Labels: SEO

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• Ross Dunn writes about Optimizing AJAX for Rankings
• Patricia Hursh at SearchEngineLand discusses Solving B-to-B Marketers' Problems
• Mobile SEO as a Part of B2B Online Marketing - ASK Enquiro
• Beware Of Google AdWords Account Hacks via Computer Exploit
• How Should Web Analysts Spend Their Day? Occam's Razor
• Which blogs have the most feed subscribers - Only 583K more to catch Engadget
• Web Metrics Guru - WEB HISTORY - Google has collected 2 YEARS of each person's CLICKSTREAM
• Search Engine Shoot-Out at PC World

Labels: Must Reads

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We tested a total of 55 services in six categories: general (text info), video, mobile/local, news, images, and blogs. We conducted our tests over three weeks. We used ten terms in each category. For general text-information searches, for instance, our categories included technology, pop culture, research/academic topics, books, and travel/shopping

Labels: Industry News

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Labels: Web Analytics

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Labels: Industry News

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• Can you talk a little bit about the success of the Fundamentals of Search Marketing?
• Who is the the target market for the advanced SEO Classes?
• What are the major changes from the Fundamentals of Search Marketing?
• What can a student in the advanced course expect to get out of the class? Are the ready for a full time search marketing position?
• Do you have any thoughts of creating anymore category specific tracks, ie: Web Analytics, Social Media, etc...?
• In what areas can the SEMPO Institute improve?

If you are interested in finding out more about the advanced courses visit: http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/training/

Also, checkout these screenshots of the interface for the advanced courses as well as this powerpoint presentation which discusses the courses in more detail.

Labels: Industry News, Podcast

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• FaceBook's most intuitive photo upload tool, in seconds I was able to upload an album containing pictures from my recent Chicago Trip.
• The ease at which you can find and add contacts by browsing through your friends' lists
• News Feed Management, get as much or as little updates from the topics that you choose. I really like the innovative 'slider' interface too.
• The 'Posted Items' is a very cool feature. Someone with an extensive friends list could really capitalize on traffic by posting a useful link (let the viral marketing flood gates open)
• Wall Posts - A quick way to see what a friend is up to. FaceBook instantly sends an email update when someone posts on your wall.

If you are interested in connecting with me, here is my profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=577260359

Labels: SEM

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• Internal Search - Ideally it should be near the top of the page because you want to enhance visitor engagement with your blog by making it easy to find more information. Try it in different locations near the top as well with a variety of text-box/submit button colors. Test the results by measuring the number of searches and the overall quality of the keywords.
  
• Feed Subscription - Test different combinations of feed chicklets, I personally use 6 different chicklets plus an optional email subscription option (all above the fold). Top Rank Blog offers a simple way to create feed button variations. FeedBurner's stats are an excellent method for getting a better understanding of your subscribers.
  
• Header - I mention this because it can dictate the layout of the rest of the page. For instance if your blog's header is massive graphic, it can potentially push much of the important items below the fold. However if your header is lost within the entire page it becomes difficult to promote your brand to visitors. My header is now 50% of it's original height and next I plan on reducing its width to be able to test ad/key link placements.

Labels: Blogging, Web Analytics

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Labels: Must Reads

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• Google-owned sites accounted for 65 percent of total revenue, or $2.73 billion, with partner sites representing 34 percent of revenue, or $1.45 billion. Partner sites refer to Google’s AdSense program.
• International revenue was $2.03 billion, or 48 percent of revenue. Google benefited from a currency exchange bump and noted that if exchange rates were constant from the second quarter to the third quarter its international revenue would have been $24 million less. Google’s United Kingdom revenue totaled $661 million.
• Operating expenses in the third quarter as a percentage of revenue were down a bit to 30 percent of revenue from 31 percent in the second quarter. In absolute terms, Google’s operating expenses were $1.25 billion, up from $1.21 billion in the second quarter.
• Google spent $553 million in capital expenditures in the third quarter. Most of that was IT spending.
• The company had $13.1 billion in cash as of Sept. 30 and 15,916 employees, up from 13,786 employees as of June 30.

How Google Makes Money: Q4 2007

Labels: Google

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Labels: Industry News

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"Our Web analytics program," he explained, "was developed from the standpoint of someone trying to understand their Web site's performance, whether that be a marketer or an IT person. But our Full Analytics program doesn't show all of those reports. We have tailored the display to suit the specific needs of search engine marketers."

Apodaca just hinted at the first major difference between Yahoo's Full Analytics offering and Google Analytics: Yahoo isn't giving search engine marketers information it deems unnecessary to their online advertising mission.

Labels: Google, Yahoo

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Labels: Industry News

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To be on the list you would have needed to have 85 Unique Blogs to link to you in the last six months. That is twice as many as you would have needed to be on the list in January 2007. It keep getting tough in the blogosphere!

Labels: Industry News

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The market share of visits to Photobucket was up 3.9% on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 versus an average of the previous 4 Wednesdays. As I wrote last week, Photobucket received 57% of its upstream traffic from MySpace in March 2007. The table below shows the Photography sites in MySpace's downstream in March 2007, and Photobucket accounted for 73% of Photography category visits leaving MySpace (1.60/2.19) Photobucket is by far the most dominant photo website for MySpace users. (Note: this data counts actual visits to the photo websites, not views of the websites' hosted content within MySpace.)

Labels: Industry News

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It's Sunday and I know this is a tad late however there were still some excellent posts/articles worth checking out from last week:

• ASK Enquiro: Social Marketing for Business to Business (B2B) Marketers
  
• Analyzing The Major Shopping Search Services (MSN, Yahoo and Google)
  
• Google pays $3.1 billion for DoubleClick - Another big blow to Microsoft
  
• Browser Wars Spring 2007 - Firefox vs. Internet Explorer at SEO Space
  
• Stephane Hamel talks about The Attention process
  
• Ask working on New Algorithm - Traffick
  
• StepForth Blog: XML Sitemap Submission Just Got a Little Bit Easier
  
• SES New York Day 2 Videos - Excellent coverage of SES NY by Lee Odden

Labels: Must Reads

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FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services.

Labels: Industry News

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Kraig Swensrud is the Sr. Director of Marketing Products at Salesforce.com. Recently he developed 7 best practices to help marketers adapt to "Marketing in the Google Era." I was very fortunate in being able to talk to Kraig about his best practices, listen to the podcast here:


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Here is the overview of my questions/topics during the converation with Kraig Swensrud:

I started by asking Kraig's motivation's for developing these best practices

1) Invest in your web properties: Are you referring to leveraging your business's website to its full potential through the understanding of what's happening on it?

2) The second tip is to Invest in Search Marketing and being in this Industry makes it a no brainer for me, yet not everyone takes advantage of it.

3) Tip 3 is to Make your Message Relevant. I can't stress the importance of this practice with personalization in the forefront.

4) Create Landing Pages for Each Program is the next practice. Matching content to the intent of the user will definitely lead to stronger conversion rates.

5) Tip 5 is to Measure Everything, in Real Time. Can you explain the advantage of measuring real time versus measure yesterday's data?

6) Use the Web for PR is tip 6 and in your PDF you discuss the power of Blogging and Syndication.

7) The Final tip is to engage your community and in a consumer driven market this concept becomes very important.

Here is the link to Kraig's webinar on the 7 best practices: Webinar Slides

Also see the Sales Force Marketing Blog

Labels: Industry News, Interviews, Podcast

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My Yahoo Home Page (Canadian Version) or Google's Personalized Home Page, what do you prefer? Personally (no pun intended), I can think of 5 reasons I prefer Google's version over Yahoo's:

1. Google Themes are much cooler, although Yahoo has 5 times more themes, they appear somewhat old and so 3 years ago. I also like how themes in Google change throughout the day and mimic your local time settings.
   
2. On my personal Yahoo home page is a massive banner, the only advertisement I see on my Google Personalized Home Page is a small text ad in the page the footer: "New to Google Checkout? Sign up and get $10 for your next purchase."
   
3. Managing content in Google is as smooth as silk, simple content management options with the ability to drag and drop content blocks; the tabbed content is also a great addition.
   
4. The process of adding additional content is also a more pleasant experience in Google. I like the layout of the content items as well as the feature which displays the "I am feeling lucky" content based on an inputted keyword.
   
5. Google includes their regular search features such as: Web, Image, Video, News, etc...very effectively, whereas these items can easily be lost in My Yahoo!

That concludes my thoughts, I hope to continue this series of comparing similar services between Google, Yahoo and MSN in future posts.

Labels: Google, Yahoo

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Labels: Google, MSN, Yahoo

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After 2.5 weeks of testing, the results showed that in each of the 3 segments – Students, Parents and Teachers – the Enquiro modified page had better conversion rates. In the student segment the Enquiro Page conversion rate nearly doubled. In the parent segment the Enquiro page had 8 times more conversions. In the teacher segment the Enquiro page had a 26.8% increase in the number of conversions.

Labels: Web Analytics

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The Google Analytics Setup Guide is geared towards small businesses who can’t afford hefty professional service fees but understand the impact that a successful web analytics initiative can have,” said Dave Winslow, President of EpikOne, Inc. “The guide would also benefit businesses who don’t have the technical staff to configure Google Analytics themselves, but are competent enough to do so given the right resources.”

Labels: Web Analytics

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• You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example.
• You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS.
• The service is fully automated, so it doesn’t rely on human operators.
• It connects you directly to the business, free of charge. However, your telephone company may apply regular charges for making a phone call or receiving an SMS.

Labels: Industry News

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↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Another excellent feature they've added is the ability to track clickthroughs from your headline animator:

As you may recall, FeedBurner unveiled engagement metrics back in Update 3 of this series when we introduced Headline Animator "Views." Today, we add "Clicks" to the mix, another way to measure the impact your content is having once it's "out there" in the "world". (Note: To activate clickthrough tracking on existing Headline Animators, you need to grab the new HTML code or re-add your Animator to your blog if you use a service that supports blog "widgets", like Blogger or TypePad. Return to your feed's Publicize tab and repeat the "Add to" process for your publishing platform.)

Labels: Industry News

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Labels: Web Analytics

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Labels: Must Reads

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HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.

HitTail looks at what keywords have been successful for you in the past and compiles a list of suggested keywords for future success. I tried it out on a few posts, not writing posts for HitTail, but rather specifically wording them to match the suggestion (good SEO, in my mind), and it worked out perfectly. I wound up with a weirdly worded title, but a new #1 search referral that is more than double my #2 (about 125% higher). You cant ask for better results than that.

Labels: SEM

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Labels: Blogging, Must Reads

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ClickTracks Web Analytics will debut ClickTracks Pro SMB, priced at $2,995, an affordable version of ClickTracks Pro that features click fraud reporting, at Booth #1504 at Search Engine Strategies New York. Also, ClickTracks Founder and CEO John Marshall will speak at the Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues panel on Thursday, April 12th as part of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. The panel begins at 4PM.

New Pricing Continues to Embrace Small-Medium-Sized Businesses

Up until recently, the Click Fraud report was only available in ClickTracks Pro ($9,344). But ClickTracks is loyal to the market segment that helped them become the web analytics legend they are today. "We know that small- and medium-sized businesses have been ClickTracks' biggest fans," John said. "As thanks, we've created a version of ClickTracks--ClickTracks Pro SMB--that has everything that these businesses need, including click fraud reporting, for only $2,995. We're effectively putting some of our most powerful tools well within reach of the average small shop."

Visit www.clicktracks.com/comparison.php to compare ClickTracks products.

Labels: Industry News, Web Analytics

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Labels: Industry News, Interviews

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