SEO For Real

Post about the value of tracking your AdSense earnings down to the page and keyword level.

I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve been asked about the gent on my consulting contact image on my site.
The image is a not so subtle homage to the monkey looking for a banana in SG’s “Big Red Fez”. It’s a book I think anyone who does websites should read anytime several times. […]



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Stock people on a website decreases your credibility. No, I haven’t done extensive studies on this, but I can spot stock photos of people from a mile off, and sites with it are much less likely to get my dollar than a site with a REAL picture of REAL people on it. Yes, […]



[[ I didn’t want douchebags stealing ALL of my content so this is a content summary only. Visit my website www.stuntdubl.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Marketing Sherpa published a very interesting little book called the Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2006 that contains some interesting information on eye-tracking studies. One of the nice little tidbits contained therein is a study showing that people’s e…

The effectiveness of a marketing mechanism is going to be inversely proportional to the volume of spam generated and marketed to the same demographic using that same mechanism. If a mechanism is saturated with spam you need to do things that add credibility or make your spam look less spamlike than the bulk of generated spam. As people kill the effectiveness of a medium or mechanism due to mass spam generation they may be setting up a new birth.

Post paralleling the development of trust measures between organic search and paid search.

I’m giving Feedburner a whirl, as it always seems like there is some cool functionality with it. I’m not sure if I got it all right or not yet, so if you see anything weird, please let me know.
Thanks to Michael for his tip about the feedburner wordpress plugin.
The new feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stuntdubl in […]



[[ I didn’t want douchebags stealing ALL of my content so this is a content summary only. Visit my website www.stuntdubl.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Post about being less than impressed with Yahoo! Publisher network’s regional ad targeting.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs offers a free tool for determining if a search query or web page is informational or commercial in nature. Yahoo! Mindset alters search results based on your level of interest in informational or commercial results.

Post about trying to avoid leaving common visual or algorithmic search spam footprints on your site.

Article about how estabilishing nearly automated baselines makes it easy to grow your business with minimal stress.

There is a new free keyword ranking tool which checks rankings on many Google data centers, while also showing cache date, PageRank, number of indexed pages, and link data from Yahoo! and MSN.

I’ve been using Constant Contact for my newsletter mailing list for quite a while, but unfortunately I need to find another service to handle it… here’s why:
CC allows you to create nice HTML emails, they have a variety of templates, it’s easy to e…

Those of you who know me, know that I like to try different things when it comes to marketing. I am offering a free SEO training class this Tuesday from 7pm-8pm US Central time. Space is limited. I don’t know if it will fill up or not, but if you wan…

I see powerful things in Digg, Slashdot, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Wikipedia, forums of all types, and other sites that attract people because of a common interest or activity.  These sites are “communities” of visitors or authors.  These sites drive massive traffic in a short blast or massive traffic that is cumulative over time.My guess is that these highly popular websites will grow in number - and these activities will start cutting into search volume simply because they consume a person’s time spent online.  Furthermore, at the present time, how many people now go to Wikipedia instead of searching, how many go to forums and ask a question rather than …

Too many items from early this week and last last week are critical reading. Make sure you take notice of these, as a few have a strong effect on the industry:

Wired exposes NSA wiretapping on the Internet Backbone at AT&T and they wrote an excellent piece on why they released the report.
Patrick Gavin and his team put together a spiffy little link price calculator. There’s even a nice little easter egg for SEOmoz.
…

The astute observer will have noticed that I’ve been rather absent lately on the boards.The reason why is rather simple - I have Hodgkin’s Disease (for the 3rd time) and I’m getting an alogeneaic transplant.  That simply means I’ve received the stem cells from my brother.Seems there was a 1 in 250,000,000 shot that he’d be a perfect match (10/10 markers) and he was Anyhow, bear with me as I go philosophical for a moment…While I was taking a few rounds of chemotherapy last week to prepare for the transplant, I was thinking about my home office.  I’ve got a couple of monitors on a desk sitting right by the window and small…

Any time someone feels compelled to ask for help in an SEO forum, there are two major red flags which tell me they have been reading way too many SEO forum posts: they tell people what their PR is and how many backlinks they have.  If it were really that simple, you wouldn’t be asking for help in an SEO forum.  And while you’re reading SEO forums, why haven’t you picked up on the fact that the people asking for help aren’t benefitting from that PR and backlinkage?
I’ve often said that everyone needs links.  It wouldn’t be the World Wide Web without the links.  But when you get your 1,000th link and you’re still unhappy, why on Earth are you going out for that 1…

I’m often asked what kind of clients we typically work with and, more rarely, the client we’d love to work with. Here’s the criteria I see as best suited to a “dream job” in the SEO business:

The project is in an industry that isn’t overrun with competition - maybe they make a product or provide a service no one else can offer or they’re a direct producer of a good that’s far and away superior to everyone else’s.
The people running the business are invested in the success of their Internet venture - they’re willing to commit time, energy, financial resources and personnel to the task.
Long term ROI is seen as more important than q…

I have had some problems with hosts lately so a couple months ago I signed up with Alertra.
I give Alertra the URL of a tiny image and they have a server request that image every five minutes.  If they get a failure they have a couple other servers located somewhere else in the world (honest - some of these are on other continents) request the file.  If these distant servers get a failure then Alertra knows that your server has the problem and its not some connection down on the web somewhere.
Alertra then sends email messages to addresses you supply so you can call up your host and tell …

I chatted with a friend in the industry this evening who signed up a consulting client several months ago. My friend has been in touch with the client several times about starting the work, but apart from a couple general questions, they’ve never used the consulting time they purchased. I was immensely curious about the details and luckily, my friend could share a few specifics.
The consulting rate is above $300/hr and they’re buying in excess of 10 hours a month (relatively common in the industry). But, my friend has a suspicion about why they client isn’t using their time, yet still wants to continue the contract. Her theory is that the client only purchased her time t…

I recently dug up this article from last summer in BusinessWeek online. Tagline creation isn’t something we’re experts in, but when you work with a lot of startup web properties or create your own businesses online, you’re bound to need one and hiring an agency at $50,000+ isn’t always a wise way to spend your initial capital. From the article:

Top 10 Taglines1. “Got milk?” (1993, California Milk Processor Board)2. “Don’t leave home without it” (1975, American Express, AXP)3. “Just…

Spotrunner, a mashup between an ad agency and a retailer of TV advertising time, apparently offers the ability to run 30-second commercials on television stations around the country on channels likes ABC, FOX, Discovery, MTV and many more (full list here). I’m dying to try them out:

The experiment that would be most interesting to me would be to drive search traffic. If you could come up with a unique name and play the Pontiac angle (as…

People trying to comment spam on my blog.
…..Can’t you comment spammers work harder to identify blogs that aren’t being used to spam on instead of active blogs? Ya know, I actually read every comment that is posted (or tries to get posted).
If someone really wants a link, I’ve made it pretty easy to give you […]

Text Link Ads just released their Text Link Ads Calculator.
It uses Alexa, backlinks, theme, number of links to be sold, sitewide or single page and location of the link in the calculation.
Announcement and discussion at their Link Building Blog.
I certainly like it, do you?
Will you use it?