One of the smartest SEOs I know who doesn’t run some kind of paid membership site now does
Whilst also blogging together on Collective Thoughts (ok so I have been slacking a little) we also have a chat group on Skype that has been running for 2 years.
Dave knows his stuff (like really knows his stuff), and if your primary interest is SEO, I can’t think of a better place to hang out and share secrets…
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Reader Blog)Today, we’re launching two changes to Google Reader to help you discover more interesting content faster. Just as the launch of Personalized Search improved search results based on your search history, these changes use your Reader Trends to improve your reading experience.
Back in April, we introduced keyboard shortcuts you can use to zip around AdWords. As fans of Gmail shortcuts already know, if you want to save time navigating your account, ditching your mouse can give you a major boost.To help you learn shortcuts faster (not to mention show off your AdWords skills), we’re giving away free sets of keyboard stickers. Take a look:(click to view larger image)If you live in the U…
Rand’s in Jolly Ol’ England this week, so I decided to share a preview from our upcoming DVD Training Series, "Tips, Tricks & Tactics: Volume 1," coming out in November.
We filmed this series during our recent seminar in Seattle and the response was amazing. One of the most popular sessions was Conductor CEO, Seth Besmertnik’s, presentation on "How to Win SEO Budget and Influence Your CMO…
A couple of weeks ago we introduced Artist Themes for Google Chrome. We asked leading designers, artists, illustrators and musicians to use the browser as their personal canvas for designing interesting themes.Since then, we’ve enjoyed hearing your thoughts on these designs and how you’ve used them to personalize your browser. We’ve also been intrigued by the ways in which these themes have had interesting and unusual cultural resonance with people around the world…
By Mike Takahashi
Recently, there have been a lot of creative ideas and uses of online ads that have been pushing the traditional medium. Takeover ads, where ads takeover the entire site design have become more common. Apple has taken banner ads into a new dimension by creating ads that appear to interact within the design of a site. While others have been able to leverage platforms such as YouTube and Twitter to create an interactive experience…
This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners.
We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to all 150+ videos (over 11 hours of information). That’s important because for movies with captions, you can translate the captions into different languages…
Marissa Mayer announces that Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in Google’s search results.
We look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information…
(NOTE: This post is written by Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin as a follow up to Ben’s presentation at the Distilled/SEOmoz training seminar in London this week)
Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we’d share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you’ll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading…
This Thursday, October 22nd, our Dublin-based AdSense team will host a webinar geared towards publishers with sites related to education. We welcome you to join us for an hour, starting at 9am PST/5pm GMT, and learn how you can improve your ad performance. We’ll talk you through our top tips and show you sample implementations, and you’ll be able to put your questions live to an AdSense specialist…
At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results…
Marketing taps into our emotions, as Rory Sutherland shares in this great TED speech
Online any good idea that works well is quickly cloned by competitors. Both the larger competitors with piles of money AND those who are driven by money so much that they would sell their own mothers for a nickel.
This fierce competition for attention forces continuous (perceived) value add. Some of that is created through innovation and/or branding…
One of our commenters, WebsterJ, recently made the astute observation:
So Derek calls out SEO as a scam while touting social media - a field that is quickly cornering the market on snake oil. Fast talking social gurus charging boring clients with nothing interesting to say big $$$ to make Twitter profiles, blogs and Facebook pages that will bring in zero return. They just make the client feel like they are “doing social media…
The WSJ reports that as soon as next week Google will begin selling music in the search results:
Google Inc. will soon let users buy songs or listen to them for free, right on its main results page, as part of a broader push to enhance the offerings on the leading search engine, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The music offerings, from four online music services, are to be packaged in what Google calls a “one box” at the top of a results page, similar to the site’s presentation of weather and financial results…
Firefox can easily be called one of the most versatile, most powerful browsers: tens, nay hundreds of extensions enable it to do just about anything from predicting the weather to playing music.
And thus we do; enable hundreds of extensions, that is. Which turns starting Firefox into a second-boot experience, its startup time equaled only by the actual boot-up of a complete operating system as you switch on your computer in the morning…
By Cameron Chapman
Managing the files and reference materials that you’ve compiled over the course of a project (or even your entire career) can be a daunting task. You need to organize invoices, proposals, creative files, mock-ups, research sources and a myriad of other folders and files for later reference. And let’s face it: most operating systems have inadequate file management tools for power users…
A lot of companies agree that they have problems with their category pages. Coming into the Holiday Season, it’s incredibly important to think of those things that will help the visitor move through her buying process easily, and improving the customer experience on category pages can have a real impact. Optimizing category pages can prevent “pogo sticking” behavior, reduce bounce rates, and improve overall conversion…
This is the second time I’ve encountered this technique in the past few months so I thought I’d spend some time explaing what it is, what to watch out for, and how it could be problematic for you.
Lets start at the beginning with sponsored themes. A sponsored theme is where you have a designer create a wordpress theme for you and give it away to others to use for free with the provision they leave the link intact in the footer…
From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see — tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.The most recent release of Android 1.6, a.k.a. Donut, introduces accessibility features designed to make Android apps more widely usable by blind and low-vision users. In brief, Android 1.6 includes a built-in screenreader and text-to-speech (TTS) engine which make it possible to use most Android applications, as well as all of Android’s default UI, when not looking at the screen…
Many ads are aimed at interrupting a consumer to get them to pay attention to the ad, but this approach has proven less effective on the Web, as consumers often come online to pursue an interest or perform a task, such as finding a local restaurant or booking an airline ticket. To address this, many advertisers are moving away from interruption toward helping consumers accomplish their tasks by offering commercial messages that are useful, helpful and relevant…
We don’t talk about email marketing on the blog much, but any of you working in the internet marketing space (and that’s likely all of you) probably know that it’s still one of the most effective marketing channels out there.
We’ve been fortunate enough over the years to partner with ExactTarget for our email marketing services and as they’ve grown and improved their offerings they constantly make me feel terrible…
People use all kinds of tools to help them get stuff done — paper to-do lists, messages with a certain label or stars in Gmail, notes in Google Calendar, a couple different iGoogle gadgets and so on. Late last year, we added a lightweight way to help you keep track of what you need to do in Gmail Labs — tasks.Since then, it’s graduated from Labs, and you can manage your tasks not only in Gmail, but also in Google Calendar, iGoogle and from your mobile phone (by going to gmail…
Recently, we introduced Google Web Elements as a new way to easily add dynamic content to your site. In this post, we’d like to focus on one of the Web Elements which you can use to earn more revenue: the Custom Search Element.As our optimization tips point out, adding search functionality to your site can improve the user experience on your pages and overall make your site “sticky”. Here are some commonly asked questions about the Custom Search Element to help you get started: Q: What do I need to do in order to start earning revenue with the Custom Search Element?The first thing you should do is activate AdSense for search in your AdSense account…
The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is getting an update today, with a bunch of new features aimed at making enterprise search easier for everyone inside a company. One of our favorites, the Self-learning Scorer, learns from employees’ searches to tune itself and improve over time. If employees repeatedly choose, say, the fourth result for a given query the GSA will learn that’s probably the most relevant one and bring it up to the top the next time the query is searched for…
Quick and powerful, jQuery can help designers and developers create awesome interactive websites that are appealing and accessible to the widest range of browsers. For your audience, the visit to your site will be both exciting and entertaining. Navigation, galleries and slideshows, are hot points for a site to shine.
Here are 35 useful fresh jQuery plugins focusing on navigation, gallery and slideshows, calendars, tab browsing and further resources to reduce time and effort while increasing your audience…
To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd. This post showcases a gallery of appealing iPhone app sites and common design trends that I see. (more…)
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AdAge highlighted Google’s Campaign Monitor, a display ad measurement tool which has been in beta for the last year:
With Campaign Insights, Google takes data from the advertiser’s server logs to determine who was shown an ad and when. Then compares that to web searches and site visits culled from data from the millions of Google toolbars on computer desktops. Those results are compared to a comparable group that didn’t see the ad…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at semdaily.com
