All enterprise ecommerce vendors test their application’s performance, but it is still a good idea to discuss the performance aspects of an ecommerce platform with the vendor before making the decision to buy. You will also need to analyze the performance test results provided by the vendor and check the reference sites to see how the system has been scaling in the real world.

After you have decided on your new ecommerce platform, despite all of this pre-purchase research, you will need to start planning your own performance testing efforts as part of your ecommerce implementation…

In late September, we launched a beta version of the updated Keyword Tool. This tool is a new, streamlined way for you to identify additional keywords and add them to your account. Previously, we offered two distinct tools to expand your keyword list. The Keyword Tool generated keywords based on the content of the URL, words or phrases you entered into the tool. The Search-based Keyword Tool gave you insight into keywords that you may have been missing out on by identifying actual Google searches that were relevant to your site’s landing pages…

You’ve spilled coffee on your keyboard. The a, e, i, o, u, and r keys have stopped working. Now try to search Google for the nearest computer repair shop. The pain of typing on this broken keyboard is similar to what many people searching in non-English languages feel when trying to type today. Typing searches on keyboards not designed for your languages can be frustrating, even impossible.Our user research has shown that many people are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google…

Google announced Monday about upcoming changes to its AdWords API fees. This change has been a long-time waiting for many agencies that have often had a constant battle gaining respect from Google.
The Google API platform is structured to allow developers to interact with AdWords. This permits agencies to create their own bidding and reporting tools. [...]

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First Google rolled out recommendations for “pages similar to” earlier this week, now they also appear to be testing brand recommendations in response to certain queries. As I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable, some users are seeing “brands for” recommendations for searches such as [digital cameras], [cheap laptops], [label printers], [fishing rod] and [...]

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The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has announced the new slate of officers for the search marketing advocacy and education association. The officers for the coming year are:

Chairman: Jeffrey Pruitt, CEO of Tallwave (re-elected chairman)
President: Chris Boggs, Director, Search Engine Optimization, ROSETTA
Vice president: Dave Fall, SVP Product and Operations, Clickable, Inc.
Treasurer: Margaret Willette, Search Marketing […

Most of you reading this headline will probably think I’m crazy. We all know that search engines do not crawl or index e-mail. What we forget is that you do have the option to view a copy of the e-mail you receive in a browser. Usually this is reserved for e-mails that are sent from [...]

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This is the second post in our Small Business series about entrepreneurship and the various Google tools you can use to establish and improve your business presence on the Internet. Here, you’ll learn how Google Places (formerly called the Local Business Center) can help you attract and be discovered by customers in your area for free. -Ed.As a local business owner, one of the things that sets you apart is your ability to make personal connections with your customers because of your passion for what you do…

Yahoo announced a new search index and algorithm update today. The update involves crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms changes over the next few days.
Yahoo said, “you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.”
The last Yahoo update [...]

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After the search box, perhaps no other Google product is so synonymous with the company as Maps. Over time Google has come to see its mapping offering — now extended to mobile — and the underlying local data as more and more strategic. To that end, last October in the US Google replaced maps data [...]

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While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others…

By Bhanu Ahluwalia

Dew drops, the water droplets condensed from the air, are a beautiful gift from Mother Nature. Dew drops have a novelty in them. They are vivid and delicate, warm and cold at the same time. They sparkle like pearls on the surface. Mornings become more refreshing and brisk when it is drenched in the dew. They are simply amazing… Capturing dew drops is considered to be the best illustration of macro photography…

After doing all of your research, you now have a pretty good crop of data to sift through. Remember, during the Research Phase, we collected every keyword we found during our various investigations. Check out this article for a comprehensive recap of Research Phase posts from this column regarding PPC research.
Some of sources [...]

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The situation: Your competitors have inbound links that are broken because of typos, changes in URL structures etc.

The common link building commentary: Most SEOs who’ve been around the link building block will tell you that it’s an opportunity to ‘build links’ for free – to pick low hanging fruit. Just drop the site owner a little email and voila – good as new…

In an effort to help our publishers navigate the array of Google products, we’re happy to announce the first part of our ‘Additional publisher resources’ video series. In these videos we aim to provide an introduction to other Google products that are of interest to AdSense publishers. We’ll cover topics such as how to maximize your site’s visibility to advertisers, how to ensure your site is properly indexed in Google’s search engine, how to make your site more interactive for users and how to gather information on your site’s traffic…

Look at any competitive PPC area today, and you’ll notice many of the ads are selling the same thing.

This is a fundamental problem.

No matter how great you are at PPC, it the product or service you’re selling is flooded with competition, the more your margins will be squeezed. The more your margins are squeezed, the less you will be able to spend on advertising…

Hitwise announced today that the search term Facebook was the top U.S. search conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Overall, Facebook related terms accounted for eight searches across the three top 10 lists.Yahoo! related terms accounted for six spots while MySpace terms accounted for four searches across the search engines. Other search terms that were among the top 10 searches for all three search engines include youtube, facebook login, craigslist and yahoo mail…

Another day, another new and/or improved search tool from Google. Yesterday it was an improved mobile version of Place Pages, and today’s announcement is an upgrade to Google’s mobile image search for iPhones and Android devices.

The changes include showing square thumbnails to maximize the number that appear after a search, swipe-based navigation (like iPhone users [...]

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Hey marketers and data heads: heads up! Next week is a good week to tell your boss you’re taking “enrichment time off.” We totally support using this excuse to take afternoons off and go to baseball games, or using it to let your boss know you won’t be at work on a Friday, when you’re actually planning to hit the slopes early for a long ski weekend. “Enrichment time”. But regarding next week, we’re actually talking about legitimate, professional, guilt free, educational enrichment time at two web analytics conferences happening at the same place in San Jose — next week!You’ve heard of eMetrics, a premiere event for marketing and website analytics…

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…

Link begging is the practice of identifying link prospects, usually through competitor backlink analysis, and then contacting each one of those sites and begging for a link. Link begging typically ignores the original context of the link, as well as the probable motivation of the linker. Not only that, it’s potentially destructive to an organization’s industry relationships and the link builder’s will to live…

Growing up in the late seventies in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, technology wasn’t really a part of my educational life. My teachers graded printouts and the idea of collaborating with my classmates on a project anytime, anywhere just wasn’t possible. Not to mention, we didn’t have a computer at home and working on the Internet was still a pipe dream for a middle schooler.Things have changed since I was in middle school of course, and there are people working hard to bring technology into classrooms to help students learn and teachers teach…

By Cameron Chapman

There have been tons of posts about minimalist and simple web design. It’s something every designer should consider and study, as minimalist and simple design principles are important in a lot of website designs. But there’s been such a focus on clean and minimalist design in recent years that many designers shy away from more visually-complex designs…

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 post, I’m going to share my thoughts on some of the presentations that I’ve attended…

Our friends at Wider Funnel and WhichTestWon.com were surprised to find that an unconventional left-hand placement of the add to cart button on BabyAge.com outperformed right-hand placement in an A/B split test, achieving a 16.7% higher conversion rate.

The discovery was surprising because it seems 99.9% of online stores place the cart button on the right hand side, and you’d think that customers have been conditioned to look for the cart button there…

Usability is common sense. Good design is common sense. After all, there is no point building a site that is unusable, or a site that isn’t designed well.

Typically, talk of usability orients around function i.e. ensuring websites are easier to use by streamlining content and making navigation clearer. The problem, like with any set of functional guidelines, is that usability is about much more than functional interaction…

You’ve obviously heard about Google’s PageRank algorithm which heavily focuses on link data to provide a grade for every website in their index. Trst.Me (powered by InfoChimps) has just launched their own version of PageRank, but for Twitter. The trst.me score is also based on a scale of 0-10, where 10 is the highest reputation possible.

Some users are more valuable followers than others…

According to Techcrunch, app store veteran, UrbanSpoon, has officially launched their iPad app. I agree with them in that the iPad app will not be useful for quick dinner solutions (like it is when firing up the app on an iPhone), however the iPad app will be useful for longer, more thoughtful decisions. Details of the UrbanSpoon iPad app below:

…

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…

In the last post in our “Bridging the Gap” series, lets explore how advertisers build tailored campaigns to promote their businesses. My team and I work mostly with medium-sized businesses that try to be as efficient as possible with their online ad spend. In the past, we found that direct response campaigns (which ask users to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter) were more common than pure branding campaigns…