That compares to about 6% of the time if someone tweets once or twice, retweets and then is gone.


So, even if they don't retweet you, respond to folks if you want them to stick around.


The more engaged participants you get, the easier it becomes to maintain a healthy community. Why? Because engaged participants will answer tweets and retweets. So, they actually generate more engaged participants, who then respond to new members, and so on.


It doesn't have to be you. Respond to folks and they'll help out.


There is a TON of great insight in Hillstrom's e-book. This little post is just a slice.


But the moral is clear: If you want to build a real, responsive audience on Twitter, nurture it. Respond to people. It pays off, big.


Caveat: This is based on his analysis of the #blogchat hastag. Your results may vary. Kevin has some other great examples of this kind of analysis, though, on his blog.


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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Can Quora drive traffic?


I'm addicted to Quora. There, I've said it.


I know some folks have doubts. I love StackOverflow too. But something about Quora has me on there, all the time, answering questions.


I do have an ulterior motive: If I can get on there and help lots of people out, I can build an audience. If I build an audience, that's one more pool of interested people who might someday hire my company, buy a book, etc..


See, I'm not actually addicted. I have business motives! I can quit any time I want.


But that business motive means I gotta see Quora actually do something as a traffic or lead generator. So I've started keeping score.


Traffic is a dead loser. After 4 weeks of posting 3-4 answers a day, and accumulating just over 400 followers, I've had a total of 42 visitors. Wooooo.


Quora referrals


But it pays to look a little deeper. On a site like Quora, I'm not necessarily looking for volume. I'm looking for quality. I want really, truly interested people to get in touch with me, follow me on Twitter, etc..


So, take another look at the numbers:


quora-tos.png


Of the top 50 referring sites for Conversation Marketing, Quora generates the third highest time-on-site. If folks are spending that much time on my site after coming from Quora, then this might just be worth it. In my own, weird scoring system, these are high quality visitors.


On the other hand, goal conversion from Quora is zero. Zilch. Nada. But it's not much of a sample size.


We'll see how Quora does. My 30-minute-per-day investment really only requires one new client per quarter to pay off.


I'll keep you posted.



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8 copywriting catastrophes and how to avoid them


I'm a creature of habit. And there are 8 stupid copywriting mistakes I make with amazing consistency. Here's how I try to deal with them:


Ever use 'form' when you meant 'from'? When you do, your computer snickers to itself and mutters something like Remember that time you cursed at me because you forgot your password? Well it's payback time, sucka! Spell check THAT!


Your spell checker won't save you. Certainly not from embarrassing stuff like this:


lick here - not exactly what they intended, I think


And, of course, truly horrendous mistakes that make a 'lick here' style typo seem like nothing.


The fix. I read most of my rough drafts backwards. Yes, you heard that right. Backwards. That makes correctly-spelled typos jump out at me. It's a trick one of my best writing mentors taught me, and it works beautifully.


Just because I know the word 'pusillanimous' doesn't mean I should use it. But I admit, I still get a little thrill out of using ten syllable word. Why use 'fix' when I can use 'ameliorate'?


Here's the thing: If I'm trying to learn about, I dunno, internet marketing, then I have enough on my mind. Keep the writing simple.


The fix. I actually use a few tools to check grade level, like this text-statistics gadget. And I keep a rubber band on my wrist. Every time I use a word with more than 4 syllables, I snap the rubber band. Ouch.


Ever read something like this?


"Dramatic Technology helps clients build value by leveraging digital assets. We use our unique skill set to integrate technology and human processes for great results."


Uh, what?


I'm terrible about this. I've written entire pages of text that could apply equally well (or poorly) to fresh fruit or bicycle frames.


The fix. Write the paragraph. Show it to someone else. Ask them what you're writing about. If you're describing a car and they say "Um, a peanut farm?" you need to rethink.


I talk a lot about the blank sheet of paper test: If you write a title tag, or a paragraph, or link text, on a blank sheet of paper, the reader needs to know what it's about.


Online, your writing gets pulled apart and re-used in search results, feed readers, etc.. So you can't rely on the fact that your headline will always be right by the photo that clarifies your meaning.


Some truly dramatic fails I've seen:


"Royals to get a taste of Angels Colon"
"Supreme Court tries sodomy"
"UN to grant Taliban amnesty"


Yikes.


The fix. Use the blank sheet of paper test. That's it.


I work for hours on a piece of marketing copy. When it's done, there's no call to action. At all. It describes a company's new service in prose that would make David Ogilvy weep from on high. Everyone reads it and swoons. But no one actually does anything.


Because I didn't ask.


The fix. I wish I knew. Right now I have a sticky note on my desktop that reads "Call to action?!!!". That takes care of it. Usually.


my sticky note


Choke. Passive voice. I could write "We build web sites". But it's so much more fun to write "Web sites are built by us".


I had a Humanities professor in college who looked at me one day and said "Lurie, if you could write in active voice, you'd save 100 trees a year."


I'm paraphrasing.


For some reason, though, I can't seem to just say [SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT]. I have to say [OBJECT] [PASSIVE VERB] [VERB] [SUBJECT]. If could add in more stuff, I probably would.


The fix. Back to the rubber band thing. SNAP.


I know, you're all snickering.


I once wrote a letter to an auto mechanic that started with "Dear Criminal". For some reason, he never called me back...


dear-dumbass.gif


The fix. I'm better now. I don't write truly angry. I wait a bit, simmer down, then write. Or I write, walk away, come back, revise, and then publish.


It's really, really hard for me to write something and not immediately publish it. The pressure to generate lots of useful, interesting stuff and get it out there is overwhelming.


But I know that, if I put in just 10 minutes of editing, I could turn a so-so article or report into a good one.


The fix. Stop using the internet. Seriously, I have no idea. I try to slow down now and then, but it feels like diminishing returns. Not smart, I know. Maybe you all can humiliate me if I do a lousy editing job on something?


The best way to avoid all of these copywriting disasters, of course, is practice.


If you write a lot, the chance that you'll leave in a horrific typo goes down.


Every time you remember to add the call to action, you improve the hardwired instinct to always include it.


And, the more you edit your own work, the better you get at it.


Any writing issues you have that I haven't listed? Bare your soul in the comments - it's good for you.



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How crawl budget works - my latest SEL column


My latest Search Engine Land column just went live. It's about Crawl Budget and how it may work. Having re-read it, though, I want to make sure I add even more qualification to what I wrote:

I talk about crawl budget a lot, but the most important part of this article, really, is 'making the most of your crawl budget'. That's what Vanessa Fox refers to as 'crawl efficiency'. If you have a huge crawl budget but 90% of it is sucked up by duplicate content and such, then you won't see much benefit.Search engines apply PageRank to individual pages, not to entire sites. However, I definitely see evidence that they look at some version of average PageRank, or domain authority, or whatever you want to call it, site-wide. That appears to impact crawl budget. There may not be a causal link - it may simply be that sites with lots of pages that all have higher PageRank get higher crawl budgets as a side effect of deep links to individual site pages.This is a very deep, geeky topic - I hope I don't ruffle any feathers too badly, but I also hope that a lot of people smarter than I will pick up the discussion, so we can all learn something.


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11 internet marketing skills you must always be learning


In spite of reading my blog, you want to go into internet marketing. Welcome to the asylum, my friend.


Time to start learning. This is a list necessary skills for an internet marketer. Warning: I do not necessarily know all these as well as I want to. I'm still learning:

Writing. I've beaten this one to death. If you can't write, don't even put the word 'marketer' in your title. DON'T. I hear you starting - "mar..." BZZZZT. Stop right there.Statistics. You don't need to be an expert statistician. But understanding a rolling average, statistical significance and confidence interval is required.SEO. Yep. Search engine optimization. This of course leads to a whole new list of stuff. That's for another blog post.PPC. Pay per click marketing. See SEO, above. Information Retrieval. I separate this from SEO and PPC because it's central to a lot of stuff you may end up doing to dig through/mine/organize data when you do everything from social media monitoring to reading your client's last 3 years of sales brochures.HTML and CSS. Please. For the love of all that's good in the universe. You can't help people market on the internet if you can't even fathom how it's all built.Design. You don't have to be a professional designer. At least I hope not - I can't design to save my life. But you should understand some basic principles: The Golden Ratio, typography, use of color, how to do a layout using a grid. Don't be a native, but at least speak the language.Social media. Shudder. It pains me to use this stupid phrase. Still, you need to understand how people connect online. It's a (sarcasm here) teeny little aspect of online marketing (end sarcasm). Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and a bunch of others.Math. Quick: What's .1 X $10,000? If you answered $100, then I've interviewed you before. Fail.Business sense. I can't easily categorize this. But you need to understand what makes a business 'tick'. Little stuff, like earning more money than you spend, can really make a difference.Diplomacy. Yeaaahhhhhhhhh I'm still working on this one. Learn to advocate, strongly, for controversial points that you know for certain are critical to your client. Without alienating every single person in the room. 'Diplomacy' is the ability to tell people they're totally wrong, and make them smile at the same time.comments (10) | trackbacks (0) | permalink


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Internet marketing in under 300 words


Today, you get to see the ugly, stench-ridden underbelly of my writing process. I actually recorded myself typing this blog post. While I removed a few typos that would've gotten me rated NSFW, the rest is pretty much straight-up:


And, in plain old text, in case you don't want the video version:


There are no tricks to internet marketing.


No secret methods.


It's about connecting with an audience.


It's about building a relationship that lasts.


Just for a second:
Forget "Social Media"
Forget search engines
Forget the internet


Focus on marketing.
Focus. On. Marketing.


...


Great marketing requires that you


1. SHOW UP:
Speak where you'll be heard
= Be found.


2. COMMUNICATE:
Favor 'clear'
Favor 'simple'
= Be understood.


3. CONNECT:
Respond to questions
Help people out
= Please them.


Every person who finds you is a potential customer.
Every person who understands you is a potential salesperson.
Every person you please joins your marketing team.


...


K, you can think about the internet again.


The internet makes marketing easier:


Search engines and social networks help you show up.
The whole web gives you a chance to communicate clearly.
Social media helps you connect with customers.


But it's still marketing:


Show up.
Communicate.
Connect.


I know what you're saying.


There's no trick.


There's no 'method'.


Does this really work?


You tell me:


You've now spent 30 seconds reading plain text.


On a screen.


There's no music.


There's no dancing raisins or speeding cars.


No tricks.


It's just marketing.
Delivered using the internet.


Tricky, huh?


You should try it.



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