Nick Garner

What do you know?
“Three years ago, I published this list, which was very much a riff, not a carefully planned manifesto. It has held up pretty well.”

Mozilla Stealth Data Project Could Be Just What The Internet Needs

Why word of mouth doesn’t happen

The Writing Process: Creating An Outline
“Outlining an article is one of the most productive things you can do to improve your workflow while blogging. Creating the outline for this article required only about two minutes to complete, and it will have saved me at least 15 minutes worth of editing time in the end on a typical article like this.”

SEO Plugins for WordPress Part II
“Ever since my initial SEO plugins for wordpress post almost two years ago, I get asked for an updated list a few times a month. Well since we???re up to wordpress 2.5 I thought the time has come. I???ll also put some of my other favorite plugins at the end, they either enhance wordpress features or just make things easier.”

Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
An exceptional SEO Moz article covering the big trendsthat govern the top 100 sites in terms of traffic on the internet.

Official Google: Introduction to Google Search Quality
There seems to be a little bit of glasnost going on here in Google. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality has written a post giving a small look into how Google works when it comes to its search work. Apart from the sheer scale of things, it is the frequency in which they are amending the algo that is so remarkable. Like the link above, its well worth a read.

These links are stuff I come across as I cruse the internet looking or knowledge!

Bridging the Designer-User Gap (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
“If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine ??? usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “
The point? Never over estimate intelligence!

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites:
Get into the top 5 or you’re in the wilderness

Public Relations: The Other Important PR In Link Development
Yes for those of you who in the link building business, who have been hiding under a rock… its about PR these days (mixed in with good SEO) and link begging doesn’t work anymore. So this article goes into some basic ideas on PR’ing your link building

The ultimate open source SEO tool
Its good – perhaps not ultimate. I’ve asked my SEO crew to check it out and they didn’t go crazy. However for me the interesting bit is how they leverage the Yahoo API. I wantto initiate a project where we use the API to do help usget related pages ‘from a search engine perspective’

Microsoft Discovers You Are Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon
If you have read ’6 degrees of separation’ then you will be into the whole social interconnectivity thing on the internet. In essence, the world is a small place and sites like linked in, facebook, bebo and so on demonstrate this well. Its use? probably in hiring well connected online PR guys to dig into their networks to get links !

15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks
Some good stuff here. I just go around in circles on this stuff. I don’t know how to make money out of it.The core issue is the lack of commercial intent with the vast majority of this traffic. I guess the relevant part for me is keeing in touch with the cultural shift this has initiated. Its all a little like cluretrain V2 playing out

12 Reputations Every Company Should Monitor Online
Reputation management is a growing tide on the internet. If you’re in a sector where online matters, then keeping your ear to the internet wire make sense. The problen with reputation management online is that there are very few filters between an idiot with a grudge and a well informed opinion. its easy for the idiot to make noise in the right place and BANG – you have a problem. And I haven’t touched on negative PR using SEO!

Study: 80-Percent Of Searches Are Informational, 10% Are Navigational
What does this mean commercially? well 80% of the time users are building a background picture of you. 10% of the time they want to transact once they are confidant about you. (the other 10% is where they know where they are going i.e. looking for a regularly visited site/brand search)

This is why a strategy I employ for my lovely employers works soooooo well. have a really good informational site, where there is no pressure to ‘CLICK HERE NOW, JOIN NOW, FREE MONEY NOW’ – you read, understand we care about what we do and when you’re ready, join and we will give you some free money. It works beautifully and this article endorses this principle.

Psychographically Targeted Web Advertising – ClickZ
Whats ‘psychographic’? (from wikipedia) psycho graphic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), and behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty).
I’m sure youve heard about demographic targeting? i.e. pick a social group and assume certain behavioral tendencies. its a nice idea for broadcast media, however for online its really difficult to do demographic targeting. hence this behavioral stuff. By building pathways around user behaviours, you are morelikly to get better conversion rates. Its a huge subject which I won’t get into here, but suffice to say this article gives a small insight into it.

Yahoo’s Quality Score Change Effective Next Week
So Yahoo are stepping in line with Google on PPC quality scoring on ads. Nice idea but I always wonder how you define the ‘quality’ in the scoring. I hate this subjectivity.

Your turn: Readers choose their 10 favorite Windows programs | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
Some old classics like winrar!

11 Tips For Recognizing A Bad SEO Firm | WebProNews
I get asked a lot about microsites…i.e. building them up and getting them to rank. For some reason the idea that they can work persists. So this article just goes through some of the idiocy people actually believe.

Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips
I agree – they are good. Written by a pro in the game, these tips are useful. I particularly like the nofollow comment!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
Another day and another interesting post from Rand. some good pointers on what really counts when it comes to anchor text

http://sphinn.com/story/36595
Yup DaveN keeping the internet clean! He picked up on a campaign by Dell I happen to have been following. I kind of figured it there would be tears in the end – an there were !

http://www.247wallst.com/2008/03/the-twenty-five.html

Does blogging pay? it seems so for a few. I hang out with a couple of big’ish bloggers and they are always moaning about how they can monetize their sites. Usually they default to advertising, which is ok, but inherently does not align well with users about 99.4% of the time. (the click through rate on an ad is about 0.06% typically) I’ve been trying to persuade them to look carefully at affiliate marketing, since in thory it pays better ten ads.

Logo Can Make You ‘Think Different’
evil laugh – HA HA HA HA HA
I’ve always felt that subliminal advertising was very powerful and shrouded in misinformation, so its great to see a useful report on the subject. Does it work? yes but not in the way you think.

YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
More stats to help you feel like you know whats going on.

Link Buying Replaced With Bartering
As this article points out, when you otlaw something and there is a desire to carry on the practice (alcoloh prohibition in the 30′s) all sorts of unforseen things happen. In this case Google’s PR assault on link buying as caused all sorts of interesting activities to emerge, amongst them is impersonating google ad sense ads !
The root of this is that if the liks are placed in the right part of a page (not in header / footer / sidebar) and in ‘context’ then the ‘Algo’ cant see them – so tis down to human judgement, hence this trick with adsense. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing linkbuilding.

18 Or Older To Use Google?
What do gambling porn and horror movies have in common with google? you guessed it – you have to be 18 and over. or in other words to use google, you have to be of an age where you can enter into a legally binding contract!

Hackers and Spammers, How will the industry survive
I have had the pleasure of dealing personally with DaveN and I found him charming and knowledgeable. However i do feel his skills at gaming the engines are becoming less and less effective as the engines get more capable at dealing with spammers. Still he has done well out of it and I hope he continues with his successes in this arena.

Affiliate Black Hat vs White Hat. I see my old acquaintance Jason Duke has been sharing his thoughts on ‘black hat’ SEO for affilaites (Jason is very good at this stuff by the way). I have said for a while now, that Google sees affilaite income as theirs. (Get rid of affiliates and merchants have to advertise with Google) Hence the war on affilaites where they are atttacking thin affiliate sites which have not a lot of content to offer…. for now.

The assertion is that 80% of traffic to bingo, casino and poker sites are from blackhat efforts. I guess the 1st quesiton is what do you call black hat? Is that any deviation from the Google webmaster guidelines? If so, then thats a reasonable figure. But all things are relative as you would see if you read this real blackhat hard core approach to getting ranked. This level of activity probably gets about 30% bingo, casino, poker sites ranked for secondary terms.
What are secondary terms? In these areas (casino, poker bingo) there are very few keywords that make money, in other words they have a very short tail. So once you’re outsitde of (forinstance) casino, online casino, casino UK, then you are in the secondary and 3rd level keywords where spammers rule, but where the pickings are not great. The lack of economic incentive means a restriction in spammers efforts.

And since Google treat different verticles differently, it means they will probably hand pick those top sites for casino, poker and bingo. I believe the reason they do this, is to prevent a spam arms war which would go on to contaminate large chunks of the internet.

The reality is that black hat works, but not like it used to. The cleaver money is on building love of a site and being clever at optimising it efficiently. I know, since I’m lucky enough to be responsible for one of the great new affilaite success stories… and no I haven’t spammed, I’ve just helped things along. ??

Link: Affiliates4u article

Some interesting links I’ve found over the last few days:

DigitalPoint Co-op, spammers heaven. Use these links to build the base for your spam network, but don’t get busted by the BOG G Blogstorm

Google releases benchmarking on analytics. Apart from the coolness of being able to match yourself against the industry norm, it also gives you an idea as to how Google are able to effectively segment the internet into specific verticals. (they also do this on their adwords console when you define which type of sites you want to advertise on when advertising banners etc)

When you mix this with the leaked google reviewers document you end up with a sense that they really do have a very solid handle on what sites are good for what subject and wether they are genuinely worthwhile to the user. It all comes back to the idea that content is king and if you make like easier for search engines through sensible optimisation, you will be rewarded.

Make those landing pages faster! If you are running a Google PPC campaign, then remember to keep an eye on your landing pages, since you will be penalised for slooooowww loading, iframe, interstitial riddled pages. Yes the BIG G is more interested than ever in making sure you work to their guidelines, as opposed to letting your profit/loss determine how you should deal with teh traffic you have paid for. Affiliates4U