Live Journal : 網路/趨勢/技術

Which sci-fi technol

2011-03-25T10:05:00.001-07:00

Which sci-fi technology will become real?: Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, p... http://tinyurl.com/4zpcqrc

3-D smartphones ditc

2011-03-24T16:06:00.001-07:00

3-D smartphones ditch the glasses: After a lukewarm reception from television buyers, 3-D technology is p... http://tinyurl.com/49txedn

Say hello to Google'

2011-03-24T05:12:00.001-07:00

Say hello to Google's online magazine: Google has quietly launched its own full-length online magazine, a... http://tinyurl.com/4m263h6

The internet vs. the

2011-03-23T16:04:00.001-07:00

The internet vs. the NYT paywall: The New York Times plans to add a paywall to its website on Monday in t... http://tinyurl.com/4vy47lo

10 social media pet

2011-03-23T06:30:00.001-07:00

10 social media pet peeves from SXSW bands: South by Southwest is a long, winding "spring break!" (yelled... http://tinyurl.com/4usc44a

Facebook booting '20

2011-03-23T05:23:00.001-07:00

Facebook booting '20,000' underage users per day: According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Lif... http://tinyurl.com/4krtrnq

Happy 5th #Birthday

2011-03-21T05:06:00.005-07:00

Happy 5th #Birthday @Twitter: The message was cryptic. Two words. No context, no punctuation, just: "invi... http://tinyurl.com/4tlvsha

Why AT&T bought T-Mo

2011-03-21T05:06:00.003-07:00

Why AT&T bought T-Mobile: AT&T, criticized and even despised for its inability to keep up with growing mo... http://tinyurl.com/4e7m7qs

Where are the women

2011-03-21T05:06:00.001-07:00

Where are the women in tech?: Historically, the tech industry has not been especially hospitable to women. http://tinyurl.com/4rvcf7c

How I became FarmVil

2011-03-18T05:02:00.003-07:00

How I became FarmVille's barn-raiser-in-chief: For my senior year at Stanford, my very last quarter, I to... http://tinyurl.com/4ooye45

Why you can probably

2011-03-18T05:02:00.001-07:00

Why you can probably skip 3G on iPad 2: When you're shopping for an iPad 2, you have a dozen configuratio... http://tinyurl.com/4hsmqud

Nintendo's new 3DS -

2011-03-16T22:05:00.005-07:00

Nintendo's new 3DS -- a multi-media trojan horse?: Nintendo 3DS, a glasses-free 3-D handheld video game s... http://tinyurl.com/4w7bqsw

Half of Americans ge

2011-03-16T22:05:00.003-07:00

Half of Americans get local news on gadgets: When you want news or information about your community, do y... http://tinyurl.com/4mjym62

Netiquette: Let's pi

2011-03-16T22:05:00.001-07:00

Netiquette: Let's pick up the phone: Let's talk about your last cell phone bill. http://tinyurl.com/4ted9cr

Rebecca Black's 'Fri

2011-03-15T22:24:00.001-07:00

Rebecca Black's 'Friday' and the viral Web: On Friday, teen pop singer Rebecca Black was a little-known a... http://tinyurl.com/4a6cynk

香港國際武術�

2011-03-15T21:26:00.001-07:00

香港國際武術節:台灣之光稱霸武林 15金5銀亮眼成績揚名國際: 被譽為「武術界的奧運」的香港國際武術節，於今日（3/15）圓滿落幕。今年武德盃賽事共號召來自全世界25個國家和地區，共8000多名武術愛好者參加比... http://tinyurl.com/4qtpw4k

AT&T adopts 'monthly

2011-03-15T10:22:00.001-07:00

AT&T adopts 'monthly allowance': AT&T broadband users will soon face a cap on the amount of internet data... http://tinyurl.com/47a6lsw

Google WebP 與傳統圖檔有何不同?

2010-10-15T07:36:00.001-07:00

Google一直在致力於提升網路的效能而努力，在前面文章Google : Lets make the web faster提到，Google建議網站提昇程式的效能並利用工具找出效能的漏洞，在網站優化的要務 : 速度、速度、速度文章也說過許多如何提升網站效能的討論，近期Google又推出WebP圖檔格式，希望網路上的影像可以更加提升效能 ...

根據Google的說法，WebP ( 發音如weppy) 比JPEG增強39.8%的壓縮效能，並且可以在壓縮比與圖像品質上讓使用者決定。

這裡有參考資料: Google新「WebP」影像技術讓圖檔更小！

根據這篇文章Google's Really Taking This Speed Thing Seriously，網頁傳輸上有65%都是影像檔案，因此如果能夠改善圖檔的效能，就能讓網頁更加快速的顯示。你可以透過Google的展示站台來看看WebP的樣貌，並且還有轉換工具。

Google比較了WebP/JPEG 2000/JPEG，發現確實WebP在壓縮上表現都比其他格式來得好 (如下圖)。

在WebP Gallery中有些範例圖片，如下圖

136780 bytes
122260 bytes (10.6%)

上面的圖檔中，以WebP格式的檔案減少了10.6%。

這篇Image Comparisons: PNG, WebP, and HIPIX表示，WebP確實具有最好的壓縮功能，但是在WebP的Wikipedia中，Jason Garrett-Glaser認為與JPEG/x264相比較，WebP的品質最糟糕 ...

但是不管如何，WebP的格式雖然品質未必最優，但是與檔案大小的壓縮相比，WebP的品質應該是可以接受的。在Google’s New WebP Image Standard Is All About SEO就明白的指出了，搞SEO就必須要用WebP啦。

改天真的必須花點時間來開始使用WebP好好的壓縮壓縮了。

參考來源: http://www.dns.com.tw/seo/?p=1076

Android 在本季成為智慧手機市場銷售量最大的系統

2010-10-06T08:06:00.001-07:00

根據報導在手機作業系統市場佔有率的統計數字當中， Android OS 短短一季的時間，在整個北美市場從第二季 12% 的市場佔有率提升到第三季的 17% ，以 5% 的成長速度飛快攀升（數據來自 comScore Reports July 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share）：

source: http://www.metamuse.net/2010/10/android.html

魚與熊掌的選擇消費者團購體驗調研報告

2010-10-06T07:48:00.001-07:00

去餐館吃飯，找會員卡，列印優惠券，都全部OUT了。如今最流行的是，去一些團購網站搶優惠。吃飯、唱歌、找娛樂活動、去旅遊……上團購網找優惠，已經成為很多消費者一種新的消費方式。

針對目前如火如荼的網路團購市場，天極傳媒Datacenter採用網路調研問卷的形式，以300個樣本為研究對象，對消費者的團購體驗進行追蹤調研。

http://big5.cri.cn/gate/big5/it.cri.cn/a/11554593.shtml

消費者對團購未來仍抱期待

儘管存在很多不和諧的聲音，但網路團購超低的價格折扣卻牢牢的抓住了消費者的心理，多數消費者對於團購仍持肯定態度。調研過程中，77%的消費者表示將會繼續關注網路團購，另有22%的消費者表示會視情況而定。由此可見未來團購規範化後，市場規模仍有較大的發展空間。

Datacenter認為：儘管網路團購不是主流的消費模式，但其競爭力已經充分的得到展現。依靠其核心的價格優勢，網路團購在一定程度上改變了傳統消費的遊戲規則：消費者在交易過程中的“弱勢”地位得以改變，網路團購營造了一個網站、商家、消費者三家共贏的局面。然而，超速發展的背後，出現了一些魚目混珠的現象，給這個行業帶入了一些混亂，在這個時候，相關監管和規範制度的建立，相關部門的適時介入，將有利於整個行業向一個好的方向發展。網路團購將進入整頓期。

團購企業與信任危機

2010-10-06T07:46:00.001-07:00

截止2010年8月底，國內初具規模的網路團購企業已達1215家，並主要分佈在北京、上海、深圳、杭州等十大一線熱門城市。“但在團購行業看似‘一片繁榮’的景象背後，團購網站良莠不齊，用戶身陷欺詐門、消費者維權難等質疑聲不斷。”浙江工商大學現代貿易研究中心胡永銓表示，要避免類似事件的發生，就要對團購企業進行約束。

Groupon作為全球團購網站鼻祖，起源於美國。因其在一年半內就獲得13.5億美元的估值，在中國引起了創業者的跟風，形成了“Groupon模式”。在這種商業模式的運作下，僅僅幾個月時間，不僅幾個國內一線城市的團購網站碩果纍纍，各二三線城市團購網站更是異軍突起。

團購導航網CEO王啟亨表示，目前團購網站的增長速度驚人，僅每天找團購導航網加盟的團購企業就由先前的幾家攀升到目前的幾十家，而在其平臺註冊的團購網站已逾千家。

但隨著團購網站的不斷擴張，一些小網站卻悄然降低了對產品品質與用戶服務的把控，近期出現多個團購網站出現購買後無法得到商品的情況，甚至有些團購網站借機騙取消費者的金錢，而且還在不斷蔓延。據統計，目前有超過50%的團購網站存在批量用戶投訴的負面情況。

中國電子商務研究中心分析師方盈芝指出：網路團購屬於網路購物的範疇，與網購一樣同樣容易發生資訊不對稱的道德風險，加之由於我國的網路團購行業尚處於快速“草根瘋長期”，團購網站的誠信與服務水準狀況良莠不齊，我國目前的現行法律對網路團購的規制和監管尚且也處於空白的“真空地帶”。

為了保障廣大消費者的合法權益，促進行業健康和諧發展，中國電子商務研究中心攜手近兩百家到場國內團購領軍企業代表，成立了我國網路團購行業首個民間誠信組織——“中國誠信網路團購聯盟”。

據了解，“中國誠信網路團購聯盟”，旨在通過“聯盟”民間的行業道德與自律力量，呼籲團購網站從商品選擇、用戶體驗、售後服務等各環節的嚴格評估，給新興團購市場帶來一個健康發展的環境，讓消費者能夠得到放心的實惠。

“這是國內首個針對團購這一新興電子商務模式的行業自律重大舉措，標誌著我國團購行業將跨入了誠信自律、自覺維護用戶權利的全新階段。” 方盈芝表示，“聯盟”將通過約束有效的抑制行業內價格虛標、消費券不兌現等的不誠信行為。

中國電子商務研究中心主任曹磊也表示：此“聯盟”最大亮點就是倡導自律，自覺主動地接受社會監督，以自身的誠實信用獲得社會的認可，影響、帶動、推進整個行業的誠信建設。

“在團購前要事先做好市場調查，要了解自己要買的商品的品牌、產地、價格及性能等商品要素，做到心中有數，切莫貪圖價格便宜而忽略產品品質及售後服務的問題。”浙江工商大學現代商貿研究中心主任胡永銓提醒廣大團購消費者，為確保購物安全，消費者在選擇團購獲取優惠價格的同時，要選擇專業、信譽高的團購網站可以提高網購安全系數、團購產品的品質及售後服務的保障。

http://big5.ce.cn/cysc/tech/07hlw/guonei/201009/20/t20100920_20506547.shtml

不要高估Facebook粉絲價值

2010-10-06T07:22:00.001-07:00

企業可以利用Facebook來做什麼呢? 許多企業把Facebook當成行銷平台，也有企業把Facebook當成客服界面，更有企業把Facebook當成促銷產品的好所在，但是也有企業把Facebook當成公告欄，到底Facebook當成啥用途最好，是許多企業想要找的答案，因為很多專家都告訴你，Facebook可以聚集很多人潮，可以吸引很多人來當你企業的粉絲，然後這些價值如何如何 ...

如果企業的Facebook粉絲數不夠多，大概行銷部門會開始抓狂，然後開始用盡各種方式來增加粉絲，因此有了許多偏方開始教你如何快速增加粉絲，如果許多方法都無法真正符合要求，就會開始使用更「殺」的方法，直到無法回頭的地步。

http://www.dns.com.tw/?p=718

向Lady Gaga學來的九個部落格必殺技

2010-07-27T00:55:00.001-07:00

當Lady Gaga很紅的時候，筆者還不知道Lady Gaga是誰。當Lady Gaga紅遍全球的時候，筆者大概知道她是一個搞怪的藝人。今年，才真正特別注意一下Lady Gaga，為啥這個穿得如此怪異的女人，會讓大家如此瘋狂。現在我們透過Lady Gaga的哲學，竟然也可以找出部落格的九個必殺技，真的有這麼神嗎? 往下看看囉 ...

詳細內容: http://www.dns.com.tw/?p=509

SEO達人養成密集班開課 ~~

2010-07-25T20:58:00.001-07:00

SEO達人養成密集班~ ~時間: 09:00~18:00 (8/7,8/8) ~~ 上課主旨: 讓您將熱門關鍵字做上第一頁 http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=139253709429821&index=1

Oexchange 內容共享協定是什麼?

2010-07-22T21:22:00.000-07:00

Oexchange是由許多大廠所支援的內容共享協定，如Google、Microsoft、Digg、Linkedin ... 等等。「OExchange is an open protocol for sharing any URL with any service on the web」一個開放協定用來與任何網路服務共享任何URL，為什麼需要一個這種協定? 這樣的協定是如何運作的?

Oexchange是由Clear Spring Technology所發展的技術，目的在簡化分享雙方的繁雜細節，例如我們在網頁上使用Addthis的功能來將URL分享到其他地方去，但是如果我們要分享的對方，沒有被列在Addthis上，那麼就沒有辦法透過簡單的方式分享。

例如Addthis如果沒有Hemidemi的書籤分享功能，我就必須到Hemidemi網站，然後把標題、敘述、URL等資訊，自己輸入到Hemidemi上。

現在如果大家都支援Oexchange，就不需要這麼麻煩，當支援Oexchange的網頁A沒有Hemidemi，我只需到Hemidemi的網頁上選擇新增服務，然後再回到網頁A就會出現Hemidemi的分享功能。

轉載自: Oexchange 內容共享協定是什麼?

Google greenlights crowdsourced film project

2010-07-08T14:19:00.001-07:00

Sometimes Google takes a break from its mission of organizing all the world's information and decides to embark upon an artsy project that encapsulates ... organizing all the world's information. http://htxt.it/lMCL

2010-06-14T06:47:00.001-07:00

*How to Get Links in Tough Industries
*by Paddy_Moogan
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/e3tjSeTPsCk/how-to-get-links-in-tough-industries

Posted by Paddy_MooganHowdy
SEOmozzers I’m Paddy Moogan I work for Distilled in the UK office.
This is my first SEOmoz post, hope you find it useful and I look forward to
your feedback. How this post came together...
A few weeks ago we decided to try to help people who do link building in
industries where links are not always easy to come by. We created a
form which asked people two questions - What industry do you
work in that you believe it is very hard to get links for? If you
could get a link from one website in your industry, what would it be?
We've received loads of great replies and I'm going to cover as
many as possible here. The second question was optional and didn't
have to be related to the industry. Any websites not related
to an industry will be covered at the end of the post. I'm hoping to
do another post soon which will cover the rest of the submissions.
My Approach My usual approach to link building is
based on the site itself and identifying what makes that website link
worthy, obviously I can't use that approach in this situation! Instead
I'm going to suggest asking yourself four questions -
Important Note: Please do not bypass "Why will they
link to me?". This is probably the hardest question to answer and
will require work to get right. Link building is hard work mainly
because you need to spend time creating content that someone wants to link
to, if you put time and resource into this part of the process, the rest
isn't as difficult. I'm going to follow this process for some of the
sites on this list so that even if non of these sites are in your industry,
you can still use the same process to identify link building opportunities
for yourself. The rest of the sites will have some quick tips and
ideas for getting links. Industries that are Tough to get Links
for Here are some of the suggestions we had submitted for tough
industries to get links for. Veterinarians
Who you want a link from: Any person who owns a pet
and a website How you are going to get their attention:
There are lots and lots of forums and online
communities out there based around various types of pets. Joining some
of these and posting a few bits of free veterinary advice would certainly
get their attention. How you are going to get a link:
Start a Q&A section where users can submit a question and
receive free advice from one of your expert vets. Capture a persons
Twitter, Facebook or website address when they ask a question. Then
prioritise questions by those who have a website and answer those
first. Ask them to share the answer on their website as a thank
you Add a Jobs Board to your site, if you have a Wordpress blog here is a
method on how to do it. Allow other Veterinarians to post job
vacancies to your site and encourage them to promote it on their own
site. Ask users to submit photos of their animals and award a prize
for the cutest - design a badge for them to use on their website with their
pets picture on it - link this to the competition page. SEOs seem to
love cats so I had to include a least one picture! Image source
Quick Link Targets: Veterinarian Business websites, this
search of Dmoz gives you a few good sites to contact
Jewelry Ecommerce Who you want a
link from: A jewelry making website or blog How you are
going to get their attention: There are lots of active
forums in this industry where you can make contacts and provide good
information. This Twitter
list search also provides you with lots of people to contact and
interact with. How you are going to get a link:
Run a competition and ask designers and students to design a piece of
jewelry which you will feature on your website. Put all the entries on
your website and encourage the entrants to share the link and get their
friends to vote for them Create a page on your website that
calculates the current price of gold, allow it to be shared easily and
embedded on other websites. You can approach pawnbrokers and see if
they want to use the calculator on their own website and credit you with a
link Link bait ideas - Men are notoriously bad at buying jewelry
and always need help figuring out what to buy and in particular what size
ring to buy. A Mens Guide to Buying Jewelry would work quite
well. Another idea would be to name the top x ways of proposing to
your girlfriend. I wonder if this
would make the list :) A bit of a combination of the previous ideas
- create a calculator that will tell a guy how much he should spend on an
engagement ring Quick Link Target:
Bonus ecommerce tip for all sites which have offline
stores - find out if any of them are within a shopping centre or
complex. If the complex has a website listing all of its shops, ask
them for a link. Here is an example of a shop doing this from the Bullring
Shopping Centre in the UK -
iPhone Apps for the SEO Industry I have to admit,
this was one of the easiest ones on the list, SEOs love to link to cool apps
especially SEO ones! Ideal person to get a link from: An Experienced
SEO Blogger with a Large Following How to get their attention:
The SEO industry is very active on Twitter, start following your link target
and RT them, ask them questions and generally be nice! How you
are going to get a link: If it is a paid app, give
out free copies to top SEO bloggers for them to review If the app
is not yet public, give them super secret behind the scenes access to it so
they can test it - in exchange for a review If the app is already
public, when you add a new feature, ask SEO bloggers to beta test it for
you. Quick Link Targets: Submit your App to
all of these, they give you a link back form your App page http://www.apple.com/webapps/
http://www.igoapps.com/

http://www.appstorehq.com/developers http://appshopper.com/
Electric Bikes Who you want a link
from: A blogger who loves anything eco-friendly, ideally
they will have a bicycle of their own at the moment How you are
going to get their attention: There are several online
communities that you could leverage for outreach. These include
cycling activists and associations, many of whom are active on Twitter such
as http://twitter.com/CTC_Cyclists.
There is also the "green" community who encourage the use of
eco-friendly products. How you are going to get a link:
Create a calculator which tells someone how much they currently
spend on a petrol car or bike along with how much damage this does to the
environment. Make this shareable and send it to bloggers who talk
about environmental issues Setup a classifieds section of the
website where users can sell their old bikes, you can then ask them to
include a link from the British
Cycling website if they are a member of the association
Quick Links:
http://www.swindonclimate.org.uk/ElectricBikes - there are lots of sites
like this in other areas
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Resources/Product-reviews/Nigel-s-eco-product-reviews
- get a product review
http://www.atob.org.uk/Electric_price_tag.html#h7 - sorry I know that
one is a nofollow!
http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/electric_vehicles_bikes_conversion_parts.htm
Sound Masking Link bait idea - overheard
office conversations. This has the potential to be a funny piece of
content but with a serious end to it - the need for sound masking in an open
plan office. A good example may be the Head of the HR department
speaking about employees in an office which has no sound masking, this could
lead to a title such as "Office Conversations you wish you hadn't
heard" etc. Image Source
These guys have created a few graphics to
help people understand what sound masking is. This could be executed
and presented in a much better way. You could create a "before
and after" graphic of a sound masking installation to show the effect
it has on the workplace. This could even be tied in with some nice
stats and graphs on how it improves efficiency as well. Eg after sound
masking you can expect an x% increase in efficiency. Business
Training - Business NLP There is an active forum here - http://nlp-experts.org/forum.php
which seems to have a small Twitter following as well. The guy who
runs this seems to have some authority in the area and a network of websites
which help promote his main business. If you do a backlink check on
the forum you'll find some of these as well as other NLP sites you could get
links from. Classifieds/Online Marketplace
Here I'd focus on certain sections of the site, for example if you have a
section with classified ads for used cars. Focus on this sector and
how to get links, one idea would be to go out to car enthusiast
websites and offer them a widget or feed which displays a few of the
classified ads on their website. This would work well if you found a
site with a focus on a certain make such as BMW. You could just give
them a feed for this section so that it will be of interest to their
users. Here is an example of how Auto Trader are doing this on the Guardian website - If
you have a pets section, you could also use the ideas outlined above in the
Veterinarians section. Fashion Shopping Portal
Ecommerce websites are often seen as difficult to get links for, I can
see why as it's hard to attract links to a product page or category
page. The solution is to think about the industry as a whole and what
content you can add to other parts of your website to get links
flowing in. There are other methods which I talk about in the next
section. I'm going to cheat here and repeat a tip - add a jobs board
which lets fashion students see an updated list of jobs. The reason
I'm repeating this tip is that you can try to get links from high value
pages such as this
and this.
Another approach would be to write a guide on How to Get a Job in the
Fashion Industry, if you can make this a good guide then you will appeal to
loads of websites including this one.
Link Building to an Ecommerce Site with thousands of
Products The challenge here is finding a solution that is
scalable, manually building links to thousands of individual pages isn't
very practical. Here is a great
article written by Rob which gives you a few starting points.
There is also this head-smacking
tips from Rand which is very scalable no matter how many products you
have, its just a case of automating the follow up email. I genuinely
think that the key to a successful strategy here is to get your customers to
do the link building for you. Try to add user generated content to
every product page along with making products as easy to share as possible
via social media. Here is an idea of enhancing a standard
product page where buyers can leave reviews - Get customers to upload
their videos and photos of their new product to you, then when it has been
approved, drop them an email to let them know. Within this email
include a line similar to the head smacking tip I've linked to above.
Ask the person to blog about the content or share it with friends.
Again this is very scalable as it can be automated after the review has been
approved. Gambling Ok, I'll admit this is a
difficult one! I'd take a similar approach to link building for
ecommerce sites, there needs to be another angle built into the website to
attract links. People are not going to naturally link to a small
gambling site without a very good reason. So give them a good
reason, one may be - Holding the licence to a famous brand that has
been turned into a game - an example being movies that are turned into slot
machine games. You can reach out to the online communities around the
brand. Also, many online slot machines started their life as an
offline game - try reaching out to users of the offline game and ask them to
spread the word that there is actually an online version too
Clothing - No Branded Stuff I'd target a very
specific market here to get links from - fashion students. If you are
not selling branded clothing, then you can appeal to young, creative
clothing designers who want to make a name for themselves. You can
contact Universities and Colleges to ask if students want to contribute
designs to your site in exchange for some publicity, they could link to it
from the University website to help promote it. The other
angle here is to contact individual fashion students with their own blogs
such as this one who
may want to take part themselves, then link to their design once it is live
on your website. I also found this competition
which you could do an online version of. Web
Hosting A quick win here would be to ask sites who use your
service link to you from their website. In the same way a web design
firm may receive a link, its something that Fasthosts seem to do as you can
see on this website.
Also submitted with this industry was a website that is hard to get links
from, the site was http://www.php.net so
I'm going to include this here as well. http://www.php.net/links.php Here
are a few ways to get links from this page: Publish a news
feed, you can do this by hiring a guest author if you have limited in-house
resource If you have a member of staff who speaks another language,
ask them to start writing a section on your site in that languauge
Create some cool merchandise - the geekiest the better! A t-shirt
which is only funny if you are a PHP coder could work quite well
There is also the possibility of getting a link from http://www.php.net/conferences/ if you
run a conference on PHP. Components for Microsoft Visual
Studio This is quite a big area which can improve the scope
of the websites that you can target. I found http://www.mcmsfaq.com/links.asp which
links to a number of websites who work with various Microsoft
technologies. Another quick win would be to ask for a link from the
companies you work with, especially if you do any work with .NET on their
websites or have build various components of their systems. Websites
that people struggle to get links from Here are a few websites
submitted to us that people wanted to get a link from. http://www.reiclub.com
This is a Real Estate Investing website, they have a few different forums on various
topics. You can have a link in your forum signature but they have a
number of rules to follow. Make sure you are contributing to the forum
and helping people before you start dropping links, otherwise I doubt
the links will stay there for long. If you are a money lender you
also may stand a good chance of getting a link from this page
http://www.reiclub.com/hard-money-lenders.php http://www.statefarm.com
State Farm is a US based insurance website, there isn't an obvious way to
get a link but it is possible if you are an agency. You can get a profile page which
includes a link to your website. http://www.education.gov.uk/
This one immediately struck me as being difficult, not just because of
the domain name, but because of the page they have in the top right corner
called "Linking" which outlines their very strict linking
policies! So lets be creative - get them to tweet a link to your
website. Ok this can be difficult but there benefits go way beyond the
link itself on this one. Their following is around 3,000 people, a
tweet from them could bring you a lot of traffic and links from other
sites. You'd also get a link from their homepage as they display the
latest tweet from their profile, looking at the frequency of their tweets,
this link could be in place for a few days. I'll admit this one is a
bit sneaky but it could get you a link from their homepage and bring lots of
attention. Bit of free advice for the Department of
Education As a sidenote, this website is showing at Google
Toolbar PR0 which I found strange. Turns out that they recently moved
domains which is a valid reason, however their old site - http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ is using a 302
redirect. Unless they are planning to take the redirect down very soon
I would use a 301 instead! Finally - www.seomoz.org This was actually
the most popular site that people wanted to get links from. This may
surprise you but there are a few ways to do this! Get your Moz
points score above 100 to get a followed link from your profile. Read
about how to get Mozpoints
here Write a good blog post and it could be included on Youmoz along with a link to you
Put extra special effort into the post and it could be promoted to the
main blog - bringing you lots of extra attention, links and readers.
This is a great example of how putting extra effort into creating content
will benefit you when it comes to getting quality links Well
that is it for now, please let us know what you think and of course if you
have any additional tips please add them in the comments. You can also
catch me on Twitter if you
want.Do you like this post? Yes No

Join the discussion.
Comment by clicking on the link below.

Latent Semantic Index 隱含語意索引

2010-06-12T01:19:00.001-07:00

到底內容是否注意Latent Semantic Index 隱含語意索引有沒有關係? 到底要如何注意呢? http://htxt.it/ooh9

Google Caffeine 正式上線

2010-06-12T01:16:00.001-07:00

Google的官方部落格公佈了"Our New Search Index Caffeine"，宣稱Google Caffeine提供更新更多的搜尋資料，至於為何要推出新的索引資料架構呢? Google解釋因為往際資料成長太快，使用者希望能夠尋找到最新的相關資料，因此勢必要做個修正 ... http://htxt.it/TzPK

WorldCup 將考驗兩個東西 ... Cell Network 跟 Social Network

2010-06-12T01:13:00.001-07:00

Can cell networks handle the World Cup? http://htxt.it/9YQ6

New York Times 不准用tweet這個字眼

2010-06-12T01:10:00.001-07:00

The New York Times bans use of word 'tweet' http://htxt.it/btkj

The post update will be working soon.

2010-06-12T00:23:00.001-07:00

As you know, the connection between applications is really hard to deal with. I think it's been fixed now.

Today is the day ...

2010-06-11T23:24:00.001-07:00

It's been a while busy travelling, and from now on the time is mine ...

2010-06-11T23:12:00.001-07:00

I am back and new articles will be on the way.

SEO關鍵解碼已經再刷又再刷, 並將在大陸銷售簡體版本!

2010-05-10T18:30:00.001-07:00

感謝各界的喜愛! SEO關鍵解碼已經再刷又再刷, 並將在大陸銷售簡體版本! 預計不久會再推出精彩續集喔!! http://htxt.it/fZpS

賀SEO關鍵解碼即時排行2010/5/10第4名

2010-05-10T18:29:00.001-07:00

賀SEO關鍵解碼, 仍居金石堂網路書店, 網路技術暢銷排行榜│即時排行2010/5/10第4名, http://htxt.it/agDy

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Online Data – Gaining Actionable Insight from Web Analytics

2010-04-29T15:56:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2ej78xe

YouTube Viewers Watched Average of 96 Videos per Viewer in March

2010-04-29T14:57:00.003-07:00

comScore Video Metrix today reported that more than 180 million U.S. Internet users watched 31.2 billion videos online in March 2010. This means 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed an average of 173 videos per viewer during the month. As Butch Cassidy often asked, "Who are those guys?"

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/2fqdr67

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 29, 2010

2010-04-29T14:57:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/34nmzqx

ConversionConference.com - May 4-5, San Jose

2010-04-29T13:57:00.003-07:00

Conversion Conference is just around the corner. I am proud to be chairing the first conference devoted exclusively to online conversion. It will be held on May 4-5, 2010 at the luxurious Fairmont Hotel in San Jose.

Join over 40 thought-provoking speakers including keynotes Bryan Eisenberg, Jakob Nielsen, and me for a dynamic two-day event. Network with over 500 peers at the parallel eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.

Over 26 hard-hitting sessions (see agenda) will keep you on the cutting edge. Whether you are looking for the psychology of persuasion, graphic design, copywriting, usability, landing page testing & tools, or best practices for your specific situation, it's all here. Enjoy world-class expert sessions, hands-on live critiques, and no-holds-barred open mic panels.

* Mingle with your peers at our birds-of-a-feather lunch tables

* Attend two afternoon networking events

* Have fun at the giant Conversion Bash party on Tuesday night

* Interact in an intimate atmosphere with the top practitioners in our field

* Visit over 50 cutting-edge exhibitors in the sold-out Expo Hall

This is a partnered event of ClikZ & Search Engine Strategies. You can save $250 off of a 2-day full conference pass when using promo code "CCW679" when registering at http://ping.fm/johfv. Follow us on Twitter with hashtag ConvCon.

Do you know the way to San Jose? It is the same road that leads to higher conversion - hope to see you there!

http://tinyurl.com/26g2toh

Last Call For Speakers For SMX Advanced

2010-04-29T13:57:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/247cbdf

Layar Launches World's First Augmented Reality Content Store

2010-04-29T11:55:00.001-07:00

Layar has introduced a new revenue opportunity for Augmented Reality (AR) developers to target the 1.6M mobiles that have downloaded their augmented reality browser.

The company yesterday announced the the Layar Payment Platform, which is a content store integrated into the Layar Reality Browser. Set up to support multiple payment providers and multiple currencies, the platform is ready to serve different local markets.

Layar deals with legal, administrative and tax rules, enabling publishers to focus on their core activities: creating valuable alternate reality experiences. The first payment provider is PayPal, supporting payments to residents of United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. More countries, currencies, payment methods and payment providers are due to be added over the next 12 months.

Among the first publishers to start offering paid AR content expriences on Layar are:

Album Covers Atlas, by Howard Ogden, from Augmentreality.co.uk. (He is a past speaker at SES.) The atlas enables users to find the exact location where iconic album cover photos were taken, such as the exact zebra crossing, the Beatles crossed on Abbey Road, or the Hotel California where the Eagles were not able to check out from.

Mixing reality with music seems like an interesting and intuitive leap for the general public to make from their MP3 players to AR browsing.

Eyetours: Explore Puerto Rico, which dubs itself as the "future of tours." While frankly unimpressive, it still demonstrates the reach of the store and niches that paid AR apps can target have.

Personally, I would prefer to discover Puerto Rico in person rather than by phone.

However, it's different strokes for different folks and this just might be your thing. Once Layar is able to do push notifications based on location, this could be much more exciting. Then you don't have to look like a dork anymore.

Publishers can start selling their content without any upfront costs, and will receive 60% of the net proceeds. The costs for the platform, legal, administration, banking and others are covered by the remaining 40%. Any publisher ready to start exploring the medium and monetizing their content can go to http://www.layar.com/create.

If you are thinking of developing your own AR experiences for Layar, we at SEW strongly advocate that you innovate within narrowly defined markets, otherwise you are likely to have no true differentiation against recent advances from Google Streetview, which has integrated local business listings.

The bigger technology providers are better able to serve horizontal markets and are likely to crowd you out. Therefore, stick to targeting niche communities of engaged enthusiasts, such as the aforementioned music aficionados. The web is fantastic for supporting the fanatical fringes of society, so build Layars for them and bring the world they love alive in front of their eyes.

Android users in the U.S., Canada, U.K. & Australia can start buying AR Layars now after installing the latest Layar browser update. Just make sure you don't use it while crossing the road.

http://tinyurl.com/2a9gqs5

Share of searches in America in March: a dozen of Bings

2010-04-29T10:55:00.005-07:00

Nielsen just released March 2010 share of searches in America. Bing search share remains at above a dozen, 12.2% exactly. Compared to February, Bing captured 12.5% share, a slightly drop of 0.3%. Share of total number of queries for the giant Google increases slightly to 65.7%, compared to February, Google's share was 65.2%, or an increase of 0.5%. Since January 2010, Bing has increased a total of 2.3%, while Google dropped about 1.6% for the same period of three months. (Source: Nielsen) http://tinyurl.com/27jce82

Google: Now Recommending Brands For Searches

2010-04-29T10:55:00.003-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2al5ohh

Google’s Preferred AdWords API Pricing Model Equals Big Changes

2010-04-29T10:55:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/29bo6a2

SEMPO Announces New Leadership

2010-04-29T09:55:00.003-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/28t3tn2

How To Use E-mail To Benefit SEO

2010-04-29T09:55:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2936aoa

What's missing in realtime

2010-04-29T09:05:00.001-07:00

I was at breakfast this morning with a friend from the tech industry, and the subject got around to Facebook vs Google, and the way Twitter is kind of in the middle of the two giants.

I've felt for a long time that Twitter should have welcomed federation early-on, when the competition wasn't so fierce. While it wasn't a slam-dunk, I thought there was a decent chance our Twitter log-ins could be the default username for many other sites on the net. Now Facebook is making a strong bid to be that, and if Twitter were to try that now it would likely be seen as too-little-too-late.

Then my friend, who asked not to be named, wondered why WordPress isn't in the same place as Twitter. I answered with an analogy -- Twitter is riding a bicycle on Interstate 95, and Facebook and Google are two semis about to have a head-on collision. Twitter may not be directly competing with either of them, and Google probably doesn't care much about Twitter one way or another, but the collision is going to do some serious damage to all who are in the vicinity. WordPress isn't riding a bike and they are nowhere near the freeway. Picture Matt sitting on the beach sipping a Mai Tai.

It sure feels this way but then I wondered -- why?

And if WordPress is on the beach sipping drinks with little umbrellas, how can Ev and Biz get some of that action? Then I figured it out.

Two bits (and they may be very hard for Twitter to do):

1. I don't mind hosting sites on wordpress.com because I know if I ever want to get them off I can run them on my own server. I need to be able to do that with Twitter (or Tumblr for that matter). In other words, there must be an open source, easily installable Twitter that's the same thing that twitter.com is running, so I can just move my presence there and not skip a beat. People are going to say I can do that with Identi.ca, but I can't -- when I move my WordPress blog my domain points to the new location and all my links still work. To really trust Twitter, they have to enable competition at this level.

2. I must be able to completely control the look and feel of my presence. This is something Matt & Company could do much better too, but Twitter hardly does it at all. This is something Ev should understand, as one of the early blogging tool vendors, he should remember how important a role designers played in the evolution of blogging. Given that Twitter and the other services in this space (e.g. Facebook) don't allow the user any control over the HTML of their presence, it should be easy to improve this. But I want power over everything. More important, I want designers to have power over everything so I can use the product of their work.

So in summary: I need to be able to isntall my own Twitter and move my presence to my own server, easily. And I need control over the look and feel of my site. Those two things would do enough to shake up the market and give Twitter a new way forward and make what Facebook and Google do in their battle-of-the-titans-to-death mostly irrlevant to them.

http://bit.ly/9XIKs0

Yahoo Search Update: 4/29/2010 Weather Report

2010-04-29T08:58:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/36xk3hf

Google Making Changes To Canada Maps, Now “Owns” The Data As In US

2010-04-29T08:09:00.003-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/35s6949

Competitive Intelligence: Purpose & Process

2010-04-29T08:09:00.001-07:00

Posted by JoannaLord

When it comes to marketing your brand online there is just so much to do. We spend our days researching, creating, implementing, and then measuring the success of our efforts. There are dozens of channels to participate in, and obviously thousands of ways to go about marketing your brand, but however you slice it—online marketing comes down to introducing new audiences to your brand, keeping your current brand users happy, and evolving the brand/company itself.

Unfortunately I think the first two steps often overshadow that third step to the process—evolving the brand/company itself, probably because to grow as a company you really need to take a pause and evaluate where you are currently standing. As marketers, the idea of pausing is equated with losing momentum which scares the hell out of us all. This industry moves too quickly, and pausing to reflect on where your brand is compared to your competitors seems like time poorly spent.

I am here to argue just the opposite. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at PubCon South on “Competitive Intelligence on the Social Web,” and I wanted to extract a few of my key arguments and offer them up the SEOmoz audience both as thought provokers and for feedback. In my opinion competitive intelligence is one of those marketing steps we all say we did, but few of us rarely do. It’s true. Most of us are big fat liars when it comes to “doing competitive intelligence.”

For example, competitive intelligence IS NOT:

Sitting in a room and ranting about your competitor’s latest marketing move

Grabbing lunch with your Product Manager and creating a roadmap based on what your competitors have that you don’t.

Putting together a grid of you and your competitor’s website’s traffic stats, never to be looked at again.

Googling your competitor’s brand name to see what latest things are noted in the SERP’s

Sorry friends that is not competitive intelligence.

However, competitive intelligence IS:

Understanding what direction your competitor's are headed & how that might intersect or parallel your own

Knowing what products you are pushing out and how they match up or differ from your competitor's

Mapping out a list of key differentials and attributes for your biggest competitors and yourself

Researching & monitoring a variety of platforms to better understand your competitors

Okay now that we all have a better sense of what it is, let’s talk about how to do it. Instead of throwing a 20-slide PowerPoint at you I thought I would dilute it down to a few key steps toward understanding your competitive landscape, and perhaps more importantly I want to tie those into how you can use this information for company gains.

The Grid of Awesomeness:

Okay maybe that name is a bit of an exaggeration, but either way, the first key step toward understanding your competitors is getting them all down on paper and forcing yourself to research key attributes. I have included below an example grid that you can use to get you started.

You might ask yourself—how do I know which competitors to include? This can differ depending on the size of your company and the scope of your industry but a great place to start is the “3-1-1 rule”. I usually suggest you pick 3 brands that are often grouped with yours, either in roundup articles, or in conversation. Those are your primary competitors. Then choose one “dreamer,” which would be the brand in your vertical you hope to be one day. Lastly, I suggest including one “newbie” in your competitive analysis, this is assuming that isn’t you of course. By picking a newbie in your industry you can often gain perspective into where your industry is moving, and key marketing channels to consider since they tend to operate pretty lean.

After you have chosen your competitors I suggest filling out the following for them: name, size, products, features, price points, affiliate program description (do they have one? What are the key attributes?), playing grounds (what channels, platforms, communities are they dominating?), advocates/influencers (who is lobbying for them?), notes. Don’t forget to fill this out for your company as well!

Example Grid:

Product Growth & Benchmarking:

This is perhaps the most time consuming element to competitive intelligence when it is done well. There needs to be someone in charge of competitive intelligence maintenance. This person should subscribe to your competitor’s blog so you are hearing about product launches as they happen, and all company announcements in real time. You can also gain a lot of insight from reading the comments to those posts.

In addition to this you should set up Google Alerts for your competitor’s brand plus the words “launches” and “announces.” We all know that Google Alerts are limited and somewhat unreliable, but you should have a daily digest set to notify you of any big moves your competitor's are making. You never know which could be a real momentum changer.

The last step to this is really to keep a pulse on the traffic growth to their sites by checking Alexa or Compete monthly. While it may seem a strain on your time and resources it’s beneficial for you to know what momentum trajectory your competitor’s are on.

Monitoring Mentions:

This is what most people think competitive intelligence is. While it's not the only piece to the competitive intelligence puzzle, it certainly is an important one. There are so many tools available to us (most free) that help us keep an eye on what our competitors do…it’s actually a bit creepy how many tools and sites are out there to help us be shady. I personally support this shadiness.

Some examples would include sites like: Whostalkin, SocialMention, Backtype, etc. All of these allow you to search a competitor’s brand or products and find out the latest things said about them. These social web aggregators search a number of channels like images, videos, blogs, new feeds, etc. They are great for understanding how a product launch might have gone for a competitor or how any other announcement was received.

Other ways to spy on your competitor’s in the social web—create private twitter lists and monitor their brand and employee’s feeds, sign up for competitor’s newsletters, etc. The key is know where they are pushing out the most crucial information and then making sure you have someone dabbling in that space.

Hiring Espionage:

Now that you have a sense of where your competitor’s currently stand and what they are doing right now, it’s time to spy on them and try to figure out their next moves. Hiring espionage is a great way to do this. You can gain a great sense of where your competitors are moving by looking at who they are investing in from an employee perspective.

A great way to do this is to keep an eye on their company job listings, and occasionally throw their brand into a job meta-engine. The best possible place to spy on hiring moves is by going to LinkedIn and finding their company profile page. There is a section down at the bottom that shows recent hires. You can defer tons of information from this section—are they hiring a bunch of sales people? Top-level engineers? Whatever team they are stacking up is probably the team they are focusing on.

The Takeaway:

The important thing to remember is that competitive intelligence isn’t something you do once and never revisit again. It also isn’t something that you can base on intuition or informal conversations with coworkers. Competitive intelligence is a key process that can be used to inform instrumental decisions you make. The better you understand your competitors the clearer perspective you have on your industry and audience as a whole. Competitive intelligence enables you to better speak on your strengths, brainstorm ideas for quick gains, and make more data-driven decisions all around.

Plus you get to pretend you are a spy which is just all sorts of fun (please note trench coat and night vision goggles are optional).

Do you like this post? Yes No

http://tinyurl.com/2av34c2

What's the Job of a Real-time Search Engine?

2010-04-29T07:26:00.001-07:00

What do we expect of real-time search, and how are those expectations different from what we expect of traditional reference search? When might we say that a set of search results is good? ... http://tinyurl.com/2uq3y2x

My favorite books: and why I love them

2010-04-29T07:18:00.003-07:00

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know... http://bit.ly/aQHw9M

A podcast about loops

2010-04-29T07:18:00.001-07:00

Every once in a while a podcast comes together in a way you couldn't have scripted.

That happened on Monday in the 49th episode of Rebooting the News.

If you have 45 minutes, it's worth a listen, from beginning to end (it's important to hear how it ends).

http://bit.ly/b8rRan

Thoughts on CS5 @FITC Toronto 2010

2010-04-29T07:10:00.003-07:00

The FITC Toronto 2009 officially ended yesterday. Congrats to the award winners. My overall experience was pretty good. I’ve attended FITC in the past four years and they are getting better and better. This year, I’ve learned a lot of new things about Flash, particularly the multitouch Flash content and mobile Flash. In this [...] http://tinyurl.com/23o9vqy

My Stuff from jQuery Conference

2010-04-29T07:10:00.001-07:00

The Bay Area jQuery Conference was amazingly fun. I met TONS of great people who I’ve wanted to meet forever. It was kinda like a Bluegrass Festival in some ways. The sessions weren’t recorded so unfortunately you can’t check them out that way. I’m going to embed my own slides below and you can view [...] http://tinyurl.com/2e7y3od

You'll Never Guess Who Is Similar to Matt Cutts?

2010-04-29T07:03:00.005-07:00

Yesterday, The Official Google Blog talked about "Discovering pages 'similar to" ones that you like." Today, Search Engine Watch invites you to start playing a new game.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/26mgqg8

UK Election 2010: YouTube Facebook Digital Debate

2010-04-29T07:03:00.003-07:00

Later today, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg will participate in the YouTube Facebook Digital Debate, adding a new social media dimension the UK election in 2010.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/235kha7

Keyword List Building 101

2010-04-29T07:03:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2akfwqn

More New Products and Services from SES New York 2010

2010-04-29T07:02:00.015-07:00

Last week, I mentioned that one of the big reasons marketers go to trade shows is to see new products and services. Well, Jamie O'Donnell of SEO-PR visited the expo hall at SES New York 2010 and here are some more exhibitors that he saw.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/2buqnu6

Google Upgrades Mobile Image Search

2010-04-29T07:02:00.013-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/288mady

30 SEO Problems & the Tools to Solve Them (Part 2 of 2)

2010-04-29T07:02:00.011-07:00

Posted by randfish

Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I'm finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.

Some of these are obvious and well known; others are obscure and brand new. All of them solve problems - and that's why tools should exist in the first place. Below, you'll find 20+ tools that answer serious issues in smart, powerful ways.

#1 - Generating XML Sitemap Files

The Problem: XML Sitemap files can be challenging to build, particularly as sites scale over a few hundred or few thousand URLs. SEOs need tools to build these, as they can substantively add to a site's indexation and potential to earn search traffic.

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Google Sitemap Generator

GSiteCrawler: Downloadable software to create XML Sitemaps

Download a few files from Google Code and Install on Your Webserver

Looks like Google Webmaster Tools, doesn't it? :-)

Both GSiteCrawler & Google Sitemap Generator require a bit of technical know-how, but even non-programmers (like me) can stumble their way through and build efficient and effective XML Sitemaps.

#2 - Tracking the Virality of Blog/Feed Content

The Problem: Even experienced bloggers have trouble predicting which posts will "go wide" and which will fall flat. To improve your track record, you need historical data to help show you where and how your posts are performing in the wild world of social media. What's needed is a cloud based tracking tool that can sync up with the Twitters, Facebooks, Diggs, Reddits, Stumbleupons & Delicious' of the web to provide these metrics in an easy-to-use, historical view.

Tools to Solve It: PostRank Analytics

PostRank's nightly emails keep me wracking my brains for better blog post ideas

PostRank sends me nightly reports on how the SEOmoz blog performs across the web - numbers from Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and more. By using this, I can get a rough sense of how posts perform in the social media marketplace and, over time, hopefully train me to author more interesting content.

Addition: Melanie from Postrank added a discount code in the comments for SEOmoz users! Use the coupon code "SEOmoz" in order to get three free months instead of just one.

#3 - Comparing the Relative Traffic Levels of Multiple Sites

The Problem: We all want to know not only how we're doing with web traffic, but how it compares to the competition. Free services like Compete.com and Alexa have well-documented accuracy problems and paid services like Hitwise, Comscore & Nielsen cost an arm and a leg (and even then, don't perform particularly well with sites in the sub-million visits/month range).

Tools to Solve It: Quantcast, Google Trends for Websites

If a site has been "Quantified," no other competitive traffic tool on the web will be as accurate

Since both sites are "Quantified," I can be sure the data quality is excellent

I've complained previously about the inaccuracies of Alexa (as have many others). It's really for entertainment purposes only. Compete.com is better, but still suffers from lots of inaccuracy, data gaps, directionally wrong estimates and a general feeling of unreliability in the marketplace. Quantcast, on the other hand, is excellent for comparing sites that have entered their "Quantified" program. This involves putting Quantcast's tracking code onto each page of the site; you're basically peeking into their analytics.

Sadly, Quantcast isn't on every site (and their guesstimates appear no better than Compete when they don't have direct data). Fortunately, one organization has stepped up with a surprisingly good alternative - Google.

Google Trends for Websites allows you to plug in domains and see traffic levels. Much like AdWords Keyword Tool, the numbers themselves seem to run high, but the comparison often looks much better. Google Trends has become the only traffic estimator I trust - still only as far as I could throw a Google Mini, but better than nothing.

#4 - Seeing Pages the Way Search Engine Do

The Problem: Every engineering & development team builds web pages in unique ways. This is great for making the Internet an innovative place, but it can make for nightmares when optimizing for search engines. As professional SEOs, we need to be able to see pages, whether in development environments or live on the web the same way the engines do.

Tools to Solve It: SEO-Browser, Google Cached Snapshot, New Mozbar

_

A longtime favorite site of mine, SEO Browser lets you surf like an engine

_

Poor Google; that's all they see when they crawl our pretty site

SEO-Browser is a great way to get a quick sense of what the engines can see as they crawl your site's pages and links. The world of engines may seem a bit drab, but it can also save your hide in the event that you've put out code or pages that engines can't properly parse.

_

I wonder if Googlebot ever gets tired of blue, purple and gray...

Google's own cached snapshot of a page (available via a search query, as a bookmarklet, or in the mozbar's dropdown) is the ultimate research tool to know what the engine "sees." The only trouble is that it works in the past only (and only on pages that allow caching). To get a preview, SEO Browser or our friend below can be useful.

The mozbar lets you dress up like Google whenever the occasion is right

One of Will Critchlow's feature requests in the new mozbar was the ability to switch user agents, turn off JavaScript and images and, in essence, become the bot in your browser. Luckily, he also forced us to place a gray overlay in the right-hand corner that alerts you to the settings you've changed and gives you an easy, one-click "return to normal." Browsing like a bot = solved!

#5 - Identifying Crawl Errors

The Problem: Discovering problems on a site like 302 redirects (that should be 301s), pages that are blocked by robots.txt (here's why that's a bad idea), missing title tags, duplicate/similar content, 40x and 50x errors, etc. is a task no human can efficiently perform. We need the help of robots - automated crawlers who can dig through a site, find the issues and notify us.

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Xenu, GGWMT

Mmmm... Parallel Threads

She canna hold on much longer cap'n!

We've already covered GSiteCrawler in this post, but for those unaware, it can be a great diagnostic tool as well as a Sitemap builder. Xenu is much the same, though somewhat more intuitive for this purpose. Tom's written very elegantly about it in the past, so I won't rehash much, other than to say - it shows errors & potential issues Google Webmaster Tools doesn't, and that can be a lifesaver.

Doh! I think we messed up some stuff when KW Difficulty relaunched :(

Google Webmaster Tools is extremely popular, well known and well used. And yet... lots of us still have crawl errors we haven't addressed (just look at the 500+ problems on SEOmoz.org in the screenshot above). Exporting to Excel, sorting, and sending to engineering with fixes for each type of issue can save a lot of heartache and earn back a lot of lost traffic and link juice.

#6 - Determine if Links to Your Site Have Been Lost

The Problem: Sites don't always do a great job maintaining their pages and links (according to our data, 75% of the web disappears in 6 months). Many times, these vanishing pages and links are of great interest to SEOs, who want to know whether their link acquisition and campaigning efforts are being maintained. But how do you confirm if the links to your site that were built last month are still around today?

Tools to Solve It: Virante's Link Atrophy Diagnosis

Does that mean Stuntdubl & SEOmoz are "going steady?"

This tool comes courtesy of the great team over at Virante, and it's a pretty terrific application of an SEO need and Linkscape data through the SEOmoz API. The tool will check the links reported from Linkscape/Open Site Explorer and determine which, if any, have been lost. Many times it's just links off the front page of blogs or news sites as archives fall to the back, but sometimes it can help you ID a link partner or source that's no longer pointing your way in order to facilitate a quick, painless reclamation. The best part is there's no registration or installation required - it's entirely plug and play.

Addition: Russ from Virante added a discount code in the comments for SEOmoz users! Use the coupon code "seomoz30" in order to get more results from these tools.

#7 - Find 404 Errors on a Site (without GG WM Tools) and Create 301s

The Problem: Google's Webmaster Tools are great for spotting 404s, but the data can be, at times, unwieldy (as when thousands of pages are 404ing, but only a few of them really matter) and it's only available if you can get access to the Webmaster Tools account (which can stymie plenty of SEOs in the marketing department or from external consultancies). We need a tool to help spot those important, highly linked-to 404s and turn them into 301s.

Tools to Solve It: Virante's PageRank Recovery Tool

3.99 mozRank for ~0.00 effort

The thinking behind this tool is brilliant, because it solves a problem from end to end. By not only grabbing well-linked-to pages that 404, but actually writing the code to create an .htaccess file with 301s to your choice of pages, the tool is a "no-brainer" solution.

#8 - See New Links that are Sending Traffic (and Old Ones that Have Stopped)

The Problem: Most analytics tools have an export function that, combined with some clever Excel, could help you puzzle out the sites/pages that have started to send you traffic (and those that once were but have stopped). It's a pain - manual labor, easy to screw up and not a particularly excellent use of your precious time.

Tools to Solve It: Enquisite

I love the ability to look across the past few months and see the trend of new pages and new domains sending links, as well as identifying links that have stopped sending traffic. Some of those may be ripe for reclamation, others might just need a nudge to mention or link over in their next piece/post. This report is also a great way to judge how link building campaigns are performing on the less-SEO focused pivot, sending direct traffic.

#9 - Research Trending/Temporal Popularity of Keywords

The Problem: Keyword demand fluctuates over time, sometimes with little warning. Knowing how search volume is impacted by trending and geography is critical to SEOs targeting fields with these demand fluxes.

Tools to Solve It: Google Insights, Trendistic

Hmmm.... Maybe we should launch Open Webmaster Tools next?

We need to make it out to India & Brazil more often, too!

Google Insights is great for seeing keyword trending, related terms and countries of popularity (though the last of these we've found to be somewhat suspect at times). However, sometimes you're really interested in what's about to become popular. For that, turning to trend sites can be a big help.

Although it doesn't yet have a "suggest" feature to help identify terms & phrases that may soon become popular searches, it does help establish the "tipping point" at which a buzzword in Twitter may become a trend in web search. As we've discussed in the WhiteBoard Friday on Twitter as an SEO Research Tool, finding the spot at which search volume begins spiking can present big opportunities for fresh content.

#10 - Analyze Domain Ownership & Hosting Data

The Problem: When researching domains to buy, considering partnerships or conducting competitive analysis, data about a site's hosting and ownership can be essential steps in the process.

Tools to Solve It: Domaintools

We should make sure to re-register this domain...

Long the gold standard in the domainer's toolbox, DomainTools (once called whois.sc) provides in-depth research about a domain's owners, their server and, sometimes most interestingly, the other domains owned by that entity. BTW - they're spot on; SEOmoz owns about 80 other domains besides our own (though we only really use this one and OpenSiteExplorer right now).

#11 - Investigate a Site/Page's History

The Problem: What happened on this page last month or last year? When conducting web research about links, traffic and content, we all need the ability to go "back in time" and see what had previously existed on our sites/pages (or those of competitors/link sources/etc). Did traffic referrals drop? Have search rankings changed dramatically? Did a previously available piece of content fall off the web? The question really is - how do we answer these questions?

Tools to Solve It: Wayback Machine

Before 2005, we were on a different domain!

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If you remember this version of the site, you're officially "old school"

Yeah, yeah, you've probably heard of the Wayback Machine, powered by Alexa's archive of the Internet and endlessly entertaining to web researchers and pranksters alike. What might surprise you is how valuable it can be as an SEO diagnostic tool, particularly when you're performing an investigation into a site that doesn't keep good records of its activity. Reversing a penalty, a rankings drop, an oddity in traffic, etc. can consume massive amounts of time if you don't know where to look and how. Add Wayback to the CSI weapons cache - it will come in handy.

#12 - Determine Semantically Connected Terms/Phrases

The Problem: Chances are, the search engines are doing some form of semantic analysis (looking at the words and phrases on a page around a topic to determine its potential relevance to the query). Thus, employing these "connected" keywords on your pages is a best practice for good SEO (and probably quite helpful to users in many cases as well). The big question is - which words & phrases are related (in the search engines' eyes) to the ones I'm targeting?

Tools to Solve It: Google Wonder Wheel

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Nothing about "Yellow Shoes?"

We don't know for certain that this is a technique that provides massive benefit, but we're optimistic that tests are going to show it has some value. If you'd like to participate in the experiment, take related phrases from the Wonder Wheel and employ on your pages. Please do report back with details :-)

#13 - Analyze a Page's Optimization of Images

The Problem: When image search and image accessibility/optimization is critical to your business/client, you need tools to help analyze a page's consistency and adherence to best practices in handling image dimensions, alt attributes, etc.

Tools to Solve It: Image Analyzer from Juicy Studio

Doh! We need to add some dimensions onto our images.

It's not the prettiest tool in the world, but it does get the job done. The image analyzer will give any page a thorough evaluation, showing missing alt tags, image dimensions (which can help with page rendering speed) and informing you of the names/alts in a thorough list. If you have image galleries you're aiming at image search optimization, this is a great diagnostic system.

#14 - Instant Usability Testing

The Problem: Fast feedback on a new landing page, product page, tool design or web page (of any kind) can be essential to smoothing over rough launches. But tools aren't enough - we need actual human beings (and not the biased ones in our friend groups or company) giving fast, functional feedback. That's a challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Five Second Test, Feedback Army

It can't be that easy, can it?

Wow... It totally is! Here I am helping give feedback to a local geek squad.

Users are easier to come by than we think

Both FeedbackArmy & FiveSecondTest offer the remarkable ability to get instant feedback from real users on any page, function or tool you want to test at a fraction of the price normal usability testing requires. What I love is that because it's so easy, it makes that first, critical step of reaching out to users a low barrier to entry. Over time, I hope systems like these help make the web as a whole a more friendly, easy-to-use experience. Now there's not excuse!

#15 - Measure Tweet Activity to a URL Across Multiple URL Shortener Platforms

The Problem: You've got your bit.ly, your j.mp, your tinyurl, your ow.ly and dozens more URL shorteners. Between this plethora of options and standard HTML links pasted into tweets, keeping up with all the places your URL is being shared can be a big challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Backtweets

Tweeting links in the middle of the night is fun!

Bit.ly can track bit.ly and many other services offer their own tracking systems, but only Backtweets is aggregating all of the sources and making it easy to see what people are saying about your pages no matter how they encode it. Now if only we could get this to integrate with PostRank and Search.Twitter.com and Trendistic and make the interface super-gorgeous and have it integrate with Google Analytics... and... and...

#16 - BONUS: Determining Keyword Competition Levels

Bonus! I mentioned last week in a comment that I'd make a post about the new Keyword Difficulty Tool. Since this post is all about tools anyway, I figured I'd toss it in and save you the trouble of clicking an extra link in your feedreader.

The Problem: Figuring out which keywords have more/less demand than which others is easy (and Google does a great job of it most of the time).

Tools to Solve It: New Keyword Difficulty Tool

The real problem was that our previous keyword difficulty tool attempted to use 2nd order effects and non-direct metrics to estimate the competitiveness level of a particular keyword term/phrase. While it's true that more popular/searched-for keywords TEND to be more competitive, this is certainly not always the case (and in fact, SEOs probably care a lot more about when a keyword has high traffic and relatively weak sites/pages in the SERPs more than anything else). The new tool attempts to fix this by relying on Page Authority (correlation data here) and using a weighted average of the top ranking sites and pages.

Running five keywords at a time is way better than one

(we're working to add more - promise)

The best bet here looks like "best running shoes" - relatively lower difficulty, but still high volume

Oh yeah, looking at the top positions, a few dozen good links and some on-page and we're there

Reversing the rankings is never easy, but parsing through KW Difficulty reports certainly makes it less time-consuming. Watch out for the scores, though - a 65% is pretty darn tough, and even a 40% is no walk in the park. At last, I feel really good about this tool; it was suffering for a good 18 months, and it's nice to have it back in my primary repertoire with such solid functionality.

I'm sure there are plenty of remarkable tools I've missed and there are likely questions about these problems, too. Feel free to address both in the comments!

p.s. This was written very late at night and I need to be up and on a plane at precisely butt-o'clock tomorrow morning, so editing will have to slide until Jen wakes up and gives this a good once-over. Sorry about any errors in the meantime :-)

Note from Jen: I finally woke up and made a few minor edits. :) I also added a discount code from Virante "seomoz30" AND a discount code from PostRank "SEOmoz". Tools Rule!

Do you like this post? Yes No

http://tinyurl.com/33engw5

Bing U: Bing gives access to professors and students to crunch its large datasets

2010-04-29T07:02:00.009-07:00

In a collaboration with its parent’s large datasets storing system via Azure cloud-based services, Bing has allowed access to its super-size datasets to include academic community around the world. Bing announced the collaboration during the World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010) this week. The datasets at Microsoft Web N-gram Services include all documents indexed by Bing which contain a collection of web search, natural language processing, and speech. For now, only professors and students at accredited colleges and universities can crunch its big chunk of datasets which are currently stored via Azure cloud-based services. According to msdn.com blog, Web N-gram Services... http://tinyurl.com/29ywjbm

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 28, 2010

2010-04-29T07:02:00.007-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/23zyvzn

Report: Apple Buys Mobile Search App Siri

2010-04-29T07:02:00.005-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2c2cf5g

Hitwise: Facebook is Top Search Term Across Three Major Search Engines‏

2010-04-29T07:02:00.003-07:00

Experian Hitwise today announced that "Facebook" was the top organic search term in the U.S. during the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Overall, Facebook related terms accounted for eight out of 30 search terms across the three top 10 lists.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/23q2uyw

Google To Phase Out Old Keyword Tool In Exchange For New Version

2010-04-29T07:02:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2dm9a35

UK Election 2010: YouTube Facebook Digital Debate Results

2010-04-29T07:01:00.001-07:00

As expected, the results of the YouTube Facebook Digital Debate were posted today. The response was amazing -- over 5000 questions submitted and more than 180,000 votes on the questions.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/22unsbx

How to Work with Stupid People

2010-04-27T15:35:00.003-07:00

I write a lot about being smart and trying not to be stupid. Well, here’s a good post by Jason Crawford on how to work with stupid people. It’s not what you’d expect.
He takes a line of thinking I really... http://bit.ly/d1fyhx

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 27, 2010

2010-04-27T15:35:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/3ae35dg

What it means to be a blogger

2010-04-27T12:32:00.001-07:00

I think it's time to write this piece, after many many years of doing this.

People debate my "review" of netbooks as compared to Apple's iPad. Who is the iPad for? I should know it's not for me (even though Apple was happy to take my money). I should evaluate it based on its intended "audience." I should think about them before I write my blog post. I should write the post they would write. I should forget about what I see with my own two eyes.

That's nonsense. It's ridiculous.

I am a blogger, not a reviewer. I'm telling a story from my point of view. There's a totally implicit YMMV on everything that appears on this blog. You have a different experience? Great! Blog it. And stop trying to tell me what to say.

Further, there's a myth that reviewers are omniscient and have infinite resources and know what everything's intended purpose is. That's also nonsense. The people who review these things for the newspapers and magazines would do better to just tell us what their experience is and who they are and let us sort it all out. In other words, imho, we could use more honest bloggers and less reviewers.

Anyway what I said happened really did happen. I had some pictures in my camera and if I had had my netbook they really would have gone to Flickr and because I had my iPad they didn't. Really. It really happened. Not the end of the world, or even particularly important, but I didn't say it was. There's no point arguing because unless you were one of the two other people there you couldn't possibly know.

I don't claim there's any global significance to what I write here. I claim these are my own experiences, related as clearly as I know how to relate them. That's all. Nothing more.

Blogging has been going on for a long time. There really is no excuse for not knowing the difference between a blog post and a review. Think about it.

http://bit.ly/bGmFZk

Brazil: Google Is Making Us Look Bad

2010-04-27T12:26:00.003-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/3anurap

How Do Americans Access Government Data? Search Engines.

2010-04-27T12:26:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2wkefmn

Innovation in a book about Innovation?

2010-04-27T11:16:00.001-07:00

When I wrote the original edition of Myths of Innovation, I asked you folks for to make a book itself innovative. There were some good ideas, some of which made it into the book.
One idea I had was the ranked... http://bit.ly/cWiy2r

Bing overtakes Yahoo by a 0.2% margin and is the number two engine in UK

2010-04-27T11:04:00.001-07:00

With all Bing and decide promotions in UK starting early March 2010 including TV ads, Bing shows some improvements in UK search market share. Based on the latest data from atinternet-institute.com, Bing overtakes Yahoo to second place in UK search engine market share in March. The latest data was collected thru 12,696 websites, from March 1 to 31, 2010. Bing captures about 3.8% search engine market share, while Yahoo drops to 3.6% share. Yahoo dropped 0.5% in UK during the period. As per the data from atinternet-institute.com, Google remains the top search engine in UK with 89.7% share. Google also... http://tinyurl.com/39w6wa4

Facebook’s Future In Social News

2010-04-27T07:55:00.003-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/24jc44j

Google Expands Rich Snippet Support Internationally

2010-04-27T07:55:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2eeomso

Another Big Roundup of Link Tools

2010-04-27T05:55:00.005-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/274ylxt

Conversion Conference West 2010 and SES San Francisco Preview with Tim Ash

2010-04-27T05:55:00.003-07:00

Okay, so the first time I interviewed the CEO of SiteTuners.com for a video entitled, "Optimizing Landing Pages -- Tim Ash's Tips and... Footwork," I made him salsa dance. So, at SES New York 2010, I cut the author of the bestselling book, Landing Page Optimization, a little slack.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/2buahga

Going to SES Toronto 2010 to Keep Up-To-Date with Industry Trends and See New Products and Services

2010-04-27T05:55:00.001-07:00

I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and Detroit, Michigan. So, I learned at an early age about the similarities and differences between these cities in the United States and their next-door neighbors in Ontario, Canada. That one of the reasons why I'm already planning to go to SES Toronto 2010.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/2c2kjpg

Netbooks are still a great deal

2010-04-27T05:03:00.003-07:00

I have both an iPad and a netbook, and the netbook is strictly more useful than the iPad. If I go out with the iPad invariably I hit a wall. No SD card slot. No USB. The keyboard is hunt-and-peck.

The iPad doesn't remember my Facebook password, so when I want to check Facebook I must reach for the netbook. A small thing you say -- but operating systems are collections of hundreds of small things, and new operating systems like the one in the iPad don't have them and old ones like XP do.

I had pictures in my camera the other day. No way to get them up to Flickr through the iPad. If I had had the netbook with me, no problem. (I used my Droid instead.)

The netbook has a real keyboard. I'm writing this blog post on it. It's taken a couple of minutes so far. I'd still be on paragraph 2 if I had used the iPad. And I'd be entering it on one of my WordPress blogs because my customized content tools don't and will never run on Apple's new platform. (Unless they change their mind.)

There's an awful glitch in the way the clipboard works on the iPad. Try to put the cursor on a mis-spelling. It always selects the whole word. I've gotten in the habit of retyping the word when there's a one character spelling error. These little things are of course little, but they mount up.

I hate the font they chose for Safari. How do I change it? There does not appear to be a way to do that. That was a new feature in Windows in 1995. Or was it 1994?

I think the tech industry should give up the belief that netbooks are a temporary thing and fully embrace them and make the work better and better. Ultimately the user is always right, and ultimately always gets what they want.

Apple has a long way to go before the iPad is a useful tool. Lots of little things to fix and tweak, and a philosophy that's going to keep the really innovative stuff flowing elsewhere (where -- not determined yet).

I hear Asus is coming out with an Android netbook-style tablet in June. Sign me up. I bet it's a nice computer. Android of course is just as immature as the iPad. I'd really like to see a Windows XP tablet made by Asus. That would sell pretty well, imho.

http://bit.ly/aBKYhD

When it should be easy to speak to a human

2010-04-27T05:03:00.001-07:00

Twice in the last few days I've had this experience.

1. Bought something on a website.

2. The goods weren't delivered.

3. There was no way to get help from the organization.

They had my money, I didn't have what I had bought, and there was no way to get help from a human being. The FAQs on both sites were of no help, they didn't anticipate the situation where someone had paid their money and had not received the product.

Now, I can understand why a company who is providing a free service tries to hide the contact information. After all, you didn't pay anything, and a human being to answer your questions costs serious out-of-pocket cash. But if you paid, that excuse no longer works.

In fact, it feels like fraud to take money online without a way to correct mistakes, which are sure to happen.

I'm not saying which organizations, because I don't want to make this about them. Eventually both made good, but in neither case was the experience satisfactory.

http://bit.ly/bob8cP

How Europeans Engage With Social Media

2010-04-27T03:55:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2czsf9c

Healthline Raises $14 Million to Grow Medical Search Engine

2010-04-26T23:55:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to speak to Dean Stephens, President & COO of Healthline, about their semantic search engine. Today, Healthline announced that it has raised another $14 million in a third round of financing led by Investor Growth Capital (IGC) and including strategic financing from a joint venture between GE Capital's Media, Communications & Entertainment business and NBC Universal and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

Click to read the rest of this post...

http://tinyurl.com/2ccwcqw

Paid Search Management: Campaign Organization, Part 1

2010-04-26T23:03:00.001-07:00

Budgeting is one of the most important factors in your paid search campaigns. Here's how to drive maximum results. Part one of two. ... http://tinyurl.com/2ekk7xy

Liberal Democrats' View: It was #nickcleggsfault

2010-04-26T20:06:00.001-07:00

The rise of social media gives readers easy ways to express their unhappiness with how their newspaper is behaving, to find others of like mind, and to impress the media and commentators with their weight of numbers. ... http://tinyurl.com/398t3nl

Google Shows Related Results At Bottom Of Results: “Pages Similar To”

2010-04-26T17:55:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/25ufkwo

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Get SEO Training and Start Ranking

2010-04-26T16:55:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/24bybfk

Bing’s extra arm: millions mobile devices made by Samsung will be pre-loaded with Yahoo search

2010-04-26T15:55:00.001-07:00

As one of the world largest mobile devices maker Samsung and Yahoo just announced a strategic global partnership to distribute Yahoo search and services to Samsung mobile devices. The partnership will start to be implemented in May 2010. Millions new mobile devices and gadgets made by Samsung will be pre-loaded with Yahoo search and services (incl. Mail, Messenger, Flickr, News, Finance, etc.). The partnership will benefit Bing decision engine significantly, as Yahoo search will power millions devices running Samsung bada and Android platforms, as per the press release. As long time friends, Samsung and Yahoo have partnered since 2007. The... http://tinyurl.com/28bo44b

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 26, 2010

2010-04-26T14:55:00.003-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/2exyll5

Google Earth Added To Google Maps

2010-04-26T14:55:00.001-07:00

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Should books include URLs? (book design)

2010-04-26T14:03:00.001-07:00

I’m currently working hard with a great team of volunteers on the paperback edition of The Myths of Innovation.
We’ve hit on a problem that can use some more opinions.
One goal we have is to make the book more useful. In... http://bit.ly/ajdDPq

The Definitive How-To Guide For Conversion Rate Optimization

2010-04-26T12:55:00.001-07:00

Posted by stephen

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Let's start by asking one of the most important questions in conversion rate optimization (CRO):

A good question.

In this article, you’ll get:

A clear and defined process for CRO

Checklists to print and check off as you go

I’ll share the same processes that I use to consistently boost my clients’ conversion rates – sometimes even doubling or tripling them. (I specialize in industries like finance, gaming, travel and weightloss, where even a 5% increase in conversion rate can generate millions of dollars.)

This is the article I wish I could have read when starting out.

Conversion Rate Optimization - setting the record straight

If you only remember one thing from this article, make sure this is it.

Conversion rate optimization is…

Finding out why visitors aren’t converting

Fixing it

That's it.

It sounds obvious, but a lot of people forget it – and they leave a ton of money on the table as a result.

Conversion rate optimization isn't…

Split-testing the colour of your buttons (unless you really want to)

Following best-practice and guesswork

Based on misleading metrics

Let's look at the first point:

Don't split-test the colour of your buttons (unless you really want to)

The more people talk about CRO, the more you hear bizarre recommendations on the colour of your buttons and headlines, the alignment of form labels, and so on.

This is one real-life example:

"Making your headline red will increase your conversion rate 30%."

Let's rephrase the statement, using the definition of CRO above:

"I think that visitors aren't converting because our headline is black rather than red."

Putting it like this, it starts to sound less plausible.

Just because Youreapoorloser.com has a red headline, doesn't mean you should.

We need to start by finding out why visitors aren’t converting – then fix it.

The trouble is that statements like “green buttons convert better than red ones” and “short forms are better than long forms” are appealing, and quickly become considered “best practice”…

Don't follow best-practice and guesswork

It sounds counterintuitive to say "don't follow best practice" (especially in an article actually giving advice). To put it another way, don’t assume that just because it worked for someone else means it’ll work for you.

It's natural that we'll look for silver bullets – in fact, it's good to look for ways to get bigger wins quicker – but this kind of testing doesn't fit with a successful conversion rate optimization strategy.

Conversion rates are hugely personal to your website – what works on someone else's website will only work on yours if you have similar objections. You've got to find out what’s wrong with your site – not what worked on someone else’s.

Don't worry about misleading metrics

Focus on the money. So don't worry too much about microconversions or other metrics. (The only reason people boast about increasing their "add to basket" conversion rate is often because they didn’t increase their overall conversion rate.)

Focus on the money and the conversion rate that’s directly linked to revenue.

Why CRO matters

Ok, let's start with the easy one:

1. Make more money

But wait... there's more! When you increase your conversion rate, it also means you can…

2. Increase advertising spend

After all, when your conversion rate increases, then PPC, affiliate marketing and other advertising will suddenly become much more profitable. And when you do that, you can…

3. Increase market share

The more you increase your conversion rate, the more traffic you can buy, the more customers you get, the more repeat business you get... You'll rapidly increase your market share. And it all starts with your conversion rate.

Conversion Rate Optimization – step-by-step

Make sure you download a copy of the checklists here:

That’s a real button. Click it!

Stage one: research and analysis

Become the customer

This is a massively important step – and one that most people skip. Don’t be that person.

Buy the product or service. And when you’re buying it, take screenshots and/or use Camtasia or similar to record yourself buying it. (It's incredible how many people haven't bought a product or service from their own site.)

Increasing sales starts with understanding what you’re selling, so when you’ve bought the product or service, use it as a customer would. Test it, take it apart and put it back together – even demonstrate it to others as a salesperson would.

Set up funnels in Google Analytics

Most companies haven’t even set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics (and if they have, they stopped working properly months ago). When they’re set up right, they’ll quickly show you where you’re losing traffic and where the biggest opportunities are.

If you need help setting this up, take a look at this excellent article on Google Analytics goals and funnels.

Use other analytics packages

Other analytics packages are great at showing you what’s happening on your website.

Crazy Egg will generate heatmaps of your website, showing you which areas are getting the most clicks. Yes, Google Analytics does heatmaps too – but not like Crazy Egg. They’ll even show you clicks on inactive elements – the things people are clicking on that aren’t actually links. Often this will reveal areas the visitors want more information on. It can be a great source of quick wins.

Crazy Egg – Look for clicks on inactive elements, as they can be a great source of quick wins.

ClickTale is several tools wrapped into one. It’ll give you heatmaps showing how far down your pages visitors are scrolling (perfect for your long spammy weightloss page). It can even record videos of your visitors’ sessions (which will help you get in the habit of looking at your site through someone else’s eyes). And finally, it has brilliant form analytics – you’ll see exactly which questions in your form are causing visitors to abandon the page.

ClickTale gives you access to a huge amount of data – including how far down the page visitors will scroll.

Do five usability tests

With several cheap usability testing companies available, there’s no excuse not to be doing it anymore. It’s one of the most profitable activities you can do. With sites like UserTesting.com (US and UK) and whatusersdo.com (UK), you’ll pay around $40 for a 15-minute usability test. At the end, you’ll get the video of their session, plus the voiceover as they navigate your site.

With sites like UserTesting.com and whatusersdo.com offering quick and cheap usability tests…

…there are no excuses not to do any.

Remember, don’t make your brief too prescriptive. You want the tester to use the site as they would if they weren’t doing a test – don’t make them follow orders. (You can even set them the same task on a competitor’s site to see what the competition is doing right/wrong.)

Survey your customers

By this stage, we should be building a good list of reasons why visitors aren’t converting – whether they’re usability issues (can’t buy) or objections (won’t buy).

We’ll gather more data on this with surveys. It doesn’t really matter how you survey your customers – so long as you do it.

You can create a survey with SurveyMonkey and email it to your customers and non-customers (but make sure to use free-text answers rather than multiple choice – we want the customers to tell us in their own words, not to pick the closest reason from a list). Or use a tool like Kampyle to gather feedback directly on your site. Or just pick up the phone and speak to them.

Talk to sales staff

Your website is the online equivalent of your best salesperson. So… find that salesperson and ask them to sell the product or service to you. (If you’ve got a Flip camcorder, use that to film it.) Find out what questions and objections the customers ask and – more importantly – find out what the answers are.

Flip camcorders – Keep one of these handy when speaking with sales and support staff.

Stage two: solutions

Create a list of all the objections + issues

Ticked everything off in stage one? Good. If not, make sure you complete it soon (seriously – if you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.)

When you’ve got all the data, start a spreadsheet with a list of all the usability issues (can’t buy) on one tab, and the objections (won’t buy) on another. Highlight the ones that come up most often, or that you think can have a big impact.

Brainstorm ways to overcome them

Next, brainstorm ways to solve the usability issues and objections. Put the possible solutions into the second columns of your spreadsheet.

Look for hidden opportunities

Remember, it’s important to be creative with the solutions. Here are a couple of examples:

If you’ve got a low conversion rate on a form, do you even need the form in the first place? Take a look at posterous.com – a great example of removing the sign-up process altogether.

Posterous.com – “Look Ma – no sign-up!”

If you have to keep your sign-up process, but people are abandoning it, how do you fix it? Lovefilm.com are great at conversion. If you abandon their sign-up form, on your next visit, they’ll redirect you back to where you left off – even if you type in their homepage URL. (Abandon their sign-up form and you’ll see how.)

Lovefilm.com – “Haven’t I been here before…?”

It’s creativity like this which will boost your conversion rate. If you do the same as everyone else, your conversion rate will be the same too.

Prioritise the actions (aim for quick results and maximum improvement)

So now we’ve got the objections, the issues and the possible solutions. Next we need to tackle them in the right order. There’s an opportunity cost, so we want to start – not with the quick wins – but the quick and big wins.

Go through the list with your developers. Mark the ones that can be developed and tested quickly and easily. If they match up with the ones you highlighted above (that can have a big impact), you’ll know where to start.

Stage three: development and testing

Develop the variations and take screenshots

Now the fun part. Start developing the variations. Don’t be tempted to test too many things in each variation – you won’t know what’s increasing the conversion rate and what’s lowering it. Be scientific in your testing and you’ll get bigger wins quicker.

When the variations have been developed, make sure you take screenshots of them. We need to keep records of everything we’re testing. It’s easy to get 20 tests into a campaign and forget what you tested at the start. Be like Travis Bickle: “One of these days I'm gonna get organezized”.

Today is that day.

Set up Crazy Egg on variations

Don’t forget your analytics when you’re testing. Crazy Egg is a staple in my testing diet. If the Crazy Egg code is in your footer, it’ll be on the new variations automatically (as long as it’s an A/B test, not a multivariate test). Just set up a test at CrazyEgg.com and you’ll get a heatmap for the new page. Compare the two and you’ll have a clearer insight why one page is converting higher than another.

Test using Google Website Optimizer or other testing software

Google Website Optimizer is fairly powerful, fairly easy-to-use and – best of all – completely free. No excuses.

Google Website Optimizer – the price is right.

Now let me qualify those statements. It’s fairly powerful out-of-the-box, but you may want to hack it to do things like testing multiple goals. It’s fairly easy to use – especially if you’ve got a good developer – but there are alternatives that are easier.

For a detailed guide to testing software, take a look at whichmvt.com.

Stage four: review and expand

Log the results and screenshots

When the test has finished, log the results and store them with your screenshots of the variations. As we repeat this process, we’ll build up a folder of what works and what doesn’t. This is crucial.

Analyse the results (big losses are just as important as big wins)

Big wins are awesome. Big losses can be interesting too – just flip it around. So rather than saying, “Page B lowered the conversion rate by x%”, you should say, “Something about Page A effectively increased the conversion rate by y% over Page B.”

Then all we need to do is find what that something is. Take a look at your Crazy Egg screenshots and review your list of objections and usability issues.

If you got a win, can it be developed further?

The first question after getting a win is, “How can we develop this?” So if you added a testimonial to your landing page, what would happen if you added five more? Take the winning element to extremes and see how big a win you can get.

If you got a win, can it be applied to other parts of the funnel?

The second question is, “How can we apply this elsewhere?” Take the principle that increased the conversion rate – adding trust, emphasising a particular benefit, introducing a guarantee – and work out how you can apply it to other parts of the funnel.

These two questions together can magnify increases to the conversion rate several times over.

Stage five: repeat

As you can see, the process works in a cycle. The insight you get after completing a test will feed into the top – giving you ideas for other tests to try.

This is Conversion Factory's approach to conversion rate optimization.

After a few rounds of testing, repeat all or part of stage one (research and analysis). Do the usability testers still struggle with the same things? Are potential customers still uncertain about the benefits of your product? Either way, you’ll get fresh ideas for CRO.

Follow this process and you’ll quickly – and reliably – increase your conversion rate.

What now?

Thanks for making it through to the end. If you haven't already downloaded the worksheets, you can get them now.

If you want to get more articles on conversion rate optimization, sign up to the mailing list on conversionfactory.com and we’ll keep you updated.

Thanks!

Stephen.

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Google “Augmenting” Street View With Local Biz Information

2010-04-26T11:55:00.003-07:00

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Macroglossa's Visual Search Engine fails to meet basic expectations

2010-04-26T11:55:00.001-07:00

Macroglossa, an Italian search engine based on image comparison, is launching the alpha version of its "Engine Comparer Technology", theoretically pushing the limits of search by working solely on visual recognition. But, right now, it's only theoretically.

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Google Announces New Approach to Working with Ad Agencies

2010-04-26T10:55:00.001-07:00

Penry Price, Google's Vice President of Global Agency Development today announced changes in the search engine's relationship with advertising agencies on the Official Google Blog. No, Google isn't offering "cashback."

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Yahoo, Samsung Announce Expanded Mobile Partnership

2010-04-26T09:55:00.001-07:00

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UK Online Video Viewing Up 37 Percent During Past Year‏

2010-04-26T08:55:00.001-07:00

If Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano doesn't ground my flight, I'll be flying to London to speak about "Video Optimisation" at the International Search Summit on May 13. It's a hot topic in the UK, as the latest comScore data shows.

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2010-04-26T06:55:00.003-07:00

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Google Closes Google Advertising Professionals For Google AdWords Certification

2010-04-26T06:55:00.001-07:00

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