Panda Everflux

After Two Years, Google has announced that they will be integrating the Panda Update into the algorithm and therefore will not be announcing Panda Updates anymore. According to Search Marketer Barry Schwartz, refreshes will be less severe and noticeable to SEO’s. The other interesting tid-bit is that the updates pushes will be real-time and not manual, my guess is that will also make them harder to pin down.

Bing To Offer Authorship

This has definitely been the big news in Webmaster World over the last couple of days! It appears that bing is is now showing image thumbnails of authors pictures next to snippets!

In a later article on Search Engine Land , it was posited that these are not really author images but rather ‘subject’ images, which means that the referent is not something that an author wrote but if a given piece of content is about a subject, such as wikipedia article, the image will appear next to the snippet. I was not able to find any information on what the official word from bing is, but this is definitely a topic I’m going to be following

Help Documentation for Hacked Sites

Google has released a fairly robust and informative help section for hacked sites. It has lots of useful content and videos for hacked sites, with all the information separated in order of steps to hack recovery. Definitely worth bookmarking, just in case your site falls victim to hackers.

Enhanced Campaigns

Unless you have been living under an SEM rock, I am sure you have heard of and researched this big Adwords change. The reaction to the change ranged from exictement to apathetic, meaning did not change any anything, to frustration at devices handling. Here are some great articles covering enhanced campaigns:

• Should You Upgrade To Adwords Enhanced Campaigns
• Adwords Enhanced Campaigns: New Campaign Checklist
• How Adwords Enhanced Campaigns Can be Used To Promote Your Mobile App
• Webmaster World Thread

Social Media News

LOT’s of news in social media marketing this month. Here are some of the big stories I have been following:

Pinterest Releases Analytics

For all of you data Nerds, Pinterest is finally going to provide you with analytics. YAY! You will now have insights into how people are interacting with pings that originate on your site. One way that this can be used is as a great engagement metric for blogs and infographics, which in conjunction with other metrics will definitely be sure to prove useful over time. According to the article on reuters on the topic, this will lay the groundwork for monetization of pinterest.

Twitter Updates AdCenter

The big scoop here is that twitter has made several upgrades to its ad center based on customer demand. Changes include updates to Twitter Analytics, that include cool new features for campaign reporting. Now, no matter how your campaign is set up, you as the advertiser will have a very clear understanding of how tvarious audience segments engage with a promoted tweet based on a number dimensions including gender, location, interest, and device. Very cool!

Coffee Break Reads

• SimCity’s Social Media Crisis [ Case Study]
• Twitter Celebrates 7th Birthday With Greatest-Hits Video
• What if John Lennon’s Imagine Came True?
• Major China Websites Plan Blackout To Mark Earth Hour
• New Map Made of First Trillionth of a Trillionth of a Second After Big Bang
• Google Keep, An Overdue Answer To Evernote Arrives
• Microsoft Releases Report On Law Enforcement Requests
• Body Language Tips For Women: How to Look As Powerful As You Feel
• How Barack Obama Gets Things Done productivity article

In PPC advertising, conducting negative keyword research and implementing the results reduces the number of unwanted visitors and improves the return on your ad spend. Here’s how it works in principle, and some screenshots and a case study of achievable results.

One of the fastest ways to conduct negative keyword research is by using AdWords stats

Adwords Statistics

Negative keywords work to tell Google which keyword variations you do not want your PPC ads to show for. For example if you are selling a product such as “dog collars”, you may want to add negative keywords such as “free” and or “cheap”. By adding these kinds of negative keywords you can limit the amount of people that will see your ads that are predisposed to wanting cheap or free products.
It doesn’t matter whether using broad, modify-broad or phrase match keyword bidding, it is important that you determine which keyword phrases are causing you clicks and impressions that you do not want. The best way to sources information is in your ad words interface. First select the campaign then click the dimensions tab in the navigation bar of the ad words interface.

Once you’re in the “dimensions” area select “view:” and scroll down select “search terms”. The list provided will show you all the keyword phrases that have triggered ads over a given period of time. (You can adjust in the top right-hand corner of the adwords interface the time period in which you want to see what keyword phrases trigger your ads.)

The keyword phrase data can be quite compelling. The biggest cause that will give you unwanted visitors and impressions is “broad match”. Once you have gone through the “search terms” list and have selected and identified the keywords that are giving you unwanted impressions and clicks it is time to add these negative keywords to your campaign.

To add negative keywords to your campaign first you need to select the campaign and select the “keywords” tab. At the bottom of this page you will see a hyperlink “negative keywords”. This is where you can add the negative keywords to help get rid of unwanted impressions and clicks.

Negative keyword research using Google’s own search

By typing in your core keyword phrases Google will automatically show some of the most popular keyword phrases related to your search query. From here we can identify potential negative keywords we should incorporate into our campaign.

If we were in the business of selling dog collars, but did not have the ability to provide names on our dog collars, adding negative keyword phrases that would segment people out that are searching for dog collars with a name on them would help reduce our ad spend on a market segment we cannot cater for.

Real Results Of Negative Keywords

We’ve been working with a business for 18 months. They are in the health product industry. When we completed a campaign audit we noticed that they were not using any negative keywords.

When we took over the account management the CTR was 0.97%, which was increased exceptionally quickly to 1.33% due to negative keywords. But that is not where the fun begins. Their conversion rate went from 1.12% to 1.53%!

We got rid of traffic that was looking for information opposed to being interested in purchasing the product.
The use of negative keywords was also able to limit the amount of low cost based visitors. The client’s product is on the expensive side and by limiting amount cheap skate visitors that came to site were able to boost the conversion rate further.

Overall the use of the negative keywords has on its own helped increase the ROI of the PPC campaign. By using negative keywords you are able to target your ideal customers more specifically. I cannot recommend using them enough in your PPC campaigns.

I eventually came across a number of posts on SEOmoz and Point Blank SEO touting a method known as broken link building. For those who don’t know what BLB is yet, it is discovering pages that have a high number of links pointing to them but have since been taken down, creating a page that is similar to the broken one, then emailing the original “linkers” telling them about their broken link and asking them to link to the new version on your site. Unlike article spinning and low-quality guest posts, broken link building is actually good for the future of the Web because it is cleaning up the broken links and making the user experience more satisfying. I have heard that something like 16% of links on the Internet break each year.

I am currently performing SEO work for my father’s business, which is in a tough niche to acquire natural links. I had a few content ideas for his website that didn’t really pan out, so I was stuck with ways to acquire real high-quality links for his business website. I eventually found an article from the early 2000’s that had been down since 2006, according to the Wayback Archives. This page had built up a number of links and authority before it was taken down, the content was related to his business, so I rewrote the article (the original author gave permission in his article that anyone could do this) and put it up on his site.

The next day I started emailing all the webmasters who had linked to the original article long ago. I wasn’t extremely confident; it looked like many of these pages were from 1999 and hadn’t been touched in over a decade. But I was just hoping for one very quality link – that surely could be attainable, right?

According to Open Site Explorer stats, the number one page linking to the original article was a PR5 .edu page from a very well respected institution. The page authority was 69 and the domain authority was a 92, so I put a lot of time into constructing an email to that webmaster, knowing very well how much it could pay off.

Click the image to see Brian’s email full size:

That same day I checked my inbox and saw that the person had responded. I quickly clicked it and gazed at the screen, “Thanks for your email, we have updated our page with the new link.” Score!

My father’s business website now has an incredibly valuable link pointing to it, search traffic went up immediately, and I was hooked on broken link building. If you are sick of sending out boring guest posts that probably give you a very low ROI, I cannot recommend broken link building enough. With broken pages all over the Internet, there will never be a shortage of opportunities to re-create some content for your site and capture those great links.

Author: Brian Klemm is the President of Northbound Digital, an SEO and inbound marketing firm in Chicago Lakeview specializing in helping small businesses in the area acquire more traffic and revenue through increased search traffic. Follow on Twitter @NorthbndDigital.”

Related posts:

Where I (Gab, the guy behind SEO ROI) invented this idea 5 years ago: Cloning Expired Sites
Broken Link Building – A Case Study
Broken Link Building Just Got Stupidly Easy
The Biggest Broken Link Building Opp In A Decade

1. UDesign Theme:

UDesign is among the most user-friendly templates WordPress offers. Anything can be changed and adapted in order to develop a website ideal for their tastes. There are 11 customizable widgets, home page sliders, and a variety of forms you can use. This is, in short, the easiest template to use in order to get a professional-looking, custom made website in as little time possible.

The UDesign theme can be found on ThemeForest.net where they boast that it is their number one seller.

It is liked for its ease of use and it was designed with SEO in mind so you can limit the amount of SEO plugins you need to install. The use of the jQuery in its development provides great slide features for video and presentations. It comes with the use of over 500 fonts and different backgrounds so the customization capabilities are almost endless.

2. Enfinity Theme:

Enfinity is a powerful WordPress theme designed to be compatible with several ecommerce plugins such as WooCommerce, widgets such as price table generators, menus, and contact lists, and an amazing amount of customizability. Every option you could possibly want is present, and potentially some you were not aware that you wanted.

One noted downside of Enfinity is that the power and robustness comes at a cost – you may see some performance problems on lower-end servers.

Given the cost of the theme and its intended clientele, this should not be an issue when it comes to putting this powerful and elegant theme to work. The Enfinity theme is a definite option for a business looking to expand their website’s capabilities and appearance. You can find this theme over at Pixadelic Themes .

3. Modernize

Modernize delivers a broad range of features, including a Page Builder and an unlimited sidebar; there are virtually an unlimited number of colors and layouts you can choose from when it comes time to start setting things up.

There are also widgets designed for consumers to share the site via social media, hundreds of fonts to choose from and three image sliders. What better way to harness the creative genius within your company than to design an Internet site for your business which is sleek, chic and modern? Themeforest Themes also sell the regular and extended usage right for the Modernize theme . This theme displays well across multiple screen resolutions, which is ever more important these days with the array of devices available.

In short, while there are many options on the Internet market today for marketing WordPress themes, UDesign, Enfinity and Modernize are three of the best to date. They are user-friendly, highly creative, and allow businesses to showcase their business’ marketing potential with just a few simple mouse clicks. All of these websites allow designers to plug in to the available options with very little issue, and have widgets available which allow you to tap into the power of not only the Internet, but of social media as well.

This is a guest post by my friends at Who Is Hosting This .

If you spend any time online in the tech blogosphere, you will have seen ads for free website building service Wix.com. One of their most successful ads is the following:

Wix ad featuring 4 circles

As you can see, they’ve got their message simplified, and contained in the first 3 bubbles or circles.

So too this Forex ad:

Forex ad 4 circles

What’s the difference between the two ads, though?

Notice the different fonts used by Wix within each bubble? That’s missing in the latter ad.

You probably can’t read the second ad, but it’s call to action reads “start now,” while Wix’s ad says “Click here.”

I don’t have backend stats for proof, but I suspect that Wix’s ad is doing better for them than the Forex ad is doing.

Why? Wix’s ad is louder – the different fonts increase contrast and are more likely to draw eyeballs and clicks – and the ad is less risky – click here vs start now.

This exemplifies the risks in copying others’ tactics. We can miss details.

Shoemoney has discussed how people from affiliate networks he worked with essentially duplicated his campaigns and only made 50% as much. He explained that the difference was that he had different layers of ad targeting that his copycats didn’t know of.

On the other hand, it’s worth adapting from others’ tactics – or far better, their strategies.

The forex company probably saw, as I did, that Wix were circulating that ad far and wide and realized that the circles probably contrast strongly with traditional square and rectangular banner ads we see around. In itself, it’s a smart observation and worth testing.

Similarly, I’d encourage everyone with a homepage slider to copy Unbounce:

Unbounce does slider well – no auto scrolling between slides, each slide’s description is clear

Their homepage slider is excellent.

First, it doesn’t move to the next slide unless you click. Such movement is annoying and gets in visitors’ way.

Second, each slide is clearly labeled, instead of how most sliders label each slide with a series of circles, squares or numbers that have no relation to the content on the slide they represent.

More broadly though, one can do even better by adapting strategies that work for others.

For instance, in association with Internet Marketing Ninjas, I’m giving away free copies of my new book, Blog Design for ROI. I got the idea from a free sticker campaign here in Israel that went viral. The big idea is to give away something physical. The execution is to give away a book, marketing on Problogger.net etc.

Strategies are different from tactics, and it’s important to explain the difference.

Strategies are high-level ideas. Like, we’re going to challenge the competition in their home market. Tactics are the execution of the strategy – how are you going to beat them in their own home?

Sometimes, particular tactics are very relevant to a given strategy, but not others. That’s why it’s easier, and likelier to lead to success, to copy strategies instead of tactics.

The ads that don’t interest me according to my politics, I close with the close button (little x in the upper right). Facebook then asks why I hid the ad, and I then check the radio box that says they’re contrary to my views. I did this for 3-4 politicians in a row from the exact same party… and was surprised when the minimized ad was replaced by another for a different politician from the same party.

It’s obvious then that Facebook doesn’t categorize ads as reflecting a certain type of content, which would allow them to understand the responses they get.

It’s like using a sex-oriented pickup line at a bar, and getting a series of women to throw their drinks in your face. You then ask why, they tell you because it’s sleazy… but you just keep up the sleaze.

Why ask if you won’t learn?

Today I saw another ad from a different party, but with views similar to those I’d previously blocked. Odd. In fairness, the other ads seem to be gone, so perhaps the system just takes a while to update. That is surprising though, since Facebook’s content and ads are real-time systems.

As you can imagine, the warning about politically incorrect and satirical content is not what people visiting the page come for – they come for the list of songs.

Once you click I accept – the URL doesn’t change, but you instantly get a content change:

This is an excellent implementation of a tactic I shared a long time ago, the splash page double homepage technique.

What’s especially impressive about Wikia’s implementation is that they hid the content, instead of just having a lightbox effect where the background is just grayed over but still visible. And of course there’s no second pageload, which is great for SEO. Indeed – I found Wikia’s article ranking in Google search.

There is of course a measure of irony in all this since Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, whose Wikipedia nofollows links and generally portrays a negative image of blackhat/grayhat SEO, of which this is an example.

Like this post? Get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book.

What is it? Optin Skin gives you some optin form templates (aka skins) and helps you split test them.

You can customize the skins with your choice of colors, text, font and a couple of other features. One that is interesting, but I’ve yet to try, is the fade-in option which will fade in the form when the visitor gets to the location on the page (ex.: end of post) where it’s meant to appear.

I bought the plugin a while ago but didn’t immediately implement as I wanted to try the form I had originally designed for my sidebar as part of my new theme. In sum, that form performed dismally, so I’m now trying Optin Skin.

Pros of OptinSkin

1. The whole process of downloading, installing and especially implementing was really quick, which I’m grateful for.

2. The ease of use is nice – I picked my default skin, customized it to have yellow colors so as to better contrast with my theme and draw attention, and then used the plugin’s widget to add it into my sidebar. I’ll hopefully report back when I have data on how well the new forms perform.

3. Additionally, getting going with split testing was just a question of checking the box that asks if you want to split test a form. Much appreciated in contrast to the hassles required by systems like Google Website Optimizer now aka Content Experiments.

That’s the upside.

Cons of OptinSkin

— On the downside, I’d want more features…

I am dissapointed that the skin I chose doesn’t allow me to add a link or phrase describing my privacy policy, which is an industry best practice for increasing conversion. Similarly, you can’t add an image of your eBook cover to all the skins (there is one , which limits your customization ability. I suppose I’m asking for power-user features though.

+ The truth is that if you dig around the admin area of the plugin, you find that there are other skins to add. In their place, I’d install all the skins for you by default, instead of requiring the extra step, but perhaps they thought to save you server space.

And you find that there are actually a few different ebook cover forms, as well as possibilities to use a risk reduction type phrase like a privacy policy.

–Unfortunately, as you can see in the above preview, the previews don’t work perfectly, and make you worry that you’re going to look stupid when you install the form. As it turns out, it’s just that their preview functionality has some layout problems, but in reality (as you can see in my sidebar), things work as they should.

Summary of My Review of Optin Skin:

Easy to use, fast to implement, built-in split testing with just a couple of clicks makes life eaaaasy for marketers.

Limited customizability place boundaries on your creativity (and potentially conversion rate) and buggy previews make you nervous, requiring extra quality assurance time. It’s easily made up for by the fast setup process though.

A sweet highlight of the interview: Formerly Google-only internal data is being made available via the new NetComber tool. It combines lots of data points to try and show networks of sites – something Google obviously uses to fight Blackhats. I had a try on the tool and while some of the results are interesting, others are underwhelming and make you wonder how accurate the results are… though there’s still self-doubt if it’s not your own incredulity that’s at fault. I.e. That the tool is right and your skepticism is wrong. Should be interesting to see how it evolves and if/when SEOmoz buy it.

If you’re not familiar with broken link building, it’s essentially a variant on cloning (aka resurrecting) old sites from the dead, which I introduced 4 years ago. You can read a broken link building case study for details on how well it works.

Essentially it automates all the research, and I quote:

• We run 280 unique search queries that yield
• ~28,000 linking pages that yield
• ~300,000 pages for status checking
• ~250 dead pages and sites ordered by # of inbound domains
• Filtered down to the strongest broken link building opportunities…
• That you can sort by link popularity and relevance!

Did I say all the research? Perhaps I should say, almost all the research. I recently wrote about a sneaky little tactic to speed up discovery of which webmaster emails were still working or not, for use after finding your broken link building prospects. And then my looooongtime reader Liam Delahunty told me he had a email testing tool as part of his Online Sales suitethat automated that end of the process, which I shared with you here.

Summary: If you want premium links … you want those two tools. They’ll set you back about $100 total/month, but then you hardly need any other tools imho.

Check it out: State of Search 2012.

Stacey’s Bio: I have seven years experience as a web analytics professional, providing analytics solutions for Microsoft Office, MSN Entertainment, T-Mobile, HomeAway, and Les Schwab. My goal as a web analyst is to identify the story within the data.

When I notice a dramatic change in analytics data I first take a look at the analytics tagging to make sure that the change wasn’t caused by a tracking issue.

I use a HTTP tool to look at the analytics tagging passing with the page load or link click. Fiddler and Charles are two free HTTP tools; HTTP Watch has a free version and paid version.

What I’m looking for with the HTTP tool is that the analytics image gif that passes the analytics variables to the analytics tool is present on the page or link click. There should only be one analytics image gif on page load and another analytics image gif on link clicks (if they are tracked). Different analytics variables are passed for page load and link clicks. Don’t worry about knowing what each variable means, for my example I’m just looking to see if the analytics image gif is present.

In part I, I walk through four common data issues that alert me to an issue with the tagging. In part II, I walk through the basic steps to start using a http tool. I’m using Fiddler for my example. The HTTP tools are similar to each other in how they display information.

Part 1: My top four data issues that can be caused by incorrect or missing analytics tagging:

1) Page views to a page spike compared to previous time periods, e.g. page views double.

Check to see if there are multiple analytics gifs passing on page load, as there should only be one analytics image gif passing on page load.

Often video(s) on the page can cause an issue with analytics tracking and multiple analytics gifs would then be passing with page load or with user interaction with the video.

2) Page views to a page are dramatically lower or zero compared to previous time periods.

Check to see if your analytics gif is passing on the page load.

If it is missing, you’ll see page views drop to zero when the analytics gif was removed from the page. To solve this issue you’ll need to add the analytics code back to the page.

3) Bounce rate is extremely low as in ~ 1% – 2%. *

Check to see if there are multiple analytics gifs passing on page load. If there are multiple analytics gifs passing you’ll need to determine which one should be passing and
remove the other analytics gif. Also, you should check to see if page views to the page have spiked (issue #2), since multiple analytics gifs sometimes inflate page views to the
page. Keep in mind that this doesn’t always happen.

For example, on one web page I found that multiple analytics gifs didn’t inflate page views to the page, but did inflate overall site page views and content group (site section)
page views. In this case, the variables in the second image gif did not cause double counting of the page views to the page.

*(Bounce rate is defined as the single page view visits divided by entry page visits, meaning that the visitor came to you page as their first page in their session and then left without visiting other pages.)

Bounce rate as a measure of success depends on the design of the page and implementation of the web analytics tool. A low bounce rate, under 35%, is considered good.

There are, however, pages or sites that will naturally have higher bounce rates. For example, if your site is one page or has many off-site links that lead the visitor away from the page bounce rates will be higher due to the design.

Readers of blogs also tend to read one page and then leave the blog, so blogs will have higher bounce rates. Whether or not you report on bounce rate as a key performance
indicator (KPI), checking it periodically will help you understand what the average bounce rate should be for your site or page. If you see a change, then you can check to see if there is a tagging issue.

4) Conversions, e.g. clicks to purchase, are low or zero.

Check that the analytics gif that passes on the link click is present and is passing the
correct variables that record a conversion event.

Extra tips: Best practices

5) Log your analytic tracking issues

Keep detailed notes of your analytics tracking issues, the date that they started, and how you solved them.

This can be documented in a bug tracking tool or an Excel spreadsheet. This will save you time when you diagnose future issues and help jog your memory when you explain issues to new members of the team.

6) Test changes to your analytics tagging before the page goes live.

This gives you time to troubleshoot issues and verify that you’re receiving data in your analytics tool. Nobody likes to hear that the first days of a new marketing campaign’s data was lost because there was a tagging issue. Since testing data doesn’t reflect customer behavior, it’s best to have a separate profile for testing so that testing data isn’t included with your regular analytics data.

Part 2: How to use a HTTP tool

I’m using Fiddler for my HTTP tool. The HTTP tool shows you all the items that pass when a page on your site is loaded or a link clicked. You’ll be looking for the analytics image gif that passes the tracking variables to your analytics tool.

1. After installing the HTTP tool open your web page in a browser.

If you already have the web page open, then refresh it while the HTTP tool is running. (It’s a good idea to look at a page with a HTTP in more than one browser (e.g. IE and Firefox)).

2. You will see the analytics image gif (.gif file extension) as well as all the items passed on page load.

3. On the left pane, look for an image gif with your analytics tool name (Omniture, Webtrends, Google Analytics, etc.).

Click on the row in the left pane and highlight it.

4. On the right pane, in the HTTP tool Fiddler, click on the “Inspectors>web forms” tab.

The “web forms” tab will show you all the analytics variables that pass to your analytics tool.

5. One analytics gif will pass on page load with a set of page load variables and one analytics gif will pass on link click (if links are tracked) with a different set of analytics variables.

The analytics variables will be specific to your implementation and analytics tool.

6. If you’re not familiar with your analytics implementation or variables, then your goal is to simply see if the analytics gif is present.

You can copy the analytics code and send that to someone, or better yet ask them to stop by and you can walk them through what you’re seeing in your HTTP tool.

Contact your analytics guru, implementation consultant, or a developer and they can check into the details.

Once you’re familiar with your HTTP tool, you’ll be able to troubleshoot issues quickly. I’ve looked at analytics code in a meeting and been able to show the group an issue that I saw. That made it much faster to fix the issue.

Caveat Emptor: Keep in mind that that the HTTP tool helps you see if analytics code is present and is passing, but it can’t verify that the analytics tool (e.g. Webtrends, Omniture, etc.) received the data.

Analytics tracking is like a radio signal, the analytics code on the page is the radio transmission, your analytics tool is the radio receiving the signal, and you are the listener hearing the song. You’ll have to check that the analytics reports are receiving data to make sure that the whole system is working.

At least once a week, I’m going to write about what I’m doing to build the site, generate revenue and how it implements my book’s advice.

Here’s a quick preview of the game plan:

– Use PPC to quickly build a list.

– Find copyright-free content to offer / focus on linking to others’ sites.

– Aim to generate links for the site from the list, using tactics from the book for anchor text selection, building/buying under the radar (and abroad), etc.

– Tack on a small ecommerce (affiliate/dropshipping) site.

– Pretest listings for CTR using the book’s tactics.

Interested in following how this works? Subscribe to blog updates with the form in the right hand sidebar –>

To Win, Share The Most Creative SEO Tactic You Can Think Of!

How To Enter The Contest

Email contest2012@seoroi.com with your new tactic/idea (ideally with accompanying case study). Use the subject line CONTEST ENTRY (all caps please – makes it easy for me to pick through email and find entries).

Include links to all photos, videos, audio etc. and say where the content is meant to go in your post. Ex.: “Insert Youtube video: link—– here.”

To Win The Contest

You need to have your entry be a finalist (judged on non-bounced visitors), and then have the judges pick your entry to win.

Contest Prizes

First Place Grand Prize:

1 Full Ticket To A Conversion Conference – value: $1,995
1 Year of SEOmoz Pro membership – value: $1,188
1 Year of MixRank Professional – value: $1164
1 Year of CognitiveSEO Starter plan – value: $588
125 Credits at Feng-GUI’s predictive heatmapping tool – value: $250
1 Year of Website-Monitoring availability checking service for up to 5 URLs – value: $240

Second Place:

1 Single-Day Ticket To A Conversion Conference – value: $1,195
6 Months of SEOmoz Pro membership – value: $594
6 Months of MixRank Professional – value: $582
1 Year of Website-Monitoring service for up to 3 domains – value: $170
50 Credits at Feng-GUI – value: $100

Third Place:
1 Single-Day Ticket To A Conversion Conference – value: $1,195
3 Months of MixRank Professional – value: $291
1 Year of Website-Monitoring service for 1 domain – value: $72
25 Credits at Feng-GUI – value: $50

Finalist prizes:

1. Every finalist entry (includes grand prize, second and third) will be printed in The Advanced SEO Book’s second edition and included in the ebook version as well.
2. Every finalist (includes grand prize winners, second and third) will get mailed a copy of The Advanced SEO Book (second edition) and emailed an ebook copy (first and second editions).

Entrance prizes:

30% Discount at Website Monitoring
20% Lifetime discount at CognitiveSEO

How We’ll Determine The Contest Winners

1. Your entries are judged on two factors: the unique visitors your post attracts AND judges’ subjective opinions.

2. The top 10 entries (by unique, non-bounced visitors) will be the finalists. I (Gab Goldenberg, the contest organizer) will have veto power over posts judged to have manipulated their way into the top 10, so don’t bother with tricks or spam.

Unique non-bounced visitors are based upon Google Analytics numbers. The formula is Unique Visitors x (100% – Bounce Rate).

3. The judges and myself will review the top 10 entries and pick the winners.

Contest Rules

1. There are no minimum word counts. Cover all the details necessary for others to be able to implement your tactic, and leave it at that.

2. You’re encouraged to include pictures, but they must be royalty-free and you must have the legal right to use them.

In fact, your entire entry can be just an image (ex.: infographic, flow chart etc).

3. You can’t enter someone else’s work as your own.

4. You can’t enter previously published work.

5. Embedding content is fine, so long as it’s legal.

6. If you do a video or audio entry, please provide either a summary or transscription for ease of reference/usability. This is to your benefit as it will strongly increase your chances of winning since more people will enjoy and share your content.

7. The contest will publish entries from Monday, ober 8th, 2012 to Wednesday, November 7th, 2012, but submissions can be made from today (Sept 10). The traffic will be counted based on the whole period. For entries submitted in the last 7 days of the contest, the traffic will be calculated from the day the entry is published + 6 days (i.e. a 7 day period). Thus the traffic counting period will end at the latest November 13th (November 7th + 6 days).

Following this period, judges will pick the winners from the top-traffic getting posts.

I’ll go on to share some tips on winning the contest below, but first some thanks to our sponsors:

Sponsors

Conversion Conference teaches attendees the latest techniques in A/B and multivariate testing, website data analysis, landing page design and layout, usability and optimization for mobile, tablets and paid search campaigns.

It’s lead by the author of the book, Landing Page Optimization, Tim Ash. Speaking personally, I’ve learnt a lot from Tim and can say definitely that this is a high-value show.

SEOmoz created Linkscape and Open Site Explorer, the SEO world’s first non-Yahoo powered link index and research tools.

They offer much more of course, including their advice via pro members’ Q&A, SEO app, social media monitoring, keyword difficulty/trifecta tool, FollowerWonk, rank tracking and still more beyond that!

Cognitive SEO is a new SEO toolset that automates something many of us do manually – link analysis and classification (guest post, blog comment etc), besides for other link tools.

Their data is sourced from SEOmoz, Majestic, AHrefs and more – so it’s extremely high quality.

Feng-GUI offer designers, advertisers and creatives, a tool that uses a scientific algorithm to predict what people will most look at. This helps you find out if you have visual clutter or visual clarity, as well as what the dominant graphic elements are.

They report results in heatmap and gaze-plot format, which helps with visual hierarchy and conversion rate optimization. I personally have an account and find it quite useful. See the #1 tip for homepage design, for an example of the reports.

Website-Monitoring by SiteImpulse constantly checks websites’ availability and validates their functions.

Each outage is reported instantly with email and SMS alerts and recorded in database for future analysis.

MixRank offers a competitive intelligence tool for online display ads, so online marketers can find the most relevant traffic sources in their industry. SEOs can monitor what publishers your competitors are paying for clicks on and snap up that traffic for free by contacting the webmaster directly for link building.

Don’t forget that you can also plug these sites into free keyword tools to uncover new keyword ideas (based on those sites’ content) that will generate additional, relevant traffic.

Tips To Win The Contest

Content Suggestions:

+ Surprise people!

Challenge a common assumption or the “accepted” way of doing things. Can you even do the complete opposite?

+ Integrate more than one discipline.

Ex.: How can you use email to make search visitors convert higher? This post on integrating Facebook demographics into keyword research was extremely popular, partly for this reason and partly because it surprised people by showing that Facebook data could be useful for SEO.

+ Make it easy to implement.

Sharing a tactic as opposed to just an idea? The above Facebook + keyword research tactic was creative – but inaccessible for many. If your tactic requires custom-code, can you offer a standard script people can just download or copy? If it requires some particular server-side doodling, can you shoot a video showing how it’s done, step-by-step? Have you provided simple step-by-step instructions?

+ Appeal to different learning styles with audio / visual.

Some people learn best by reading, while others learn by watching or listening. If you can speak to more learning styles, then you can get more visitors.

+ Write 10 titles, then pick the best.

Have some friends rate them and give you feedback on which to use. Avoid “clever” titles since you’re probably the only one who’ll get it – speaking from my own experience as one who’s made this mistake several times.

Promotion Suggestions: Don’t just publish, promote!

+ Ask friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to read the entry and share the post and/or vote it up at Inbound.org or other relevant sites. Don’t make them feel obligated – acknowledge that they have their integrity and say that they should only promote it if they like it.

+ Write a blog post sharing the link to your entry and encourage your readers to go read it, and share it themselves.

+ Got an email list? Offer a teaser with a link to read the full thing.

+ Consider some ads:

Stumbleupon Ads start at 10 cents, and getting stumbleUpon thumbs up from paid visits will generate additional free visits. Similarly, Twitter ads start around 50 cents a click but can get retweets especially from influential Tweeters.

Terms & Conditions

1. All entrants give Gabriel Goldenberg the right to publish their entry in part or in its entirety online, in book and ebook format. This includes images and any screen captures of video. The right is transferrable.

2. The contest is open to people age 18+.

3. I reserve the right not to publish any entry for any reason whatsoever, or to delete any entry for any reason whatsoever. This is unlikely to happen if you use your judgment and follow the rules and guidelines.

4. The entry must not have been previously published elsewhere online or offline.

5. I reserve the right to change the rules as necessary, at my sole discretion. (I can’t predict if the prizes will incent misbehaviour, so I have to include this to allow me to remedy the situation if there’s a problem).

The above rules, terms etc were heavily inspired by JobMob’s guidelines. Thanks Jacob!

Poker chip stacks: The greater your stack, the longer you have to learn. 

In a poker cash game (aka sit-and-play, as opposed to a tournament where everyone starts with the same amount), your budget is how much you choose to sit down at the table and play with – your total risk. Lose all of that and your game is over.

Let’s take an example to understand how the bankroll works.

Imagine you’re playing No-Limit Texas Hold’em Poker, and you’ve got $100 bankroll. The table stakes are $25-$50, meaning that the small blind bets $25 and the large blind bets $50.

If no one raises, the most a $100 bankroll can do in such a case is play two hands.

Obviously then, a $100 bankroll gives you very little chance of success, since it’s statistically easy to lose two hands consecutively.

Suppose instead the limits were $1-$2, and that the rest of the people only have $50 bankrolls.

Suddenly that $100 bankroll is a pretty significant advantage: you can play up to 50 hands without raises, and this is twice as many hands as competitors.

How does the poker bankroll apply to online marketing?

Generally speaking, the link is that successful marketing follows a cycle – which you need to see through in its entirety to be successful. The steps are:

1. Research/plan.

2. Execute. (Run the campaign.)

3. Measure. (Analyze your analytics data.)

4. Optimize (cut what’s not working, increase what is) and execute again.

A. Pay-per-click marketing is the most direct application of the bankroll .

If you are committed to spending only $100 on clicks and your average CPC is $2, then you can try your luck for up to 50 clicks without a conversion.

Considering that random probability means you might easily go through 50 clicks without a single conversion (especially with average conversion rates being only about 2% in ecommerce), then you’re not really doing PPC marketing – you’re doing PPC gambling.

You’ve got $100 of lottery tickets and are hoping one of them will get you luck and earn you what- $150? $200 at the most optimistic?

Most importantly, such a tiny bankroll doesn’t give you enough time to optimize. You might run out of money before even getting statistically useful data to measure/optimize with.

B. Contract lengths are another application of the bankroll.

In the past I and others have tried to offer month-to-month renewable contracts for search marketing services.

Horrible idea.

Why? Because it encourages short-term thinking and you can NEVER do your best in such a mindset. For a simple example, link building and social media require building relationships, and 30 days just doesn’t suffice … and even 3 months is very little.

C. Being a jack-of-all-trades consultancy/agency/webmaster (hint you’re a master-of-none)

Do you do print design and web design and SEO and social media and PPC?

Unless you’ve got lots of staff who specialize in each discipline, you’re watering down your offering.

Each of these have developed so much that it’s difficult time-wise for anyone to keep their skills up to date in each field.

The bankroll here is your time – how are you going to spend it?

I know when I got into online marketing, I read sites that talked about domaining, affiliate marketing, SEO etc – and proceeded to try my hand at each discipline.

Guess what? I’ve wasted thousands of dollars on domains, loads of time, and my affiliate marketing to this day is paltry. Had I spent all my time on SEO, I’d have saved lots of money and been a better linkbaiter.

So how do you determine the right bankroll?

The correct bankroll varies, but it depends essentially on how many times you need to repeat your bet before you can be successful in a regular way (i.e. your conversions will be frequent and profitable enough to cover your click/consulting fees).

If we’re talking about PPC click budget – it’s the amount of time necessary to collect enough data and optimize.

If we’re talking consulting – you want to give your agency at least 6 months for either SEO or PPC. This accounts for the reality that a consultant/agency rarely has only one client whom they spend 100% of their time on.

Inhouse staff solely dedicated to this would still take at least 4 months, because there are setup tasks and time costs independent of consulting/agency – e.g. the volume of traffic available, time to create landing pages etc.

Learning a new discipline: A few years – enough to gain intermediate skill and see if you enjoy this and can earn a stable living.
How passionate are you about the discipline? Speak to people with several years experience to hear the downsides and think how you’d be affected. This can save you lots of heartache starting something you later discover has a downside you loathe (ex.: bad clients, reporting etc.)

Got somewhere else this applies? Love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

P.S. You independent webmasters out there: Take the “Is Your Site Defensible?” 10 Point Quiz. This also ties into what I wrote about multi-armed bandit algorithms for CRO, which is another application of the bankroll concept.
P.P.S. The bankroll is another face of the concept of Expected Value, which I discuss in the Rules section of The Advanced SEO Book.

In my last email, I said that I was looking for feedback on how to run a contest seeking new SEO tactics and case studies. Many of you generously chimed in with prize and voting suggestions, in particular that you would prefer for the prizes to be memberships to tool sites and the like.

Well, you asked and I’m delivering.

1) SEOmoz have agreed to offer a 1 year membership to the 1st place winner, and a 6 month membership to the runner up :D! (Thanks to everyone who caught the typo in me initially writing 6 year membership to the runner up, hehe ;).)

If you didn’t already know, SEOmoz are the industry’s biggest brand and produced the first link research tools based on their own crawl of the web.

2) Cognitive SEO is a new SEO toolset that automates something many of us do manually – link analysis and classification (guest post, blog comment etc), besides for other link tools.

Their data is sourced from SEOmoz, Majestic, AHrefs and more – so it’s extremely high quality.

Cognitive have also agreed to offer our winner a 1 year membership!

3) Feng-GUI are offering 125 credits to the first place winner, 50 credits for second and 25 for third. Feng-GUI offer designers, advertisers and creatives, a tool that uses a scientific algorithm to predict what people will most look at.

The results are reported in heatmap and gaze-plot format, which helps with visual hierarchy and conversion rate optimization. I personally have an account and find it quite useful. See the #1 tip for homepage design, for an example of the reports.

4)

____ Want to sponsor?

There are more slots available. I’m especially looking for companies willing to offer the following: cash, free tickets to industry trade shows (ex.: SMX, Pubcon, LinkLove etc) non-competing tools, or other things that would appeal to advanced SEOs. Email me!

The above prizes are on top of getting your entry published in version 2 of The Advanced SEO Book, and other prizes I’m still weighing up.

Sponsors get links, their logo and a description of their services in official contest emails to people who downloaded free chapters from The Advanced SEO Book, and in blog posts (i.e. mine, not the contestants). There will be at least 4 more contest blog posts / emails, discussing such things as the official rules, judges panel, finalists and winners. Plus my own guest blogging in promotion of the contest drives additional indirect exposure from the traffic I send here that will see your copy/links/logo.

Want to enter?

Keep an eye out on my blog – seoroi.com/blog for details, as well as The Advanced SEO Book emails. You’ll need to share a new tactic with optional case study, in text, image or video format.

The kinds of posts the judges and I will be looking for will share new tactics / ideas. So far, Garrett French of Citation Labs has agreed to help judge the contest and I’m still open/looking for others to help :D.

Some examples of the posts sharing new tactics/ideas/case studies:

How this affiliate redefined the game – merchants promote HIM
9 Tactics for whitehats to survive a Google ban
Should you buy Youtube embeds for SEO?
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intel

Thanks for listening,

Cheers
Gab Goldenberg
p.s. Don’t know if you saw, but I’m offering The Advanced SEO Book free for 6 weeks – try before you buy.

The idea is to be a niche Search Engine Land for two types of content: tactics and case studies. SEO ROI won’t cover news, controversy etc except if it’s related to exploring a new tactic or sharing a case study (ex.: a post called “How I Recovered From The Penguin Update”).

So far I’m pleased to announce that I’ve had commitments from SEO.com, Internet Marketing Ninjas, Slingshot SEO, SkyRocket SEO and Pole Position Marketing, and have spoken to other friends and contacts whom I hope will join soon. You can see the first post on SEO KPIs from beginner to advanced by SEO.com

If you’ve got what it takes to be a regular contributor (i.e. at least monthly), I’d love to have you. Contact me and share some links to creative tactics or case studies you’ve shared before. Likewise if your friends or favourite agency should get more exposure – tell them to come and apply via the contact form – they just need to share some links to their best writing.

The theoretical three-step process to link laundering – as yet untested – is as follows:
1. Use blackhat seo to rank fast.
2. Build whitehat links as you go.
3. Once whitehat links can sustain your rankings without the blackhat links, “disavow” the blackhat links (wink wink nudge nudge).
So link laundering is the same idea with links, as money laundering. It’s just like first making money from drug dealing, then laundering it through Swiss and Caribbean banks and reinvesting the proceeds into legitimate businesses to hide the origin. (Except that the moral issues involved with drug dealing don’t exist with blackhat SEO so long as you’re not spamming others. Ex.: Buying links.)

The net result is ranking faster than you could with whitehat SEO alone and longer than you could with blackhat SEO alone, and with much less risk than the normal blackhat approach.

#Fail Risks:

a. Disavow too much and drop. But… Bing says “you should not expect a dramatic change in your rankings as a result of using the tool.” So it seems the risk here is limited.
b. Draw attention by disavowing too much, leading to a manual review.
c. Get banned before you can disavow the links… In which case that might just precipitate the disavowal.

[sidebar]
Isn’t this rehashing others’ ideas?

People have spotted similar – but different – issues with a disavow links tool. On that same note, Ryan Jones wrote a great writeup on what Negative SEO can include.) [/sidebar]

How do you know you’ve got enough whitehat links to disavow the blackhat ones?

I’m not sure. You could

– Annotate your rank tracking charts as you build whitehat links, to keep track of which really gave you a boost. This works best if you’re building links to deep pages.
– Compare your whitehat link profile to competitors’ profiles. Focus on median and average unique referring domain counts, as well as median and average inbound links. Advanced folks might scrape this data and put it into spreadsheets.
– Run a test campaign for this first to test the effect of disavowing, and then use the test campaign’s data on your followup campaign.
– Split test with running two sites in parallel

The last two choices obviously require double the work, which is a bit dissuasive …

What do you think? Is my logic sound? Am I missing something? Please comment below!

Some related posts you might like:

Link Buying Risks vs Rewards FAQ
Should You Buy Video Embeds for Youtube Rankings?
Buying text links: Pre-published vs Post-Published

For those unfamiliar with GAS, it’s got a Site App (or standalone version from Git) that enhances what your installation tracks, giving you tracking for PDF downloads, video views and more.

I asked André Mafei and Daniel Focas Carrer of Brazil’s dp6 some questions and they graciously provided clarification.

What does the value mean in max scroll?

Daniel: “The VGA column shows only the average percentage of each page view visualization.”

What does the form tracking value represent? The percentage of fields completed? Conversion rate of all forms? Can you share what the formula is, please?

Andre: See slide 20: http://www.slideshare.net/eduardocereto/gas-google-analytics-on-steroids-13070356

Events are multidimensional, and the form tracking metric represents an aggregation of other submetrics, which track form related events.
For example, you can see the amount of people who filled out the name field on your contact form, separately from the name field on a different form.

So that’s why there isn’t a unique formula.

“There isn’t an unique formula, it depends on the site and what you want to measure. Basically you need to play dividing and multiplying metrics like
1. Forms Unique Pageviews
2. Fields Unique Events”

That was still a bit confusing to me, so I asked a followup:

How can there not be a unique formula when it’s about multiplying or dividing form unique PVs and unique events? I’m a bit confused? Is it unique events/ unique PVs ? In response, Andre showed me some of the complexity in calculating the metrics

‘Last Step’ Unique events (like ‘send’ button) / unique PVs = A specific Form Conversion rate

(Sum of each form conversion rate) / the number of forms = average form conversion rate

The percentage of fields completed? There isn’t an one number result for this. For example:

1 form with 3 fields and 1 send button, got:

100 unique pageviews
80 unique events for filling the field 1
60 unique events for filling the field 2
30 unique events for filling the field 3
25 unique events for clicking the send button

Form conversion rate: 0,25

Percentage of fields completed:

Field 1: 80% (or 80% of the visitors filled 33% of the form)
Field 2: 60% (or 60% of the visitors filled 66% of the form)
Field 3: 30% (or 30% of the visitors filled 100% of the form)

And these numbers are right just if nobody did something like filling just the field 3.

Liked this post? You might want to read our item from yesterday on choosing the right KPIs for SEO.