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Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click?
Rebecca Kelley

Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click?

Marketing Psychology

Unnecessary clicks really put the "super" in "superfluous," yet we run into them all the time. Whether they're the fancy yet impractical creation by a site designer, a lazy workaround courtesy of an apathetic developer, or a misguided "I've been trying to architect this site for two months now and I can no longer see straight" decision by an SEO, these seemingly innocent clicks can have a negative impact on conversion rates or, simply put, they can irritate users. Below are a few examples of some clicks that cause me to grit my teeth and shake my fist.

SEO Company Search Results - An Embarrassment to Google and the Other Engines
Rand Fishkin

SEO Company Search Results - An Embarrassment to Google and the Other Engines

Search Engines

One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that offer this service. It was therefore to my dismay to see the following search r...

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 10/19/08
Rebecca Kelley

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 10/19/08

SEO Events

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: * Dwight Silverman criticizes Valleywag writer Paul Boutin, who said that blogs are becoming obsolete and that nowadays all blogs are a "tsunami of paid bilge." Never mind the fact that Paul works fulltime at the SiliValley gossip blog. What a butthole.

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Have a Commercial Website? Then Digg Won't Like You
Rebecca Kelley

Have a Commercial Website? Then Digg Won't Like You

Social Media

I'm a fan of Digg and visit it every day to read various stories and check out what's new. Every so often I comment on stories and submit stuff. I get a "woo hoo!" feeling whenever one of my comments gets a bunch of diggs or when a submission hits the home page, which, combined with the site's content and news stories, keeps me coming back for more. Sure, lots of people bash Digg...

PissedConsumer.com: Link Farm Dominating Google SERPs
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PissedConsumer.com: Link Farm Dominating Google SERPs

Blogging

First off I would like to point out that I am a paid search specialist, not an experienced SEO. If this article contains technical mistakes, I apologize. I am a marketer by nature, not a techie. I am technically savvy enough, however, to spot an obvious link farm/spam scheme, such as the one run by the web site: www.piss...

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Help! My Industry Is Boring And My Imagination Is Hurting
Jane Copland

Help! My Industry Is Boring And My Imagination Is Hurting

Social Media

This is an older topic, but one which is still worth discussing: what is the best way to investigate linkbait, viral or other content-based link building efforts in "boring" industries? How best to find out what worked in the past? How best to find out what didn't work? We have a range of tools at our disposal when it comes to content-based link building research. You've h...

Learning a Little About Email Marketing
Rebecca Kelley

Learning a Little About Email Marketing

Online Advertising

I don't know a whole lot about email marketing, but I enjoy studying the marketing emails I receive and identifying the ones that are more effective than others. I talked to Scott, who handles our email marketing campaigns, and he praises email marketing for being "dirt cheap and very effective." I can agree on the cheap part: we use Exact Target, whose suite of email marketing solutions start at $1,000 per year for one user and go up to an Enterprise account ($15,000 a year for five users). While there are expensive email marketing packages available, you can definitely find an affordable option to start out with and get your feet wet.

SEO: A Process of Episodic or Continuous Change?
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SEO: A Process of Episodic or Continuous Change?

When you are through changing, you are through. ~Bruce Barton Within the (organizational) change literature there is a distinction between change that is episodic and change that is continuous. Even though both types of change may seem fairly identical to the unknowing observer, there are structural differences between them. When examined up close, it becomes clear that episodic change is discontinuous and intermittent, while continuous change is evolving and incremental.

Why New Content Briefly Flickers Out Of Google
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Why New Content Briefly Flickers Out Of Google

Technical SEO

A few days after new content shows up in Google, it will sometimes flicker out of the SERPS for a few hours. Apparently, this is common knowledge to some SEOs. This is not common knowledge to programmers like me, and I nearly made a tin foil hat in preparation for the googlicopters when I learned the project (Linkscape) that I'd worked on for months had disappeared from all SERPs on th...