Google continues making moves toward establishing a monopoly on the web, with today’s announcement of SideWiki. SiteWiki is basically a Google Toolbar addon which lets anyone with a Google account comment about your site or add content, to the SideWiki, which can appear on the side of your site. This gives Google expanded presence on …
On a call with a client recently, I got asked a question that highlighted how poorly many “Top 10/20/30 Tips To SEO” guides are done. The question was entirely logical, but if we as SEO bloggers (i.e. teachers) were doing a little more thinking and a little less rehashing, I’d have never had a client …
What are your direct competitors doing in the way of getting more backlinks? My research in over 30 verticals sheds some light on the question. This is part 1 of 2. In this part, I’ll address three issues: Practical uses for this competitive intelligence, My methodology in conducting this research, Some fun data points for …
Imagine playing the “Six Degrees of Separation” game, but with websites. The closer you are to having a link from Maclean’s magazine or Time, the better. The ideal would be to actually be Maclean’s or Time, obviously. But short of that, getting a link from either site is excellent (1 degree of separation). Getting a …
Creating new landing pages for testing is getting cheaper. And scalable. So there are fewer and fewer reasons for SMBs not to be testing their landing pages and sites to optimize conversion rates. Testing landing pages has long been a preoccupation of mine, particularly because of the traditionally prohibitive costs. Even if you use a …
(Scratchpad photo by Leonard Low.) I’m preparing to advertise something I hope will become linkbait, and it’s made me dig into some advertising ideas. Just before I begin, for those of you who are unfamiliar, scratchpad is a column I write (usually on my own blog) featuring an informal style that’s kind of like a …
If you’re a PPC agency, you do not want to be making this mistake. It can really tick off clients. 1. Let your tracking/redirect subdomain get indexed. This means that your “ppc clicks” may be random longtail crap clicks. Or else nasty competitors, breaking your analytics with fake traffic. 2. Carelessly run the subdomain off …
We see this happen with more amateurish ad campaigns, but seriously, the ad agency and web developers running this campaign for Canada Revenue Agency should know better. The page you send visitors to from Hockey Night in Canada ads and from your website needs to EXIST. The page is supposed to be at www.canada.gc.ca/taxinfo . …
Retargeting is an advertising technique that aims to convert browsers into buyers by increasing the number of times they see a campaign’s ads in a set period of time. The catch is that you’d normally need fancy technology to do this. In response to this problem, I came up with poor man’s retargeting for low-budget …
