Posted by neopunisher

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.

After Nick announced the free Linkscape API, I decided to write a SEO extension for chrome. I wanted to focus on all aspects of SEO and not just linking (like some other extensions) as well as a fast clean UI. I organized data from the page and external signals into 5 categories: External Page Data, Page Elements, Social Media, Page Terms, Server / Domain Info, and Suggestions as well as enhancing some common SEO related sites like Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Analytics 

Install the SEO SIte Tools extention and see for yourself… it’s only one click and you won’t be disappointed.

External Page Data shows domain metrics link links and rank

• Linking to page and domain from Yahoo
• Page Authority, Domain Authority and links from SEOmoz
• Alexa popularity (with graph) links
• Google index date and PageRank along with domain trends
• Dmoz listing and compete.com data

 Social Media pulls shares and bookmarks from a number of places

• Page Diggs and Domain Diggs
• Recent tweets about the page along with total number of tweets
• Facebook shares, likes and comments
• Reddit points
• Delicious bookmarks

 Page Terms displays relevant page elements to SEO

• Meta Robots
• Meta Description
• Anchor tags and follow attribute)
• Header tags (H1-H5)
• Bold/Strong
• I/Em
• Meta Keywords

Server / Domain Info checks the domain’s IP and country and displays it on a map along with registrar information and WhoIs info 

Suggestions gives helpful on-page SEO suggestions about title tag, links on page, meta description, meta keywords (hey it can’t hurt) 

Page Terms (still a work in progress) performs term extraction and lets you do keyword research with Google’s keyword research tool 

It also has ability to enhance Google Webmaster Tools with links anchor text, if they are followed links and mozRank (or PageRank) of linking pages 

Adds Social media reactions to Google Analytics page details with Facebook shares, likes and comments as well as Delicious bookmarks and Diggs 

It also adds the link and anchor text info to Yahoo Site Explorer with mozRank (or PageRank) 

It is still being developed so I would love any feedback you could give me on it…

Some future plans are:

• Keyword search volume in Webmaster Tools
• Indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Improved keyword research tools
• More site suggestion information
• StumbleUpon share data 

Get the SEO Site Tools Extention Now

Get in touch with me on twitter I’m @cartercole and follow me for updates of new releases (but if you install the plug-in it will automatically update) [highly recommended]

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Dear Facebook Friends,

I’ve been wondering when and how to do this for a while now but the time has come for me to bite the bullet and clean up what I’m doing on Facebook.

For 99% of you – this means that I’m about to de-friend you from my personal account on Facebook.

It is nothing personal – in fact…. that is what this is all about…. my personal account on Facebook does need to be personal and its not.

To use a phrase Ed Dale used in doing this same thing – It’s not You It’s Me.

I hope you’ll allow me to explain why I’m doing this and and provide those of you who wish to remain connected with some alternatives.

What I’m Doing

In the next 48 hours I’m returning my Facebook account to a personal account (in fact the process has already begun). This means a number of things:

1. I’ll be pulling my all talk about my blogs out of my Facebook account
2. There will be no more auto Tweets pulled into my status updates
3. My videos about blogging, updates from my blogs etc will all be removed from my Facebook account
4. I’ll be de-friending almost everyone – all that will remain will be real life family and friends who I regular catch up with (or those who I want to keep in touch with).

Why Am I Doing This?

When I started using Facebook it was largely something that I used for real friends to share updates of what I was doing.

However in time, as Facebook grew, I began to see how it connected as an opportunity with the work that I do with my blogs. I saw the opportunity to use Facebook to create secondary points of connection with my readers, build a brand and even drive some traffic to my blogs.

As a result my Facebook account became more and more focused around my blogging. As it did so it became less and less relevant to my real life friends and family.

I began to promote this account on my blogs and it quickly got to the point where I had 5000 friends (99% of whom I don’t actually know in real life).

5000 is the limit Facebook allows so I was then at a point where I was rejecting peoples friendship on Facebook – it suddenly became quite exclusive. In the last few months alone I’ve rejected thousands of friend requests – it’s even started to become a little nasty with a number of people thinking I’ve snubbed them.

A while back Facebook started to offer the opportunity for its users to create pages. I started a couple up – one for each of my two main blogs – one for ProBlogger and one for Digital Photography School.

Pages don’t have a limit of how many people can follow them yet they have many of the same features as a personal profile.

Now that I have pages set up and working my personal account on Facebook has become a little redundant for talking about those topics – in fact much of what happens is duplicated and it means my attention is split between updating three accounts.

Since setting up the pages I’ve just felt plain weird about using my personal Facebook page. I’m updating friends on my blogging stuff which doesn’t have any relevance to them (in fact last week I told my parents who are new to Facebook that I didn’t want to friend them because I didn’t want them to have to wade through all my blogging related updates) and I feel like I’m just sending out the same stuff multiple times to others who do want my blogging related stuff. I don’t feel like I’m really achieving anything for anyone with the account.

As a Result – I’ve decided to move all my blogging related updates purely over to my Facebook pages and return my personal account to being a purely personal one – a place where I connect with real life friends and family.

So I’m going to remove all people that are not either friends and family who I see regularly and want to stay in touch with.

My hope in doing this is:

1. anyone who want to keep connecting with me on the topics of my blogs will still have a place to do so (not limited by the 5000 number)
2. friends and family will have a more relevant place to connect with me
3. I will feel slightly less torn each day about what to post (and what not to post) on my personal page

I’m also looking forward to have a private place to just be me – living so openly on the web for so long has been great but a guy needs a place to let what little hair he has down.

If You Do Want to Stay Connected

If you’d like to connect with me around one or both of the topics I blog about I would encourage you to become a fan (I wish they didn’t use that term) of one of my Facebook pages:

• http://www.facebook.com/digitalps
• http://www.facebook.com/problogger

Alternatively – much of the Facebook updates that have previously been here on this Facebook account have been pulled in from Twitter. You can get those updates directly from twitter at http://www.twitter.com/problogger – my Twitter stream at @problogger will continue to pull in both blogging related stuff as well as some more personal stuff from time to time also.

I hope this sheds some light on what is about to happen on this Facebook Account.

In terms of WHEN it’ll happen – I’ve already started to pull out some of the blogging stuff from my Facebook page – but I’ll be starting to de-friend people later today. It will take me a while though to de-friend close to 5000 people!

If you’re a real life friend and I do de-friend you – my apologies. I’m sure I’ll mistakenly do that with a few as I go through everyone – I’m certain that going through 5000 people is going to be a process with a few mistakes! Please friend me again if this is you so I can fix it up!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Dear FaceBook Friends, I’m De-Friending Most of You [It's Not You, It's Me]

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Posted by great scott!

This week Rand discusses recent changes that seem to signal the coming of another big shift in how the engines determine results. With the incorporation of social networks into results, increased personalized search, and even Google Buzz, the social graph is clearly becoming a more and more important factor for the engines. What will these changes mean for online marketers and how can you take advantage of them? Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday and find out…

And here, for your browsing pleasure, are some of the resources Rand mentioned in the video…

• Video intro to Google Buzz:

• Royal Pingdom says Twitter now processing more than one billion tweets per month.

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Over the last three weeks I’ve noticed a massive upswing in emails, tweets and comments from bloggers feeling depressed about their blogs going into 2010.

• Some of them took a week or two off blogging over the holidays and can’t get restarted.
• Others are looking back on 2009 and realising that they didn’t meet past goals.
• A few are paralysed by the possibilities and don’t know which direction to head

It’s that time of year when we assess how we’re traveling and wonder what we can do about it!

Tomorrow, and for the next 7 days only, I’m releasing 3 bonuses for all previous and all new owners of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook.

The workbook itself is a great way to to kickstart a blog that has been struggling (it gives a series of 31 tasks to help bloggers get their blogs going) but from tomorrow and for one week only I’ll be bundling it with 3 extra bonuses:

1. 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in The New Year – a short report that gives bloggers an extra 9 tasks/exercises to help get you focused for the new year (based on the process I take myself at the start of every year).
2. Interview with Leo Babauta – just under an hour of a podcast interview with Leo from Zenhabits.net.
3. Interview with Neil Patel – a 45 minute podcast interview with traffic generating and personal branding genius from Quicksprout.

None of these bonuses have been available before and each will be available for those who buy the workbook in the next 7 days only (although once you’ve got access to them you’ll be able to access them indefinitely).

If you’ve already got the workbook you’ll get an email with download details of these bonuses tomorrow.

If you’ve not bought your workbook yet you’ll have 7 days to grab a copy to secure the bonuses (note: if you buy it now/today you’ll get an email with the bonuses tomorrow).

Update: if you purchase the workbook now you’ll receive the bonuses immediately. Previous buyers of the workbook should now be receiving emails telling them how to collect their New Year Bonuses.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Feeling Depressed About Your Blog? Get the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Bonus Pack Here Tomorrow

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Posted by Tom_C

This past week saw the launch of Google’s real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it’s not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this.

Questions I’d love to see the answer to are things like:

• What triggers real-time one-boxes?
• How long do they last?
• Are they tied to a geographic location?
• Are they tied to a language?

Unfortuantely I think it’s a bit early to have answers to questions like this, so rather than tackle these questions I’m just going to talk a little bit about how you can go about tracking the impacts of real-time search results on your industry.

Does real-time search affect my industry?

The answer is probably yes. For search terms that have hardly any tweet-volume I’ve already seen examples where literally one or two tweets can generate a real-time one-box. Sometimes even for the brand name term. That means that more or less any breaking news in your industry will generate some level of real-time results.

But what about other industries? After all many of us will be working on sites that target keyphrases that people DO tweet about. For us, the focus is on trending search terms. The key thing is to identify the types of keyphrase that might feature real-time search results. The most useful way of doing this that I’ve found is to monitor twitter volume and in particular monitor peaks and troughs in volume. Trendistic will do this nicely for you. The first neat thing from Trendistic is that you can see a long list of hot topics by day in the archive:

The second nice thing from Trendistic is the ability to query individual terms and see when peaks and troughs occured over time, for example here’s a snapshot of the [eagles] term (nice win Eagles!):

By using a service like this you can query the historic search volume and take an educated guess at when real-time search might have been triggered. By doing this for your main search terms you can start to understand things like strange traffic drops or spikes that might have been caused by real-time one boxes hanging out in your SERPs.

What about if you’re actively engaging in twitter though? If you feel like you might have gained a portion of your search traffic from tweets that were appearing in real-time search results then you should think about tracking those clicks.

Tracking real-time search volume and one-box traffic is a difficult problem however and one that isn’t completely solved. That said, here’s a few things that might be of use. Firstly, for anyone seeing #-based Google URLs you can actually track clicks from different parts of the page. Looking at the following real-time search for [nexus one]:

I clicked on two different results, the first one was a ‘real’ result that appeared in the real-time box, that is a page that’s been crawled recently and shows up via Google rather than showing up because Google found the result on Facebook or Twitter etc. With the # URLs at Google in action I saw the following full referral path:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=blog_result&ct=result&cd=11&ved=0CBcQmAEwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccortez.com%2Fhtc-nexus-one-blessed-by-the-fcc-updated%2F&rct=j&q=nexus+one&ei=gComS7LCDZehjAeDwdTOBw&usg=AFQjCNF2939x_yuKVTzL9UlN6m23cw0Kog

Note the "&oi=blog_result" in the referring URL (bolded added, obviously). This let’s you see any real-time traffic that has come via a crawled blog post. After that I clicked on a twittered URL and got the following:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?url=http://bit.ly/7315xj&rct=j&ei=2yomS4y7NYvNjAfQ3qXfBw&sa=X&oi=microblog_result&resnum=9&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CD8QoAQoADAI&q=nexus+one&usg=AFQjCNGWb9DkQaPZd2NGuOg6Th7lWd9hsg

Note both the url=http://bit.ly/7315xj and &oi=microblog_result (again, bolded). This allows you to see both where the click came from (a real-time microblog result, i.e. from a site like twitter or facebook) but also the URL that was twittered (in this case the bit.ly link).

These referring URLs will show up in your server logs but unfortunately won’t show up in Google Analytics (since Google treats these all as search queries and so will just dump them in the same place and only let you see the keyword searched for). To get them to show up in Google Analytics you need to set up a profile to show the full referring URL, such as the filter detailed in part 2 of this post.

Not all users see these # Google URLs however, most are still seeing the old style search?q= Google URLs. From looking at the traffic for sites where we have the appropriate filter set up I’d say somewhere between 5 and 10% of users are seeing these URLs. This means that if you can get this kind of data for a small proportion of your traffic and extrapolate for the other 90% of users. (Btw, does anyone have any more accurate stats on the % of users seeing which search result type? I’ve not seen anything concrete anywhere…)

Of course, looking at the example above we see that a fair amount of traffic from micro blogging servicies actually goes through URL shorteners such as bit.ly. In that case there’s another method you can use to track your traffic. Take a look at the following referral list for this bit.ly URL:

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Earlier this week, Google announced that it has begun integrating real-time search into its regular search results. Incidentally, Rae Hoffman, CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media, began playing with the new feature and discovered some alarming results.

The first concern Hoffman noticed is a spam issue. Upon tweeting about Viagra, she found that her results were showing up in Google’s results. She was even able to drop links into her tweets that people could access directly from Google.

Secondly, Hoffman uncovered reputation management issues with Google’s new integration. An unhappy employee or competitor could easily damage a company’s reputation. During a session at SES Chicago, Dave Naylor even mentioned that he might have to clean up his Twitter stream over fear of losing business.

Thirdly and probably the most serious of the issues Hoffman revealed is the safety concerns for children online. Through a series of tests including the highest level of safe search, Hoffman was able to reach out to kids who searched for queries such as Sesame Street and Miley Cyrus. Unfortunately, sexual predators could easily do the same. Scary, huh?

There were actually even more discoveries Hoffman was able to uncover that she did not disclose.

Many people believe Google rushed its real-time integration to respond to the recent real-time efforts Bing has made. Hoffman predicts that Google will either have bad results for a while as they fix their problems, or admit they made a mistake and deal with a reputation management problem.

What is your response to Google’s real-time integration?

Posted by jennita

Disclaimer: This article consists of our favorite articles of the past year and does not have actionable SEO techniques. Please read on if you’re interested in knowing more about us, and what we like!

This week I’ve been personally invested in Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge aka #best09. The idea is that each day in December you reflect on the past year and write about a different topic each day. Obviously you can write every day, or pick and choose which topics you want to cover. It’s only been a few days but I’ve enjoyed reading through some of the blogs and tweets from people participating. Today the topic is:

December 3 Article. What’s an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious’d and reference throughout the year.

Since the topic is right up our alley, the SEOmoz crew decided to put together a list of our favorite articles from 2009. Some of these are search related, but many of them are not. Take a peek into our minds and I think you’ll find it interesting the types of articles we love.

---

Not sure if it "qualifies" since it’s from last year, but I shared this article, about what it really means to be a billionaire, with a ton of people. It’s absolutely fascinating, especially if you’re someone (like me) who fantasizes about how you would potentially spend great sums of cash

On the flip-side of the equation is this excellent article from the Washington Post illuminating the incredibly high cost of being poor. Fascinating and eye-opening. 

Together they pack a one-two punch that sheds a ton of light on just how drastic wealth and class disparity can be, even in the U.S.

---

I’m a big fan of this GapingVoid post from October: The moment

From an SEO standpoint, I’ve been getting a lot of mileage from Eric Enge’s interview with Google Image search engineer Peter Linsley. It’s a topic that doesn’t get covered often, and the information in the article is incredibly useful.

This Smashing Mag post is Usability-oriented, but great stuff for any web person. Unlike many of these kinds of articles, almost every point in this one is directly actionable:

Of course, I also think this post was pretty good – the author is clearly a genius

---

Life lesson: There is no speed limit – talks about how education is designed to get everyone through and how many people take this slow pace with them throughout their life.

We Have Been De-googled! – One blog talks about the impact of being kicked out of Google for seemingly no reason.

---

The article that made the biggest impact on my life this year was this one from SEOmoz. It is Lindsay’s first post and it was an announcement of the job opening I ended up getting.

Personally this short post helped me get my personal goals organized.

---

Rand’s favorites from the past few months:
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/youre-just-getting-started/
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/11/24/on-self-promotion/
http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/
http://www.everywhereist.com/borough-market-a-place-for-love-but-not-vegetarians/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?hp
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek
http://cdixon.org/?p=1391

---

I’ll continue to add to this list if any of the other team members decide to add theirs as well. 2009 has been a wonderful year for us and we look forward to many great articles in 2010. Please tell us about your favorite posts and articles from 2009. And we encourage you to be a part of the blog challenge!

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Over the last 11 days I’ve been on a massive learning curve.

This post is a number of the scattered lessons I’ve been learning – mainly from the launch of my Portraits E-book over at Digital Photography School. This builds upon the post – The Insiders View of How I Launched My New E-book from last week.

Update on the Launch

In the last few hours I’ve ended the official launch process of the e-book. You may remember that we launched the book with a 25% off discount on the book that was to last a bit over a week (9 days actually).

In that time we’ve sold a bit over 4800 e-books.

Before you rush off to grab the calculator – that’s a little bit below $72,000 since launch.

While it has certainly been a profitable week – do keep in mind that there are some costs to take off this figure, it’s not all profit. PayPal takes a fee off every transaction, there were design costs, proof reading, affiliate commissions etc.

All in all it’s been a fun week but I’d learned a lot about this type of launch that I’ll do differently next time.

Lesson #1: Offers with Deadlines Work:

You’ll see from the following chart the number of sales each day during the launch.

Day 1 and 2 were the ‘pre-launch’ – held over the weekend and basically a trickle of sales from a couple of tweets that I made.

Day 3 was launch day. It was when I emailed my list, posted on the DPS blog, tweeted in earnest about it and posted my last post mentioning it here on ProBlogger. It was a great day of sales.

Days 4-9 saw me do a few promotions on Twitter and an attempt by me to get my affiliates for the product promoting it. I’ll talk more about the affiliate promotions below. I also mentioned the e-book in the weekly newsletter that I sent out (Day 5) but that promotion wasn’t as in your face as others as I didn’t want to burn out readers. These days were steady in terms of sales which surprised me a little as Thanksgiving was in the middle of it all!

Day 10 was the day I sent out my final ‘last chance’ email to my list. It was a short email simply reminding them that they had 36 hours to go to take action on the 25% discount. The email also linked to a page on the blog where I had a number of reviews from other blogs that said nice things about the e-book.

This last action email and the post on the blog drove a heap of sales. I was expecting it to be a good day but Day 10 went past the launch and considering that the promotion ended halfway through Day 11’s figures that was a good day too.

All in all I think this chart illustrates the power of having an offer with a deadline. The sense of urgency and scarcity that such an offer brings about is powerful.

Lesson #2 – Extra Launch Offer

One thing that I almost immediately regretted with this offer was not having a time sensitive offer that ended after 24 hours. While the first day and last day were great, the reaction of a lot of readers on Day #1 was ‘I’ll think about it’.

Perhaps having a fast action bonus of some kind might have helped convert some of these procrastinating buyers. I’m sure some did end up buying but perhaps not having a fast action bonus lost a few sales on launch day.

Lesson #3 – Mid Promotion Offer

I mentioned above that on Day 5 I mentioned the e-book in my weekly newsletter. I showed the above chart to a couple of experienced internet marketers over the last few hours and each one of them said it’s a pretty typical result. The first and last day of an offer are generally the biggest.

However a couple of them also suggested that they also try to do a mid launch promotion also. In this way they try to get their chart to look more like a W than the V that my chart is like.

Upon reflection I could have done something similar with a number of things. Next time I’ll consider a post and/or email mid launch that points to some reviews/testamonials of the product as well as adding an extra bonus.

Jeff Walker did a nice mid launch promotion on his latest launch that seemed to work well – midway through he added a series of extra bonuses for buyers.

Lesson #4 – Affiliates Need More Hand Holding

Next time around I will be putting a lot more effort into developing relationships with the affiliates promoting the promotion. While 2-3 of the affiliates did quite good promotions – they were in the minority. Here’s what I’ll work on next time:

1. communicating with affiliates before the launch – the craziness of the launch I didn’t start equipping affiliates until I’d already launched. While I did have a couple of them set up and ready to go most signed up on Day 3-4 and didn’t start promoting until days 5-6 which coincided with Thanksgiving.
2. tips for affiliates – as I watched the promotions that some of the affiliates ran it became pretty obvious that many didn’t really have much experience in affiliate marketing – I think I assumed too much and should have developed some resources for them that showed them how to promote the e-book. While I’m not a big fan of swipe files and would never use them myself when promoting a product – I can now see why many people offer them to affiliates.
3. banners – again, I wish I’d put a little more time aside to put together some banners and other graphics for affiliates to use. This was on my list of things to do but in the whirlwind of the last few days before launch it didn’t happen.
4. recruit affiliates – I think this will get easier as I launch more products because I’ll have previous affiliates already set up but next time there are a few sites that I’d like to target as potential affiliates that didn’t come on board this time. Perhaps they didn’t come on because it was all too last minute or perhaps I simply didn’t have the relationship with them that I thought I did – but next time I want to be more prepared and have done more groundwork in this area.

Lesson #5 – Pre Launch Buzz

Apart from a few comments in passing in newsletters and blog posts – I did very very little to build anticipation on DPS in the weeks before this launch. I think I wasn’t wanting to build unrealistic expectations with readers or to be too in your face – and in doing so failed to create ANY anticipation among readers.

I look back now and think I should have done more – perhaps doing a live interview with a portrait photographer in the days before, running a competition, publishing an excerpt from the e-book…. etc

I don’t think that these pre-launch promotions need to be ‘in your face’ at all – rather they should both build buzz but also be useful to readers.

Lesson #6 – Price Isn’t Everything

When I ended the 25% off discount I expected that the folder in my inbox that collects emails about new sales would sit dormant for a while. The promotion is over – sales will stop now won’t they?

Not true. The price is back up to it’s normal price now of $19.95 but the sales are coming in pretty much at the same rate that they were before the discount. There’s still a certain buzz going around about the E-book and this momentum continues to drive sales. Even since writing this post we’ve had another 10!

Lesson #7 – It Takes a lot of work

This type of launch is both exhilarating and exhausting.

The excitement of launching this 9 days ago was fantastic. Seeing the first sales being rung up over the first few hours was a real buzz. Getting up each morning and realizing that you’d sold several hundred e-books was great.

However the number of emails that I’ve personally replied to this week must have been quite a few hundred. The weight of customer service type queries that come in when doing a launch is massive.

People whose computers crash during downloads, problems with credit cards, complaints about PayPal, people with old versions of Adobe Reader that mean they can’t read the PDF, people who fail to see that you’re selling an E-Book not a hard cover book (despite you slapping it all over your sales page)….. etc

This is just the territory that comes with this type of launch and if I were smart I’d probably have outsourced it – but it was good to get my head across it all as it taught me a lot.

Lesson #8 – Products are Powerful For More than Just the Money They Earn

I’m planning a post on this later in the week so won’t say too much except that both with this Portrait e-book and the development of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook I’ve discovered that having a product of your own is something quite powerful.

Not only is it an income stream – but it’s something that has a real impact upon both your readers and your standing in your niche/industry:

• I’ve noticed that readers are quite excited about the launch – they are proud that a blog that they belong to has it’s own resource.
• Some readers somehow feeling more ownership of the blog because they have bought the e-book. I guess they now have something a little more tangible from the blog that they own.
• I’ve also had a few emails from others in the photography space who seem to have taken a bit more notice of the site as a result of the e-book. It’s already opened doors.

That’s it for now – I’m going to log off now for a bit and have a glass of bubbly before crashing into bed to try and recuperate before I have to do it all again!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

$72,000 in E-Books in a Week – 8 Lessons I Learned

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Posted by jennita

It has been a couple weeks since PubCon and yes, it’s taken me this long to recuperate! Bare with me here as I reminisce about my favorite tidbits over the 3 days of sessions. PubCon does an amazing job of putting together a schedule that covers a multitude of tracks and topics. Which usually means that I often end up with a case of "session envy." You know, when you’re sitting in a session and you start to see tweets about how great another session is. It doesn’t even mean that the one you’re in is bad, it’s just that you want to be in two places at once.

Many people were live blogging the event and obviously there have been quite a few recaps of PubCon as well. I realize I’m a little late to the game.   But, let’s get to the good stuff! While there were many great speakers and presentations there were a couple that stood out to me. What I was looking for were answers to questions that we often get either through comments on the blog or through Q & A. With that said, these are my favorite take-aways from PubCon 2009.

Day 1 – How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?

This was a great session, full of valuable information. The biggest takeaway for me, came from  Bruce Clay. He took the road of sticking to a very specific topic, image and video content and explained how to get them indexed.

Since these are topics that come up quite a bit in Q & A I was excited to get some specific information on interesting ways to index images and videos. Thanks to Virginia Nussey over at Bruce Clay sending me the actual presentation (woot!).

Case Study – Indexing Images

The first thing Bruce spoke about was a case study they did involving getting images with text indexed. Here are the steps they took:

• Take a newspaper article
• Scan it to create a jpg
• Include that image into a PDF
• Submit that PDF to Google
• Search for info in the article as a PDF and the article is found.

So what happened? Well the PDF was indexed AND the text from the image was also indexed. Take a look at this SERP.

Obviously this isn’t going to work for you in all cases, but it’s an interesting way of getting images indexed and could be useful in a number of scenarios.

Case Study – Indexing Video

Next, Bruce went through another case study where they got a video indexed. Here are the steps they took.

• Take a Video
• Run it through our processor
• Edit the text transcript and save with the image
• When playing the video, search for words
• Jump into the Video

You can see this most clearly at Google audio indexing in the Labs section. Do a search for "economy" then notice how it shows you where in the video the word "economy" is spoken. I can see this being the wave of the future. How awesome would it be to have your videos come up in a search for words that were spoken within the video. Yea, pretty cool.

What I really liked about this presentation was that the information was displayed as a case study. If you read SEOmoz often you know how much we like to test theories out and put them to action. And although indexing images and video in this way may not be new to everyone, it’s new to some people and could be a great way to enhance your sites.

Day 2 – SEO/SEM Tools

This was seriously one of my favorite sessions. The speakers (including Rand) had a ton of great information but the one that really stood out to me was Jim Boykin of We Build Pages. He gave away some really great tips but the one I liked the most had to do with how to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to take:

• Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Enter in the URL of your competitor’s sitemap
• check box for " Include other pages on my site linked from this URL"
• When you get results, Change "Match Type" to "Exact Match"to see actual searches and volume for specific phrases.

Obviously not only does this help with checking out which keywords your competitors are focused on, but it can also help you make sure you’re site is also focusing on the right keywords.

Day 3 – The Search Engine Smackdown

For me the third day was my favorite. I actually wanted to attend every session in the first slot. I ended up watching the first part of the Link Buying session and the second part of the site review with Matt Cutts. I have to admit also that I loved the fact that the PubCon team programmed Matt Cutts doing a site audit at the same time as the Link Buying session… pretty darn ingenious if you ask me! Rand posted information about the site review, so I wont go into detail but it was a great session.

Although I think the best part came after the session when Matt took to shaving Evan Fishkin’s head due to a bet they made while at the SEOmoz Werewolf party earlier in the week. And although that alone was pretty great, I loved the fact that while Matt was shaving Evan’s head, people were asking him questions and he was answering as if it were a regular Q & A. Here’s a short clip of the shaving!

Ok, ok back to the Search Engine Smackdown. I should admit that I debated whether I should head back to the hotel after a long 3 days or go to the final session, and I’m glad I went! These are the topics I found most interesting… and yes they’re all from Matt Cutts.

Google Social Search
Here’s the information straight from the site:

Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called "Results from people in your social circle."

To see even more social content you can click the "Show options" link at the top of the results page and then click on the "Social" link.

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about social search.

I can see myself using this quite a bit. Most of my job is about "social searches" in general,so this one is right up my alley! It was a fun find for me.

Testing for Speed

As Rand mentioned in his post, Google representatives have mentioned several times that page load time is important and Matt himself said at this session that although they haven’t used speed as a ranking factor in the past, that they’re thinking about adding it in the future. He gave some resources on how to check the speed and ways to make it faster.

• http://code.google.com/speed/ - Ways to clean up your site’s speed
• webpagetgest.org – Let’s you input a URL, select test location and other configuration options, then test!
• http://code.google.com/closure/ - a JavaScript compiler

Wrap it up

I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter you know quite well how I feel about Vegas. I really wish there was a good way to clone myself so I could attend multiple sessions at once. With up to 7 tracks going on at the same time, it’s difficult to pick one. In the end PubCon was a hit, and it was great to meet many of our SEOmoz members and see some old friends. See you again next year!

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According to Guy Kawasaki, the Co-founder of Alltop, the best way to use Twitter is for marketing. He is anything but shy when it comes to both his love and usage for the microblogging service. However, not everyone agrees with his stance. He has especially received criticism from the SEO community.

One area of controversy is in regards to Kawasaki sending out the same tweet multiple times, a practice some people refer to as spam. Secondly, he has been greatly criticized for the “ghosts,” or other people he has tweeting for him.

In spite of the scrutiny, Kawasaki defends his strategy on Twitter. In a Q & A post on his blog, he explained his reasoning for repeating his tweets. He said:

“I repeat a handful of my tweets because I don’t assume that all my followers are reading me 24 x 7 x 365. This is the same reason that ESPN and CNN repeat the same news stories (without updates, simply identical reports) throughout the day.”

In response to the opposition of his ghosts, Kawasaki told WebProNews:

“At the end of the day, the ultimate test is not who tweeted it, as much as, is it interesting.”

As a result of the controversy, his ghosts now identify when they are tweeting. Ironically, he said that one of his ghosts actually gets retweeted more than he does.

Although his usage of Twitter has been brought under attack numerous times, it doesn’t appear to be affecting his success on the service at all. Since Twitter is a free and open platform, is there really a wrong way to use it?

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