For the past several months, we have been decisively studying a new wave of marketing methods.  We want to share this knowledge with everyone who wants to learn how to upgrade and manage the organic SEO of your own site.  These methods are usually free and require little more than an hour a day to improve the quantity and  quality of visitors to your sites.

We’re discovering the importance of a load of critical but unexciting things like:

• Researching your market
• Testing different propositions to suit your chosen market
• Learning how to write compelling copy
• And trying out a range of content to see what works best

These skills are not part of the average modern web designer’s arsenal, but they very soon will be! Those web site owners and designers who don’t apply the knowledge that direct marketers have built up over the last 125 years will soon find it harder to compete against those who can show real business results, backed up with figures.

We’re discovering a range of simple techniques that can have a massive impact on the success rates of your site. Many of these have been known for generations among certain disciplines, and it’s time we bring them into daily use in web design and online marketing.

Free Optimization Webinar

Our business development guy, Christian, recently attended several seminar on web site optimization and wants to share and disseminate the information to all of our associates.

We’re following up with our own free webinar to give time to answer our clients and all attendees’ questions. We also commit to analyse a few sample sites submitted in advance of the webinar. This will probably be on Monday September 23rd at around 13.00-15.00 Central time, but I’ll confirm the date & time later.

If you would like to attend, watch out for an email from me in the next week or so, and I’ll give you the link. Places are limited to 100, but we may follow up with more over the following weeks, so if you don’t get on, please let me know.

Our goal is to share all of our knowledge with the public.  The day of paying insane amounts for someone else to monitor and maintain your SEO campaign are definitely not over, but we want to at least show you how to take control of your marketing should you choose to.

You will need to first download the SEOmoz toolbar for Firefox.  This toolbar has a function that shows “No Follow” tags on page links.  Using this tool will allow you to determine which blogs are worth commenting and interacting with for links and track-backs.

Most everyone with a blog has visited or even pursued Tecnorati… (if you haven’t you will after reading this.)  Within Techgnorati, you have access to blogs that are separated by category and relevance.  There are other blog index sites that maintain a strong list of blogs by content, but Tecnorati tends to be the most reliable for the search engines.

Once you are on the site, search for a blog that resembles the topic of whatever page you wish to link to.  If you are choosing to link to your main page, choose a blog that is closely associated with the Keywords of your entire site.  If you are using the link of a specific page, search for a page that has that specific topic.  Tecnorati has a ranking system that allows the user to comb through different levels of relevance. Obviously, you want to get links from the most relevant site to the topic being covered.

Using this method, you’ll want to start by performing a “Time Honored Blogging Tradition” RTFA!!! Read the article people.  Seriously, if you don’t know what the topic is, it will show in what you’ve written. Once you read the article, then it’s time to interact.

Make sure that the comment you leave is more than the following junk:

“nice post”

“I agree with the points you made”

“good thoughts but I take issue with your points”

These comments are common and quite annoying pieces of spam.  These statements will likely be caught in any filter and removed from any site that cares about their relevancy.   It would always be suggested to be Part of a conversation.  If you’ve read a post, use enough of the material within it to make a valid statement.

Here’s a list of other rules that will avoid negative treatment for blog comments:

• Only leave comments that are a full, comprehensible sentence.
• Sign up for updates on future comments.  This can ensure many links and a future relationship between your site and the site you are commenting on.
• Leave only on link on the site, the one in your name description.  Leaving tons of links in the content of your comments makes it strongly resemble an unwanted communication, leaving many to list your comments as spam.  If your site links or email addresses becomes associated as spam, it’s very likely that your future comments on other blogs will be filtered as well.
• Leave the auto commenting software to those who don’t mind being banned from the search engines.  It’s just not worth it.
• Read the articles!!! There will always be a better exchange of ideas when you do and you’ll likely receive more convertible visitors to your website if they believe your communication to be respectful.

While linking structure has always been an important piece of the SEO equation, it seems that a more intuitive linking structure is becoming more and more necessary for modern SEO development.  The day of submitting to random directories or commenting on unrelated blogs is long gone.  Spam comments and unrelated directory listings cause damage to website relevance and search engines are constantly looking for ways to counter their effects. That being said, there are highly effective methods of getting related backlinks, they just require more work than the spammers and scammers are likely to give.

If you’re wondering, “is Christian about to rail on the Spammers again?” the answer is always, yes!  Spammers not only made the system harder for all of us, they’ve caused themselves to become endangered.  Yes, you can still find tons of affiliate websites offering their “Link Building Software”.  This software is usually some form of Blog Spamming software.  While these sites can be found all over the place, they’re owned by only a small group of spam-jockeys who and are becoming marginalized by people becoming more aware of affiliate scams and MLM’s.`

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, blog backlink software is going to do nothing for your site but possibly get it banned from Google.  Not only is the software disastrous for your reputation with the SERPS, they almost always have a very short and mitigated list of sites to choose from.  They claim that their program makes searches through Google, but this is only a half truth, they are most often pre-rigged with a select amount of search criteria.  The resulting searches leave the user with the same tired group of blogs that were used 1,000’s of times before by other Spammers. Most of these sites and pages that have been bombarded by spam are already flagged by Google.  Add your link to this page, and you risk being considered spam as well.

That out of the way, the question of how to get the quality links and avoid being all spammy is going to be asked.  Unfortunately, the answer will have to wait until tomorrow. We’re out of coffee.

1. Spiral Vectors

2. Skeleton Vector

3. Abstract Vectors

4.  Floral Vectors

If you’ve played with even half of the major names, you’ve likely run into and identified one major problem… they all give different numbers.  Many find themselves wondering which ones to trust and what to make of the numbers they’ve received.  Here is our take on the top 6 site Analytics and why we use them.

1. Google Analyticor- OK,  To those who always wish to bash the resource, I start by agreeing with you that Google looses a lot of information when scripts are blocked.  That being said, the number of people using script blockers is still not that high, so it’s really a moot point.  Google Analyticor is the most widely used website traffic index and is at least one must for web traffic monitoring. -to avoid the debate, that’s all we’re saying about Google today-
2. Majestic SEO Tools-  While Majestic has been around and has had a major resource for a few years now, the past year has offered a lot of new and useful tools within the site.  While it requires an account to gain access to some of the better tools, they are well worth the free account and the ten minutes it takes to set it up.  After a month of indexed tracking, Majestic provides a complete  breakdown of all your website backlinks.  This is quite useful in determining and targeting where to make more backlinks and what anchor text to use with them. Granted, there are plenty of costly and buggy forms of software that will perform this function, but most of them accompany an affiliate scam or someone’s get rich quick “Pyramid Scam”.  While the data for the links may be lagging, it’s fairly respectable in determining the  needs of a backlink campaign.
3. Quantcast -  Same as below…
4. Compete-    Do they help? Honestly, not so much.  What they do offer is valued information for those considering advertising on your website.  While many would argue, and often I’d agree with them that the information in both sites is a random guess, they are free and offer a strong form of traffic evidence when looking to sell ad-space on your site.  Whether you like them or not, it would be suggested to get listed within their database.  While you may not like or trust their services, most advertising groups are going to want to see their numbers to put ads on your site.
5. SEOmoz Free Tools-  These are an incredible assortment of custom tools designed for and by SEOmoz.  The SEO tools and link structure tools provided here are much stronger than most of their competition offers.  While we have yet to try their Pro Tools for review, we will soon be putting it to the test.  All I can say it that if the pro tools excel well above the free tools, we will likely remain a customer and refer our clients.  The free tools include several strong tools, but the best one and most unique is the “Trifecta Tool”.  This tool gives a full breakdown of a site in Page, Domain, or Blog format.   The information given here is usually free in it’s individual formats, but the way that they collate and arrange the data makes for a clean and valuable view of a websites performance.  It’s well worth signing up for a free account to try it out.
6. HUBSpot Grader.com Program – What can’t be said for the brilliant strategy of Inbound Marketing that HUBSpot has highlighted with this and many of its other websites.  Websitegrader.com is one of the most widely used website evaluation websites in use today.  With over 2.6 Million sites graded to date and an Alexa ranking around 2,000, they are becoming the most widely use “quick check” for determining any websites effectiveness.  We, like anyone else who has received it, value the 99% grade we were given by websitegrader.com and view and updated score from them on a weekly basis to see what adjustments need to be made.  If you have yet to run your site through their system, give it a try.  The information given will only serve to increase the reach and effectiveness of your website.

Before we get into that portion though, we should probably explain why we were down…

As we often point out, we are hosted by Byethost.  They and Bluehost are the two hosting companies we’ve come to trust the most for shared server space. Unfortunately, we discovered that a plugin we were using for the feeds was not well accepted by our neighbors on the server.  We were capturing all of our feeds with the WordPress plugin wp-o-matic. What we didn’t realize is that this plugin causes for some major drain on the server side, and when on shared space, damages your neighbors bandwidth… OOPS!!!

We honestly never considered that such a widely-used plugin would be the cause of such issues, but test afterward have shown that it couldn’t have been anything else. Because of the excessive bandwidth, resources, and memory that wp-o-matic was stripping from the shared space, we were booted to a Virtual Private Server… Ie…Banished to the Degaba System.

It took a week of negotiating, but byethost was willing to settle the discourse once we were well assured that it had to be the plugin that was causing all of he trouble.  One week later, we’re back up and on the way again…. Needless to say, our feeds will no longer run through WP-O-Matic.

Now for the sob-story

While we were only down about a day and back and forth from IP’s for one week, Google took a lot of notice.  Our impressions went from an average of 1,000/day to 22 tonight.  Our traffic went from an average of 200/day to 30 tonight.

The past week of being back up is representative of absolute downtime in the SERPs.

Notice in the screen-shot that the exact date of being down is visible, as well as the subsequent falling out with Google ranking.

While this is a pretty steep setback for the short-term, we will return to our previous standing rather quickly.  We’ve run into similar situations with client sites, but never thought we would need to do damage control of our own.

Here are the following steps that must be taken directly after an event like this.

1. Immediate push for Back-links- During the month following a down-time like this one, the need for sites around the web to verify your existence is crucial.  The pages that Google attempts and fails to Crawl can be put on the back burners for a period of time.  Making a strong push for links and acknowledgment can get a faster crawl to those skipped pages than would likely come otherwise.

2. Add more content.  We all know that the best way to get Google’s attention is to give it something new to look at. While we feed several different blogs on this site, we also enjoy adding our own content on a regular basis  At this moment its pertinent to add more than we normally would.  The additional content will signal that the site is not dead and is in fact very much alive and active.

3.  In addition to adding the content, we have to make sure that Google is aware of it being added.  To drive home this point, we submit sitemaps… Several sitemaps.
From XML to ROR, wee submit every possible format of sitemap available.  Some may think this a bit eccentric, but in dire moments like these, it can be the difference between being demoted  for weeks or for months.  For additional sitemaps in WordPress, we suggest using the following

• Sitemap Index – a PHP virtual sitemap built upon every update.
• Google News XML Sitemap -Automatically generate an XML sitemap for inclusion to Google News 2.0
• XML Sitemap Feed – Creates a feed that complies with the XML Sitemap

We also have some made at xml-sitemaps.com in url.txt and rss.ror format.

Our running experiment will now be to see how long it will take to return to the traffic and ranking that we had last month.  We will share this experience with you all and welcome any suggestion or thoughts you would like to add.

Here’s a description of PrestaShop from the core site:

“PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution was built to take advantage of essential Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features and next-generation ergonomy. PrestaShop guides users through your product catalog intelligently and effortlessly, turning intrigued visitors into paying customers”

PrestaShop began as a network and community maintained e-Commerce Software. The script is maintained in much the same way WordPress is.  The most up to date version of PrestaShop can be downloaded here.

It offers the Following:

Front-office

• Featured products on homepage
• Top sellers on homepage
• New items on homepage
• ‘Free shipping’ offers
• Cross-selling (Accessories)
• Product image zoom
• Order out-of-stock items
• Customer subscription & user accounts
• Payment by bank wire
• Google Checkout module
• Cash-On-Delivery (COD)
• Preconfigured for Paypal

Back-office

• Unlimited categories & subcategories, product attribute combinations, product specs, images, currencies, tax settings, carriers & destinations
• Real-time currency exchange rates
• Inventory management
• Unlimited languages & dialects
• 100% modifiable graphic themes
• Newsletter contact export
• Alias search
• SSL encryption
• Visitors online
• Customer groups

Our first site built in the platform (fr mainstream anyway) will be Malloys Finest. – the site that we are preparing for them can be found here-

TemplateMonster.com, the Internets largest templates provider, introduces brand new PrestaShop Themes which are basically a brand new eCommerce solution designed specifically to provide the customers with the speedy and very lightweight tool in setting up their own PrestaShop stores.

PrestaShop is a new feature-rich and open-source eCommerce software which has a very powerful back-end for its size. Combined with decent and affordable designs PrestaShop is an efficient eCommerce shopping cart solution available for small and medium-sized online businesses. PrestaShop multilingual eCommerce system is fully customizable, quick and simple to install. And the site owners will appreciate its flexibility as it supports unlimited categories, sub-categories and image pictures. Besides, the store admins can manage the inventory, customers, orders, and payments easily.

According to companys authorities, PrestaShop themes provided by TemplateMonster are developed to take advantages of this new shopping cart system. The themes are HTML/CSS Validated and optimized for fast page loading, plus they support all major browsers and have built-in jQuery elements for even more spectacular design.

David Braun, CEO of the Template Monster, said, “Our customers have been asking us to launch PrestaShop themes for many months now. And today we can proudly claim that TemplateMonster now offers innovative PrestaShop themes brushed and polished by our website design pros. Dedicated to providing unbeatable functionality for customers online eCommerce presence, our PrestaShop design solutions ensure youll fully enjoy fantastic functionality of PrestaShop. Not to mention that the themes are extremely easy to modify. And of course we are eager to extend our PrestaShop selection by adding more and more new designs into this product type. So be sure to check back for more premium quality PrestaShop templates!”

Previously the company has launched the Free PrestaShop Theme for cell phone store. This template is still available for download at Free PrestaShop Theme download page.

Affiliate Email Lead Generation is the laziest and least performing form of marketing that there is. The only people who make any form of true wealth from running these scams are the leaders at the pinnacle of their particular pyramid scheme.  I call them pyramid schemes because that’s just what they are.  If you prefer Multi-Level Marketing Scheme or Platform Scheme, please understand that changing the name of a scam does not change the fact that it’s Pyramid Scheme and a scam. Having websites that take two minutes of scrolling to reach the bottom and serve only to harvest email addresses or to sell junk is still scam sales and weak marketing techniques.  It’s like the guy who claims to be the modern Fonz. He gets a decent amount of dates and interaction, but has to work nonstop to do so, burning every bridge as he goes.

I’m not certain when it happened, but at some point people began perpetuating a fake reality of internet marketing.  With the lowest conversion ratio of any sales “Ever” these people are bragging about the rewards to be had from internet affiliate marketing.  I should qualify my statements though, I am an affiliate for Woo Themes, Theme Forest, and many others… I am not speaking of this form of affiliation, I’m speaking of the obvious crooks like”incomehome55.com” (I just don’t like giving those crooks a link to prove this point) or the crooks that are in the Rx or Acai camp.

They blast massive amounts of scam material and give bad names to internet marketers… For What?  To make sales as poor salesman.  The sad truth is that these affiliates with long draping websites are so disastrous as salesman that they’ve taken the scam route as their only option to make a living.  At this point, there are far more scammers than true marketers out there.

There is hope though.  There are true marketing methods still being practiced on line.  There are still marketing groups that demand for themselves to turn a conversion rate of at least 10%.  If you are with a group that doesn’t even mention their conversion ratio, it would be wise to ask.  A quality group will be glad to show(prideful to say the least) that their conversion ratios are working in their clients benefit.  The initial reaction to these numbers is the knowledge that more people that find your product are purchasing through this marketing method.  Purchasers/Subscribers are definite cause for celebration… but don’t discount the other reward.

Your future clients won’t perceive you to be a crook because of all of the Spam and Brute Force marketing techniques the other guys will be associated with.  This is the true reward.  Having true “Leads” recognize your brand as one to be trusted, nit run from.

Here are some of the websites we are inherating.

We’ll show progress with them to all of you in the coming month.

• Pro Jersey Sports
• Chicago Armour Doors
• Sophisticated Elegance
• Evans Weightloss
• Grapsas Law
• EZ Notes
• Malloys Finest Wines and Spirits

While we are also engaged in the creation of content and SEO for other clients, we offer these as sites to visit and grade the experience this month. Over the course of July, you should have several opportunities to witness growth with them all.

  

By Obaid ur Rehman

Photoshop is the basic requirement of a designer and that’s why designers all around the world regularly look for the tutorials that can help them in polishing their Photoshop skills. Since the demand for Photoshop tutorials is too high these days, we prepared a post that can truly help you in achieving amazing results with your Photoshop skills.

Photoshop Tutorials for Attractive Photo Effects

Graceful Lady In The Dark
In this tutorial you will find some of best technique to beautify your photos.

The Colors Of Love
In this tutorial you will learn some great tips to modify your photographs.

Simple Make Up
In this tutorial, shows you how to enhance your normal potrait photo into beautifully fair skin and well done makeup, plus shiny healthy hair just like what you see on tv.

Easy composition but nice result
This photoshop tutorial will be very useful for the beginners.

Impressive Photo’s Background
In this tutorial you will find some of best technique to beautify your photos.

Adding Light Streaks To A Photo
how to add colorful streaks of light to a photo.

How to create Glowing Fashion Photo Manipulation
how to create a glowing fashion photo manipulation using Photoshop techniques, starting from a basic model shot.

Creating a Vector Composite Effect from a Photo
how to take an image, in this case a woman’s face, and give the appearance that it is entirely composed of vector shapes.

Selective Sepia
how to use Photoshop to create selectively add a dramatic sepia effect a photo. This Photoshop effect works best when used with Photoshop CS3 but will also work with Photoshop CS2 or older using an alternative method.

Hot & Fiery Photo Effect
how to create a photo effect like the one in the below image, it’s pretty much all accomplished by using Filters, as are most photo effects, right? Photo manipulation on the other hand uses many tools of the trade, most commonly “airbrushing”, as everyone calls it.

Creative Photo Of A Bride
In this tutorial you will find some of best technique to beautify your photos.

Adding Reflections To Sunglasses In Photoshop
how to add reflections, or at least, different reflections, to sunglasses.

Beautiful Lighting Effect
In this tutorial you will learn some great tips to modify your photographs.

Create a photoshop mermaid image manipulation
how to create your very own water splash techniques using only Photoshop, and you’ll learn how to customize brushes that are essential to this effect’s success.

Remove-freckles
In this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn how to subtract freckles using a layer. This process provides the most natural results for light-brown freckles (ephelides) but will not work for dark freckles (lentigines).

Airbrushing – Natural Smooth Skin
In this tutorial you will teach you an effective Photoshop technique to simulate airbrushing without losing the texture.

Photo retouching
In this tutorial we are going to practice some amazing Photo effects using Wacom tablet. Of course you will be able to do it with PC mouse.

Thermal Photo Effect
how to convert your photos into Thermal Photo Effect.

Glamour Model
how to retouch a face’s photo and make from a simple picture a very original one.

Retouch A Girl with Lighting Focus
how to use lighting effect to emphasize her face, skin and hair.

Star Diffusion
This Photoshop effect creates diffusion in the shape of a four point star and is an ideal effect for portraits or any photos with a strong background blur.

Galaxy Angel
how to retouch the skin of a model, imitate the make-up, draw the tattoos, represent the hair out of the smoke, use different textures, represent the clouds and insert the wings on the picture, enlarge the background the model is situated on, not cutting it out and create the effect of an old picture, at least on its edges.

Add Dynamic Lighting to a Flat Photograph
how to spice up a fairly dull and flat photograph.

Create a Funky Perspective of a Model Riding Digital Volume
how you can achieve the feeling of depth and motion.creating the volume fading away and adding foreground and background images.

Add Cool Fireworks to the Photo
If you are interesting in pyrotechnics then this tutorial special for you!

Create an Artistic Photo by Yourself
Here is not so hard, but very interesting tutorial how to make an artistic photo.

Old Style Photo Effect
how to create old style photo effect with interesting accent.

Make Up Effect for the Face
In this tutorial you will find some of best technique to beautify your photos.

Coloring Effects
In this tutorial you will learn some great tips to modify your photographs.

Fantasy Art
In this tutorial you will find some of best technique to beautify your photos.

Make Perfect Selection for Human Object by Utilising Channel Mask Technique in Photoshop
In this tutorial you will learn some great tips to modify your photographs.

How to Turn Humdrum Photos into Cinematic Portraits
how to transform usual photo into regular, humdrum portrait, even faking HDR effects a little bit.

How To Create A Neat Bird House From Scratch
In this tutorial to create your own “Bird House”, just read the steps carefully, and you’ll be surprised how easily this can be achieved with Photoshop

Adding Light Streak
how to add light streak into a photo.

Reducing 5 O’Clock Shadow And Beard Stubble In Photoshop
how to reduce the appearance of 5 o’clock shadow and beard stubble in a photo.

Retouching a Studio Portrait
how to enhance backgrounds, dodge and burn, brighten eyes, and add hair shine while keeping a low count of layers.

Dream Photo Effect
how to create dreamy effect in your photographs.

Create a Beautiful and Dramatic Scene With Photo Manipulations
how to combine two pictures to create a picturesque background, how to draw long hair manually using Photoshop brushes, as well as how to add some adjustment layers to add dramatic effects to the final image.

Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching
how to repair some image noise from a low-quality shot The woman in this shot is not a model, and she has a lot of character so you don’t want to overdo it with the smoothing.

Quick and Effective Facial Photo Retouching
Here’s another method for quick and easy facial retouching.

Achieve Brilliant Lighting Effects in Photoshop
Lighting effects can make or break any digital artwork. When done properly, lighting can add visual impact, draw the viewer’s eye, convey depth and emotion, and tie together all the elements of the piece for a quality finished result.

A designer can never have too many textures on hand to add dimension, depth, or just to distress their artwork. Today, our friends at CX City were gracious enough to donate 8 high resolution screen print ready textures that you can use in your work. CX City is an apparel and art project based in southern California and they have packaged up some really nice textures contained within a PSD file that you can download and apply to your apparel designs.

8 High Resolution Screen Print Ready Textures Included

This pack includes 8 high-resolution textures contained within a PSD file. Each texture is 17 x 14 inches, at 300 dpi, and has been halftoned and extracted from its background, making it super easy to distress your apparel designs. You can view a low resolution example of each texture below.

We recently posted some correlation statistics on our blog. We believe these statistics are interesting and provide insight into the ways search engines work (a core principle of our mission here at SEOmoz). As we will continue to make similar statistics available, I’d like to discuss why correlations are interesting, refute the math behind recent criticisms, and reflect on how exciting it is to engage in mathematical discussions where critiques can be definitively rebutted.

I’ve been around SEOmoz for a little while now, but I don’t post a lot. So, as a quick reminder, I designed and built the prototype for the SEOmoz’s web index, as well as wrote a large portion of the back-end code for the project. We shipped the index with billions of pages nine months after I started on the prototype, and we have continued to improve it since. Recently I made the machine learning models that are used to make Page Authority and Domain Authority, and am working on some fairly exciting stuff that has not yet shipped. As I’m an engineer and not a regular blogger, I’ll ask for a bit of empathy for my post – it’s a bit technical, but I’ve tried to make it as accessible as possible.

Why does Correlation Matter?

Correlation helps us find causation by measuring how much variables change together. Correlation does not imply causation; variables can be changing together for reasons other than one affecting the other. However, if two variables are correlated and neither is affecting the other, we can conclude that there must be a third variable that is affecting both. This variable is known as a confounding variable. When we see correlations, we do learn that a cause exists — it might just be a confounding variable that we have yet to figure out.

How can we make use of correlation data? Let’s consider a non-SEO example.

There is evidence that women who occasionally drink alcohol during pregnancy give birth to smarter children with better social skills than women who abstain. The correlation is clear, but the causation is not. If it is causation between the variables, then light drinking will make the child smarter. If it is a confounding variable, light drinking could have no effect or even make the child slightly less intelligent (which is suggested by extrapolating the data that heavy drinking during pregnancy makes children considerably less intelligent).

Although these correlations are interesting, they are not black-and-white proof that behaviors need to change. One needs to consider which explanations are more plausible: the causal ones or the confounding variable ones. To keep the analogy simple, let’s suppose there were only two likely explanation – one causal and one confounding. The causal explanation is that alcohol makes a mother less stressed, which helps the unborn baby. The confounding variable explanation is that women with more relaxed personalities are more likely to drink during pregnancy and less likely to negatively impact their child’s intelligence with stress. Given this, I probably would be more likely to drink during pregnancy because of the correlation evidence, but there is an even bigger take-away: both likely explanations damn stress. So, because of the correlation evidence about drinking, I would work hard to avoid stressful circumstances. *

Was the analogy clear? I am suggesting that as SEOs we approach correlation statistics like pregnant women considering drinking – cautiously, but without too much stress.

* Even though I am a talented programmer and work in the SEO industry, do not take medical advice from me, and note that I construed the likely explanations for the sake of simplicity

Some notes on data and methodology

We have two goals when selecting a methodology to analyze SERPs:

1. Choose measurements that will communicate the most meaningful data
2. Use techniques that can be easily understood and reproduced by others

These goals sometimes conflict, but we generally choose the most common method still consistent with our problem. Here is a quick rundown of the major options we had, and how we decided between them for our most recent results:

Machine Learning Models vs. Correlation Data: Machine learning can model and account for complex variable interactions. In the past, we have reported derivatives of our machine learning models. However, these results are difficult to create, they are difficult to understand, and they are difficult to verify. Instead we decided to compute simple correlation statistics.

Pearson’s Correlation vs. Spearman’s Correlation: The most common measure of correlation is Pearson’s Correlation, although it only measures linear correlation. This limitation is important: we have no reason to think interesting correlations to ranking will all be linear. Instead we choose to use Spearman’s correlation. Spearman’s correlation is still pretty common, and it does a reasonable job of measuring any monotonic correlation.

Here is a monotonic example: The count of how many of my coworkers have eaten lunch for the day is perfectly monotonically correlated with the time of day. It is not a straight line and so it isn’t linear correlation, but it is never decreasing, so it is monotonic correlation.

Here is a linear example: assuming I read at a constant rate, the amount of pages I can read is linearly correlated with the length of time I spend reading.

Mean Correlation Coefficient vs. Pooled Correlation Coefficient: We collected data for 11,000+ queries. For each query, we can measure the correlation of ranking position with a particular metric by computing a correlation coefficient. However, we don’t want to report 11,000+ correlation coefficients; we want to report a single number that reflects how correlated the data was across our dataset, and we want to show how statistically significant that number is. There are two techniques commonly used to do this:

1. Compute the mean of the correlation coefficients. To show statistical significance, we can report the standard error of the mean.
2. Pool the results from all SERPs and compute a global correlation coefficient. To show statistical significance, we can compute standard error through a technique known as bootstrapping.

The mean correlation coefficient and the pooled correlation coefficient would both be meaningful statistics to report. However, the bootstrapping needed to show the standard error of the pooled correlation coefficient is less common than using the standard error of the mean. So we went with #1.

Fisher Transform Vs No Fisher Transform: When averaging a set of correlation coefficients, instead of computing the mean of the correlation coefficients, sometimes one computes the mean of the fisher transforms of the coefficients (before applying the inverse fisher transform). This would not be appropriate for our problem because:

1. It will likely fail. The Fisher transform includes a division by the coefficient minus one, and so explodes when an individual coefficient is near one and outright fails when there is a one. Because we are computing hundreds of thousands of coefficients each with small sample sizes to average over, it is quite likely the Fisher transform will fail for our problem. (Of course, we have a large sample of these coefficients to average over, so our end standard error is not large)
2. It is unnecessary for two reasons. First, the advantage of the transform is that it can make the expect average closer to the expected coefficient. We do nothing that assumes this property. Second, as mean coefficients are near to zero, this property holds without the transform, and our coefficients were not large.

Rebuttals To Recent Criticisms

Two bloggers, Dr. E. Garcia and Ted Dzubia, have published criticisms of our statistics.

Eight months before his current post, Ted Dzubia wrote an enjoyable and jaunty post lamenting that criticism of SEO every six to eight months was an easy way to generate controversy, noting "it’s been a solid eight months, and somebody kicked the hornet’s nest. Is SEO good or evil? It’s good. It’s great. I <3 SEO." Furthermore, his twitter feed makes it clear he sometimes trolls for fun. To wit: "Mongrel 2 under the Affero GPL. TROLLED HARD," "Hacker News troll successful," and "mailing lists for different NoSQL servers are ripe for severe trolling." So it is likely we’ve fallen for trolling…

I am going to respond to both of their posts anyway because they have received a fair amount of attention, and because both posts seek to undermine the credibility of the wider SEO industry. SEOmoz works hard to raise the standards of the SEO industry, and protect it from unfair criticisms (like Garcia’s claim that "those conferences are full of speakers promoting a lot of non-sense and SEO myths/hearsays/own crappy ideas" or Dzubia’s claim that, besides our statistics, "everything else in the field is either anecdotal hocus-pocus or a decree from Matt Cutts"). We also plan to create more correlation studies (and more sophisticated analyses using my aforementioned ranking models) and thus want to ensure that those who are employing this research data can feel confident in the methodology employed.

Search engine marketing conferences, like SMX, OMS and SES, are essential to the vitality of our industry. They are an opportunity for new SEO consultants to learn, and for experienced SEOs to compare notes. It can be hard to argue against such subjective and unfair criticism of our industry, but we can definitively rebut their math.

To that end, here are rebuttals for the four major mathematical criticisms made by Dr. E. Garcia, and the two made by Dzubia.

1) Rebuttal to Claim That Mean Correlation Coefficients Are Uncomputable

For our charts, we compute a mean correlation coefficient. The claim is that such a value is impossible to compute.

Dr. E. Garcia : "Evidently Ben and Rand don’t understand statistics at all. Correlation coefficients are not additive. So you cannot compute a mean correlation coefficient, nor you can use such ‘average’ to compute a standard deviation of correlation coefficients."

There are two issues with this claim: a) peer reviewed papers frequently published mean correlation coefficients; b) additivity is relevant for determining if two different meanings of the word "average" will have the same value, not if the mean will be uncomputable. Let’s consider each issue in more detail.

a) Peer Reviewed Articles Frequently Compute A Mean Correlation Coefficient

E. Garcia is claiming something is uncomputable that researchers frequently compute and include in peer reviewed articles. Here are three significant papers where the researchers compute a mean correlation coefficient:

"The weighted mean correlation coefficient between fitness and genetic diversity for the 34 data sets was moderate, with a mean of 0.432 +/- 0.0577" (Macquare University – "Correlation between Fitness and Genetic Diversity", Reed, Franklin; Conversation Biology; 2003)

"We observed a progressive change of the mean correlation coefficient over a period of several months as a consequence of the exposure to a viscous force field during each session. The mean correlation coefficient computed during the force-field epochs progressively…" (MIT – F. Gandolfo, et al; "Cortical correlates of learning in monkeys adapting to a new dynamical environment," 2000)

"For the 100 pairs of MT neurons, the mean correlation coefficient was 0.12, a value significantly greater than zero" (Stanford – E Zohary, et al; "Correlated neuronal discharge rate and its implications for psychophysical performance", 1994)

SEOmoz is in a camp with reviewers from the journal Nature, as well as researchers from MIT, Stanford and authors of 2,400 other academic papers that use the mean correlation coefficient. Our camp is being attacked by Dr. E. Garcia’s, who argues our camp doesn’t "understand statistics at all." It is fine to take positions outside of the scientific mainstream, although when Dr. E. Garcia takes such a position he should offer more support for it. Given how commonly Dr. E. Garcia uses the pejorative "quack," I suspect he does not mean to take positions this far outside of academic consensus.

b) Additivity Relevant For Determining If Different Meanings Of "Average" Are The Same, Not If Mean Is Computable

Although "mean" is quite precise, "average" is less precise. By "average" one might intend the words "mean", "mode", "median," or something else. One of these other things that it could be used as meaning is ‘the value of a function on the union of the inputs’. This last definition of average might seem odd, but it is sometimes used. Consider if someone asked "a car travels 1 mile at 20mph, and 1 mile at 40mph, what was the average mph for the entire trip?" The answer they are looking for is not 30mph, which is mean of the two measurements, but ~26mph, which is the mph for the whole 2 mile trip. In this case, the mean of the measurements is different from the colloquial average which is the function for computing mph applied to the union of the inputs (the whole two miles).

This may be what has confused Dr. E. Garcia. Elsewhere he cites Statsweb when repeating this claim. Which makes the point that this other "average" is different than the mean. Additivity is useful in determining if these averages will be different. But even if another interpretation of average is valid for a problem, and even if that other average is different than the mean, it neither makes the mean uncomputable nor meaningless.

2) Rebuttal to Claim About Standard Error of the Mean vs Standard Error of a Correlation Coefficent

Although he has stated unequivocally that one cannot compute a mean correlation coefficient, Garcia is quite opinionated on how we ought to have computed standard error for it. To wit:

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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.

You know the client.  The one that really needs your help.  The one that gets pumped when you explain how keywords work.  The one that has an image file for a site.  Or maybe the one that insists that if they copy their competitor’s title tags word-for-word, they’ll do better in search results (I had a product manager make his team do that once. Needless to say (I was thrilled when) it didn’t work). 

In Step 6 of the SEO Strategy document I noted that this strategy document we’ve been building isn’t a best practices document, and it’s more than a typical SEO audit.  It is a custom set of specific, often product-focused recommendations and strategies for gaining search traffic.  For that reason I recommended linking out to SEO basics and best practices elsewhere (in an intranet or a separate set of documents).

But most of the time you’ll still need to call out some horizontal things that this client must have put in front of their faces, or else it will be missed completely.  SEO/M is your area of expertise, not theirs, so help them make sure they’ve got their bases covered. You can create an additional section for these call-outs, wherever you feel it is appropriate in your document.

WHAT CAN I INCLUDE HERE?

Here are some examples of things you could include if you felt your client needed this brought to their attention:

1. Press Release optimization and strategy
2. SEO resources for specific groups in the company:
   1. SEO for business development (linking strategies in partner deals)
   2. SEO for writers/editorial
   3. SEO for designers
3. SEO for long term results rather than short term fixes
4. International rollout recommendations
5. Content management system – how it is impairing their SEO
6. Risks and avoidances
7. Anything that you feel should be covered in more detail for this particular client, that wasn’t covered in your strategy in the last step. This is a catchall – a place to make sure you cover all bases.
8. Nothing – if you dont feel it’s needed.

If the client really needs a lot of help, you’d want to provide training and best practices, either as separate deliverables along with the strategy document, or better yet – work on training and best practices with them first, then dive into more specific strategy. You don’t want to end up with a 15 page (or even 4 page for that matter) best practices document in your strategy doc. Remember, we’re beyond best practices here, unless, in this case there’s something specific that needs to be called out.  

If the client needs more than one thing called out, do it.  If it’s several things, consider either adding an appendix, or as I mentioned, creating a separate best practices document.

The reason I recommend best practices as a separate document is because it is really a different project, often for an earlier phase.

EXAMPLE 1:

Let’s say for example, my client has the type of content the press loves to pick up. They don’t do press releases, mostly because they don’t know how exactly to write them and where to publish them, but they want to.  I‘ll add a Press Releases section after the strategy and I might give them these simple tidbits:

• High level benefit of doing press releases
• What person or group in the company might be best utilized to manage press releases
• Examples of what to write press releases about
• Channels they can publish press releases to
• Optimization tips
• References they can go to for more detailed information

EXAMPLE 2:

My client gets it. They’re pretty good at taking on most SEO on their own. This strategy document I’m doing for them is to really dig in and make sure all gaps are closed, and that they’re taking advantage of every opportunity they should.  Additionally, in a few months they are going to roll out the site to several international regions. 

My dig into the site and its competitors (and search engines) for this strategy have all been for the current site in this country. Because the Intl rollout hasn’t started yet, I will add a section to my document with specific things they need to keep in mind when doing this rollout.

• Localized keyword research (rather than using translate tools)
• ccTLD  (country code top level domain) considerations
• Tagging considerations (like “lang”)
• Proper use of Google Webmaster Tools for specifying region
• Potential duplication issues
• Maybe even a lit of popular search engines in those countries
• Point to more resources or list as a potential future contract project

Make sense?  Use your judgment here. Like we’ve seen in the rest of the steps, this strategy document is your work of art, so paint it how your own creative noggin sees it, Picasso.

Other suggestions for what you might include here? Love it? Hate it? Think this step stinks or mad I didn’t include music to listen to for this one? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

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We have all been there once or twice, maybe a few more than that even. You just launched a site or a project,  and a few days pass, you login to analytics and webmaster tools to see how things are going. Nothing is there. 

WAIT. What?!?!?! 

Scenarios start running through your mind, and you check to make sure everything is working right. How could this be?

It doesn’t even have to be a new project. I’ve realized things on clients’ sites that needed fixing: XML sitemaps, link building efforts, title tag duplication, or even 404 redirection. The right changes are made, and a week later, nothing has changed in rankings or in webmaster consoles across the board. You are left thinking "what did I do wrong?"

A few client sites, major sites mind you, have had issues recently like 404 redirection and toolbar PageRank drops. One even had to change a misplaced setting in Google Webmaster Tools pointing to the wrong version of their site (www vs non-www). We fixed it, and there was a drop in their homepage for their name.

That looks bad. Real bad. Especially to the higher ups. They want answers and the issue fixed now … yesterday really.

Most of these things are being measured for performance and some can even have a major impact on the bottom line. And it is so hard to tell them this, even harder to do, but the changes just take …

Patience

That homepage drop? They called on Friday, as of Saturday night things are back to normal. The drop happened for 2-3 days most likely, but this is a large site. Another client, smaller, had redesigned their entire site. We put all the correct 301 redirects for the old pages and launched the site. It took Google almost 4 weeks to completely remove the old pages from the index. There were edits to URLs that caused 404 errors, fixed within a day, took over a week to reflect in Google Webmaster Tools. 

These are just a few examples where changes were made immediately, but the actions had no immediate return. We live in a society that thrives on the present, immediate return. As search marketers, we make c-level executives happy with our ability to show immediate returns on our campaigns. But like the returns on SEO, the reflection of changes in SEO take time. 

The recent Mayday and Caffeine updates are sending many sites to the bottom of rankings because of the lack of original content. Many of them are doing everything "right" in terms of onsite SEO, but now that isn’t enough. The can change their site all they want to, but until there is relevant and good content plus traffic, those rankings are not going to return for long tail terms. 

There has also been a recent crack down on over optimized local search listings. I have seen a number of accounts suspended or just not ranking well because they are in effect trying too hard. There is a such thing as over optimizing a site, and too many changes at once can raise a flag with the search engines. 

One Month Rule

Here is my rule: Make a change, leave it, go do social media/link building, and come back  to the issue a month later. It may not take a month, but for smaller sites, 2 weeks is a good time to check on the status of a few things. A month is when things should start returning to normal if there have been no other large changes to the site. 

We say this all the time with PPC accounts. It’s like in statistical analysis, you have to have enough data to work with to see results. And when you are waiting for a massive search engine to make some changes, once they do take effect in the system, you then have to give it time to work. 

So remember the next time something seems to be not working in Webmaster Tools or SERPs:

1. If you must, double check the code (although you’ve probably already done this 15 times) to ensure it’s set up correctly. But then,
2. Stop. Breathe. There is always a logical explanation. (And yes, Google being slow is a logical one)
3. When did you last change something to do with the issue?
4. If it’s less than 2 weeks ago, give it some more time.
5. Major changes, give it a month. (Think major site redesigns and URL restructuring)

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“BACK UP YOUR SITE REGULARLY”

I’m 5 cups of coffee past sanity and still have an hour or two before I can sleep.  Recently many of our clients began getting hacked by the children on the Defacement Logging Website that shall remain nameless.  (Quite frankly, I don’t want to add ourselves to the hit-list.)

They targeted three of our clients sites this past week. Their targeting was very general in nature, and used a few different methods.  Two were injections, and one is still being debated.   The portion that hurts is that one of our clients didn’t back up his database.

After a forced entry into your website, it is generally considered a good idea to burn the damage.  IE… kill the database and erase data from the server to ensure that back door code has not been left in the site.
Tonight, that is not an option.  our client had apparently gone three months without an xml backup, and has misplaced where that copy is located.

Instead of the famous 5 Minute Install, or in some cases 5 Minute Reset”, we get to go through tons of lines of MySQL database to ensure that we eliminate all code that may have been left.  I will not be a very happy person in the morning, and I’m grateful that it will be Sunday.  Hopefully we get a day off.

No, this is not a replay of 2002.  SQL Injection is still in an active exploit for hijacking and defacing a database driven website.  While there are several methods and builds of site that can be attacked in this method, we will be confining our feeds to SQL Injections into a WordPress MySQL database.  Here is the first we will be referencing.  It comes from G4B1DEV and is a good article on ways t protect your PHP and MySQL Database.  In None of these feeds will we reference the “How To” in SQL Injection, but we will be adding regular post on how to protect your website.

-Enjoy-

SQL Injection Protection in PHP With PDO

Database abstraction layers like PHP’s Portable Data Objects (PDO) are not a new concept, but a lot of developers don’t seem to realise the security benefit they’re getting for free by using them – inherent protection against SQL injection.

SQL injection is the buffer overflow of the web application world – it’s been around forever, and every web application developer should know how to write secure code that’s not vulnerable to it. For those not in the know, SQL injection is a technique whereby a malicious attacker can exploit inadequate data validation to inject arbitrary SQL code into your application’s queries and have it executed as though it is a legitimate query. I won’t go too deeply into SQL injection in this article, but here’s a simple example:

The front page of your application has a login form, which is submitted to a PHP script to validate the user’s credentials and allow or deny access to the application. The login form submits two variables by POST as follows:

username=fred&password=Fr3dRul3z

The POSTed data is then used to build an SQL query to validate the credentials, like this:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘”.$_REQUEST['username'].”‘ AND password = ‘”.$_REQUEST['password'].”‘”;

This would result in the SQL query:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘fred’ AND password = ‘Fr3dRul3z’

Assuming a row exists in the database with these credentials, the user would be allowed to log in. An attacker could easily circumvent this authentication scheme by escaping out of the username field into the SQL query by entering nothing into the password field and this into the username field:
‘ OR 1==1 –

The resulting SQL query string would look like this:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘fred’ OR 1==1 — ‘ AND password = ”

Which, as I’m sure you can see, would select all users from the database as the condition 1==1 will always be true. The rest of the query is discarded with the comment operator ‘–’. The way to avoid this kind of attack is to sanitise the data submitted to the form by escaping everything that could be used to escape the confines of the quotes around the fields (e.g. mysql_real_escape_string() if you’re using MySQL). However, in a land far away somebody was inventing database abstraction layers…

The primary objective of database abstraction layers like PDO is clean abstraction in your code away from the database platform – so, theoretically, you could switch database platforms from, say, MySQL to PostgreSQL or Oracle with minimal changes to the code. In practice this depends heavily on how much your code relies on platform-specific features like triggers and stored procedures, but if you’re not relying on them at all and you’re just doing simple INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations it’s a free ride. Sounds moderately useful, but nothing exciting, right? Right. Another neat feature invented a long time ago is prepared statements, and most database abstraction layers (including PDO) implement this as a way to perform the same query multiple times with different data sets (e.g. inserting a whole bunch of new rows). Now, when building statements with PDO, instead of building the SQL string manually as demonstrated earlier, we build the statement with placeholders like this:

$sql = “INSERT INTO fruits (name, price) VALUES (?, ?)”;

and then execute the query with a data set passed to the abstraction layer as follows:

$sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
$sth->execute(array($fruit, $price));

When the data is handed to PDO like this, it then either passes the data on to the database driver directly, or builds the query internally in a safe manner with any potentially malicious data encoded or escaped. As you can see, this is an easy way around the problem of SQL injection.

However, prepared statements with PDO aren’t all puppies and rainbows. Using prepared statements can introduce a number of interesting caveats of which developers should be aware. For example, in the MySQL client API prepared statements can not execute certain types of queries[1] and they do not use the query cache[1][2] which may have an impact on your application’s performance.

The inherent security in using prepared statements sounds great, but developers should not let PDO and other abstraction layers/prepared statement implementations lull them into a false sense of security. Untrusted data should always be validated and sanitised, PDO is just another line of defense. It doesn’t cover the territory of a multitude of other input validation vulnerabilities like cross site scripting, but it does do a good job of protecting applications against SQL injection. The best strategy is only allowing known good data by whitelisting characters and matching input data against regular expression patterns, then using prepared statements to catch anything SQL injection-wise that the input validation misses, all in conjunction with a web application firewall like ModSecurity.

PDO has been built in to PHP since version 5.1.0, which was released in Nov 2005. Unless you’ve got a good reason for not using it in your PHP apps, you should be – it is a portable replacement for the old mysql_* functions and other platform-specific functions with the added benefit of protection against SQL injection.

Author: Loukas Kalenderidis
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Duty on LCD/Plasma TV

Naoerville Business Directory

Raleigh Business Directory (serving the entire Triangle Area)

Chicago Business Directory

Aurora Business Directory (Aurora, Illinois)

Charleston Business Directory (For the entire Tri-County and Low Country Area)

There will be many more directories added to this list and all will be managed for accuracy.   After implementation on July 1st, listings will be automatic for all registered users of each site.

Leave your thoughts, and we’ll see what we can add to the directory plot that will make it more user friendly.

1. Sit around drinking and talking about funny video ideas.
2. List a bunch of successful viral videos and come up with knock-off ideas to copy them.
3. Call every funny video idea “viral” before it’s even created and before someone has ever seen it and before anyone has ever passed it to anyone.
4. Let your clients disapprove all your good ideas and then run with the lame ones.
5. Create videos without thinking about distribution because OF COURSE it’s going to go viral after just the first person views it.

You get the point.

I recently interviewed a couple of people for my Social Media Expert Interview series – Scott Stratten of UnMarketing fame and Carrie Wilkerson, The Barefoot Executive – who gave me a new perspective on viral video creation.

Why You Shouldn’t Try To Be Funny

The upshot is: funny videos are the hardest to get to go viral. Sense of humor is very personal. And it doesn’t matter if 100,000 people see your skateboarding dog catch fire and faceplant if you don’t get anything out of all those video views. Unless you’re just trying to have fun. But if you care about results, keep reading.

There’s a simpler way. And you can tie it to a conversion event you want to get.

A More Effective Viral Video Style

Just create what I call the “Emotional Slideshow” (because there was no name for it and that’s all I could think of on the spot) type of viral video.

These are nothing new, but they work like gangbusters.

The Time Movie has received 1.4MM views despite being very simply and cheezier than Fabio movie backed by a Yanni soundtrack. Scott admits to being sick of it. But his goal was to get motivational speaking gigs and launch his speaking career without years of painful free gigs- and it worked.

The Boss Movie helped Carrie Wilkerson build a list of 24,000 work-at-home women to market to in just 9 months.

The Crappy Day Movie just debuted and is my first attempt at one of these Emotional Slideshow movies. But it has its own Facebook page and I hear those are really hard to start and very, very expensive.

The Five Steps to Creating An “Emotional Slideshow” Viral Video

1. Know your audience
2. List their three biggest problems and three biggest obstacles (you’ll have 6 points)
3. List their three biggest dreams (not goals), then three examples each of life with those dreams fulfilled (you’ll have 9 points)
4. Create a line of negative and positive affirmations for each of those 15 points above
5. Find an emotionally evocative image for each point, and music for the entire slideshow, and create the movie

You can have more points, but you want each image and sentence to last about 7 seconds, and the full movie to be 3-4 minutes.

Then, of course, watch it on several occasions and have other people proof it, especially if they’re your target audience.

Getting Results

If you watched The Boss Movie, you’ll notice Carrie brings up an opt-in page after the movie for a pdf about the 7 Things Your Boss Doesn’t Want You To Know. This is a bribe that goes straight to the audience’s core problem- the limitations of employment. When conceiving your bribe, make sure you start with titles and think like a copywriter before you create the content you’re going to give away.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Simple Steps to Viral Video Results

Recently, they just launched the ability to track and report on domains or pages ranking within local packs. If a keyword your tracking throws a local pack, and your domain isn’t found in it, you’ll get one icon in the ‘Type’ column.

Here we can see when you search for ‘hotel in dc’ you’ll get a local pack, but the domain ‘monaco-dc.com‘ isn’t ranking in it.

If you’re tracking a domain that is found within the local pack you’ll get a similar icon, but one which indicates where that domain ranked inside the local pack. Here you’ll see that if you search for ‘tampa lawyer’ you’ll get a local pack also, but in this case the domain ‘tgalaw.com‘ was found within it it at position E.

From my testing, it seems accurate for keywords which are locally targeted (ie: real estate seattle vs real estate). What’s interesting though, is being able to understand which keywords are throwing a local pack that aren’t locally targeted.

As with anything, you’ll want to take this data and look at it in aggregate. So, if you have a lot of keywords which are throwing the local pack, you know local optimization should be a priority, and for the keywords which are locally targeted you can track your progress. If you don’t have a lot of terms throwing the local pack, local optimization may not need to be a priority for you.

Along with local data, they’re also reporting on which universal results are found on a page. Currently, it looks like they’re finding image, video, shopping, real-time, news and blog results. In this case, we can see that a search on Google for ‘tiger woods’ throws image, news, video and blog results.

Again, this information is really useful in aggregate. So, if you’re tracking 100 terms and 90 of them are throwing image results, there’s an opportunity there for easier page one exposure. Or at least, you now know your images should be properly optimized, and you’ll probably see results from that work.

They took it one step further, and are also capturing whether or not rich snippets were found on a search result. So, if you have a lot of keywords where rich snippets exist, getting some micro-format or RDF markup on your pages will probably help bump you up a few spots, or at least, get you a few more clicks with a fancier serp snippet.

I appreciate Chase (one of the founders of Authority Labs) taking the time to walk me through, and demo a lot of these new features.  I would encourage you to keep an eye on them, they are doing some pretty cool stuff, and I personally know of some cool new tools they have in the pipeline that, IMO are going to be a game changer in the industry.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Using Authority Labs for “Local Pack” Rank Checking; My Review

Want an even better deal? Sign up with the discount code sejreader for an additional 10% off the Early Bird price!

What’s BlueGlass LA?

The anticipated follow-up conference to the Search & Social Spring Summit, BlueGlass LA is a special collaboration between us & 10e20 to bring the best speakers on Search Marketing & Social Media together into one spot for two days of sharing, discussion, education and networking. But the collaboration does not stop there because we needed a man on the scene in LA to make things happen! And who better to make the magic happen in LA than Tony Adam, the Sr. Online Marketing Manager at MySpace!

Just like Search & Social and 10e20, Tony Adam knows how to crank and get things done. And this special collaboration has put together an incredible conference agenda over the course of the last two weeks. Another month, another conference and another conference, another name; BlueGlass LA!

Why BlueGlass? Well, it’s short, brandable and gives an instant visual representation of transparency and vastness. There’s much more to the branding and BlueGlass name, but that explanation will have to wait until the conference.

What’s the Format of BlueGlass LA?

Just like our previous conferences, we’re going to keep the registration numbers low, and the sharing of information and collaboration high. Our format is this; get the best speakers and content available, and provide an exclusive atmosphere where attendees can interact with industry experts, fully participate in Q&A sessions, LIVE search & social marketing for 48 to 72 hours, and leave with the event with an expanded knowledge base, skill set and business connections that will last a lifetime.

Because of the intimate setting and round the clock events, from breakfast until the nighttime parties & networking events stop, all attendees will leave knowing much more than they did walking in, and usually with solid leads and business on the table.

Don’t just take it from me… here are some testimonials from past attendees :

“It’s small, close-knit setting, gives you a chance to sit down and talk shop with everyone, not just folks from your social clique. The topics were interesting, and I found myself taking a lot of notes…something that I haven’t done in years. It’s definitely on my must-do conferences for next year.” Kathryn Katz, Consolidated Credit Counseling Services

“Search and Social Summit was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in years. The sessions were extremely informative, and I’m looking forward to attending the next one.” Avi Wilensky, ProMediaCorp

“The casual feel of the event mixed with the intimacy and small size truly made your event top notch. Not only was I able to reconnect with my ‘Twitter family,’ again, but was also lucky enough to speak with many industry experts who were such a wealth of knowledge and were no means bothered by any sort of questions asked, whether basic or advanced.” Victoria Edwards, LinkShare

“This is by far my favorite SEO event not only because of the content but also because it takes the attendees and speakers from strangers to friends in 2 days. The willingness of the speakers to engage attendees, answer questions and really dig deep into their project issues, not only in sessions but in the pool as well is something special.!” Kristina Durakis, Timeshares Only

Where & When is BlueGlass LA?

BlueGlass LA will be held at the Marina del Rey Marriott, an oceanside resort in Marina del Rey, CA on July 19-20, 2010. The Marina is 15 minutes from LAX and within walking distance to Venice Beach & Venice Pier. It is also the location of the club Glow, which is one of West LA’s most happening hot spots!

Who Will Be at BlueGlass LA?

LA is a business town, and we’re looking to go a little beyond the usual basic online marketing tactics, and more into the nitty gritty of success stories and case studies. The speaker lineup for BlueGlass LA reads like a list of top quality Keynotes, and includes leading technologists and entrepreneurs like :

• Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger
• Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz
• Neil Patel from KISSMetrics
• Tony Adam from MySpace
• Marshall Simmonds from The New York Times
• Greg Boser of 3Dog Media
• Dave McClure from FF Angel
• Vanessa Fox from NinebyBlue

… and many more!

Please visit our agenda for the lineup of speakers and discussion topics.

And like Search & Social Spring Summit; Dave Snyder, Chris Winfield, Jordan Kasteler, Brent Csutoras and myself will be moderating, chiming in when needed, and running the show. It’s just going to be AMAZING!

How Much will BlueGlass LA Run?

The cost of attending BlueGlass LA is surprisingly affordbale. The Early Bird price until June 10 is $495. I highly recommend taking advantage of this deal now by registering.

This includes admission to both days of the conference, all speaker sessions, hyper-networking opportunities with speakers and attendees, three meals/day (breakfast, lunch & dinner), cash bar and two nights of evening entertainment.

Here’s more information on the location, hotel, pricing and accommodations from BlueGlass LA.

BlueGlass LA is an Internet marketing conference and networking event that is a follow-up to Search & Social Summit. It is produced by a collaboration between 10e20, an established leader in social media and search marketing, and Search & Social, a full service Internet marketing company that specializes in SEO, ORM and social media.

For additional information and to purchase tickets, please visit http://www.blueglass.com/conferences/la

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

BlueGlass LA : Last Day for Early Bird Tickets

Times have changed.

From a marketing standpoint, the use of local business listings has exploded with the increase of social media and mobile devices. Consumers not only use these interactive yellow pages to locate a business, product or service in their area; they are also posting reviews of those products and services.  Today, there are over 60 local business listing websites on the Internet in five different categories.  They include the search engines, social communities, 411 websites (aka yellow page type websites), GPS websites and that age-old business directory.

You can no longer be passive.

To make your interactive yellow pages listing a stronger marketing tool, you must first “claim” the listing with all the search engines, social communities, websites and organizations that lead people to it. Once you prove the listing is really yours you can update it with your business marketing material. Businesses are realizing the importance of this claiming process.  Once you have claimed your local listing you can update information with text, keywords, business descriptions, products, services, photos, videos, coupons, and more.  Some websites, such as Google, allow you to use all these options while others charge a fee for enhanced listings making this information present for local consumers through web or mobile searches

So what’s the “security challenge”?

The claiming process is crucial to security because if the wrong person gets access to your business local listing they can direct customers to a different location by phone or website address.  Additional damage can include incorrect information on photos, videos, coupons, and more.  Because consumers are using local business listings to locate a business, product or service in their immediate area, the security around local business listings must have a high priority for any local listing website.

Remember phishing?

Phishing was described in 1987 before the Internet was a commercial boom.  The first recorded use of phishing was in1996.  The question is whether the business industry is going to wait for something similar to occur using Local Business Listings. The security holes are quite evident with Local Business Listings and I don’t think it takes a genius see what could happen if businesses do not “claim” their listings – the first step in closing those “holes.”

When hackers capture a Local Listing it’s called “high-jacking.”

It is absolutely important that businesses not passively wait for local listing websites to put the appropriate security in place before you claim your listing. Installing security starts with the obvious claiming process, but many sites allow data to be inserted from other databases on the Internet and I am not sure there’s good security around this later process.  If someone wanted to hijack a local business listing, they could easily insert the wrong information through a low level business directory that sells its data upstream or inserts its data directly into a higher level local listing website.

While the top search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo have “some” front-end security; their API’s (Application Programming Interface) makes them vulnerable through the back door.  Data is provided to their local listings from 3rd party sources including “get listed” services.  Additionally, if someone cannot claim a listing easily, the process within these local listing websites allows for additional listings with the same address to be submitted by anyone.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Local Business Listing: A Marketing Opportunity and a Security Challenge

This is why the new non-official tool by Twitter employee Robin Sloan got my attention.

Blackbird Pie is a Twitter-based tool that allows to embed a Tweet to your web page to save time immensely:

• No time spent on making the screenshot;
• No time spent on editing the image;
• No time spent on uploading the image.

Besides saving your time, the tool has one more advantage: clickable links to:

• The Tweet;
• The Twitter user who said that.

- which will potentially encourage more people to go to your profile and follow you:

So let’s see this time-saver in action:

How It Works

1. Step one: get the direct link of the Tweet you want to embed.

Find it here:

2. Provide the link in the form and press “Bake it”:

3. Get the code to embed the Tweet to your page:

Enjoy the Time-Saving Tools

While Blackbird Pie is a time-saver in itself, it has a couple of tools that make it even faster:

1. WordPress Plugin for Blackbird Pie

That makes it easier to embed the Tweets to your WordPress blog.

2. Blackbird Pie Browser Bookmarklet

Just drop the bookmarklet to your browser, navigate to a separate Tweet page, click it and grab the code instantly.

Note: there’s also a Chrome extension that works the same way in Google Chrome.

Do you feel like using this tool?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Quickly Embed Tweets to a Web Page with Blackbird Pie