@Search Engine Land: How predictive heatmap tools work and how they can lift your conversion rates. I write for SEL’s Just Behave (Usability/Conversion Optimization) column once a month.

@Wolf-Howl: Why Google HQ Really LOVES Thin Affiliates . I write at Mike Gray’s site periodically, when I have something that will fit with his audience.

@Wildfire Marketing’s Marketing Tips: An Interview on Link Building With Yours Truly

If you liked those, you should add my rss feed to your reader because some of the best stuff I write gets published here before it gets cited or repurposed in other contexts elsewhere…

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky 3 Guest Posts Of Mine

Time and date based navigation offer terrible usability and even worse SEO. Have you ever heard of mystery meat navigation? Maybe not, but you’ve probably seen archive navigation that meets the following description:

“Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined by usability expert Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are.

“The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons [...]”

Now, just because the typical forms of mystery meat navigation are unrevealing icons, that doesn’t mean people can’t get creative and find other ways to make crummy navigation.

Here’s one particular example that still exists on a number of blogs.

What will I go to if I click on 2? Or 3? Or 11? Or 17? To the best of my knowledge, there’s no difference between them except the date they were published. So I may as well click on any of those links! Or none, because they don’t look especially compelling…

For similar reasons, such mystery meat navigation is bad for SEO. Rather than linking internally using valuable anchor text that will help other pages rank higher, you use some useless anchor text that won’t get you a single extra visitor.

Similarly, it’s also bad usability if you have archive navigation organized by month.

We’ve all seen that kind of navigation:

There’s hardly any reason for anyone to navigate an archive by month, unless they’re doing historical research. For example, if you wanted to find out when Yahoo announced the end of paid inclusion, and you had a hunch it was in July 09, you might visit a search blog and go to their July archives.

That’s not how most people browse content though. Most users are interested in a topic, like link building, or link buying from news sites in particular.

That’s why my own archive navigation in the sidebar is organized by topic, and not by month.

Now, there is an exception to this:  if you write about ‘royds. Not hemorrhoids, you creeps .  The Refuge of Delayed Souls, at http://roydss.blogspot.com

That site makes unique use of the blog format of reverse-chronological posting to tell a story. Each new post furthers the story.

Obviously, not everyone has been with it from day 1.

So the author [her name isn't on the site] has organized her archive navigation so that people can start at Part 1 (eg the first chapter). And they can stop at, say, Part 5 and return the next day and go from there. Kind of like placing a bookmark to keep your place in a book.

So if you’re writing a story or some other content that follows a logical chronological order, time and date based navigation make sense for usability.

They’re still not all you should have, however.

Consider someone who loved a particular romantic scene. Do they have to memorize what Part of the story it was in? Wouldn’t it make more sense to offer some thematic navigation too, based on your story arcs?

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Least I Could Do, a popular webcomic. And they get this storyline navigation just right:

If you liked this post on usability, add my rss feed to your reader to get more quality posts like this regularly. If you’re looking for usability consulting, then email me.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky If I Could Go Back In Time, I’d Kill Date Based Navigation

Are competitors mining your backlinks with tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Linkscape and Majestic SEO? Just because they can check your backlinks out, doesn’t mean you should make life easy by giving good data to their link building tools.

So here’s how to dirty the data that competitors see when using backlink checking tools or hub finders.

(Hub finder are tools that find so-called ‘hub websites’ that link to multiple sites in a niche)

The answer is counter-intuitive: build useless backlinks. Why?

Because useless backlinks can be copied until doomsday without their marginal effects won’t add up to overtaking you in the rankings.

Is it nofollow? Great! (Though note that David Leonhardt has found some value in nofollow links, likewise Mike Belasco has good arguments for nofollow links.)

Is it just a link in a comment? Perfect.

Is it a useless directory? Ok, now I need to nuance my tip.

When I started out in SEO, I got links from a boatload of free directories. It was what I knew and what I could afford to do, as a newb. Know what that did?

Got me a PageRank 5 in 3 months. That’s what.

But the killer part is that I couldn’t rank even for ridiculously non-competitive terms I wanted to rank for. Why?

Simple: I had unwittingly tied myself up in the sandbox. That’s where little sites that aren’t trusted by the biG kid go to play, isolated from all the others. You get a bunch of poor quality links like a load of freebie directories, and the net result is that you sit in the sandbox.

So then what do you do? You get a lot of trusted links first… then you make it dirty. You need to balance things out to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

By now you’re probably wondering, “What the heck is a trusted link, then?”

One that is listed along with other resources, on a page dedicated to helping people find quality resources on a topic. The algorithm is known as Hilltop.

If you thought this post was interesting, add my rss feed to your reader (that page also allows you to subscribe by email; both options are free). If you want some help doing link building, email me or call me.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Competitors Checking Your Backlinks? Give Their Tools The 180 Fake Out!

Surprising people forces a reaction, and if it’s a silly surprise, that reaction is laughter. That’s why list-jokes or series-jokes are a staple of comedians everywhere.

In high school, I remember my friend Johnny Shanaan giving a speech to our English class for his public speaking assignment. He was talking about body language, and handshakes in particular. He said,

“There are different types of shakes. There’s

• The firm shake,
• The weak shake,
• The clammy shake,
• The power shake,
• And the milkshake.”

What’s nice about series jokes like that is that the first items in the list create an expectation. And when you know what people expect, it’s easy to throw in an oddball item that surprises them.

That’s also true of humor generally. If you can set up an expectation, it’s easy to find the unexpected.

A favourite line of mine when I want to loosen people up is that I shower regularly… first of every month. (Stolen from a Get Fuzzy comic strip, to be honest.)

So the next time you want to lighten your writing, your small-talk, whatever… look for what should follow from what you said, and say the opposite. Look at what people relate to, their social reference points (like showering daily) and step outside of them.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader or check out some other content posts.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky How I Inject Humor Into My Writing, My Speaking And My Veins

If you could find out your competitors’ top converting ads when you enter a market, you’d save a lot of time optimizing campaigns, wouldn’t you?

It would be like knowing where the jelly is in a jelly donut – you’d bite right into the good stuff and skip the mostly-dough areas.

The principle that applies in this case is to look at the length of time an ad has been running. Duration is indicative of ad performance.

The problem is that when you search for a given keyword, you only get a snapshot in time of competitors’ ads. So you don’t know if what you’re seeing is tried-and-true copy that converts well or if it’s the flavor-of-the-month split test.

Fortunately, SpyFu (aff) has two new products that enable late-comers to catch up quickly, and for serious optimizers to get premium competitive intelligence for instant inspiration.

SpyFu’s Ad History tools – Domain Ad History and Keyword Ad History – provide you with data on competitors’ copy going back 12 months.

Domain Ad History focuses on a  single competitor’s keywords and copy for those keywords. It shows you changes over time. You can see if they keep returning to the same copy, and thus what is working best for them.

Keyword Ad Historyshows you all competitors’ ads for the past year – but on a single keyword. This way, you can quickly identify patterns between competitors’ copy on your primary head terms. Take your top 100 keywords, plug them in, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what benefits and what offers convert, and which don’t.

The bottom line is that that these tools let you learn from others’ mistakes, which saves you time and money on testing. For $59/month, the subscription is well worth it for anyone doing PPC!

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky How To Find Competitors’ Best PPC Ads

If you could find out what competitors’ conversion rates are and you can estimate the traffic value to your competition? Surely the PPC pros could use that conversion data…

Well, it turns out you can get a pretty good idea about competitors’ conversion rates.

At SMX Advanced, Addie Connor shared the tip that you could bid for traffic to your competitors’ pages. Why do that? To find out their quality scores.

The catch is that such a technique won’t tell you what they’re converting at. You still can’t access their analytics.

Let’s think about this critically.

(I’m writing a little book on advanced search marketing (mostly SEO but some PPC too), and one of the main themes is that you can get really creative if you think logically and break things down into manageable pieces of logic.)

The argument we have is as follows.

We don’t control competitors’ pages. Therefore we don’t control what analytics code is on those pages. And if you don’t place your own analytics, on the page, you can’t read the reports!

Suppose we did control the pages. We could then place our code on them, right? And we could read the reports, right?

Now I’m going to share a little secret.

Don’t go sharing it with everyone, because this is really just an inner-circle thing among elite programmers.

…

The secret’s called “View Source.”

Right click, and select “view source,” to view your competitors’ html. Then duplicate your competitors’ page and host it yourself, with your own analytics embedded.

Caveats with finding competitors’ conversion rates in this way

1) For Trademark law reasons, you can’t duplicate competitors’ branding. This obviously affects conversion rate.

2) Similarly, you can’t use their domain name in the display URL (legally), or in the destination. This affects CTR and consequently conversion rate (since the mix of traffic is different).

3) This would be a hell of a lot of work for any sizeable ecommerce competitor. It’s easier to do this with simple landing pages or paths.

If you liked this post on competitive intelligence, add my RSS feed to your reader, or subscribe to get my posts delivered by email. I’ve got 2 more posts on competitive intelligence for later this week, covering how to find competitors best performing keywords AND ad copy, as well as how to muddy your backlink tracks so competitors have a harder time duplicating your efforts.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Find Competitors’ Conversion Rates

Reading is the best investment you can make in yourself, and it’s also incredibly enjoyable. So to share the fun and help you build your businesses, I’m giving away a copy of The Knack, a fantastic business book by Bo Burlingham and Norm Brodsky. (Here’s my review of The Knack.)

It’s going to be a random drawing. Here’s how to enter:

1) Tell me what was the first post that you really enjoyed on this site, and name any others you found helpful along the way. The more detail you can share, the better.

2) Then, give me constructive criticism on things you don’t like about the site, such as layout, navigation, given posts I’ve written etc.

3) Finally, you need to mention in your comment the password that I’ve put in my RSS feed / email newsletter. I’ll edit the comment before it goes live to remove the password so others can’t see it, but I need to see that password if you want to be eligible to win.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Win The Knack, A Sweeeeet Book On Entrepreneurship

First, the information that’s valuable to all my readers: Check out my most recent usability guest column for Search Engine Land, How Much Detail Do Product Detail Pages Need?

Second, in response to my 4Q visitor surveys, Tara Cervantes wrote me the following in response to the question, “What do you value most about the [company] website?”

“[I]nsight, shared knowledge, great food for thought. I’m an Internet Marketing Master’s student who just can’t get enough (now I’m thinking of old Depeche Mode)…Anyway, great site, I signed up for the blog. Your site made it as a reference for my usability class. The specific assignment was about Personas, just so you know, since the post we read talked about how you read user comments. taracervantes@(sitename removed to prevent spam)”

How can you not feel good when you see feedback like that ? I’d noticed Full Sail-referred-traffic in my server logs (the information your server records about each visitor), but to get a verbal explanation for it (since the page is restricted to Full Sail Internet Marketing Master’s students) is even better.

If this site is good enough for Full Sail’s Master’s students, perhaps you’d like to add my rss feed to your reader?

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky A Usability Reference For Internet Marketing Master’s Students

Hey guys,

After my previous great experiences going to you for advice, I thought I’d ask how I should go about creating my “Best Of” page? In particular, I’m interested in 2 things:

1) What posts belong there?

2) How should I highlight the page? I used to have a best of page in my main navigation, but it got very few clicks. I’d like to perhaps try a different approach – what would you guys suggest?

Cheers

Gab

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky How Should I Create My “Best Of” Page?

As my friend Mike Gray pointed out at SMX Advanced, RTing is a great way to get people’s attention and build a relationship with them. The difficulty is getting people’s attention when they write a really popular post that gets RTed 100+ times.

So here’s the greyhat solution. 1) Create fake accounts.

2) Have them RT your RTs with a “via @YourUsername” appended.

The blogger whose post is being widely shared is now much more likely to take note of you. You not only RTed their post, but engendered multiple RTs.

3) Once you have enough followers for this to happen on its own, you can cut out the fake accounts’ RT activity. Until you make it, you can fake it.

As with most greyhat tactics, there’s a whitehat version, too:

Instead of relying on fake accounts, just have a group of friends RT each other’s RTs.

Reciprocal voting happens throughout social media like Digg etc., so it shouldn’t be difficult to extend the concept to Twitter.

What do you guys think of these social media tactics? If you liked the post, as either practical knowledge or entertaining creativity, add my RSS feed to your reader.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Twitter Grayhat Tip: Fake It Till You Make It

Here’s what I’ve been reading for the past few months. Most of these are excellent, and I encourage you guys to get your own copy.

1) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. An excellent how to on business management as well as an entertaining read. One application I’ve been using it for is to minimize the chores I do for business.

2) The Knack by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham. I knew Burlingham from his book Small Giants, but was I ever in for a treat with Brodsky’s writing. I’ve since become a fan of his Inc. magazine column.

3) Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. This is THE classic book on usability and conversion optimization. Failing all other education on the topic, buy this book. Even though I had read a lot on usability before buying, much of what I found here was new to me.

4) Call to Action by the Eisenberg brothers. The book’s a good primer to conversion optimization, particularly for people who are new to the field. Unfortunately, I bought it after reading blogs on the topic (including the Eisenbergs’) for ages, so I didn’t learn a lot of new stuff.

5) Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. Underhill’s book was an eye opener into the world of offline conversion optimization. People who can do so-called transversal thinking – taking an idea from one field and applying it in another – should love it. Plus it’s often entertaining with the numerous anecdotes he shares. He’s often self-promotional though, and it wears on you.

6) Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash. This is a great how-to book that explains many advanced concepts in generally simple terms. One thing I really enjoyed and dog-eared was his list of things to test. Chapter ~7ish got a little dull because he explained math principles I’d seen before in school. But most folks haven’t taken a course on research methods or quantitative methods in CEGEP, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Besides which, Ash got me to understand the math principles behind multivariate testing (MVT), which are pretty important since there are different types of MVT. Note: There’s also some self-promotion that gets kind of annoying on occasion.

7) Web Design 4 ROI by Sandra Niehaus and Lance Loveday. This amazing book on conversion optimization opened my eyes to conversion optimization both figuratively and literally. Sandra was nice enough to give me a copy at SMX West, and I ate it up. This paired with Steve Krug’s book = 10% ecommerce conversion rate, guaranteed. I keep coming back to this book and lending it to family and friends.

I also owe Sandra and Lance thanks for their recommended reading list at the end of their book, which influenced many of these purchases.

Honest Seduction by Justin Talerico, Anna Talerico and Scott Brinker. I ate Ion Interactive’s book up. Partly because 80% of it was repeating the same ideas over and over, which got frustrating. But also largely because there were some brand spanking new ideas that I LOVED. These guys can convert traffic and it shows. If you’ve never created a segmentation-oriented lander, Honest Seduction will make you a true believer.

9) Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes by Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov. This is another book I blitzed through. I won’t repeat my review, but it’s a fascinating, very digestible read full of charts and consumer insights.

10) Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. This book is entertaining and educational. If you’ve ever struggled with pricing or consumer psychology, you will LOVE Ariely’s book. He’s done experiments to research how we behave, and shows that we frequently aren’t the ‘wealth maximizing rational actor’ traditional economics would have you think we are. A classic.

11) Wikinomics by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D Williams. I put this down somewhere in the middle and have yet to pick it back up. Some parts are really brilliant, but others leave you asking whether this kind of thing can apply beyond a narrow range of industries. Borrow this if you’re interested.

12) The Influentials by Ed Keller and Jon Berry. The science and research these two put together is interesting for a while … then they get bogged down in sharing numbers while forsaking analysis. I was all the more dissapointed because Seth Godin’s testimonial was on the jacket and that influenced my purchase decision. (I generally love Seth’s writing, The Dip notwithstanding.) I put this book down a long time ago and have no desire to pick it back up…

13) The Dip by Seth Godin. This book was alright, but it felt like a small pack of chips. It’s modestly substantial, but you’re still hungry afterwards. I’d borrow this one from a library.

14) Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin. Entertaining and practical, this book really does provide some actionable insights for people to use. I loved it and have dog-eared a bunch of the pages to return to as well as written in several margins.

Still to be read: Getting Things Done, Trust Agents, Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics, Waiting For Your Cat To Bark,

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky My Search And Business Reading List

To visitors coming via my 101 Advanced Text Link Buying Tips article on Search Engine Journal, welcome. Here’s an overview of my link buying services. (To my regular readers, check out the article and link to it or link here if you like it . )

The main benefits of using my text link buying services are that I

• Reduce your risk,
• Get you the most value for money, and
• Maximize your ROI.

To buy text links effectively, I follow a few principles:

- Minimize risk by making paid links indistinguishable from unpaid links. This also maximizes effectiveness.
- Purchase links for rankings, but also for branding and community building. Brands and communities are valuable assets that drive traffic and revenue.
- If it can send traffic that converts, the link is worth buying. This is why demographic targeting is a valid approach to buying links.

My rates start at $1000 for every $1000 in paid link spend, which is based on the average amount of time involved in managing such a budget. For link purchases beyond $8,000/month, we can negotiate better rates. The rates are also negotiable for long-term commitments of 9 months+.

If you’d like discrete text link buying services, contact me.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Text Link Buying Services

It may not be possible to automate all of SEO (or other business processes) with software, but that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid the chores in SEO. If you can document the processes, you can delegate them to virtual assistants (VA).

(A virtual assistant is an assistant you work with online rather than in person. VAs are typically contractors rather than salaried employees, so they’re also likely to be cheaper than a secretary if you don’t need them full time.)

Right now, I’m experimenting with documenting those of my processes that involve brainless chore work.

By documenting, I mean breaking down the process into steps. Someone completely unfamiliar with the field should be able to read it and understand.

There’s little reason for me to do these instead of an assistant. This is all the more so because when I’m not motivated, as when I’m doing chores, I’m slow. So besides being bored to tears with some parts of SEO, I get less done than an assistant could.

Once the processes are documented, my goal is to break them down into individual steps and assign those to various virtual assistants.

The reasons I don’t want to trust one assistant doing the whole process are that:

1) It means greater risk if he/she trips up anywhere – the lack of a fallback means that a whole project could be delayed.
2) Giving the whole process to one particular VA could lead to it being mass-duplicated-and-abused. It’s not that these are short-term techniques, but it’s easy to imagine how the whole technique – both as executed by poor quality and high quality SEOs – could be devalued as a result of the shoddy folks’ work.
3) I want to limit my costs if the work isn’t done properly.

My friend and fellow SEO consultant Jon Rognerud suggested VAs to me at SMX West 2008, but I didn’t know how to go about working with them. I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek and basically paraphrased the above points from my memory of his book.

I’ve adapted Tim’s tips in 1 important respect, however. I’m preferring multiple independent VAs doing interchangeable work to going with a VA company.

Tim recommends companies over individuals because if the virtual assistant who is assigned to you gets sick or is unavailable for some reason, you can quickly get a replacement if you’re with a company.

The problem is that most VA companies also do “SEO” work. I put “SEO” in quotation marks because I’m skeptical about the quality of these companies’ work.

So if I outsourced to one of these companies – even if it were just part of the process – it would go to hell in a handbasket.

It would appear as a service offered by ‘SEO India’ companies. And then it would be duplicated by their rivals. And pretty soon the whole thing would be devalued, even when done properly.

So I’m aiming to hire individuals with NO background at all in SEO. And I’m not even presenting the job ads as something SEO related.

Which is why I had to document my processes first – I didn’t want to rely on the existing processes of crummy foreign SEO companies.

Why have multiple independent virtual assistants doing interchangeable work?

This eliminates the risk of one of them botching things.

Note: I’m not asking for redundant work because I don’t want to pay for exactly the same thing. That could happen if both VAs did well!

Instead, with interchangeable work, I get equivalent results but not identical results. If both VAs worked out, I’d be happy with owning the products of both of their assignments.

If you liked this idea on delegating SEO chores to virtual assistants, add my rss feed to your reader! You’ll see follow up posts describing how things go!

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky How To Use Virtual Assistants To Eliminate SEO Chores

I’m working on an absolutely massive text link buying piece for SEJ. To keep your appetites whetted, here’s a little sneak preview.

“8) Buy a spot in a link roundup, whether it’s a list of resources, bloggers, blog posts etc. There are as many ways to do this as there are list posts!

9) Buy a text link in a ‘How Not To Do ABC’ post. These are popular in the web design community, such as the famous Web Pages That Suck. (Note: I’m not suggesting that site sells links; it’s just an example.)

10) Pay for inclusion in some widely syndicated ‘Recent Blog Posts’ widget. For example, SEO Chat distributes widgets you can put on your site featuring their most recent blog posts.

11) Buy family. Wouldn’t you like to be part of the Gawker media network? Legitimate sitewide links from major news properties…”

[...]

23) Pay bloggers you hire to add “guest author badges” to their sites, which badges link back to you.

24) Send webmasters holiday greetings. A parking provider I worked with did that for me once and it made them stand out in my mind. Small gestures can go a long way. Like $20 bills in ‘hope you’re having a nice January 17th’ holiday greetings .

25) Pay to be interviewed 1-on-1 by a blogger.

26) Pay your own bloggers to interview others, so that the “hey, I was interviewed at this site” link goes to you.

27) Work link requirements into standard contracts with suppliers.”

If you liked this post on link buying and greyhat seo, add my rss feed to your reader!

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Preview of My Big Link Purchasing Feature for SEJ

I’ve used each of the SEO and webmaster services and tools below in the past, and can vouch for them.

I was also interested in sharing certain other internet marketing products (like PPC Coach and Clayton Makepeace’s copywriting materials), but I’ve never used them myself so I’ll pass for now. There are others run by friends

Most of these are affiliate links, but a few are non-affiliate, too.

Competitive Intelligence SEO Tools

Compete – The Rolls Royce of competitive intelligence products, these guys get their data directly from the ISPs and their panel of millions. This is very valuable for impressing leads: bring a sample report to your meetings and say, “You can keep this sample report, and get more of them by working with me. This is also the kind of advanced intelligence and playing field I operate on.”

Compete used to be based on buying credits, but now you need a monthly membership. These start at $199/month.

I’ve personally got the Pro-Advanced Plan, which includes referral analytics. That goes for $499/month. These can be used for retargeting, which aims to make your advertising more effective.

.

Spyfu- Also formerly based on buying credits, Spyfu now offers monthly subscriptions that start at $59/month or $395/year (two months free).

They get their data by scraping search results, and were the first guys with ad copy data, so you could see competitors’ PPC ads. I’ve bought their reports and love em.

A tip on using this to its max potential: Since your reports are based on a domain, buy the reports for mega ad buyers like eBay and Amazon and category killers in your vertical.

.

SEOmoz Pro – As the title indicates, SEOmoz has some of the world’s biggest sites as clients, including eBay and the Marriott, and for good reason. Here are some of the things I like about their pro membership:

First, SEOmoz finally caught up to SEO Book and created their own Hub Finder, plus they went one better and organized the links by mozTrust (that’s jargon for the quality of the link). That’s very helpful in prioritizing link building targets.

Seomoz also have a boatload of useful tools like Linkscape, Trifecta (formerly Page Strength), Juicy Link Finder etc. The price is $79/month or $800/year (ie get 2 months free).

Besides that, I happen to be friends or friendly with most of SEOmoz’s staff, including Danny Dover, Scott Willoughby, Gillian Fishkin etc, and their associates at Distilled like Tom and Will Critchlow, Duncan Morris etc. Those personal interactions only reinforce for me the trust I accord these people.

Majestic SEO – Majestic offers a competing product to SEOmoz, but is different in certain key respects.

Their main service is free, and shows much greater link numbers than SEOmoz’s Linkscape.

The flip side is that they have no mozTrust metrics, so you can’t sort the links for quality. You can also buy ‘credits’ that are redeemable for advanced reports and data.

I’ve also interacted directly with Majestic SEO’s staff, lead by Alex Chudnovsky, and can speak to their extremely rapid and helpful support!

Webmaster Tools

Dreamhost Web Hosting – I use Dreamhost for literally all of my hosting, for 3 reasons: value for money, value for money, and value for money.

Dreamhost offer fantastic customer service, address downtime issues very quickly, reply to support emails within 24 hours and frequently within 2 hours … I can’t say enough good things about them.

I also love Dreamhost’s one-click installs. I don’t mess around with databases, PHP versions and other headache-inducing techie stuff when I setup a new Wordpress site. I click, and I’m done.

Use promo code HESREALLYNUTS at Dreamhost for a cash discount, a free Unique IP for the first year (useful for sites you promote aggressively and don’t want tied back to your other sites) and a bonus free 2nd domain registration. Total value: $50! (Valid on full year registration or longer.)

Namecheap domains I switched to Namecheap from Godaddy because they give you both (i) a free SSL certificate for 1 year with a new domain registration and (ii) a free private Whois registration for the first year (they call it “WhoisGuard”). You also don’t need to use it with that domain in particular.

Sitemeter – I love these guys for getting into the nitty gritty of particular visitors and seeing what kinds of patterns emerge. Their premium product costs only $70 a year and is extremely valuable. Instead of only seeing your 100 most recent visitors, you get to see the last 4000, and it also saves the data on that. SO

Business Tools

Basecamp HQ for reporting progress in link buying. I like that it’s online, which makes life easy for everyone involved. Link sellers login to post the URLs on which they sold me links. Clients login to see the URLs and make sure that quality keeps up. And at the end of the month I login to see where we got links and to make payment.

BuzzStream for manual link building campaigns. You can add new prospects in there, add notes and other info to track progress on building the relationship, and finally update with info on links obtained. It helpfully scrapes the code of a site for any emails you can use to contact the webmaster, but doesn’t yet point you to contact forms.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Search, Web, and Business Products I Endorse

SMX West’s video SEO panel taught me that the number of embeds your video gets is important to having it rank better at Youtube, and potentially in Google’s universal search results. So why not speed things up by buying a few installs and links for your video?

If more embeds means better SEO, there seems to be an argument for buying installs, just as there is for buying links in normal SEO. An embed is when someone copy-pastes the html code from Youtube to put a video on their site.

Buying embeds or links for a Youtube page is all the more interesting since there’s less risk than buying links for your own site.

• It’s hard to see Youtube get penalized by Google, so your chances of wasting your money are less.
• Even if a Youtube page is penalized, you can always reupload the video with some slight modifications and try again.
• It’s not like you burned a website, with the associated expenses in time and money…

The problem is that it’s easier said than done.

Youtube Video Data Patterns Quantitative Data: Embeds, Links…

There’s likely a pattern in the data in terms of the ratio of views to embeds and links. If a video has 100 views, it probably won’t also have 100 embeds.

Additionally, there’s probably a longtail curve in terms of what videos get the most embeds. A few videos with hundreds of thousands or millions of views get astronomical numbers of embeds.

The pattern also likely varies in accordance with the quality of the video or audio. For example, an amazing song will likely rack up more embeds per thousand views than an average track.

Qualitative Data: Video Star Ratings, Saves, Favorites, Adds-to-Playlist

There’s probably a large range of variance in the quality of videos. If that’s the case, the ratings look something like a bell curve: most ratings on most videos fall somewhere in the middle, and a few great / awful videos get extremely positive or negative ratings.

What The Video Data Means For Link And Embed Buyers

You’re likely to stand out from the pack if you buy links or embeds disproportionately to your video quality and popularity. This is especially true if you have very few impressions (eg under 1000).

One possible way around that is to buy traffic to send to your video. You can buy StumbleUpon traffic or you can even buy traffic from Youtube’s own sponsored video ads. See also Barry Schwartz’s screenshots.

But again, you may not have sufficiently good star-ratings, enough saves-to-favorites-and-playlists or other quality metrics to legitimize your embed buying and link buying.

One possible workaround is that the same way people sell Diggs, Stumbles etc., there’s likely an underground market for people who will manipulate Youtube quality metrics. Think of them as your own army of Google quality raters!

The bottom line is that there are some interesting opportunities here if you have a budget for experimental tactics.

You’ll probably need to do a fair amount of testing to get around Google’s data beasts. But if you can find a quiet spot under the ratings bell curve, and in a midrange area of the tail, you might pull in some nice video rankings.

If you liked this post, please add my RSS feed to your reader. That way, you can read more posts from me on link building, greyhat SEO and watch videos I create.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Should You Buy Links And Video Embeds For YouTube SEO?

I’m working on some pretty detailed, informative pieces on link buying. One is a MASSIVE how-to. The other is a niche how-to for a specific type of content. If this type of link building is your thing, add my rss feed to your reader for more.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Keep Your Eyes Peeled

There have been lots of innovations in technology, in the algorithms, in products and search engines (hi Bing!). I’m curious to know what you feel has had the greatest impact on SEO. Feel free to name multiple things, and share practical tips!

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky What Has Changed In SEO In 2009 So Far?

I often take screenshots as I browse the web, and I’ve found some weird rankings. This isn’t really outing, just some odd things I’ve noticed around. I’d love to hear your theories as to what’s behind each of these.

302 Found

Why not just index the original page or the one it redirects to? Also, when I checked just now with Live HTTP headers, it shows only 300, 304 and 200 status codes – no 301 or 302 redirects.

Dr. Oz Weird redirect? Cloaking?

The above search results would make you think you’re going to droztv.com . Actually, you go to Oprah.com .

It looks like Dr. Oz’s site is at one particular location. But go there, and you’ll find yourself redirected elsewhere. Is it cloaking? Is it canonicalization? Note: I don’t think this is outing since 1) Oz’s web people probably have no idea they’re making the engines act wonky and 2) No penalty would happen to a celebrity brand like Dr. Oz, so the outing debate is irrelevant.

Acai Berry Complaints? Or something else entirely?

Fascinating page. Check it out and see for yourselves.

What is this?

If anyone can explain why this is ranking and what it is, I’m all ears.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Weird Ranking Observations

My friend Geno Prussakov wrote a fascinating book entitled, Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes. This is my review of Geno’s book, for those who might like to buy it.

After reading his affiliate program management blog for several months, I finally got to meet Geno in person at last month’s Affiliate Summit East, where he gave me a copy of the book. I tore through it on the way home and finished it in about 2 days.

As you might guess, the book is an easy read, and not overly long. It’s substance is a presentation of a  107-question survey of consumers who have shopped online.

Geno begins by presenting the question asked, continues by sharing the results (usually in the form of a chart), and then he presents his own analysis of what the answers mean. Frequently, that analysis includes actionable tips for internet marketers.

The questions themselves cover topics that are extremely pertinent to current online marketing challenges.

Question #80 asks: “What would you consider a substantial one-purchase spending for the total of an online order?”

The top answers were $250 – $500 (27%), $120 – $250 (26%) and $500 – $1000 (20%).

Question #60 asks what would make consumers, while browsing for a specific product (eg people in buying mode), choose one store over another. Geno got a list of over 20 factors from the open ended answers!

Do you know how valuable that is for building a point of difference and lifting conversion rates?

Anyone doing online marketing for an ecommerce site, especially in a B2C context, will obviously derive interesting insights from the book. Personally, this gives me an idea on where to make the cutoff points for price-refinement navigation.

Question #60 helps marketers find a point of difference. Geno asked, “When browsing the internet for a specific product, what criteria ultimately dictate you choosing one store over another for your purchase ?” The answers he got came out to a list of over 20 factors!

At the same time, I found problems with how Geno conducted the survey.

- There were leading questions that suggested one answer over another.

-Sometimes the answers were improperly or poorly structured. For instance, 10% of people thought that a purchase of $100+ was a significant total for an online order (eg in response to question #80). If you combine that with the $120 – $250 segment, then really 36% of people think that order totals between $100 – $250 are significant, for an online purchase.

Despite these problems, there are a lot of valuable ideas to be found in the book. You should buy it, just make sure to keep your critical thinking hat on and not accept everything at face value.

Downloads:

• Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. More info is available on the Internal Link Building page.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Contests: The Knack giveaway password: 51 Sparky Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes – Book Review