{photoslide_plugin 5} Description: We love shopping! It is high time to change your online store into modern look with creative ideas and a new and highly attractive project from GavickPro which combines two different stores; VirtueMart, the same as, K2 Store.Combined design of best quality and unique style, structured and organized for professional and splendid presentation of your best products to your best customers.If your customer likes what he sees, your business will move two times faster to successful sale. After all, we do like shopping and all good salespeople like selling. Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote Features: Tableless design and 100% css based. 3 Color Theme Styles (Red – Green – Blue ) Template development based on T3 Framework. Supports multiple layout options, configured within seconds from backend Amazing Mega Menu system with multiple menu types support . Native Iphone & Handheld optimization and style support. Google Chrome Frame Meta Support. Improved style for Joomla! Core system pages. Page layouts overwrite option in template parameters. Modules suffix's built-in template for module styling. Build style support for Jcomments Component from JoomlaTune. Built style support for Virtuemart Component. Build style support for K2 Component from JoomlaWorks. Built style support for K2 Store addon from Weblogicx india. Built support for the new News Show Pro GK4 module with exclusive built-in template design. Built support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive module built-in template design. Built support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with Image Show module built-in template design and with exclusive VirtueMart support interface. Built support for new GK Register module with built-in template design. Built support for Cufon fonts javascript rendering. Improved template parameters administration panel with friendly interface and automatic check-in available updates. Disable option for main body appearance on front page. Option for main body and component position display. Full block's size for user customization in template parameters. Option for family and size font in template parameters. Full control of Login, Register, Tools, Date and Style button display on frontpage. Option to enable/disable CSS3 styles Option to enable/disable VirtueMart styles on template pages. Option to enable/disable Google Chrome Frame support . Easy footer content configuration in template parameters. Built support for WYSIWYG Friendly Template Typography editor with GK Typography plugin. Compressed engine option for each GavickPro modules. Support for language file translation. All 40 modules are fully collapsible and more than 20 module positions ready for tabs and 10 module positions ready for mega menu content display. Impressive built-in content style. Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design. Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional. W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible with: IE7+, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome. Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files. Delivered with “QuickStart Package”.

{photoslide_plugin 4} Description: Almost all quality improvement comes from the simplification of the project, processes, resources and objectivity. In this modern business world, innovation is the distinction between the leader and the follower, ambition and learning the difference between those who prevail and those who dive into oblivion. It is in this perpetual optimism, with a force multiplier, which achieves the desired levels to success and recognition in business world. This month, we give you a little help to your corporate business.Accept the challenge and make your own way to the future. Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote Features: Tableless design and 100% css based. 4 Color Theme Style (Red – Green – Blue - Neutral) Template development based on T3 Framework. Supports multiple layout options, configured within seconds from backend Amazing Mega Menu system with multiple menu types support . Native Iphone & Handheld optimization and style support. Google Chrome Frame Meta Support. Improved style for Joomla! Core system pages. Page layouts overwrite option on template parameters. Modules suffix's build-in template for module styling. Build style support for Jcomments Component from JoomlaTune. Build style support for K2 Component from JoomlaWorks. Build support for the News Show Pro GK4 module with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive module build-in template design. Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with Image Show module build-in template design. Build support for GK News Highlighter module build-in template design. Build support for Cufon fonts javascript rendering. Improved template parameters administration panel with friendly interface and automatic check-in available updates. Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page. Option for mainbody and component position display. Full block's size for user customization on template parameters. Option for family and size font on template parameters. Full control of Login, Register, Tools and Style button display on frontpage. Easy footer content configuration on template parameters. Build support for WYSIWYG Friendly Template Typography editor with GK Typography plugin. Compressed engine option for each GavickPro modules. Support for language file translation. All 40 modules are fully collapsible and more 20 module positions ready for tabs and 10 module positions ready for mega menu content display. Impressive built-in content style. Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design. Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional. W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible IE7+, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome. Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files. Delivered with “QuickStart Package”.

{photoslide_plugin 3} Description: The power of Music evokes feelings, gathers the crowd with senseless and endless enthusiasm with splendors of invisible and sensible delight. The solemn night had taken its place and the conquerors of the world awake for another day. Meet a certain party where the whole atmosphere is filled with an ideal oscillating motion,  delight emotions and where the eyes spread extravagance and immorality. After all, experience is the name that we give to all our mistakes. This is the Party Freak, where you will be all day.. Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote Features: Tableless design and 100% css based 3 Color Theme Style (Yellow – Blue – Red) Template development based on T3 Framework Supports multiple layout options, configured within seconds from backend Amazing Mega Menu system with multiple menu types support Native Iphone & Handheld optimization and style support Google Chrome Frame Meta Support. Improved style for Joomla! Core system pages. Build support for JomSocial v1.5 – Joomla! Social Network Component Build support for GK JomSocial Members module with exclusive build-in template design Build support for GK JomSocial Statistics module with exclusive build-in template design Build style support for Jcomments Component from JoomlaTune Build style support for K2 Component from JoomlaWorks Build support for the News Show Pro GK4 module with exclusive build-in template design Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive module build-in template design Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with Image Show module build-in template design Build support for Cufon fonts Improved template parameters administration panel with friendly interface and automatic check-in available updates Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page Option for mainbody and component position display Full block's size for user customization on template parameters Option for family and size font on template parameters Full control of Login, Register, Tools and Style button display on frontpage Registration form as a module Easy footer content configuration on template parameters Build support for WYSIWYG Friendly Template Typography editor with GK Typography plugin Compressed engine option for each GavickPro modules Support for language file translation All 42 modules are fully collapsible and more 20 module positions ready for tabs and 10 module positions ready for mega menu Impressive built-in content style Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional, W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible IE7+, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files Delivered with "QuickStart Package"

{photoslide_plugin 2} Description: A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. It's true nature of beauty in hands of an artist, fixing his/her eyes in perfection and offering it to the world. Life has taught us that history never repeats itself, demands innovation, a new beginning, story to tell. So, welcome to the new dimension of GavickPro art which is bringing the most professional template design. Whether you need a Business related or Personal website, thank you for choosing GavickPro Memovie Project. Memovie template is our first project based on T3 Framework by JoomlArt.com. Therefore, we want to thank JoomlArt.com for allowing us to use this framework in order to create more innovative and sophisticated templates. We do hope that we will be improving our work with T3 Framework which will bring more interesting and advanced solutions to our templates. Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote Features: Tableless design and 100% css based. Template development based on T3 Framework. Supports multiple layout options, configured within seconds from backend Amazing Mega Menu system with multiple menu types support . Native Iphone & Handheld optimization and style support Google Chrome Frame Meta Support. Build style support for Jcomments Component from JoomlaTune. Build style support for K2 Component from JoomlaWorks. Build support for the News Show Pro GK4 module with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive module build-in template design. Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with Image Show module build-in template design. Background image user control Build support with Cufon fonts generator. Improved template parameters administration panel with friendly interface and automatic check-in available updates. Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page. Option for mainbody and component position display. Full block's size for user customization on template parameters. Option for family and size font on template parameters. Full control of Login, Register, Tools and Style button display on frontpage. Easy footer content configuration on template parameters. Build support for WYSIWYG Friendly Template Typography editor with GK Typography plugin. Compressed engine option for each GavickPro modules. Support for language file translation. All 42 modules are fully collapsible and more 20 module positions ready for tabs and 10 module positions ready for mega menu Impressive built-in content style. Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design. Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional. W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible IE7+, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome. Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files. Delivered with “QuickStart Package”.

Description: If you feel like something is missing, then you need to have our latest Hewahoo template! Hewahoo will excel your music content wholeheartedly with our professional and cutting edge template. You and your visitors will see together the most compelling articles, latest news, gossip about popular music stars and other in a very sophisticated and surprising way! Get to know all about your music community and see all the videos and news coming from the music world. Are you waiting for a fascinating music adventure? Do you need something to cheer you and your visitors up? Do not wait, grab yourself this exciting music Hewahoo template. Create your own unique site where all your visitors will admire your roaring success! Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote Features: Tableless design and 100% css based. 2 Color Theme Style (Blue – Red) Build support for the News Show Pro GK1 module with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with new Image Show style (thumbnails block) Build support for GK Highlighter GK1 module. Build style support for Jcomments Component (3th party free extension from JoomlaTune). Build support with Cufon fonts generator. New template parameters administration panel with more friendly interface and automatic check-in available updates. Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page. Option for mainbody and component position display. Full template width customization, by setting template, right, left and inset blocks (GK framework - beta version) Option for family and size font on template parameters. Option for use compressed template CSS and compressed template JS. Full control of Login, Register, Date, time and style button display on frontpage. Support for social links display. Easy footer content configuration on template parameters. Build support for WYSIWYG Friendly Template Typography editor with GK Typography plugin. Compressed engine option for each modules. Support for language file translation. 3 layout options: 3 columns (left + component + right), 2 columns (left or right + component) and 1 column (component). All 54 modules are fully collapsible and more 20 modules positions ready for tabs. Impressive built-in content style. Gavick Suckerfish menu version, with 2 built-in options - Suckerfish menu and Mootools. 34 different styles moomenu animation effects.. Speed menu animation option. New table-less HTML overrides from YOOtheme company (GNU/GPLv2) to optimize for search engines Optional IE6 Warning / Upgrade Notification with design. Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional. W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible IE7+, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome. Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files. Delivered with “QuickStart Package”.

Description: This month, GavickPro brings you closer on what's happening in the world. Delivering daily round-up of the latest breaking news stories, information, online news service, high-profile global cases and current stories as they unfold, the latest Gavick Pro Template provides it all, with the necessary professional tools, indispensable to publish in the most elegant and organized way. Freedom of information and speech is a legitimate and absolute human right, so be proud of unveiling all the Worldwide News Today! This template comes with new extensions: GK News, GK Headlines, GK Categorys and new style for News Image Show (module dedicated to Photoslide GK3). Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote GK NewsGK News module is an advanced solution for those who want to present their articles organized in sections and categories. Dropped down blocks with sections guarantee optimal space use on the site. Thanks to support for GK AJAX component and settings panel application for each section, user has the possibility to adjust the content to his/her needs by choosing category, section order specification in component and the number of articles presented. The use of data stored in cookies files allows the Internet user to save configuration created in his/her computer. By template system, it is possible to set appearance of individual module parts with the data downloaded from database. Thanks to this, possibilities of module appearance change are nearly unrestricted. Undoubtedly, by its possibilities, this module suits perfectly as the main element of Information Exchange.GK HeadlinesGK Headline module is an easy in support module used to present the latest articles from categories chosen. Thanks to template system for displaying elements and information downloaded from database, user is able to change module appearance easily by customizing it to his/her needs. Thanks to GK AJAX component assistance, there is a possibility to load asynchronously another or positions from database, just after loading the site. This module is a perfect solution for Information Exchange where organizing the space on the site is essential. While creating The World News, we used 3rd party extensions in order to get its newspaper style. We used wonderful JComments (from JoomlaTune) to comment articles and SmartResizer  (from Lot-Studio) to differentiate the size of photos used in articles.We used new table-less HTML overrides from YOOtheme company (GNU/GPLv2) to optimize The World News for search engines. To reduce the number of HTTP requests generated by images, we used the CSS Sprite technique. Features: Tableless design and 100% css based. 3 Color Theme Style (Blue – Red – Green) Build support for the new GK News GK1 module with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for the News Show Pro GK1 module with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with new Image Show style (thumbnails block). Build support for new GK Headlines module. Build support for new GK Categories module. Build support for GK Highlighter GK1 module. Build support for GK Weather GK1 module. Build support for GK Stock GK1 module. Build style support for Jcomments Component (3th party free extension). Build support with SmartResizer plugin (3th party free extension). Build support with Cufon fonts generator. New template parameters administration panel with more friendly interface and automatic check-in available updates. Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page. Option for mainbody and component position display. Full template width customization, by setting template, right, left and inset blocks (GK framework - beta version) Option for family and size font on template parameters. Option for use compressed template CSS and compressed template JS. Full control of Login, Register, Date, time and style button display on frontpage. Support for social links display. Easy footer content configuration on template parameters. Build support for WYSIWYG Friendly Template Typography editor with GK Typography plugin. Compressed engine option for each modules. Support for language file translation. 3 layout options: 3 columns (left + component + right), 2 columns (left or right + component) and 1 column (component). All 54 modules are fully collapsible and more 20 modules positions ready for tabs. Impressive built-in content style. Gavick Suckerfish menu version, with 2 built-in options - Suckerfish menu and Mootools. 34 different styles moomenu animation effects. Speed menu animation option. New table-less HTML overrides from YOOtheme company (GNU/GPLv2) to optimize for search engines. Optional IE6 Warning / Upgrade Notification with design. Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional. W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible IE7,IE8, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome. Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files. Delivered with “QuickStart Package”.

Description: It’s all about Good Vibrations! This is the first step to build the strongest foundation between different people with unique and shared experiences. Attract values; promote activities and discussion at various levels, that’s all happening in the world and beyond it. For the best and the worst, communication and respect will always be the way to insure the best relationship between you and the rest of the world. GavickPro gives you a little help, by offering to his community another top and professional template, where you can balance your space, full of positive energy and ambition. So, keep in touch with Quay energy. Quick Navigation: Live Demo! Download Support Forum Help File Vote This time we used GK framework to build the template. What is this? GK Framework is the next stage development of possibilities offered by GavickPro templates. Its basic advantage is the rise of flexibility in relation with the solutions previously used. GK Framework offers huge amount of modules, creating in main configuration three – column arrangement in which, each of column may contain some additional ones. From the administrative panel level it is possible for the user to specify the whole template and the particular columns width. There is a possibility to specify those columns width which needed and the rest is adjusted automatically. Thanks to the framework template mechanism use, it is allowed to restrict the number of modules displayed without the need of switching them off in Module Manager. Advanced users in the central file responsible for the framework usage (GKTemplate.php) are able to specify details as follows: 1. Styles used on particular modules positions (xhtml, raw, gkround, etc), 2. Margins, complements and the framing size for each of the main template’s blocks, 3. Switching on/off columns’ alignment in particular blocks, Other innovative features: 1. Main body position may be specified and saved in relation with the component content (they may occur interchangeably or together on the positions specified), 2. Possibility of specification the default font size on the site, 3. Possibility of choice of font family used in the template, 4. New message for users IE6 browser and older versions   Features: Tableless design and 100% css based. 3 color themes: Blue, Green/Purple, and Red. Build support for JomSocial v.1.6.x – Joomla! Social Network Component. Build support for the new GK JomSocial Members module. Build support for the new GK JomSocial Statistics module. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive build-in template design. Build support for the News Show Pro GK1 module with exclusive build-in template design. Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page. Option for mainbody and component position display on template parameters. Full template width customization, by setting template, right, left and inset blocks (GK framework - beta version). Option for family and size font on template parameters. New floating panel with social icons display. Option of animated or fixed floating social icons panel. Easy footer content configuration on template parameters. Build support for WYSIWYG Friendly Typography editor plugin. Compressed engine option for each modules. Support for language translation. 3 layout options: 3 columns (left + component + right), 2 columns (left or right + component) and 1 column (component). All 54 modules are fully collapsible and more than 20 module positions ready for tabs. Impressive built-in content style. Gavick Suckerfish menu version, with 2 built-in options - Suckerfish menu and Mootools. 34 different moomenu animation effects styles. Speed menu animation option Optional IE6 Warning / Upgrade Notification (new version of layout). Lightweight, modern and very fast-loading design Joomla 1.5 Native W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional. W3C CSS Valid Fully compatible IE7+, Firefox 2+, Firefox 3, Flock 0.7+, Netscape, Safari, Opera 9.5, Chrome. Delivered with Special 50% discount coupon to get JomSocial Component. Delivered with source Adobe .PSD files.

The Dominion Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.11 which contains Google Analytics, Mootools 1.2 upgrade and minor bug fixes.

The Reaction Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.10 which includes Google Analytics, Mootools 1.2 upgrade and minor updates.

The Kinetic Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.6 which contains Google Analytics, Mootools 1.2 upgrade and minor updates.

The Quantive Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.4 which adds Mootools 1.2 compatibility, contains minor bug fixes and Gantry Google Analytics

The Juxta Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.3 with Google Analytics update, added Mootools 1.2 compatibility and minor bug fixes.

The Somaxiom Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.1 with updates for JomSocial, Mootools 1.2 compatibility, additional login/logout popup functionality and minor bug fixes

The Panacea Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.3 with minor bug fixes JomSocial and some additional login/logout popup functionality

The Panacea Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.2 with minor bug fixes covering JomSocial, K2, RTL support, overlay controls, rotator transitions and Joomla components.

The Grunge GPL Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.1 with minor bug fixes.

The Panacea Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.1 with minor bug fixes.

RokPad has been updated to version 1.3 which adds support for Mootools 1.2 and Joomla 1.5.19

RokTabs has been updated to version 1.13 which adds support for Mootools 1.2.

RokNavMenu has been updated to version 1.12 which adds support for Mootools 1.2.

RokAjaxSearch has been updated to version 1.9 which adds support for Mootools 1.2.

RokNewsPager has been updated to version 1.6 which adds support for Mootools 1.2.

RokBox has been updated to version 2.3, 1.6 which adds support for Mootools 1.2, as well as updating the inbuilt JWplayer and numerous additions and fixes.

RokStories has been updated to version 1.8 which adds support for Mootools 1.2, as well as a style toggle for the Read More button.

RokStories has been updated to version 1.7 which fixes an PHP 5.3 error, as well as adding a new layout style: Masked Showcase.

RokQuickCart has been updated to version 1.2 which fixes a backward compatibility issue, as well as adding shelf dimension functions.

RokNavMenu has been updated to version 1.11 which fixes a bug with centering dropdowns in RTL mode.

The Affinity phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes.

The Modestus phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes to make phpBB3 style more standalone.

Panacea, the August 2010 phpBB3 Style Club release, encapsulates stylistic freedom with the inclusion of the Color Chooser, allowing for easy style customization with just a few clicks. Offering an unconventional approach to such designs, combining ease of alteration with a mainstream appearance. The style also supports a Background Rotator for the sub-header area, as well as popular features such as RTL Support or Google Web Fonts..

Modestus is fast and elegant phpBB3 style and it's completly free. With Modestus, we combined speed and simplicity, with some of the powerful configuration options. An assortment of 5 preset styles also accompany the template.

Somaxiom, the July 2010 phpBB3 Style Club release, concentrates on elegance of design. The visuals are refined and conservative, making the appearance suitable for many different types of forums, as well as providing a base for extensive customization. The phpBB3 style provides support for Google Web Fonts, and is equipped with few interesting RokBB3 options.

The Nexus phpBB3 style has been updated to version 1.5 with a minor bug fixes.

Juxta, the June 2010 Style Club release, is a design-centric theme, focusing on unique, professional and fresh visuals to constitute the fundamental appearance of the template. Style is very important with any theme, and Juxta intends to entice any visitor of your site. The theme has a plethora of features beyond its stylistic exterior. The core is managed by RokBB3, offering powerful phpbb3 style customization.

The Quantive phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes including missing subforum images.

The SolarSentinel phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes.

The Affinity phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes.

{rokstyle} .appblock-title {font-size:200%;line-height:150%;color:#000;margin:30px 0 20px;border-bottom:1px solid #e7e7e7;} .appblock {overflow:auto;margin-top:15px;} .appblock img {float:left;margin-top:15px;} .appblock h4 {color:#666;} .appblock h4, .appblock p {margin-left:120px;} {/rokstyle} Ok, so you've made the plunge and are committed to using a mac as your primary development machine. Congratulations, you've made a fantastic choice, and after 4 years after jumping in with both feet, i've never been happier with my decision. I'm going to save you a lot of time by getting you up to speed quickly on how to setup your machine with all the essentials that will make your development life easier and more efficient. For simplicity I'm going to assume you're a PHP developer and your source control system is Subversion. Update: July 5th 2010 - There's been several months since I put down this original list of applications, and during that time I've changed a few of my recommendations based on new products that have been released aswell as improvements to some existing products. This list below represents my currently installed and recommended apps:

After several months of development, we are very pleased to announce the launch of our new Gantry Framework site located at http://www.gantry-framework.org. This site provides a lot of documentation, screencasts, and other great information to help showcase what Gantry can do and how to use it. As well as launching the site, we are also releasing the stand-alone Gantry template that can be used as a good base template for any template development. Also, there is a RocketLauncher version to get you started as fast as possible.

RocketTheme continues to grow and branch out from our traditional Joomla roots into new areas such as phpBB3, WordPress and our upcoming Drupal Theme club. We've also been extensively developing our GPL Gantry Framework project for Joomla and this has been a huge success. We are deep in development on a WordPress version too, and we'll be bringing Gantry to other platforms in time. Sometimes you have to mix things up, and today we are announcing a entirely new and exciting direction for RocketTheme, we are pleased to announce the formation of RocketTheme Racing.

I am going to be doing a talk about the Gantry framework during CMS Expo which is being held May 3rd, 4th, and 5th in Evanston, Illinois. I intend to give a high-level overview but also get into the real guts of the framework to show how creating a Joomla template is easier than ever if you build them on Gantry. I'll also cover how to use the configuration to create some stunning layout control that has never before been achievable with Joomla. After that, I will get into the meat of the framework to show how you can modify, customize, and extend the core functionality to push the boundaries even further.

The Affinity phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes.

The Dominion Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.11 which contains Google Analytics, Mootools 1.2 upgrade and minor bug fixes.

The Reaction Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.10 which includes Google Analytics, Mootools 1.2 upgrade and minor updates.

The Kinetic Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.6 which contains Google Analytics, Mootools 1.2 upgrade and minor updates.

The Quantive Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.4 which adds Mootools 1.2 compatibility, contains minor bug fixes and Gantry Google Analytics

The Juxta Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.3 with Google Analytics update, added Mootools 1.2 compatibility and minor bug fixes.

The Somaxiom Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.1 with updates for JomSocial, Mootools 1.2 compatibility, additional login/logout popup functionality and minor bug fixes

The Modestus phpbb3 style has been updated with some minor bug fixes to make phpBB3 style more standalone.

The Panacea Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.3 with minor bug fixes JomSocial and some additional login/logout popup functionality

Panacea, the August 2010 phpBB3 Style Club release, encapsulates stylistic freedom with the inclusion of the Color Chooser, allowing for easy style customization with just a few clicks. Offering an unconventional approach to such designs, combining ease of alteration with a mainstream appearance. The style also supports a Background Rotator for the sub-header area, as well as popular features such as RTL Support or Google Web Fonts..

Karma 1.5 is a user rating system with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down to click for rating. Karma 1.5 is a system which includes a component, CB plugin and optional modules for rating CB members. Karma 1.5 is a FREE download. I'm contributing the system as a thank you to the Joomla! and Community Builder communities for all they've provided me. Best regards and much Karma to you! Note: Considering JomSocial integration. Let me know if you are interested.

Plugin to embed a javascript chessboard in joomla articles for replaying chess games. The plugin enables a new bbcode tag in joomla articles that translates in a graphical chessboard, using the following syntax: [pgn parameter=value ...] chess games notation in PGN format [/pgn] Example: [pgn initialHalfmove=16 autoplayMode=none] [Event "World championship"] [Site "Moscow URS"] [Date "1985.10.15"] [Round "16"] [White "Karpov"] [Black "Kasparov"] [Result "0-1"] 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nc6 5. Nb5 d6 6. c4 Nf6 7. N1c3 a6 8. Na3 d5 9. cxd5 exd5 10. exd5 Nb4 11. Be2 Bc5 12. O-O O-O 13. Bf3 Bf5 14. Bg5 Re8 15. Qd2 b5 16. Rad1 Nd3 17. Nab1 h6 18. Bh4 b4 19. Na4 Bd6 20. Bg3 Rc8 21. b3 g5 22. Bxd6 Qxd6 23. g3 Nd7 24. Bg2 Qf6 25. a3 a5 26. axb4 axb4 27. Qa2 Bg6 28. d6 g4 29. Qd2 Kg7 30. f3 Qxd6 31. fxg4 Qd4+ 32. Kh1 Nf6 33. Rf4 Ne4 34. Qxd3 Nf2+ 35. Rxf2 Bxd3 36. Rfd2 Qe3 37. Rxd3 Rc1 38. Nb2 Qf2 39. Nd2 Rxd1+ 40. Nxd1 Re1+ 0-1 [/pgn] Please note: separate install packages are available for joomla 1.5 and for joomla 1.6, please select the package matching your joomla version. The plugin is based on the pgn4web tool, a tutorial, including configuration options and tag parameters, is available at the pgn4web wiki: http://code.google.com/p/pgn4web/wiki/User_Notes_joomla The full pgn4web project is hosted at http://pgn4web.casaschi.net

Advanced Content Protector is an advanced version of Content Protector. The objective of this extension is to act as a shield against plagiarism. The extension will restrict certain functionality like disable right click, disable word selection and control key combination. The Advanced Content Protector contain all functionality from Content Protector and on the advanced version, we have extend the functionality of the extension to give special permission for user type "Author". When the Author log in to the system, the Author can use ctrl key combination, word/text selection and right click when the Author browsing the article that the Author written. The Author also able to use these function when editing. The Author also can request certain of its article to have no protection. On version 1.1, we have added some new security features into the extension and also improving the existing security features. We also change some code on the installer so that the installer only update the source code of the extension and retain the previous extension settings. What's new on Version 1.1: 1. Improving the existing security features. 2. Added some new security features. Features: 1. Block the saved web page from opening in localdisk. 2. Block the saved web page from opening in different domain. 3. Disable right click. 4. Disable word selection. 5. Disable control key combination. Example: ctrl + c, ctrl + v, etc. 6. Able to give immunity to certain user. 7. Able to protect the article of your choice. 8. Super Administrator is immune to all functionality of this extension. 9. Joomla! Administration is not affected by the functionality of this extension. 10. Compatible with AJAX enable website. 11. Added two fail-safe system. 12. Able to protect all your content with a single click on the extension parameters. 13. Able to determine which ctrl key combination to be disable. 14. Support Joomla SEF URLs. 15. Faster execution speed due to code restructuring. 16. No restriction for the Author when the Author browsing its article. (Advanced version only) 17. No restriction inside the editor. (Advanced version only) 18. Able to disable the copy paste and word selection functionality for an article on Author request. (Advanced version only)

Content Protector is an extension that protect your website. The objective of this extension is to act as a shield against plagiarism. The extension will restrict certain functionality like disable right click, disable word selection and control key combination. We have added two fail-safe system that will enable the extension to protect your website when you forget to set some of the extension parameters. This is to ensure that the extension will always protect your website. We also added Protect All function that will protect your entire website. We have modified the extension to support Joomla SEF URLs. If your site is using Joomla SEF URLs and you want to protect certain article in your site, this is the extension you might find it useful. The extension coding have been restructure for faster execution speed. On version 2.3, we have added some new security features into the extension and also improving the existing security features. We also change some code on the installer so that the installer only update the source code of the extension and retain the previous extension settings. What's new on Version 2.3: 1. Improving the existing security features. 2. Added some new security features. Features: 1. Block the saved web page from opening in localdisk. 2. Block the saved web page from opening in different domain. 3. Disable right click. 4. Disable word selection. 5. Disable control key combination. Example: ctrl + c, ctrl + v, etc. 6. Able to give immunity to certain user. 7. Able to protect the article of your choice. 8. Super Administrator is immune to all functionality of this extension. 9. Joomla! Administration is not affected by the functionality of this extension. 10. Compatible with AJAX enable website. 11. Added two fail-safe system. 12. Able to protect all your content with a single click on the extension parameters. 13. Able to determine which ctrl key combination to be disable. 14. Support Joomla SEF URLs.

AceVersions allows you to manage versions of the extensions you have developed and list them on your site. Your visitors will be able to check the version history on your site. It offers you to show your version info in HTML, XML and RSS formats to your visitors. You can either show all extensions in one page or select a specific category. With it's well formated XML page, you can also use it for automatic version control for your extensions. We use it for our own AceSEF, AceVersions and AceSubscriptions components. Check our documentation for more info about how to implement automatic version checker into your component.

We have just released Agora 3.0.136. Agora Olympus 3.0.136 is the latest release of the class leading Joomla! integrated forum component. This fully featured forum component is the result of a complete rewrite by jVitals developers after years of experience with the forked Agora 2.x. At all stages the community has been consulted, and with this extensive input Agora continues to be developed with a community focus. jVitals' large dedicated community has downloaded Agora over 100,000 times and implemented it on thousands of sites serving millions of users. Agora can be installed and configured in as little as 5 minutes with correct permissions and groups pre-set for your convenience. All that is required to create a functioning forum is to set up a set of Categories and Forums. The simplicity of such a basic configuration can easily be expanded with numerous advanced setting for subforums, advanced user and group permissions, and easy to install Styles to create a powerful flexible forum posting system. Translated into 31 languages, you can use Agora almost anywhere in the world and have it understood. In order to be as convenient as possible to adopt Agora has been designed to compliment your site and existing community. The designers have created styles to match almost any look. Notification emails can be customized to match your community, Styles are easily customized, and numerous modules are included in the download. To ensure complete integration with existing communities popular social networking applications including Community Builder, Joomunity, Jomsocial and the upcoming jSocialSuite integration is included, as well as UddeIM integration. With all these options, we have not forgotten what makes a forum popular. The users of the community must enjoy using it. For the site's users Agora has a powerful, easy to use BBCode editor, comprehensive profile setting and options, integrated User Map, advanced search options and much more. Agora's integrated Private Messaging System automatically searches through existing usernames, allowing messages to be sent to 5 separate users while using the advanced editor to create custom styled messages. Thanks to the many feature requests, bug reports translations and styles submitted by the community, Agora is one of the most popular, and we believe best, forum extension Joomla! has to offer. Agora 3.0.136 now comes complete with built in converters free of charge for * Kunena * ccBoard * SimpleForum * jooBB! Visit our documentation for a detailed Change Log Thank y

A simple field plugin for Flexicontent that allows you to configure and output a Facebook "Like" button based on the configuration values specified by Facebook. Version 1.1 adds news features : + Add a xfbml method + Add an api application (for xfbml method) + Add a language option

JuliaRssToArticle, the component that allows you to publish rss items to articles is now available, and most of all it's free! You can take articles from any feed, you can set up keywords to retrieve the articles (only articles that have at least one of the keywords in their title or content are published) and you can setup which tags/atrributes to strip from the content of the articles. Versions can be safely installed over previous ones without affecting existing data Version 1.2 changelog 1. Fixed cron jobs for virtual hosting environment Version 1.1 changelog 1. Added cron job possibility (file cron.php in the front-end) 2. Added icons 3. Added possibility to remove the source of the article

A World of Warcraft Guildroster Component. Retrieves and caches your guild(s) members from the World of Warcraft Armory. Compatible with EU and US guilds. * Configure cache retention * Configure Class colours * Configure Rank names * Use for multiple guilds * Easily configured for new classes/races * Filter/Sort by class/race/level/gender/rank/achievement points * search members * Displays Guild Emblem * very fast version history: 0.1.5 Security Update ! Fixed sql injection vulnerability 0.1.4 * Removed cURL requirement for fetching armory xml * Fixed issue with race selection box being empty at first guild load * Fixed class colour issues 0.1.3 *fixed class colours not displaying correctly *fixed some incorrect syntax

Wonderfully smart readers ... I need to pick your brains. We've been using Pingdom for years to track our sites. I love it. When sites go down it sends out an automatic email, SMS and even a message via an iPhone app. When our servers go down, we know. However, that's not the same thing as saying when our sites go down, we know. This weekend a site was hit by a session error and that bought the site down. All a visitor could see was a MySQL error and the message "please repair the database". Because the server was still responding, Pingdom thought the site was up and so didn't tell us about the problem. Any ideas on how we can get around this? How can we get notified even when our server is active but our site is throwing out errors?

We've been to over 50 cities in North America from Anchorage in Alaska to Miami in Florida. There aren't many places left on the list of place we'd like to teach. There's Hawaii of course (we very nearly had a client invite us there) and Puerto Rico too. However, there is one gaping hole in our U.S. coverage ... Boston. No longer. Next week we'll be in downtown Boston teaching Joomla and Drupal for 2 days each. What's even better is that I'll be teaching with the wonderful Jen Kramer. If you don't know who Jen is you will shortly. She's a mainstay of the Joomla world: Jen Kramer Jen is a senior faculty member at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, teaching courses and workshops in web site design and management, including Joomla. She has also previously taught at Champlain College, the Community College of Vermont, and the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Jen is a Lynda.com author for the titles "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates", "Joomla! Advanced CSS" and more. Her first book, “Joomla! Start to Finish” was published by Wrox Press/Wiley in January 2010. Read more...

One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed. I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve's readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.

Out of all the blog posts I've read this year, one has stuck in my mind more than any other: Why [the] open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems. He takes on Drupal and KickApps for their lack of usability and then moves on to Wordpress. He's right. Even Wordpress usability sucks. It's generally regarded as the best of the Open Source projects in terms of usability, but even it sucks. Read more...

My apologies for the lack of blog posts here over the last few months. Between the Open Source Matters board and getting a new company off the ground with Open Source Training it's been a hectic year. In the last few weeks I took a working vacation to  Germany for JandBeyond and then back home to England. I've been blogging but my limited time and energy has gone into Joomla.org rather than here. Still, there are quite a few things I'd like to write about that aren't appropriate for Joomla.org so look for some new articles here in the next few weeks. Here's a recap of my Joomla.org posts: Read more...

This was the third year of the CMS Expo in Chicago and it took another leap forward. Rather than getting lost in downtown or suburban Chicago they've moved to the suburb of Evanston, right on the lake and next to Northwestern University. It's a good fit for a conference of 300 to 400 people. Was it worth going? Absolutely. I've only missed one Expo out of the four and wouldn't make that mistake again. Here's what stood out to me this year: More Drupal and other CMSs. Although the people and sponsors were at least 50% Joomla, this was the first time that it became a true CMS event. Drupal was there in a big way. Wordpress were disappointingly absent as their Wordcamp San Francisio coincided with the event, but a host of other smaller CMSs attended. Cloud, cloud, cloud. We had the sponsors' booth next to Acquia and I couldn't help but notice that they promoted Drupal Gardens almost to the exclusion of their other products. I'm not sure whether that's because they thought it was the best fit for this audience, but it was hard to avoid the cloud everywhere I went. CloudAccess were getting ready to launch demo.joomla.org and lots of other companies had cloud-hosting products. An industry is growing. Many companies still only support one CMS which means we currently have lots of separate industries. However, nearly all the companies in attendance realised that smart companies are now supporting several CMS platforms. CMS Expo broke even for the first time. These events are always expensive and risky so that was a big step forward to ensuring the Expo's long-term stability. Read more...

This week's tutorial is the second of a two-parter. We've had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors ... blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal's default handling of nodes. In the first part we covered how to give people easy to a list of their own nodes, using a module called workspace. In this second part we're going to create a workflow, allowing you to choose who has control over a node. A newspaper website is a great example - a writer may submit an article which is then passed to the copy-editor for checking and then to the editor for approval and publication. In Part 1 we used the "Workspace" module. This time we're using the "Workflow" module. Read more...

Shaper Carousel is a free image scroller module for joomla. It is compatible with joomla 1.5.19 and mootools 1.2.4. Popular iCarousel script is used for this module. This module has the ability to scroll images form any image directory and joomla category.

Ajax Wtranslate it's this extension for the automatic translation of pages with help Googla API and Ajax technology. The basis of this product is the plugin from Jquery and certainly API googla, which does translate. This module will enable your visitor or website members to browse content of your website in 56 supported languages easily it more than 98% of internet users. Module Ajax Wtranslate easy to install in Joomla 1.5. In addition, the module has many parameters with which you can easily configure the module as you need. Also for the module I created a series of templates with which you can display nicely on the site languages to select the translation. Below is a brief list of the principal advantages of this module: - 4 template for output module; - hides "Suggest better translation" pop-up; - hides Google top frame after translation; - ability to specify html blocks that do not need to translate; - mouse over effect; - option to open translated page in new window; - valid XHTML; - use cookies to store the selected language, which allows you to translate the page directly when you open the page; - option to translate the page on fly; - the ability to automatically determine the language of the page. Languages - English - Russian - Spanish - J. Raul I shall be very glad if you make a translation into your language and send me the files ageent.ua@gmail.com Thanks                                                       *** PLEASE RATE OR REVIEW THIS MODULE IF YOU FOUND IT USEFUL ***

AceVersions allows you to manage versions of the extensions you have developed and list them on your site. Your visitors will be able to check the version history on your site. It offers you to show your version info in HTML, XML and RSS formats to your visitors. You can either show all extensions in one page or select a specific category. With it's well formated XML page, you can also use it for automatic version control for your extensions. We use it for our own AceSEF, AceVersions and AceSubscriptions components. Check our documentation for more info about how to implement automatic version checker into your component.

ARI Cloud Carousel module based on Cloud Carousel jQuery plugin and provides possibility to create pretty 3D image carousel based on images from specific folder(s). Main features: * Accurate 3D perspective; * No flash. Pure javascript and CSS; * Optional auto reflections - no need to modify your images or add server code; * Can sort images by file name, modified date or in random order; * Supports mouse navigation; * Provide ability to create your own themes; * Supports auto generating of thumbnails; * Can start slideshow automatically; * Supports possibility to show images titles, descriptions and define redirect links which you can define in INI file; * Can be integrated with different lightbox extensions: - ARI Sexy Lightbox, - ARI Fancybox - ARI Colorbox - ARI Pretty Photo; * Works in all modern browsers.

It is unique and simple gallery for virtuemart. Features include * Displays VirtueMart product thumb and full images * Linkable full images * show/hide Categories drop down list * Show/hide short description of the product image

Virtuemart Homework is Microsoft Access Application for Virtuemart Component and it directly connect with Virtuemart mySQL database tables. A Simple timesaving “FRONT END” editing solution for Virtuemart Shop Data. You don’t have to logon Joomla / Virtuemart website as administrator for editing and adding new data. Now use VM Homework and process easy and fast Add New / Edit data in Virtuemart shop from MS Access Application format. It is ideal for Websites which having “Heavy Data” of products and categories. VM Homework works fine with its own sorting order. Capable to manage product categories/sub categories including thumb and full size images, Products Descriptions, Prices, Shopper Groups, Qty from and Qty to, Discounts, child/parent management, image managements publish or un-publish, Product Attributes etc. All you will do above tasks without Browsers but from MS Access 2003-2007. As you finish your homework then you will export your localhost mySQL database to your webserver using phpmyadmin and upload (FTP) products /categories images from your home computer to your hosting servers. Best thing: if your site have more than 1 theme, you can shuffle your themes easily. It is tools for professionals so you must know about following. IIS / Apachi (Internet information Server) PHP (installation on window environment) MySQL server Phpmyadmin-How to download it and how to import/export databases Joomla / Joomla Installations / Joomla Concepts Virtuemart / Virtuemart Installation on Joomla Site Virtumart Shop Image Path Folder (what is the purpose) Requirements: A Joomla/Virtuemart Website running on your localhost, MySQL ODBC Connector, Ms Access 2003 or 2007 Installation: Small size copy paste, Key Validation Videos : http://www.youtube.com/user/yazinc#g/c/494EC039BA7AD084 Screen Shots: http://yazinc.xtreemhost.com/WMHW_intro/

You want to let your customer know how much they will pay as shipping rates with Australia Post? Then this module will be a must for you. It shows real time quotations based on vendor and cutomer postcodes in your website in any module position. This module calculates automatically the shipping rate from AustraliaPost based on the content of your customer's cart. It will used the following parameter: - Vendor postcode (the vendor has to live in Australia); - Customer postcode (if not login then it will try to localize him from his IP address); - Customer country (if the user isn't localize in Australia); - Product's weight (if overcharge - more than 20kg - it will display a message); - If ajax is enabled in your VirtueMart shop, the module can refresh automatically. Two languages available: french and english

Virtuemart Discounted Product Scroller (converted from Virtuemart Product Scroller module)

This system plugin makes use of Tynt Insight which automatically adds a link back to your original content with every copy and paste done by users. The attribution link ensures you get credit for your work, drives new visits back to your site and improves your SEO results. So benefits are: To driving traffic (sites using Tynt Insight have seen double the amount of visits to individual pages via this automatic attribution link) , improve search rank and get immediate SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible and measure engagement (to find out exactly what your readers engage with most.)

Your customers have great ideas. Are you ready to listen? JFeedback bridges Joomla with UserVoice.com service (which current client includes SUN, Nokia, MySpace.com etc) , to enable the easiest way to turn your Joomla website's customer feedback into action: Share ideas, Vote up the best, Respond, implement and repeat!

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 6 (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only. Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 5 release on Jun 12, we have fixed approximately 98 issues in the tracker. This progress is directly related to the continued efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable! See the CHANGELOG for details of what has been changed in this release. What's next? This is the fifth in our series of continuous beta releases. Beta 7 will be released on August 9, 2010. Download here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5346 Related Links: Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1168-joomla-16-development-shifting-gears.html Joomla 1.6 Beta Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5275-joomla-16-beta-now-available.html Joomla 1.6 Beta 2 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5278-joomla-16-beta2-now-available.htmlJoomla 1.6 Beta 3 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5279-joomla-16-beta3-now-available.htmlJoomla 1.6 Beta 4 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5279-joomla-16-beta4-now-available.htmlJoomla 1.6 Beta 5 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5279-joomla-16-beta5-now-available.html  

  The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.20 [senu takaa]. This is a security release that addresses issues with the Joomla 1.5.19 packages.  We recommend users upgrade immediately. The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.     Download Click here to download Joomla 1.5.20 (Full package) » Click here to download Joomla 1.5.20 (Upgrade packages) »   Instructions New installation and technical requirements Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x Want to test drive Joomla? Try the online demo or the Joomla JumpBox. Documentation is available for beginners. Please note that you should always backup your site before upgrading. Release Notes Check the Joomla 1.5.20 Post-Release FAQs to see if there are important items and helpful hints discovered after the release.  Joomla! Bug Squad Thanks to the Joomla Bug Squad for their dedicated efforts investigating reports, fixing problems, and applying patches to Joomla. If you find a bug in Joomla, please report it on the 1.5 Bug Tracker. Active members of the Joomla Bug Squad during this last release cycle include: Andrew Eddie, Ian MacLennan, and Mark Dexter Coordinators; Airton Torres, Artyom Bisyarin, Bill Richardson, Elin Waring, Marijke Stuivenberg, Matt Thomas, and Omar Ramos, Team Leaders.Akarawuth Tamrareang, Alain Rivest, Amy Stephen, Andrea Tarr, Anja Hage, Ashwin Date, Bo Astrup, Brian "Sully" Sullivan, Brian Teeman, Chistopher Garvis, Christophe Demko, Cristina Solana, Dan Chay, Dennis Hermacki, Detlef Volmer, Gobezu Sewu, Hannes Papenberg, Henrik Hussfelt, Janich Rasmussen, Jean-Marie Simonet, Jeremy Wilken, Joe LeBlanc, Klas Berlic, Marius van Rijnsoever, Mark W Bender, Martin Blodau, Michael Babker, Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos, Nikolai Plath, Ole Ottosen, Pete Nurse, Phil Snell, Pierre Gazzola, Radek Suski, Rob Joyce, Ronald J. de Vries, Rune Sjøen, Sam Moffatt, Selene Feigl, Steven Littrell, Steven Trullinger, Tim Plummer, Troy Thomas Hall, Vicki Payne, and Viet Hoang Vu. A warm welcome to the newest members of the Joomla Bug Squad: Alex Wai, Babs Gösgens, Cassiano Faria, Dan Chay, E.Karnika Yashwant, Janich Rasmussen, Jason Sponaugle, John Kouvakis, Jonathan Chang, Melissa Wetherby, Michael Babker, Nikolai Plath, Olivier Nolbert, Pablo Centurión, Phil Snell, Rick Stubblebine, Rune V. Sjøen, Sam Carecho, Sandino Nuñez, Selene Feigl, Steve Hanlon, and Tim Plummer. Joomla! Security Strike TeamThanks to the Joomla Security Strike Team for their dedicated efforts investigating reports, and fixing security issues in Joomla. Current active members of the Joomla! Security Strike Team are: Alan Langford, Claire Mandville, Ian MacLenn, Jason Kendall, Marijke Stuivenberg, Mark Dexter, Omar Ramos, Pierre Gazzola and Sam Moffatt. 

  The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.19 [Wojmamni ama batani]. This is a security release. The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.     Download Click here to download Joomla 1.5.19 (Full package) » Click here to download Joomla 1.5.19 (Upgrade packages) »   Instructions New installation and technical requirements Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x Want to test drive Joomla? Try the online demo or the Joomla JumpBox. Documentation is available for beginners. Please note that you should always backup your site before upgrading. Release Notes Check the Joomla 1.5.19 Post-Release FAQs to see if there are important items and helpful hints discovered after the release. Security Low Priority - Core - SQL Injection / Interal Path Exposure. More information »Medium Priority - Core - XSS Vulnerabilities in back end. More information »Medium Priority - Core - XSS Vulnerabilities in back end. More information »Medium Priority - Core - XSS Vulnerabilities in back end. More information » Components  No component issues were fixed for this release Modules  No module issues were fixed for this release. Plugins  Mootools 1.2.4 Upgrade Plugin (21416). Note that this change does not have any impact on existing sites unless you choose to enable the new plugin. See the wiki article What is the Mootools 1.2.4 plugin?  for more information. Legacy No legacy issues were fixed for this release. Templates No Templates issues were fixed for this release. Language No Language issues were fixed for this release. Administrator  No Administrator issues were fixed for this release. System No System issues were fixed for this release. Statistics for the 1.5.19 release period: Joomla 1.5.19 contains: 4 issues fixed in SVN 9 commits Tracker activity resulted in a net increase of 40 active issues: 48 new reports 4 closed 4 fixed in SVN At the time the 1.5.19 release was packaged, the tracker had 376 active issues: 229 open 105 confirmed 42 pending Joomla! Bug Squad Thanks to the Joomla Bug Squad for their dedicated efforts investigating reports, fixing problems, and applying patches to Joomla. If you find a bug in Joomla, please report it on the 1.5 Bug Tracker. Active members of the Joomla Bug Squad during this last release cycle include: Andrew Eddie, Ian MacLennan, and Mark Dexter Coordinators; Airton Torres, Artyom Bisyarin, Bill Richardson, Elin Waring, Marijke Stuivenberg, Matt Thomas, and Omar Ramos, Team Leaders.Akarawuth Tamrareang, Alain Rivest, Amy Stephen, Andrea Tarr, Anja Hage, Ashwin Date, Bo Astrup, Brian "Sully" Sullivan, Brian Teeman, Chistopher Garvis, Christophe Demko, Cristina Solana, Dan Chay, Dennis Hermacki, Detlef Volmer, Gobezu Sewu, Hannes Papenberg, Henrik Hussfelt, Janich Rasmussen, Jean-Marie Simonet, Jeremy Wilken, Joe LeBlanc, Klas Berlic, Marius van Rijnsoever, Mark W Bender, Martin Blodau, Michael Babker, Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos, Nikolai Plath, Ole Ottosen, Pete Nurse, Phil Snell, Pierre Gazzola, Radek Suski, Rob Joyce, Ronald J. de Vries, Rune Sjøen, Sam Moffatt, Selene Feigl, Steven Littrell, Steven Trullinger, Tim Plummer, Troy Thomas Hall, Vicki Payne, and Viet Hoang Vu. A warm welcome to the newest members of the Joomla Bug Squad: Alex Wai, Babs Gösgens, Cassiano Faria, Dan Chay, E.Karnika Yashwant, Janich Rasmussen, Jason Sponaugle, John Kouvakis, Jonathan Chang, Melissa Wetherby, Michael Babker, Nikolai Plath, Olivier Nolbert, Pablo Centurión, Phil Snell, Rick Stubblebine, Rune V. Sjøen, Sam Carecho, Sandino Nuñez, Selene Feigl, Steve Hanlon, and Tim Plummer.

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 5 (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only. Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 4 release on Jun 28, we have fixed approximately 65 issues in the tracker. Much of this progress is directly related to the stepped up efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable! See the CHANGELOG for details of what has been changed in this release. What's next? This is the fifth in our series of continuous beta releases. Beta 6 will be released on July 26, 2010. Download here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5314 Related Links: Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1168-joomla-16-development-shifting-gears.html Joomla 1.6 Beta Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5275-joomla-16-beta-now-available.html Joomla 1.6 Beta 2 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5278-joomla-16-beta2-now-available.htmlJoomla 1.6 Beta 3 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5279-joomla-16-beta3-now-available.htmlJoomla 1.6 Beta 4 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5279-joomla-16-beta4-now-available.html  

After many months of hard work by a very dedicated group of volunteers, today we proudly announce that the new Joomla! Community Magazine has launched! You can get to the JCM by clicking on the new Magazine link in the horizontal navigation for the Joomla! community site, or by going directly to http://magazine.joomla.org. In each monthly JCM issue you will find stories that will educate, inform, challenge, and inspire you. And because we encourage community members to submit articles to the JCM, we also hope you will think about what makes Joomla! special to you, and then come back here to share your story with the rest of the community. And that is really what the JCM is all about: Helping members of the Joomla! community connect with each other and share their stories. We would love to publish yours!

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 4 (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only. Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 3 release on Jun 14, we have fixed approximately 103 issues in the tracker. Much of this progress is directly related to the stepped up efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable! See the CHANGELOG for details of what has been changed in this release. What's next? This is the fourth in our series of continuous betas. Beta 5 will be released on July 12, 2010. Download here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5300 Related Links: Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1168-joomla-16-development-shifting-gears.html Joomla 1.6 Beta Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5275-joomla-16-beta-now-available.html Joomla 1.6 Beta 2 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5278-joomla-16-beta2-now-available.htmlJoomla 1.6 Beta 3 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5279-joomla-16-beta3-now-available.html  

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 3 (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only. Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 2 release on May 31, we have fixed approximately 102 issues in the tracker. Much of this progress is directly related to the stepped up efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable! See the CHANGELOG for details of what has been changed in this release. What's next? This is the third in our series of continuous betas. Beta 4 will be released on June 28, 2010. Download here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5276 Related Links: Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1168-joomla-16-development-shifting-gears.html Joomla 1.6 Beta Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5275-joomla-16-beta-now-available.html Joomla 1.6 Beta 2 Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5278-joomla-16-beta2-now-available.html  

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 2 (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only. Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 1 we have fixed approximately 140 issues. Much of this progress is directly related to the stepped up efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable!See the CHANGELOG for details of what has been changed in this release.What's next? This is the second in our series of continuous betas. Beta 3 will be released on June 14, 2010.Download here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5249Related Link:Joomla! 1.6 Development Shifting Gears http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1168-joomla-16-development-shifting-gears.html Joomla 1.6 Beta Now Available http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5275-joomla-16-beta-now-available.html

  The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.18 [Wojmamni ama wojnaiki]. This is a security release and also corrects one priority issue in version 1.5.17. The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.      Download Click here to download Joomla 1.5.18 (Full package) » Click here to download Joomla 1.5.18 (Upgrade packages) »   Instructions New installation and technical requirements Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x Want to test drive Joomla? Try the online demo or the Joomla JumpBox. Documentation is available for beginners. Please note that you should always backup your site before upgrading. Release Notes Check the Joomla 1.5.18 Post-Release FAQs to see if there are important items and helpful hints discovered after the release. If you have modified core template overrides, please be sure to back them up before upgrading. Security High Priority - Core - XSS Vulnerabilities in back end. More information » Components  No component issues were fixed for this release Modules  No module issues were fixed for this release. Plugins  Revert issue 19859 (Graceful handling of Apache plugin failures) (20424) Legacy No legacy issues were fixed for this release. Templates No Templates issues were fixed for this release. Language No Language issues were fixed for this release. Administrator  No Administrator issues were fixed for this release. System No System issues were fixed for this release. Statistics for the 1.5.18 release period: Joomla 1.5.18 contains: 1 issues fixed in SVN 3 commits Tracker activity resulted in a net increase of 21 active issues: 29 new reports 7 closed 1 fixed in SVN At the time the 1.5.18 release was packaged, the tracker had 337 active issues: 195 open 105 confirmed 37 pending Joomla! Bug Squad Thanks to the Joomla Bug Squad for their dedicated efforts investigating reports, fixing problems, and applying patches to Joomla. If you find a bug in Joomla, please report it on the 1.5 Bug Tracker. Active members of the Joomla Bug Squad during this last release cycle include: Andrew Eddie, Ian MacLennan, and Mark Dexter Coordinators; Airton Torres, Artyom Bisyarin, Elin Waring, Marijke Stuivenberg, Matt Thomas, and Omar Ramos, Team Leaders. Alan Langford, Alessandro Nadalin, Andrea Tarr, Christophe Demko, Dennis Hermacki, Edvard Ananyan, Flavia Silveira, Gergo Erdosi, Hannes Papenberg, Jean-Marie Simonet, Jennifer Marriott, Joseph LeBlanc, Julio Pontes, Kevin Devine, Klas Berlič, Koen Kuipers, Mustaq Sheikh, Niels Braczek, Ole Bang Ottosen, Pete Nurse, Ron Severdia, Ronald J. de Vries, Sam Moffatt, and Will Mavis. A warm welcome to the newest members of the Joomla Bug Squad: Alain Rivest, Amy Stephen, Anja Hage, Artyom Bisyarin, Babs Gösgens, Beat, Bill Richardson, Bo Astrup, Brian Sullivan, Brian Teeman, Cristina Solana, Detlef Volmer, Duane Brown, Eduardo Diaz, Gobezu Sewu, Henrik Hussfelt, Jeremy Wilken, Joe Sonne, Manoel J. Silva, Marius van Rijnsoever, Mark W Bender, Nate Bohn, Nicholas Antimisiaris, Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos, Pierre Gazzola, Radek Suski, Rob Joyce, Robert Vining, Steven Littrell, Steven Trullinger, Troy Thomas Hall, Ulas ALKAN, Vicki Payne, Viet Hoang Vu, Waseem Sadiq, and Yuval Maman.

Update [16-6-2010] Note that the dates to the conference are being changed. Please watch this joomla.org site for further information. The Joomla! project is pleased to announce that the inaugural Joomla! World Conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia on 3 - 7 November 2010. The five-day conference features a series of program tracks to suit everyone from end-users to enterprise-level business leaders, and will bring together Joomla! leadership team members, developers, designers, and users. During the conference, there will be a number of different sessions going on, including: Joomla! Development Team and Community Team presentations Seminars by popular extension developers Flexible workshop sessions Hands-on training  

We are proud to announce the release of the new version of Xmap - The sitemap generator for Joomla!. This version fixes some small errors from the previous one, updates some extensions, adds new functionality and introduces four new extensions.

Our new mooTree List is a little system plugin that replaces your desired lists with mooTree nests. For example, after installing and publishing plg_mootreelist, the following list: Node 1 Joomla mooTree Download Will show like:

We are proud to announce the release of the new version of Xmap - The sitemap generator for Joomla!. This version fixes some small errors from the previous one and updates the Content and Virtuemart extensions. This release fixes one error with the Google News Sitemap, specifically with the language tag.

This RSS feed may have been deleted, purged, or disabled. Please visit Feedity.com to rebuild this feed, or to create more custom RSS feeds.

As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free. :D Sure that can make sense for seasonal promotions, but you could do the same thing by having subdomains and sister websites. Dell.com can be the main site, Dell.net (or deals.dell.com) can be the deals & promotions website, and Dell.org can be the good karma charity site. No paying someone else for brand you already spent to build. Beautiful. But I digress... In October of 2008 Google's CEO revealed which ad Dollars they were chasing, and what loophole they were opening up in their relevancy algorithms "Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." That led to the brand update, and now Google even recommends specific brand modifiers when you search for words like "digital cameras." ...and here is the problem... Less than 2 years after Mr. Schmidt's prophetic brand drivel, the Financial Times is doing a series on Google, in which Google's Amit Singhal is blaming brands as being a major issue: Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By “pointing” to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence. ... Google’s Mr Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition”: where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect, he adds. No mention (of course) that it was Google which put excessive emphasis on domain authority, or how Google gutted the link graph, or how Google funds most of the content mills with AdSense. Those are all irrelevant details, just beyond Google's omniscient view. :D The other thing which is absurd, is that if you listen to Google's SEO tips, they will tell you to dominate a small niche then expand. Quoting Matt Cutts: "In general, I’ve found that starting with a small niche and building your way up is great practice." And now brand extension is somehow a big deal worth another layer of arbitrary manual inspection and intervention? Meanwhile scraper sites are still clogging up Google, and they claim they need to write better algorithms to detect them. It isn't hard to see the sun at noon! If sites which expand in scope deserve more scrutiny then why is there so much scrape & mash flotsam in the search results? What makes remixed chunks of content better than the original source? A premium AdSense feed? Brand?

Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms. Content farms, such as Demand Media's eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry "concern". "Industry" being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being "competitive threat". A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled "Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout". They talk about "job threatened journalists" and "diminishing content standards". Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press! :) The pundits have also weighed in. So many journalists, eh. Looks like an over-supply if you ask me :) Some of them could learn a thing or two from SEOs. For starters, many seem to be working on the false premise that Google returns "quality" results. Since when has Google ever been about "quality" results? Google's aim is to return links the searcher finds relevant. "Quality" and relevance may not be the same thing, and thinking in terms of an arbitrary notion such as quality is to misunderstand what Google does. For example, if a searcher, with a below-average level of reading in English wants a quick answer to a question about the common cold, then who's to say a simple, peer-produced bullet-point explanation is less relevant than a doctoral thesis on the same topic? Everyone benefits when the answer is factually correct, of course, but there's nothing to say the content mill won't offer factually accurate content just because the production process is low cost. If geared towards rankings, the content may also offer the facts in a format the user finds more useful. Google is mostly about utility. It's about providing value to the end user. "Quality" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Let's also not forget Google argue that Adwords - advertisements - are content, which are also rewarded by a relevance algorithm. I'm guessing the council won't be arguing that advertisements can be a form of quality content any time soon. And what does quality mean anyway? And who defines it? I think I can guess what the elitists at the ICSC may argue - they know what it is, and they will define it! Nice work if you can get it, I guess. Solutions To The Content Crisis One solution they offer to this perceived "content crisis" is to create a set of public guidelines for internet content, or an accreditation process for syndicated content. Heh. Reminds me of the SEO "best practices" debates of years past. The result will be the same, of course - they'll end up talking to an audience that consists entirely of themselves. Everyone else will be getting on with the job of producing content. What concerns us is that most of these new content syndicators are producing low-quality articles that are link based,” said Tim Duncan, the ICSC’s recently installed executive director. “They are designed to score high on search. That drives down high quality content. Wikipedia, and white hat SEOs, might not agree, of course. Content can both be ranked well and be highly relevant. This is, after all, Google's aim. Some ICSC members have even advocated reaching out to Google to urge the search giant to tweak its algorithm to give more weight to content quality in its search results Hilarious. I think they mean "any content they think is quality" Perhaps Google can send them a regular cheque each week, too! I suspect money is the true driving force, as opposed to any real concern for editorial standards. Have you seen some of the trash the MSM serves up? Quality stuff, certainly. At the end of the day, quality standards arguments are pointless. Besides the confused frame of journalistic news vs Q&A-style content, the end user decides the level of quality they will accept and pay for on the internet. The real problem traditional publishing and the mainstream media is facing is that their business model is screwed. Their content production costs are simply too high, and they are being undercut. If they think that people want higher quality, then the answer is simple - produce it and let the visitor decide. And get some good SEO advice, so they don't inadvertently bury it. Google Joining In? In a further twist, Google might be looking to join the content mills at their own game. An interesting patent, "Identifying Inadequate Search Content" identifies keyword areas where there is search demand, but low levels of relevant content. That's essentially what Demand Media does. Assuming Google don't/can't get into publishing for every vertical in existence, Google would do well to make this information publicly available. Especially to their hordes of Adsensers ;) How You Can Create A Successful Content Mill Ignore mainstream media journalists and whiners who like to form councils. Understand that Google is looking for relevant content. "Relevance" is, in the end, deemed by the searcher. If there are a lot of searches for "pay levels for doctors" and you publish a page that shows "pay levels for doctors", then you are producing relevant content and Google will reward you. Google are, no doubt, measuring how relevant visitors think the information is, and there are various signals that could be used to determine this. These signals will not come from a council of elitist, self-interested old media. The signals will be based on user activity and user voting patterns. These signals must be scalable i.e. links, visits, timeliness, recommendations, frequency of appearance, re-quoting, etc. Increases in "quality" i.e. content depth and accuracy - will come from end-user voting. If users want deeper answers to search questions, either Google will deliver it, or users will abandon Google and go somewhere that provides it. Perhaps that's what ICSC should do - start their own search engine ;) Having said all that, a lot of samey, lightweight content won't survive in the long run, because Google likes to provide variety in their result sets. Look for ways to differentiate your content. Quality is only one - arbitrary - point of differentiation. You'd be better concentrating on aspects such as ease of access, readability, findability, relevance and freshness. Keep the end user firmly in mind.

Widgets Video content Video games Product comparison Travel eBooks They might prefer to use different labels (so as to minimize fear in the marketplace & slow down regulators), and they might claim that aggregate statistics control the investments & thus they are not really publishers, but they plan on skimming a big piece off of the top of many big markets. AdWords was just the start! Videos, maps & product search...look how Google self-deals in each while managing to call it a value added feature (or some such). If Google collects data, hosts data, sorts data, recommends personalized consumption habits, and then makes small investments in new content from proven past performers (and then give them a bit of stealth promotion on their network)...how is it possible for Google to lose money? (Outside of lawsuits)? Google can claim they are "democratizing" media while showing a string of successful partnerships based on investing using real time data that nobody else as access to. Meanwhile if you are a publisher they are gutting your business model through paying people to snag your content and wrap it in their ads, while they also redirect user attention to the companies and acts they have invested in. "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market... and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that." - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO Note that there was no moral debate on the table. Their only internal limitation to setting up a hedge fund and swaying the markets to increase the profits of their trades would be that they thought it was illegal. How much of the online ecosystem can Google consume before publishers promote other views of the web? One way to fight this sort of strategy is Yahoo!'s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy. It increases short term margins, but in the longrun it makes one that much more vulnerable. Google can always buy the partner of choice and then ride off the free promotion & validation that the acquisition gained from earlier partnerships. Sure adding more noise to a noisy market can bring in eyeballs, but fleeting ones. Death by a thousand compromises. The other is to work in markets too small for Google to be interested in. Or to define & create a new vertical, like Zynga did. Even with as shady as Zynga's founder is, longterm that company is in a better position than Yahoo! is.

In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn't tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location. Words which have a low discrimination value may have a higher discrimination value when combined with neighboring words. Hot and dog might have a different meaning when they are next to each other. As explained in this Wired article: Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.” But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.” The concept of discrimination value also has value outside of search. If you get feedback from an anonymous person on a third party site it gets so much weight (maybe none). If you get feedback from someone who is not anonymous it gets more weight. If you get feedback from a paying customer it gets much more weight. One of the most powerful levels of discrimination is indeed payment. If a person pays you the (typically) you know who they are & they have expressed significant interest beyond what most people will do. I think online business models which require payment from the typical user are not hyped and are not considered sexy because those sorts of models are often slow growth due to the penny gap and the requirement of greater trust to convert. Whereas a programming marketer can hear of a new network (say Pippers) and create 40,000 bogus accounts in an hour. The owners of Pippers can then talk about their explosive growth rate in the media, which earns them media coverage. In turn this increases their ability to raise capital and continue their "growth." But many of the social networks end up being a bag of smoke that will fade because they aim to bucket people as beings in a database and are so broad as to have little discrimination value. I have been reading You Are Not a Gadget and he compared the depersonalization on the broad social networks to the beauty of an oud forum he is a member of. Much like charging for admission, obscurity is a filter which improves the level of discourse. Compare the comments on *any* niche topic site to what you find on Youtube. If you can show me a site which is consistently worse than Youtube (outside of site like 4Chan which specialize in creating campaigns to try to make epileptic people have a seizure) I will buy you a beer then next time we meet. :D My wife deleted her FaceBook account because she was annoyed at some people's behavior on it. Part of the problem with the social networks is that they are so broad and so frictionless that your activities on them really don't matter. As a marketer there are a couple ways to play such networks largely ignore them be friends with everyone use bots As a marketer the first of those options means you are saving your time for higher paying areas, and the second of those options means more people seeing more distribution of whatever content you create. But many of the helpful aids are at best dubious short term opportunistic ploys. The third option means you are one of the people who is going out of their way to make the web worse, but many will. ;) Generally any given month I haven't been on Facebook for more than 5 minutes outside of writing & targeting ads, or approving a few real "friends" and hundreds to thousands of other people who claim to be my friend. But if you message me on FaceBook there is a precisely 0% chance of getting a reply. :) When FaceBook launched Beacon a few years ago they wanted to sell peer pressure as an ad unit. If brands can show that your friends did something then maybe that can help lead to a cumulative advantage sort of environment which has you follow along. Beacon was such a flagrant violation of user privacy that it was quickly shot down by the market. But with the new FaceBook like button, they are trying to use like button clicks to put your name on ads: "Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. "That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time." In the short run it may work, but in the longrun I don't like the concept. The reasons are many. You can agree with one particular thing a person says and like it while being nearly diametrically opposed to their general philosophy on life. For example, when we launched that "How Google Works" infographic last week one of the reporters who wrote about it also mentioned how sleazy and nefarious the SEO industry is, and yet he was willing to promote the efforts of an SEO because it was published on a blog with a sister acronym in the domain name. :D ... Of the 3,000+ people who voted for us likely less than half of them know anything about me, or even my association with the site. You can like one product from a company, but not like their other products. I have worked with GoDaddy as a registrar for years. And I have had no complaints on that front. But they also sell some search engine submission service that I would cringe to see my name promoting. You click the like button once on one page. Years later the business you liked is trading in another area...they moved from remnant inventory to spyware, and you recommend them. ;) An individual can have multiple lines of work. You might like Thom Yorke's role in Radiohead, but you might not like his political views or his solo work. Imagine when someone buys a car that you passively recommended which has a manufacturer defect. One of their loved ones gets killed and you eat the blame. Just like businesses, people change over time. This is especially true in the area of business, where a former partner or friend goes out of their way to betray your trust and screw you. How do likes work with 301 redirects? How do they work when the content of the page shifts from genuinely useful to hawking trash with a hyped up sales letter? A like doesn't have much discrimination value. And it shouldn't last very long. Why did you like something? When did you like it? Who knows. Did you like Toyota right up until the brakes didn't work? After you get out of the hospital, how do you feel when your friend asks you why you are still promoting their products? Did you work for a digital sharecropper overlord like Jason Calacanas who required you to push their junk elsewhere? How did you feel when your friend asks you why you are promoting his trash after he canned you with 1 week notice while boasting how they are nearing break-even and have over 8 years of cash in the bank? Once people experience that will they become jaded and stop recommending things? And if there isn't a backlash against the like button then given enough time one of your friends will like almost anything. It doesn't matter the product/service/offer ... if your pool of "friends" is wide enough then one of them is receiving an affiliate commission for pushing something, one of them owed a favor to the merchant, and one of them liked the merchant because they picked up a tab in the bar last month. A wave of 100 million blond hair 18 year old girls who are lonely have joined FaceBook friending up with the desperate and then promoting scammy wares to them via automated clicks of the like button. And then of course there will be services like SpikeTheVote. Sure a fad might work in the short run, but given enough time and there will be friend recommendations for almost anything. Once the novelty wears of does any of it matter? In time any database record can be an ad targeting mechanism. Will I be promoting some of the products my thousands of "friends" create or endorse by a click of the mouse which changes purpose after the fact? At first online petitions were powerful because they seemed to have mobilized swaths of people. But then people realized that a vote represented nothing more than an automated form submission and clicking send. 2 clicks of the mouse. Not much discrimination value.

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more "move on please" rather than "let's go!" types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign. Competition is usually a good thing, it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to "Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47." Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable. It isn't so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics. Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there! However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low. Certainly I'm not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them. There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists: Business Sports Personal Relationships Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind: The best team is not unbeatable The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they're good. However, it doesn't mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it's quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor's site. You can't win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose :-). Look at is as a learning lesson. What could you have done better? Where could you have pushed harder? Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities? The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don't torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it's a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data - not a bad deal. Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull. So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently. Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox, you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you'll want to consider are: Number of backlinks from unique domains (don't be *wowed* by the total link count) Anchor text distribution of external links Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links) Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com .Edu Links .Gov Links Is the exact match ranking? Is it all big brands? Are there lots of interior pages ranking? The on-page optimization of the site/page PageRank and so on... There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools : SEM Rush Compete Keyword Spy SpyFu iSpionage Alexa We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums. So while you shouldn't ignore the competition completely you shouldn't be consumed by it, particularly if it's just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing. Studying a competitor's on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for "The Fountain of No Competition" promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from :-). And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site's visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance. And so they never got a response. :D It is the same reason I don't use services like AddToAny on our websites. Given that we live in "the information age" it is surprising how little people value data & how little they expect you to value it. But there are still a lot of naive folks online! Google has a patent for finding under-served markets. And they own the leading search engine + the leading online ad network. At any point in time they can change who they are voting for, and why they are voting that way. They acquired YouTube and then universal search was all the rage. Yes they have been pretty good at taking the longterm view, but that is *exactly* why so many businesses are afraid of them. Google throws off so much cash and collects so much data that they can go into just about any information market and practice price dumping to kill external innovation & lock up the market. Once they own the market they have the data. From there a near infinite number of business models & opportunities appear. Google recently became the #1 shopping search engine. How did they respond? More promotion of their shopping search feature. All those star ratings near the ads go to a thin affiliate / Google value add shopping search engine experience. Featured placement for those who are willing to share more data in exchange for promotion, and then over time Google will start collecting data directly and drive the (non-Google) duplication out of the marketplace. You can tell where Google aims to position Google in the long run by what they consider to be spam. Early remote quality rater guidelines have highlighted how spammy the travel vertical is with hotel sites. Since then Google has added hotel prices to their search results, added hotels to some of their maps, and they just acquired ITA software - the company which powers many airline search sites. Amongst this sort of backdrop there was an article in the NYT about small book shops partnering up with Google. The title of the article reads like it is straight out of a press release: Small Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market. And it includes the following quote Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners. “I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.” He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.” If they have all the sales data they don't need to make recommendations. They let you and your customers do that. All they have to do to provide a better service than you can is aggregate the data. The long view is this: if Google can cheaply duplicate your efforts you are unneeded duplication in the marketplace. Look at the list of business models Google publicly stated they were leery on: ebook sites get rich quick comparison shopping sites travel aggregators 3 out of 4 ain't bad. But even on the one they missed, they still have an AdSense category for it. :D

This image might need updated in the years to come, but it does a great job laying out how Google works when you type a query into their search engine. Search is so easy to do that it is hard to appreciate how complex it is unless you take a look under the hood. Which is exactly what this graphic does :D Click the image to get the full sized beefy image :D A side benefit of this graphic is that it should help prospective clients realize how complex SEO & PPC campaigns can be. So if anyone is trying to be an el cheapo with their budget you can use this to remind them how complex search is, and thus how time consuming and expensive a proper search marketing campaign is.

There are so many blogs on search marketing. Then there are so many forums. And Tweets. So much SEO noise, and so little time. So how does anyone make sense of it? The deluge can be overwhelming for the experienced SEO, let alone the poor beginner. If you are just starting SEO, here are the ten areas you should spend most of your time on when you're starting up. 1. Stop reading Blogs/Forums/Tweets/Facebook. Too much noise, takin' all your time :) "SPAM = Site's Positioned Above Mine" - Greg Boser 2. Before you do any SEO, define your niche. What service does your website provide? Who are your readers/customers? What can you provide that your competitors don't? How are you going to deliver your services and make a profit? There's no point ranking well for a business that doesn't work at a fundamental level. "Search is a "reverse broadcast system." In a broadcast system, advertisers spend lots of money to reach a mass audience, hoping to build desire for a product or service. But most of the audience is not interested in their pitches. Search is the reverse. Each search is an expressed desire, something that someone at a particular time actually wants. Advertisers can tune in to the "desire-cast" that’s going on." - Danny Sullivan 3. Set business-specific goals and include a time frame. "I want to make x in 12 months". "I want 20,000 RSS subscribers in 6 months". It's important to be specific. It's difficult to measure goals that aren't specific i.e. "be popular". Never let your ads write checks that your website can’t cash. - Avinash Kaushik 4. Create interesting content. If you know your audience, you already know what content they will find interesting. If you don't, revisit #2. I’m not even sure myself - Matt Cutts 5. Links. You need links Not just the Google-juice, PR-passing kind. Links are the arteries of the web, Traffic travels across links, so all links, crawlable or not, no-followed or otherwise, are valuable. Asking for links from people you don't know is pretty much a waste of time. It's a better idea to create fantastic content, then link out to the popular people who can spread the word. They'll follow their inbound links back to you. Make sure that what they find is remarkable. The urgent can drown out the important. - Marissa Meyer 6. Do SEO. All that stuff you're no longer reading in #1? It all boils down to this: put keywords in your title tag, write on-topic content, make sure your site is crawlable, get links to that content, get people to talk about you. Repeat. We're trying hard to find user needs that aren't being met at all- Larry Page 7. After a month, look at your keyword referral logs. Take those terms and plug 'em into keyword research tools. Create a list of 30 keyword terms that your audience would find interesting. Those are your article headings. Write 30 articles. Repeat. 8. Look at your competitors. Your competitors are ranking well for a reason. They're being mentioned elsewhere for a reason. What are they doing that you're not? Reverse engineer their sites i.e. who links to them, find out what articles they publish and find out who is talking about them, and why. Emulate them, then go one better. Either that, or stop competing with them directly i.e. define a slightly different niche. We are currently not planning on conquering the world - Sergey Brin 9. Get social. Social media is often over-hyped, but the principles, and numbers behind it, are sound. Getting mentioned is the new link building. It's about building connections between people. Google has a problem. Using links as a measure of relevant content doesn't work as well as it used to, so you can be sure Google will be using an ever-more complex set of signals. These signals will involve the connections people make with your site. That's really what Google wants to know - who is most relevant. Consider the many different ways people can connect with you, and enable those connections. 10. Start reading the blogs/forums/twitter. The irony, of course, is that I've linked to some truly great resources and thinkers :) If you've followed the ten steps above, you're 80% of the way there. The final 20% will take a while longer, and that's where the minutae comes in. Keep in mind that some of the most lucrative SEO information isn't likely to be published in the public domain. Cultivate personal networks to get this information. This is true of any business endeavor. Network :)

I just read a WSJ article about how some hotel chains are trying to woo people leaving negative remarks publicly about their brand. 'I Hate My Room,' The Traveler Tweeted. Ka-Boom! An Upgrade! Generally speaking, the idea is crap. In essence they are spending resources trying to make the most unsatisfied segment of their market happy, and rewarding people for trashing their brands with free upgrades & other perks. And so it teaches more people to complain & to find arbitrary things to complain about. Hence the friendly article offering the tip on how to get free room upgrades, with tips like: "Have a lot of online friends or followers. Hotels will pay more attention to your requests." Hey Ritz-Carlton & Shangri La ... we have 10,000's of readers and you suck! Please save my complimentary upgrades for the next time I am in town. :D Does anybody think those leading brands got to where they are by tracking complaints on Twitter? The customers who have complaints actually worth listening to will probably give it to you directly rather than Tweeting it. The people who are unhappy are often the type of people who shop by price and have 0 brand loyalty. And no matter what you do it is never enough. About two days after opening up our membership site (nearly 2 years ago) I got a phone call while on the road by someone who couldn't figure out how to log in. I pointed out where it was. That wasn't good enough. I spent about 6 hours digging through the PHP to try to make the login even more intuitive for them. The next day they asked for a refund because I didn't provide 24/7 phone support. The login wasn't the problem. It was just a handy excuse. The problem was that they were cheap and nothing was going to be good enough for them. And just to put a bit more salt in the wounds, about a week later someone else complained about how the login was changed. FAIL! :D Since then we have increased our price 200% (as we have added more tools, more staff, and the value of my time keeps going up every day) and we still have many people who are happy as longterm customers at a higher price point. In fact when some people accidentally cancel their account I can get 3 to 5 emails in an 8 hour period when I sleep because they miss the site that much. But there is the opposite end of the spectrum as well: potential "customers" who demand a free trial, beg for aggressive discounts, or have 50 "one more question" questions before joining. They probably are not sold enough on the solution to be worth the effort of selling to. No matter what you offer them its probably not going to be enough. Their lack of internal value is reflected into their perception of the works of others, and if they buy from you without being sold on you they will probably ask for a refund, or find a way to be abusive to make you want to can them. In our support suite many non-paying non-customers mark their messages as critical. Whereas the people who are paying customers use a less extreme level, like normal. The levels that people can select are almost a filtering mechanism. Have you spent $0 with us & you mark your issue as critical & you use caps lock & rude slurs? Shift-delete. I didn't intentionally plan it, but our old programmer even built another filter into our business model. The people who join and then cancel right away get locked out right away. We then send them refunds, but this level of filtering filters out a major type of potentially abusive customer. The type who generally won't read or research but will ask 5 different questions 8 different ways each every single day until they have annoyed your members so much that you are forced to boot them to lessen the noise. The person who makes over 100 posts in their first 2 days isn't taking any time to read or listen or implement, so they would just harm your community without getting any value out of it. This leads to my theory of filtering: if a person needs lots of support becoming a customer (or before they become a customer) then they probably are not going to become a good customer. And if you take them on as a customer (or spend any money pushing in that direction) you will probably lose money. The person who sends me an enraged email about "why should I install Firefox" just wasted 5 seconds of my life & will never spend a penny with me. And that is fine. Many of the best companies aim to be polarizing. They pick their spots and define what they do, and work hard to make that market segment happy. That is how Steve Jobs views flash, and it is how Marc Andreessen likes to invest. Find out what people smarter than you are doing and find a way to incorporate those themes into your business strategy. The smaller you are the more polarizing you can be, because you don't have to create something that feeds thousands of employees to be profitable. You could spend every day trying to make any unhappy person happy with your offering. ... OR ... What if you took those same resources that were spent trying to appease the angry and spent them on making those who are happy that much happier? Does the free upgrade go further when it is given to an enraged steroid addicted customer, or does it go further when given to someone who has stayed with your hotel multiple times in the past? Where are they on this circle? The concept to think about here is that if someone is already fairly loyal it doesn't take much more marketing or attention to make them *super* loyal. And then they spread the word. There is a concept of fairness which is preached in school, but you should overweight your business toward your best customers. The person who has been a paying subscriber for years is worth thousands to tens of thousands of Dollars to our future business interests. And for clarity purposes, I agree with Chris that their can be great value in being a guide & helping people out. But angry high-maintenance people are rarely where sustainable profit margins come from (unless, of course, you are a divorce lawyer OR a PR firm who gets paid to give hotels bad advice). From the above WSJ article's comment section It wasn't enough. It never is. :D

Internet success stories rarely get any sexier than the story of Johns Wu.  In 2006, while still an undergraduate research student in neuroscience, Johns started a Wordpress blog he named Bankaholic.com. A one-man-show, Johns used an SEO/SEM-focused approach to build traffic and revenue. Just over 3 years later, he sold Bankaholic to BankRate for a reported $14.9 Million. He was 22 years old. Recently, we caught-up with Johns. This proved to be a bit of a challenge, as he is currently enjoying the ability to travel all over the world. He graciously stopped just long enough to answer some questions about his success and what it takes to create a multi-million dollar website these days. So what leads a guy like you from studying neuroscience into SEO? My original inspiration was the story of Anand Lal Shimpi and Anandtech.com. When I was in middle school, I saw a news report about how he became a media-tycoon when he was only in high school. Since then, I have always been fascinated by online media. In college, I was originally on track go to medical school, but the deeper I got into science, the more I realized that I hated it! I explored some computer and business classes on the side, and in 2005, I started a stock blog called thebulltrader.com. I had a good time blogging and running the site, and a year later, in 2006, I started Bankaholic. After getting my first AdSense check of $50+, I became interested in getting more traffic, and the rest is history! ;) Online affiliates tend to do really well in areas that are either directly or closely tied to finance. Do you evaluate the proximity to finance when considering an area or niche where you'd like to build? Not at all. The Internet is huge and there are tons great niches out there. Is topical expertise required to compete in a valuable market? It definitely helps, but it isn't 100% required. What are specific things you feel might substitute for topical expertise? Being Internet savvy definitely helps. More specifically, understanding how SEO and SEM works will grow your business and give you a shot even if competitors have more topical expertise. Do you like to operate in markets where there is passionate competition, or markets where people tend to approach it with less passion? I always steer clear of competitive niches. Always. There is so much money out there that you shouldn't be wasting your time chasing over-saturated/impossible niches like ringtones and online poker. Let's talk a bit about how you grew Bankaholic. What was your original vision for the site? In 2006, it was the peak of the financial bubble. Banks were very aggressive with marketing so they were paying easy sign-up bonuses to new customers. Any average Joe with a social security number could make a couple hundred bucks a month by taking advantage of these deals. My goal was to aggregate the best deals and create a SlickDeals/Fatwallet kind of site that was exclusively about banking. My vision was to create an online cult of "bankaholics" that would come to my site every day for the latest deals. Great domain name, BTW. What led you to create a uniquely brand-focused name opposed to using a direct-match or keyword-rich domain within the finance sector? Picking a domain name was incredibly frustrating because (as you can imagine) all the good names were taken. I remember the day I thought of the word "Bankaholic" very clearly. I was in the neuroscience lab waiting for one of my lab experiments to finish, so I went on the computer and used NameBoy.com to brainstorm some names. I saw the word "Bankaholic" and I thought hey, this sounds alright...so then I quickly registered it on GoDaddy. Given the size of the sale {$14.9 Million}, it would seem you were quite ambitious and narrowly focused to build that much market leverage so quickly. Were you always focused on reaching that level of success? Yes, after I graduated college, Bankaholic became my life. I knew that I was sitting on a goldmine and that it was my one shot in life to make it big, so I took it very seriously and spent every free moment obsessing over how to grow and improve my business. Did you employ any offline strategies to help drive your success? The only offline strategy I ever attempted was printing Bankaholic t-shirts and giving them out. Since the ROI was so dismal, I never did this again!! Did you have any specific priorities that you feel contributed in a meaningful way to your success? Measure and optimize. You can't optimize what you don't measure. Are you still writing regularly on the site? (One of the current authors in particular seems to share your love affair with culinary treats). LOL! I continued writing for a few months after the sale, but after the transition, Bankrate has totally taken over. The social media scene was emerging as Bankaholic grew, but is a much stronger presence today. Has this changed the way you are approaching new ideas or projects? I'll be honest. I HATE social media. I admit, it can be powerful, but it is so unpredictable and uncontrollable that it is more of an afterthought for my online strategy. I personally would much rather spend my time on SEO since it is predictable, measurable, and (most importantly) 100% profitable. However, Twitter and Facebook are valuable tools because they allow you to reach a fresh demographic that hasn't yet descended into the 'conversion funnel'... So in that respect, yes it is important to have a level of fluency in SMM depending on your niche and business model. If new to a niche with limited resources, how does someone tackle bigger, more challenging markets? Experience is everything. Learn from your mistakes, and don't be afraid to fail your way to the top. Do you feel a success story like yours is something that anyone can do, or what makes the difference? Not just anyone can do it, but there are many who can. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to be a jack of all trades. You gotta be able juggle and excel at many disciplines: creativity, design, business, project management. You can only pick one: which is the most valuable asset for a young webmaster starting a competitive website (with all things being magically equal): capital to invest, passion for the subject matter, expertise on the subject matter, SEO savvy, technical/graphic/content development skills Definitely expertise. If you are a true authority in your niche and you create remarkable content, your website will naturally attract links, advertisers, and business development opportunities. How has the money affected the way you're approaching new business interests? I'm very active in domaining because it is a great place to put my money. I think premium domain names are great for my situation. Since I understand the Internet better than anything else, I know what valuations are attractive. Buying domains also leaves me the option to get into more web development in the future. You've created an amazing "Rags to Riches" story with this entire effort. How does this affect the way you're viewing future challenges? Unfortunately, I have a lot less motivation these days. I am a lot less 'hungry' for success but it's okay... eventually I will get back into my Internet marketing groove. So what's next for Johns Wu? These days, I've just been traveling and relaxing. Once I get the travel bug out of my system, there is no doubt that I will continue chugging away at domain acquisitions and development. Thanks for taking a moment to talk, Johns - safe travels, and here's to your continued success! Marty Lamers owns a Freelance SEO Copywriting company you can visit at Articulayers.Com. Since 2001, Articulayers has been fixing the world, one word at a time.

It's bad enough having to compete with Google's engineers. But to win the search game, you need to out-compete your competition, too! Back in the dark, distant past - around the turn of the century - there was an "us" vs "them" mentality in search. "Us" being webmasters, and "them" being search engines. Back then, in those simple times, in-the-know webmasters gathered in dark forums to discuss and share cunning strategies to crack the algorithms. There was a time when the postings of the secretive GoogleGuy were a big deal. Imagine - a search engine rep actually fraternizing with the enemy! How strange was that! Times have changed. These days, webmasters are more likely to work with the search engines, in the form of Adwords and Adsense. GoogleGuy is now the non-mysterious Matt Cutts, who helpfully announces indexing changes before they happen, even if he is still rather vague on detail. Unfortunately, the collective "us" - webmasters - do not share the same level of camaraderie we once did. As search marketing is now above radar, competition levels have become fierce. It's more dog eat dog. Winning The Search War Against Your Competitors Once we've figured out what Google wants, or we think we know what Google wants, we then need to out-compete everyone else who thinks they've figured it out, too. Typically, webmasters reverse-engineer competing sites. Who is linking to them? What pages are linked? How old are the links? What keyword terms are they targeting? What are their most popular keywords? What Adwords are they running? What meta keyword tags are they using"? ;) Good questions - apart from the last one, obviously - and a legitimate strategy for emulating high ranking sites. Tools like SEMRush provide a valuable insight into what our competitors are doing. BTW: Not pimping, I've been using SEMRush a lot recently, and I think it's a great tool :) However, there's more to it. We also need to look at some other, non-technical factors that reveal something much more lucrative and interesting. Competitive Analysis Competitive intelligence is an ongoing, systematic analysis of our competitors. The goal of a competitor analysis is to develop a profile of the nature of strategy changes each competitor might make, each competitor's possible response to the range of likely strategic moves other firms could make, and each competitor's likely reaction to industry changes and environmental shifts that might take place. Competitive intelligence should have a single-minded objective -- to develop the strategies and tactics necessary to transfer market share profitably and consistently from specific competitors to the company. The essential question underlying competitive analysis is this: "why do some web businesses do a lot better than others?" In terms of search, we not only need to look at the technical aspects of the sites positioned above us, but we also need to analyse the markets in which they exist, what our competitors goals are, their pricing and products, and even obscure details, such as who they are hiring and firing, and why. As you can see, it's not just about getting ranked higher for a certain keyword term. It's about getting ranked higher in terms of overall business performance. It's about seeing what market they capture, and where that market is heading in the future. Once you've figured out that, you might be able to discover new keyword streams that your competitors have missed, and may never think of. Ok, so how? How To Undertake Competitive Analysis It would be nice if you could call up your competitors and ask them exactly what they're doing, and where they are heading. But we all know that's not going to happen. We have to do a little investigative digging. The problem is we don't want to do too much digging, as it is time consuming and can be expensive. Thankfully, a lot of the answers we need are sitting right in front of us. Ask these questions: What is the nature of competition? Where does the competitor compete? Who does the competitor compete against? How does the competitor compete? The nature of the competition is the overall market, and market forces. Take a look at Google Trends, trendwatching sites and other market research tools to figure out where their market is now, and where it heading. Does the market require significant resources? Why are these competitors in these markets? What related markets have they avoided, and why? A concrete example. A few years ago, many SEOs competed as service agencies. Market trends showed that a lot of SEO was moving in-house, particularly at the top end. As SEO moved in-house, demand rose for training. A lot of SEOs are now engaged in training. Ask yourself where your market will be in five years time. Where does the competitor compete?For example, are they limited to a certain geography? Culture? Language? Do they have an offline presence? Who does the competitor compete against? Make a list of the, say, top ten competitors in a niche. Compare and contrast their approaches and offerings. Compare their use of language and their relative place in the market. Who is entrenched? Who is up-and-coming? Who has the most market share, and why? Can you grab some of this share? How does the competitor compete. What are the specifics of the products and services they are offering. Lower prices? High service levels? Do they provide information that can't be obtained elsewhere? Do they have longevity? Money, staff and resources? Are they building brand? Whilst we could go into great depth, the value of even a basic competitive analysis is considerable. By doing so, we can adjust our own offering, like altering price and service levels or by targeting a specific niche. We may slice a new niche in order to avoid direct competition with a highly resourced, entrenched market leader. We might make a list of all the things we need to do to match and overtake that fast rising new challenger. We then position against keywords aligned with the competitive realities we face. There's much more to search competition that algo watching, keywords and links. And many more diverse ways to compete, too :)

In 2008, Eric Schmidt let slip that Google would use brands as a signal to clean up the "internet cesspool. SEOs ears twitched. Quoted by CNET at the time: Web crawlers aren't particularly good at making judgments about the truthiness of digital matter, and the wisdom of the crowd can't keep up with the river of data streaming online. Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool... Schmidt was talking to magazine executives who were concerned about competition they faced from low-cost publishers, like you and me :) Whilst we can't know exactly what aspects Google's algorithms will reward, it's not difficult to see brand factors becoming increasingly influential in search results, both directly and indirectly. Schmidt may be talking about a level of authority that the brand possesses, so is therefore trusted as an "editor", but there may be something else going on, too. It might also be a question of clear subject/topic focus. Establish A Brand If your site has a very clear focus, in terms of brand identity, a number of search and social media benefits naturally follow. On-topic linking, context, and more. I'll discuss this shortly. A brand is more than a name, graphic or logo. A brand is everything you do, from the way your position yourself in the market, to how you answer your emails. Brand is the total sum experience you offer. It's also a collection of keyword terms people naturally associate with you and your site. Whilst it is expensive to create a national or international brand, you can create well-known brands in niches. Consider SEOBook, Webmasterworld.com and SEOMoz. Those brand identities are clear, and I'm sure that a number of unique qualities for each brand springs to mind when those names are mentioned. Ways To Establish A Brand Philip Kotler, Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, identified the steps to developing a brand. Amongst those steps were: Develop The Value Proposition Choose A Broad Positioning For The Product This sounds like marketing guff, but what does it mean in practice? The Value Proposition No one can be good at everything - there isn't enough time and resources - so what is the one thing you are really good at? Is this a value people are willing to pay for? Broad Positioning Kotler identifies three alternatives: the product differentiator the low cost leader the nicher Which one are you? It's possible that a business can be all three, but such generalist businesses tend to be outgunned by businesses that are superior in one way. For example, Versace *could* do cheap items, but it would compromise their focus and confuse their brand identity, which equates to luxury. Here's how to translate these brand ideas into an SEO advantage. The value proposition is based on the demand you identity. For example, if a business owner found keyword demand for the phrase "SEO services in Los Angeles", then the value proposition is: A locally focused SEO service provider The business owner would be suited to providing "SEO services in Los Angeles", presumably by virtue of their location, contacts, focus and experience. The broad positioning would be "niche". A catchphrase/byline may emphasize regionality, locality and accessibility for clients located in Los Angeles. The terminology used in the copy should reflect this niche approach - again, use words and phrases associated with both the service and the locality. When people link to such a site, they would naturally use terms that reflect locaility, because it's an intrinsic part of the brand identity the owner has established. When people talk about this business on Twitter/Facebook etc, they will hopefully use the terms consistent with the brand identity. Whenever people talk about your site in a certain way, Google will surely follow. All the ducks are lined up. Business focus, keyword text, link text and the frame of reference in which people can talk about the business. Simple, right? But how many sites lack this type of focus, and thus miss out on keyword associations? Brand can also be about personality. Danny Sullivan may know a lot about general tech, but to most people, Danny is "the search guy". He gets keyword-rich links, without having to ask. Aaron is "the SEOBook guy". It's hard to not link to Aaron without using the term SEO. Whenever people talk about them, people will naturally use search terminology in the same breath - in their keyword copy, link text and so on, which all flows through into SEO advantages. This benefits flows from having a tight brand identity. The alternative is to be all things to all people, and this doesn't work so well in 2010, either online or off. There's just too much noise. Building a brand is about building a a clear and established identity, and in terms of SEO, it's about being associated with a specific list of keyword terms relating to that identity. Could you sum up your brand identity as a list of keyword terms?

I spoke to Loren from Search Engine Journal today and he mentioned a conference he is helping put together in Los Angeles. The conference is BlueGlass LA. It's on July 19/20 in LA. The speaker line up is pretty awesome and takes a business / start up approach on top of the killer search & social media tactics he will be reviewing. Tickets are only $495, and he has put together a 15% discount for SEObook readers/members. It's seobook SEJ is also running a contest to give away a free pass. Many years ago I got my start in going to SEO conferences at the 2003 Boston SES conference by Danny giving me a free pass for help packing the schwag bags. And on the last day of the conference it snowed and snowed & was a scary snowy drive home. Years later I got to pass the free pass favor onto Patrick (who now has a great view). If you have any questions about the conference, you can comment below and Loren will catch them.

In the past when I claimed that the Google Maps insertion in organic search results wasn't more organic search but rather a Google promotion, I was met with skepticism by some, who argued that Google Maps was just another flavor of organic search and visitors would still be able to go to the end ranked website. If you search for something on Google and click on one of the end URLs you can still visit them, but Google made one step in the opposite direction today. If you click on the map now the Google Maps section lists a bunch of places on the maps, rather than giving you the URLs. You then have to click onto one of the locations to see it on the map and open a pop up area which contains information including the URL. More clicks to do the same thing. How long until Google replaces the URL listings in the search results with links to locations on the Google Maps or links to Google Places pages? It is the next obvious step in this transition. Originally Google wanted to send you to the destination as quickly as possible, hoping that in doing so they would encourage you to come back again. This year Google's strategy has changed to one that wants you to stay for a while. There is no better example of that shift than Youtube Leanback: Jamie Davidson, a YouTube product manager, says that the 15 minutes of daily viewing by a user typically involves six videos, with the conclusion of each presenting "a decision point, and every decision point is an opportunity to leave. We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience."

Back when I got into SEO part of the reason I wasn't too into PPC back then was because I had limited cash, but another big reason I wasn't big on it was because it seemed so simple and boring. Over the past couple years that has changed a lot! Today Google AdWords is far more complex than SEO was in 2003. With that complexity there are additional opportunities for some & additional expenses for others. But keeping up with all the changes is easily a full time job. Noticing that trend, and seeing stuff like the below image, I thought it made sense to try to create something great servicing the AdWords / PPC market. Google keeps controlling more real estate, and if you are not leveraging AdWords then there is a chance your business could eventually get pushed "below the fold" - perhaps not for longtail keywords...but certainly for the highest traffic and most valuable keywords in your industry. Google recently launched their vertical search panels, and to some degree you can think of many of these as what will eventually amount to some form of an ad channel (or a channel which promotes content from premium related partnerships with Google). I am decent at AdWords, but my level of proficiency is nowhere near my level with SEO, and so we needed the help of someone else if we were going to make sure that we had bar-none the best product/service on the market. And so we decided to partner with Geordie to turn PPC Blog into a great membership website which mirrors this one. Off the start access costs $179, but Geordie and I wanted to offer SEO Book blog readers a recurring 30% discount off of that, by using this code EF0 This coupon will work for the first 100 subscribers, and then after the discount will no longer be available. You can join here http://ppcblog.com/member-tour-seobook/ Just like with SEO Book, you can cancel anytime and are under no obligation to stay any longer than you find it valuable to do so. If you do any serious amount of PPC it is quite easy to find a few tips that help you save $5 or more a day, especially when you consider how much PPC stuff Geordie has done (he has managed millions/yr in ad spend for the past 4 years & has brain dumped everything he knows) & how high quality the membership will be. 60+ training modules and a friendly PPC focused forum await you :D

The third reason we really like [eNom] is because the data, right. Almost 10% of the entire web hits our servers. At least 10 million domains. In a world like the web, where everybody is everywhere, trying to figure out what people are doing, particularly in the longtail this is a really exciting source of data. If the domain name data leakage from eNom & BulkRegister is "exciting" for him that means sharing it must be "not exiting" for their customers. One more from the "competing against yourself" series. ;) A few other recent examples: giving away your analytics data, giving away your most valuable keywords, and doing link research for competitors.

This video is a review of one of our online SEO tools - the keyword list comparison tool, which makes it easy to compare up to 10 keyword lists against each other. This can be used to help determine the quality of keyword data sources, to pool data into a handy unified list, or to help understand the overlap in keyword strategy from competing sites when using competitive research tools.

Want to Live Strong? You have to look strong. Start with a nice manly high & tight haircut livestrong.com/business_barber/ You have to be strong. Drink propane. 3 times daily. livestrong.com/propane/ You have to bulk up. Not steroids! Feed the search engines their own search results. livestrong.com/business-don-and-tennas-hair-place_563-326-2277/ I think Google is getting the message on what the search results would look like in a couple years if they let the above continue. Sure they own the search category, but if they let the rot set in too much then people will shift to other modes of discovery. Google realizes that search may splinter - its why they bought Youtube, why the offer a mobile operating system, etc. Google may not be 100% responsible for the above trend. But they will be 100% responsible for cleaning it up. I won't be surprised to see a lot more of this in the near future. Such a shame, as Jason is such a great guy. :(

When Google enters a field sometimes they do so quietly, but when they decide they want to own something there is nothing quiet about their approach. They are not content to pick one niche and one model (the way that Netflix does): Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down. Google wants to turn Youtube watchers into mindless drones who are spared the expense of thought: “If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder. ... “We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says. They want Youtube to be like television, because the TV ad market is far larger than the web ad market, and they already own search. They are desperately searching for new markets for avenues to grow. Google spent $106 million buying On2, and then open sourced their V8 video codec: It’s the “first one is free” approach that a drug dealer uses, and it’s not a “free” play, it’s a “we are the new railroad” play. For one-tenth the amount they paid for that crappy old codec, they could have paid Firefox’s licensing fees in perpetuity, if being a sugar daddy is what they want. They don’t want it. This is a “in your face, Apple” play, and a monopoly play. And in addition to owning Youtube, tons of dark fiber, and their video codec, Google announced their Google TV effort. The person who controls the set top box has the market data. Mark Cuban highlights the gaming that will occur in manipulating the rankings The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV ? Like Google said, there are 4 billion TVs and growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does. but if Google is passively monitoring the network they are far better than a guide. It becomes easy for them to see when their recommendations were not relevant & adjust. And if a network screws them multiple times they can always provide a dampening factor in their rankings. If successful their TV efforts can tear down the walls between different types of content: Google will do what it does, and that’s insinuate itself between information and the user. And the fretting will be minimal. As for the impact of Google TV, this has the potential to challenge the TV hegemony. By blurring the lines between TV and the Internet, Google TV has the potential to destroy classifications of content. No more “TV shows,” just “content.” No more “Web videos,” just “content.” And, once the distinctions are completely undermined, then direct distribution via the Internet becomes more viable. Google TV could replace Big TV as the aggregator, then it just becomes a matter of who offers the fattest pipes. Once Google has the aggregate usage data they can use it any way they like. The concept applies to any market. Economies of scale advantages breed more economies of scale. Apple and Amazon want to have proprietary ebook formats? Fine. Google will assist publishers in creating the default common e-book format. It is not just regular algorithm updates that can whack your traffic. A couple years out these additional content formats will be a big issue for many web publishers because if Google gets a significant sample size & market leverage in any of these parallel markets then some of these other content formats will start bleeding into the search results. And that (along with market competition) can quickly drive margins into negative territory for many publishing business models.

Yesterday someone emailed me this quote "People that pay for things never complain. It's the guy you give something to that you can't please." ~Will Rogers and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage. But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value. What a lot of SEO professionals don't realize is that when they rent text links many of them are paying for their own demise. If you go through a central link broker that operates at scale you are telling them: what areas your business is focused on what keywords are important to you what links you are buying how much you think you will make from the marketing That is fine if you are a huge company with tons of other quality signals which can't be replicated. But if you are a smaller company, what happens when that link broker is also a web publisher? Hmm... xyz is spending $5,000 a month with us to promote that site...well they must be making some good money off it - lets clone it. ;) The equivalent to trusting most your link buying to a single link broker would be doing a public export of all your bids and conversion data for PPC. You wouldn't stay profitable very long with that strategy, and if you share your link purchase data with some of the shadier (and more well known) link brokers you can expect the same result. A friend of mine recently mentioned buying some links and then seeing a number of sites pop up which seemed suspiciously associated with people who work behind the scenes at their link broker. Oooops! Buying links from a central network is not only risky from a Google risk management perspective, but also from a "thanks for the data, fool" perspective.

Now that big media practices keyword stuffing, engage in link selling, are invested in SEO start ups, and are selling SEO services perhaps they won't publish ill-informed pablum when writing about SEO. :D Don't hold your breath waiting on that, but... Now that newspapers are looking to sell SEO services, Google is rumored to be out and about asking them to remove links: We understand that newspapers are currently being contacted by Google and being asked to remove links (especially those placed after the articles have been written – ie comment links and links that are placed for payment in articles weeks or months after it had gone live). As a company, we have been aware that placing links in articles once they have picked up PR is not an uncommon practice in the industry, and we also knew that it would probably come to no good which is why we stayed well away. However, we do have some legitimate links on these sites that were placed as part of a press release or an interview and these are slowly being removed through no fault of our own. So much for all the hard work eh? Google is warning newspapers from linking out and is warning webmasters not to do guest posts. It turns out that any and every link is a bad link in their warped mental model of the web. :D The random surfer must be quite inebriated. And lost. As Google controls more traffic and the value of a #1 ranking increases Google continues to filter filter filter the web graph. The good news is that as Google's view of reality is increasingly warped & their guidelines reflect reality less and less they create a greater opportunity for some competing company to come along and build something better. And for any professional SEO who reads between the lines there is value in Google misleading the rest of the herd. About a decade ago Sergey Brin stated they didn't believe in spam. A decade later they don't believe in the media and don't believe in links. What happened?

Wordstream Review Wordstream is a suite of online marketing tools which cover Keyword Research and Management for PPC and SEO Campaigns. They also offer a Firefox plug-in which we'll cover in a bit. Wordstream gives you access to three free tools: Free Keyword Niche Finder Free Keyword Suggestion Tool Free Keyword Grouper While there are many free and paid keyword tools on the market Wordstream does offer more in the way of integration with industry leading products like Google AdWords and Google Analytics. Recently Wordstream earned the Editor's Pick award in the Google Analytics Application Gallery: Google Marketplace Award Wordstream's keyword data is produced via "blended" data which they acquire from multiple sources. The discuss their data sources on the FAQ section of the Free Keyword Tool. It's important to note that they do not simply pull keyword data from Google like many other "keyword research" tools do. Both PPC and SEO campaigns can fall victim to poor organization which leads to poor site or campaign architecture which eventually leads to poor results as data becomes more and more difficult to accurately manage. Wordstream aims to aid in your keyword research, PPC campaign management, and SEO execution. Free Tools Free Keyword Niche Finder The Keyword Niche Finder attempts to find niches of a core keyword. In this example I chose insurance. Usually, I've had better results with this tool by using really broad keywords. The longer you get into the tail the less associations the tool can perform hence the less niches available for you to analyze. You can choose to have the niches emailed to you (you'll get a zip file of all the niches shown on the screen, not all the available ones so be sure you've got the ones you want, and they come as separate .csv's within the .zip) and you can get started sorting through the niches shown to get an idea of what part of the insurance market you may want to pursue. Let's say I'm not interested in travel insurance. So I click the X to get rid of that and another niche pops up, "uk" insurance. Note the number of niches has gone down and I'm left with a new niche to evaluate, "UK", within the insurance market. So after sorting through the available niches I've narrowed it down to the following niches: So I've decided to pursue the life insurance market so I click on the bucket and I'm shown 774 keywords for that niche. As you can see, there is a filtering option but that is available to paid subscribers. Relative frequency refers to their "blended data" approach meaning the term life insurance quote typically is searched more often than life insurance exam in aggregate. If this is the only niche you want to target simply remove the other niches and request the emailed .csv (need to leave at least 2 active niches for export though). This way you'll receive the keywords you want for further processing in whatever spreadsheet application you use. This tool is somewhat limited as it is a free tool but it can be a pretty useful way to get a broad view of niches available in a specific market when first starting out. Plus, it's a pretty slick way to bounce back and forth between different niches without having to re-query a keyword tool every time you want to look at a different market. Free Keyword Grouper Wordstream's Keyword Grouper tool where you can enter up to 10,000 keywords and have Wordstream group them by category and word/modifier association. This tool can be quite useful when you pull data from something like your web analytics or PPC programs and receive a variety of new keywords back. The Keyword Grouper tool will group using modifiers (cheap, free, buy, etc) which helps you identify new market segments or new keywords you may have been missing out on initially. I think the idea behind the tool is solid but I also think you'd want to spend some time going through your own results to further refine your data. The following screen shot was produced after entering the following data: home insurance 88 auto insurance 39 home insurance company 33 auto insurance quote 28 The groupings are mostly sensible and they also filtered in some modifiers that I didn't originally include but ones that I know are valuable in this industry. Aligning your keywords to your site's structure is always a good idea when doing SEO and this tool can help a bit in that area. The tool (free) is not perfect but it does provide useful, actionable data. Wordstream put out a helpful Keyword Grouping white paper as well.   Free Keyword Tool Wordstream's Free Keyword Tool does exactly what you would expect it to, it gives you keyword data. Their "blended" method of aggregating data can be found here. My Favorite Feature When you export the keywords you are given the top 10,000 sorted from the highest relative frequency to the lowest! Car insurance returned over 45k results and I am now able, for free, to download the top 10k keywords in order of search volume. This is a killer feature for any keyword tool, much less a free one. Consider that: Wordtracker goes up to 1k Google AdWords is less than Wordtracker Even some Competitive Research Tools do not offer the ability to export 10k results with sorting enabled! So that about sums it up for their free tools. I personally like how Wordstream keeps feature bloat out of these tools. So many times you see these keyword tools come out and start making up their own custom metrics which at some point involve: Total number of competing pages Some form of KEI Some made up metric to distract you from the fact that all they are doing is pulling data from Google and recycling it :-( A keyword tool, which pulls data from sources other than Google, has some inherent value as we know that Google's data often has disagreements within their own tools so it's important to have one or three third party sources of data. Paid Tools Wordstream's toolset is broken down into 4 groups of tools: Discover Keywords Manage Keywords Create PPC Campaigns Create SEO Content Discover Keywords Keyword Suggestion Tool A simple keyword tool where you enter your desired keywords and get up to 10,000 results for your search. Wordstream also provides an area where they suggest related words and synonyms which you can easily add to your keyword search by clicking the check mark adjacent to the modifier. The keyword results section offers up your selected results with the following options pertaining to how deep your results will go: 15 50 100 200 500 1,000 5,000 10,000 From here you can whittle down to the keywords you want to add to your campaign (you can add these keywords to your Wordstream database from inside the tool). The speed and depth at which these keywords are returned at are both very impressive compared to other keyword tools. Spy on the Competition Tool Similar to how the Google AdWords Keyword Tool operates, you can place a URL + check all the pages on a website or just a specific page in the search bar and get keywords relevant to whatever site/page you searched on. Where I think this tool falls short is in the categorization data that the AdWords tool returns when you place a URL in their search box. The AdWords tool basically gives you a nice head start into potential site structure options via how they break down the categories and keywords within a URL that you search on. You can use Wordstream's organization capabilities after you are done adding the keywords into your database but I think having the initial breakdown that AdWords provides is slick and something Wordstream may want to consider as they continue to develop their toolset. Enable Continuous Keyword Discovery In a world filled with buzzwords used simply to sell you on recycled products or feature bloat you may look at this as say "riiiiiight". However, this is actually a unique point of differentiation between Wordstream and every other keyword tool on the market. This tool gives your Wordstream keyword database real time access into keywords that are bringing you traffic from either your Google Analytics account or, if you don't use Google Analytics, a custom Wordstream tracking code you can embed on your website. If you make the decision to utilize Wordstream to manage your keyword database then this is a killer feature. No other keyword tool offers such a feature, that I'm aware of anyway. So if you are not overly interested in combing through your analytics reports frequently in order to find additional keywords to target, then this feature will be beneficial to you as the new keywords automatically pop up into your Wordstream database. It's also useful for transitioning these keywords into a PPC campaign you may be managing in Wordstream either as a new keyword to bid on *or* as a negative keyword. So this tool is also handy for being a negative keyword finder as well. Other Ways to Import Keywords Wordstream allows you to copy and paste keywords into your account and initially tag them as either "Paid", "Organic", or "Suggested" keyword sources. You can also download a tool which analyzes your web server logs for keywords You can also upload a CSV or TSV file... So those are the ways you can initially find and upload keywords with Wordstream. The second function of Wordstream's workflow is actually managing those keywords. Manage Keywords Wordstream puts out three options for keyword management: Organize Keywords Find Negatives Prioritize Workflow Organize Keywords At first glance it seems a bit overwhelming, but it's not. You have the following features/options available to you: Automated keyword grouping suggestions on the left side, which you can accept, show, hide, or decline Keywords in your campaign sorted by paid, organic, or suggested (based on tagging you control), new keywords found via your analytics or AdWords tie in, date filtering options, view by keywords that are grouped and ones that are not grouped. The ability to add buckets of filtered keywords to a PPC campaign The ability to use their new SEO Content feature to tie into your CMS and create content for a specific keyword Goals and Action data, available for customization within your settings options Export keywords Keyword Group Explorer The Keyword Group Explorer gives you keyword grouping suggestions based on your keywords. The buckets in yellow are ones which have been accepted by the user as groups and the ones in gray have not been. You can decline the grouping by clicking the gray X or accept it by clicking the check mark. You can hide these suggestions by clicking the light bulb in the bottom of the sidebar. So I'll investigate the puppy suggestion. I click on the suggestions and I'm shown keywords specific to puppy or puppies. This groups all the keywords containing puppy or puppies into one bucket. You can rename the group by clicking "create keyword group" in the right corner. You can also hover over any individual word in the keyword group to delete it and filter out any other keywords containing that modifier. I renamed the group "Puppy Stuff" just to illustrate the ability to customize your groups. So back to the Keyword Group Explorer, turned off other suggestions for now and ta-da, there is Puppy Stuff.   The little arrow indicates the sub-groups Wordstream automatically created with the keywords in the Puppy Stuff bucket (I named this pretty horribly as you'll see in a second). So if you click on the arrow you'll see the sub-groups Wordstream automatically created (I should have left it as Puppy!):   Similar to the main groupings you can click on the check to accept, the X to decline, or the keyword to see the keywords within that group for further grouping and refinement. Hover over a group and see the following: This gives you the top keyword in that sub-group. The stats are as follows: 15.2% represents how much traffic this group could produce, saying the keywords within the puppy stuff training group accounts for 15.2% of the traffic for the main group Puppy Stuff. 16.5% represents the % of keywords in this group accounting for that same percentage in the parent group Puppy Stuff. So this group has 16.5% of the keywords in the entire group. If you right click on a group you get the following options (applies to groups and sub-groups as well) Some of these items are self-explanatory but the de-duplicate option is pretty sweet. Click on that and you'll see duplicate keywords across your groups. This is handy because it really lets you refine your lists pretty quickly and efficiently. You can choose which group to remove duplicates from: Another neat feature is if you click on the jack looking icon in the keyword results you can get options to search Google Trends, the Google Search Results, Bing's xRank, and Bing's search results: You can use this method to keep creating more and more sub-groups if desired but usually 1-2 levels deep is good enough. You don't want to integrate so tightly that someone has to click 17 times to get to an article that could have been easily served on a sub-page within a top-level category. Negative Keyword Selection This tool allows you to search for negative keywords at the group and sub-group levels. It highlights the words that might be irrelevant to your campaign and gives you the option to accept the modifier or deny the modifier via a yes/no option. So what you are saying yes/no to is the highlighted word, not the phrase itself. They also have a checkbox option which keeps potential negative keywords out of this report IF they have previously resulted in conversions (via your AdWords/analytics tie-in data). Once you add a negative keyword in there you can choose phrase, broad, or exact match as negative keyword options. You can manually add negative keywords as well. One option I'd like to see is "add full keyword/phrase or just highlighted modifier" rather than just adding the modifier. They also offer a feature which tries to associate a selected negative keyword with other ones that appear in this report. So for instance, I checked off Chesapeake and hit yes, then I was presented with this:   Prioritize Workflow Wordstream's products play to agency type accounts and workflow is a big part of what they offer. The Prioritize Workflow tool allows you to review workflow information at the group, sub-group, and account level. From here you can: Segment groups with no sub-groups into sub-groups Associate an ad group with a keyword group Associate a landing page with a keyword group or groups Cleanse a group (takes you to the negative keyword tool) De-duplicate groups The columns are as follows: Relevance - A custom score which is derived initially from the amount of keywords within a group and how many visits they have driven. Typically the higher the relevance the more important the group to your traffic levels. Visits - Total number of visits per group of keywords Keywords - Total number of keywords within a group Group Size - If you get the triangle it means you've exceed the group size you set (or was set by default) in the Wordstream Settings panel which is found under the Settings Tab - Wordstream Settings AdWords/Landing Pages - Shows whether or not a group is associated with a landing page or an AdWords account Filthiness - Shows (based on settings that can be modified in Settings - Wordstream Settings) if you've exceed limits set for negative keyword candidates as a percentage of the keyword group. The Relevance field has some customization options: So you can play with this a bit and throw in goals and value of goals as variables as to show which groups are not only driving the most traffic, but are also producing the most goals. Usually you'll find custom keyword performance metrics are not so great because they don't use any relevant data. Here though, Wordstream is using 3 of the most relevant pieces of data when it comes to keywords and keyword importance Actual Traffic Actual Conversions Value of Conversions That was an overview of what Wordstream can do for finding and managing your keywords both on the paid search and organic search side. The third piece of Wordstream's suite of tools is the PPC Campaign Management option. PPC Campaign Management Wordstream's Create PPC Campaign tab takes you right into a nice, clean (dare I say Google like) interface. Here you can pretty much do everything you can do with the AdWords Editor. You can do all of the following here: Download an existing campaign Create a new campaign (for uploading or exporting later) Set your campaign name Set your campaign budget Adjust your campaign status Choose Search and/or Content Network Work with Content Network bids Set a start and end date Work with language and location targeting Assign ad groups to campaigns Interface with Google's Conversion Optimizer Moving Keyword Groups to Ad Groups It is very easy to move one of your existing Wordstream Keyword Groups into Ad Groups. All you need to do is go to Manage Keywords - Organize Keywords right click on the ad group (we'll go with Puppy Stuff) and select "Create Google AdWords Ad Group" Then you are brought to a screen where you select the campaign you want to add it to: Then the group is added to the Create PPC Campaign interface where you can work with just about everything you are use to working with within AdWords. Currently you can only work directly with the AdWords interface but you can export your campaigns in both Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter format. Landing Page Assignment In the same way you export Keyword Groups to AdWords AdGroups you can associate landing pages by simply clicking "Associate Landing Page with Keyword Group" in the Manage My Keywords - Organize Keywords area or in the Prioritize Workflow Area. Adding Conversion Goals If you tie into Google Analytics this is already added automatically added (each time you add a Goal to analytics). You can manage them here and add ones manually. This is managed in the Settings - Conversion Goals tab. So this feature is pretty sweet on the SEO side of the house because with that custom Relevancy data we discussed earlier you can get a real, honest picture of which set of keywords are performing well and perhaps where more sub-groups of that keyword need to be investigated for more content and hopefully more conversions. The goals can be viewed right in the Organize Keywords area and keywords can be sorted by completed goals which is handy when you are refining your campaign. So this is really another piece of their unique feature which we talked about earlier, Continuous Keyword Research. If you choose to manage your campaign within Wordstream it is really a slick set up for SEO (and PPC) and they are looking to beef up the SEO side of things in the near future which is exciting. Create SEO Content and Wordstream Firefox Plug in Wordstream's Create SEO Content feature within your account is a tie in with the Firefox Plug-in. The plug-in is really useful if you utilize blog software for web publishing and especially if you have multiple content authors. The firefox plug-in loads in the left side of your browser and ties into your existing Wordstream database giving you the option to do keyword research as well as create blog entries right from the plug-in in either: Wordpress Blogger Drupal Typepad If you are self-hosting the blogs/sites on WP, Drupal, or Typepad you'll have to provide your login URL and the URL for adding content. You can use your own CMS as well, but you'll need to manually log in to these CMS's/Blogs. The image below shows you how the keywords are presented (in groups similar to the Wordstream tool), the content tie-in to the right, and the keyword options on the bottom: Top Ten Keywords Longer Tail Variations Questions associated with your selected bucket And when you are writing your content the tool will show you instances of the longer tail keywords in your copy as you write it! In the first image the second tab shows "My Keywords". This is the tie in to the existing Wordstream database (your private database) and allows you to start building out your site structure, pretty cool stuff. The "associate content" link indicates that you have not associated a page with your keyword(s). You can also right click on any keyword and get direct access to the following queries:   I stole these images from Wordstream's great piece on their plug-in as they do a great job of showing the CMS integration: Wordstream's Firefox Plug-in A Handy Dashboard Ties it Together In your account you have access to a dashboard that shows the following stats in one spot: Top New Search Queries (from Analytics) My Search Query Database Size New Negative Keyword Possibilites Best Performing Search Queries Search Query Conversions Possible Grouping Options Based on Queries Worst Performing Queries Best Performing Groups Great Wordstream resources can be found here: About Wordstream Wordstream User Guide So What Do You Think? Wordstream certainly has lots and lots of features as well as some nice features not present in any other quality keyword tool (that I'm aware of) such as: Continuous research (being able to bounce from keyword set to keyword set right in the same interface and managing those keywords as well) Being able to research keywords in clusters/groups with a click of the mouse, then automatically showing sub-categories Their database, likely because it pulls from many sources, does a solid job with long tail keywords Using your analytics and AdWords reports to automatically pull in new keywords for you to act on, to track goals on, and so forth is a fantastic feature as we discussed earlier (being able to truly see the more valuable keyword sets within your site's architecture) Overall Wordstream has a robust PPC offering along with a strong SEO toolset offering. In discussing their future plans on the SEO side they did state that they are continuing to improve their UI (which I quite like) as well as continue to add SEO features and tools to their current offering. Their current SEO offering is on par, price wise, with many of the other non-Google tools out there, and offers just as many features as some and more features than others. They have a 7 day free trial available and I think it's worth spending some time with their toolset to see if it fits in with your current workflow. You can manage multiple sites (profiles) so long as you own and operate the sites. You can also get an agency account with Wordstream so you can manage client accounts as well. Each type lets you add multiple users to the account to assist with whatever your workflow needs happen to be. Check Out Wordstream Wordstream Pricing Options

Posted by JoannaLordWe have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes. You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives that you usually discover the data that can change your current course of action. So this post is going to tackle an approach to analytics that is often overlooked and (thanks to Google and their silly naming convention decisions) is rarely used to its fullest capacity. Get excited folks we are going to talk about benchmarking {Woohoo! Insert audience applause here}. All of you excel spreadsheet lovers out there know plenty of ways to extract data and pinpoint specific red flags or recent successes. In fact, most people use analytics to simply analyze the current state of their account. While this is certainly a priority, it really is one dimensional. Instead of stopping there, why not go further? Why not better understand where your data was, and how you are measuring up? In fact, why not use this data to help inform your internal decisions as a company? It’s like an analytical epiphany—“using past and current data to help guide you moving forward.” Glorious. While many of the analytics platforms out there have given us a number of ways to compare historical data to current data, we are still limited to two distinct time ranges (for the most part). It’s great to see those two ranges stack up against each other, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. Without going further you miss the "interaction" between those two distinct time ranges. Benchmarking your data is a great way to discover more about this, often overlooked, gray area. Benchmarking simply means you set a standard at which you compare something else to. When used for data mining, it means you plot two distinct variables (time ranges, metrics, dimensions, etc.) over a period of time and then use these “benchmarks” to infer conclusions when making decisions. You can then see  a more complete picture of your site’s momentum. In my opinion, understanding your site’s momentum is one of the most powerful metrics an analyst can calculate. If you can say with authority that you know how your site is doing and how it will likely be doing in the next week, month, few months, etc., you are in an ideal place. With data like that you can take more calculated risks. *First, I want to throw out a disclaimer—a little over a year ago Google decided to integrate “Benchmarking” into their Visitors tab in GA. This just made things confusing in my opinion. The GA feature actually shows your site in comparison to a {very very very limited} industry pool of similarly {not really} sized sites. There is a lot wrong with the assumptions of this feature, but for our purposes here, when I say “benchmarking” I mean the act of plotting two distinct variables over time to extract insight…not the {ridiculous-I-can’t-believe-they-took-it-out-of-beta} GA feature. The "benchmarking" feature in GA on SEOmoz Okay now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can benchmark your data to hopefully gather some insight into your site’s performance. Know your bottom-line (and your "high-line" –yes, I just made that word up) This is probably the most common approach to benchmarking. It’s a pretty simple way to analyze the current state of your account. You should know your extremes for every metric. For example if you are a company that sells a seasonally successful product, you should know what your lowest conversion rate is for the year, as well as your peak conversion performance. In understanding the extremes you can make better assumptions on how your off season stats are trending. While not the most accurate approach to data mining, benchmarking the extremes of your account enables you to speak intelligently, at any given moment, on how your site is currently performing. Know your ratios & relationships Am I the only one that always reads “ratio” as “radio”? I digress. Knowing your metric ratios and how they relate to each other, is a great way to quickly detect when things are headed south. Often, as analysts, we don’t realize something has gone wrong until we see sales are down. While that is an effective method of pinpointing mistakes, it certainly isn’t ideal. Wouldn’t it be nice to quickly identify issues as they actually become issues? Crazy, I know. Well this is exactly what benchmarking the ratios of your site’s metrics can do. At SEOmoz, we use ratio/relationship benchmarking to keep our traffic stats in check. We don’t just plot out how many visitors each section of the site brings in out of the total visitors; we compare those percentages against each other. This gives us a ballpark value to guide us. An example; “the X part of the site brings in roughly twice as much as Y, which brings in about 1/3 of the traffic as Z.” The great part about this method of benchmarking is you can easily turn it into a visual representation of the different pieces of the pie, and isolate out when things start to shift. Below is an actual example Rand pulled together earlier this week (yes he does that sort of thing for fun! A true data-head!). In this chart we have graphed out the top trafficked pages on our site, and then plotted them against each other to show how they are performing in relation to each other. Also see a larger, detailed version You can see the significant drop in the blue segment (our Tools page), which was due to a redirect mistake we made (oops...Rand talks more about that here). By visually representing these sections, we can easily identify shifts in the relationships, which can guide us on where we should focus our attentions (aka fix our silly SEO mistake ASAP!). Know the norm Okay I know, I know…I talked a whole lot of trash above on the GA benchmarking feature, and here I am talking about “knowing the norm,” but approaching data analysis this way can be insightful. Knowing and using industry standards in benchmarking can efficiently identify low hanging fruit. However, the actual GA benchmarking tab is a poor example of this. Keep in mind that sites have to opt into the benchmarking, so (a.) this feature might not even have your industry represented and (b.) you have no way of knowing how many sites these “standards” are calculated on. Also keep in mind there are only three buckets for website “size” in this feature—small, medium, and large. WTF right? Yeah, since when do all websites fit into those three sizes? What am I ordering a latte over here? With that said, it’s worth knowing the vital metric standards for your industry. If you see that similar sites to your own have a bounce rate of around 40% and you are chilling around 65%, while all the other metrics look closer in range, then you can assume this metric is where you should direct your optimization efforts. This approach isn’t as scalable or as accurate as other benchmarking methods, but it’s definitely worth a mention, if only for peace of mind. Know the limits While benchmarking is incredibly effective for things like trending, projecting, and exploring the data, it’s important to know the limits of the process. It is meant to be a discovery process, not a scientific formula. Just like anything else you take away from the data, it is just an insight, not a guarantee. You are making assumptions based on past performances, and performances change. So one word of caution to all of you data-heads out there—benchmarking is a great tool to add to your bag of tricks, but it is only one of many you should be using. Don’t get so caught up in forming relationships between the metrics and dimensions of your site that you lose perspective on the independent variables themselves. In conclusion Get in there. I mean it, seriously. I know we are all crazy busy, but that shouldn’t translate into a two minute GA log-in, a quick glance at the vital metrics and a few automated reports. Our analytics are meant to be explored. Benchmarking is one of those processes that may take an extra hour or two, but discoveries made during those few hours can be instrumental in guiding your company’s decisions. Confession: At SEOmoz we haven’t always been the best with analytics and tracking, but in the past half a year we have refocused our energies on truly knowing what our users are doing, how our site is performing, and finding opportunities within the data. It’s time consuming, and tricky, and what you discover is not always fun to find out, but it has certainly helped us redirect resources where they are needed. Over the next few months we are rolling out all sorts of good stuff, {the Chrome toolbar launch was just a teaser my friends }. We are using processes like benchmarking to better prepare us for these changes. Taking on new challenges as a company is an awesome thing, but doing it with a little data to steer you, makes the ride even more fun.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. ;-) Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google's Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.   Ask and Ye Shall Receive Whether it's from Twitter, Facebook, email or comments here on the blog, almost every day we get some sort of request for a Chrome Toolbar. We knew there was a high need for it, and wanted to make sure that we didn't rush and put together something unmozworthy. The new toolbar is pretty baller if I do say so myself (which I just did). It works very similarly to a toolbar in Firefox where it displays across the top of the screen, but with the ability to easily drop it down to the bottom of the page as well. The new Chrome toolbar has most of the same features as the Firefox edition, but if you want to learn more... please keep reading. :)   So How Does This Help Me? 1. Search Results Overlay This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.     "I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow 2. Quickly find important SEO information with the Analyze Page Overlay Our analyze page overlay provides quick access to useful data points which include: On-page Optimization Elements – All of the essential SEO on-page elements (title tag, meta description, meta robots, rel canonical) are in one place. Location Data – As local search becomes more important, the value of information like server location increase. Google cache – Want to see exactly what Google saw when it's bot crawled a given site. The link to Google's cache will get you there.   "The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin 3. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain information.   What if I find a bug? Reporting Bugs The best way to report bugs is to e-mail us at customerservice(at symbol)seomoz.org. This is the quickest way to get into our development queue. Known Issues 1. The toolbar overlays some of the page content. We attempted to inject the CSS into the page and push down the page content, but this ended up breaking some useful sites (like Twitter) so we overlay the page instead , but do now offer the ability to display the toolbar at the bottom of the page, which should hopefully help, when you've just got to see the Facebook nav. :) 2. Because of the way the toolbar is rendered as part of the page, it only shows up when the page loads, so if the toolbar is turned on while other windows already have loaded content, you will need to click refresh to see the toolbar. Unfortunately, this is also the case when you open a new chrome window, since chrome shows cached content on open to appear faster. We hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to post feedback in the comments below.   Not yet a Chrome fan? Still plugging away in good ol' Firefox? Well we haven't forgotten about you! You were our first love, and can still be downloaded here.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Oli GardnerThis 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.As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear:  “My name is Earl. My conversion rate sucks, and I can't stop sending expensive PPC traffic to my homepage.” Feel better? You should. You just passed the “unofficial” first test of landing page rehab, and now you’re ready to take 12 little steps that’ll lift you from that river in Egypt (denial?!?) to a higher place on the conversion charts. This is the intervention your landing pages have been crying out for, so take a deep breath... and let’s get started. Study the 12-step infographic to see where each step in the program should be applied to the conversion funnel. (Click to image view full size) View Full size version  |  Download a poster sized version (24"x13") MEASURING YOUR PROGRESS - THE CONVERSION SCORECARD Before we begin, we need a quick breathalyzer test to get some baseline metrics in place and measure how effective your treatment program is. The conversion scorecard can be used whether you’re using a standalone landing page for your marketing campaigns or sending traffic directly to a page on your website (homepage, shopping cart or registration page) - although it is geared slightly more towards the standalone variety. (Click to view or print the full size graphic with the complete set of 20 questions on it.) Scoring your page Answer each of the 20 questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The goal is simply to get a ballpark sense of how good your page is. Then take all of the “No” responses and create a “To Do List” of things to improve on your page. You’ll find some guidance and tips for making these improvements as you follow the 12-step program below. Remember that after you leave the rehab clinic and have made some positive changes to your conversion funnel, you should revisit the scorecard to measure your improvements. View and print out the full sized Conversion Scorecard STARTING THE 12-STEP PROGRAM STEP 1 - Use a Separate Landing Page for each Inbound Traffic Source   The principles of inbound marketing are founded on facilitating multiple streams of traffic. Examples include PPC, email, banner ads and social media. There are two key reasons why you should be using a separate landing page for each source: Each inbound medium has it’s only unique style and limitations. Using separate pages allows you to sync up the visual and tonal qualities  with the source. Email for instance can contain a lot more information that a tweet, so the amount of extra information your landing page needs to communicate is inherently different. Imagine also that one of your inbound streams suddenly requires a different offer (perhaps a 20% discount for an affiliate) - with only one page you would have to show this change to all inbound sources. With measurement comes accountability. With separate funnel flows, you can measure the effectiveness of each inbound stream and focus your efforts on the one(s) that convert the best. Doctors Orders: Start thinking of each inbound source as it’s own mini campaign. You want to have multiple rivers bringing boats to your port (rather than many tributaries feeding one river). Print out the ads for each inbound source (PPC, email, banners, social media) and spend time observing their differences - size, tone, language and visual weight. This will help you design appropriate landing pages.    STEP 2 - A/B Test Your Landing Pages A/B testing is the process of splitting your traffic between a series of pages to see which performs the best. Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com is a fun site that shows examples of A/B tests and lets you pick which version you think would produce the highest conversion rate. On a corporate level, testing helps to remove conjecture and subjective argument from the boardroom and is a great way of understanding your customers (which messaging and design do they respond to best). It should be done as an iterative process - think evolution vs. revolution. FACT: Your landing page can always be better. Just like a plant, it needs ongoing attention for best results. Some online tools/services for testing: Unbounce (landing page platform including self serve A/B) - disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Unbounce Liveball (A/B & Multivariate) Google Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate) Visual Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate) Doctors Orders: Take the plunge and get a tool set up so you are at least able to start testing your landing pages. Then the fun part of trying new ideas and experimenting can come. STEP 3 - Match Your Landing Page Message to the Upstream Ad If the primary headline of your landing page doesn’t match the copy on your ad you’ll be getting a lot of action on your browser’s back button. As an example, consider the following: Bad message match Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro Landing page message: Welcome to Bobby’s Computer Store    Good message match Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro Landing page message: Get 20% off a Macbook Pro at Bobby’s Computer Store Seems obvious right? The problem is that most inbound traffic gets sent to company homepages where the messaging is necessarily generic. Using a targeted standalone landing page is key to reinforcing the customer’s belief that they made a “good click”. You will also get a better quality score and thus a lower cost-per-click from Google AdWords if your message match is strong (this extends to the entire content on the page which should be congruent with the headline message). Bonus tip: If you are driving social media traffic, you can enhance the “social message match” by including an appropriate social icon on your landing page to further reinforce the connection between the source and destination. Doctors Orders: Learning to construct your campaigns in the right order can help you ensure good message match. Start with a concept based on communicating your product/service/offer to your target market. Come up with your promotional headline and landing page content, then work on a series of ads that closely match the headline. If you do it the other way round (ad first), you are forced into building from what might be the wrong foundation.  STEP 4 - Context of Use They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A better picture is one where your product or service is shown being used in context. Salespeople will tell you to sell the fire, not the fire extinguisher - the point being that you need to illustrate the need in order to develop desire for the solution. Effective landing pages use photography and video to provide evidence of how your product or service solves a real problem. A statement like “Our vacuum cleaner is so powerful it can suck up a bag of nails” beside a stock photo of the product against a white background is far less likely to convert than a video showing (and letting you hear) the vacuum cleaner actually doing the job. An example using photography could show a fold-up ladder in two states. Being tucked into a small cupboard by it’s owner, and then extended to show the owner reaching onto high shelves to retrieve something. Simply showing it in it’s intended context of use will improve your sales.  Would you really have bought a ShamWow without seeing it in action? Doctors Orders: Take your product or service and actually use it for real (you’d be surprised how many people haven’t even used the item they’re selling). This will help you to understand and visualize how it should be presented in your photography and videos. If it's an online tool, try observing someone else using it. STEP 5 - Use Videos to Increase Engagement & Conversions According to a study by eyeviewdigital.com, the use of video can increase your conversions rates by as much as 80%. By providing users with a passive engagement mechanism you can keep them on your page longer allowing your brand message to seep into their subconscious. Warning: don’t just throw up a poorly animated Powerpoint presentation - nobody will watch it. If you are peddling a physical product, show people using it as mentioned in step 4. If it’s an online tool, provide a demo of the primary features while narrating the benefits of it’s use (don’t show every step, make it a highlight reel). If you offer a service, put yourself front and center and communicate directly with your viewers. Make eye contact for maximum engagement and make use of directional cues to guide them to your intended conversion goal. Great videos do this by having the host look and point outside the frame towards other elements on the page - bringing the whole page into the experience. Usability best practices say to never auto play a video as the audio shock can make people hit the back button immediately, especially if they are in a sound sensitive environment - like most offices. However, this is something you should test on your visitors. My advice if you want to start the video automatically would be to at least allow a shot delay before it starts, and make the controls very obvious in case someone wants to mute or pause the video. (This is a decent example of a nice pause and transition into video - http://raw.glow.com/dms1825/ - warning: the alerts when you try to leave the page aren’t so nice). Doctors Orders:  If you don’t use video yet, plan to start soon. For online product demos, try recording a screencast using software like Jing. It’s really simple and cost effective. Once you get a feel for it you can upgrade to more elaborate tools with stronger editing and post-production features. Audio is very important - write a script before you record so you’re not bumbling your way through and try to use an external mic for better quality.  STEP 6 - Use Directional Cues to Lead the Way Imagine an airport without the expertly placed wayfinding signs and maps - it would be chaos. If you’ve visited the emergency room at a hospital, you might be familiar with the colored lines they paint on the floor to take you to different departments - follow the yellow brick road. These are examples of directional cues, which can be broken down into explicit and implicit (both of those were explicit). Directional cues are used on landing pages to guide the visitor to your call to action. Here are some examples of ways to do this: Graphical arrows: Take a look at the header area of the lead gen form on this landing page template. When you add a lead gen form to your page, the call to action button is often pushed below the fold. Here, the arrow lets you know that the point of interaction can be found directly below that area. Whitespace: Don’t cramp the style of your CTA. Resist the temptation to fill in every pixel of your page, instead give your buttons plenty of room to breathe. Color: Classic colors for buttons include blue (link color) and orange. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that it stands out clearly from the rest of the page (e.g. don’t make your button blue if your page has a blue background). Contrast: This is essentially the same as the point about color (but thinking in terms of black and white or tonal range). Eye direction: It’s been shown that when using photos of people (or animals), that you can improve conversion by having them look at your intended call to action. It makes sense. If you see someone looking up at the sky while you’re walking down the street, the chances are you’ll follow their gaze in case you’re missing something important. Interruption: Surprise is an excellent way to get someone’s attention. Breaking established design boundaries gives reason to pause and observe. Boo! Encapsulation: Think of binoculars or the viewfinder on a camera and how they focus your vision. You can construct similar experiences using shapes and contrast. Think about archways, holes and windows for inspiration. Pathways: Roads or the earlier example from the hospital floor are examples of pathways. You can use background design elements (lines with arrows generally) to walk someone round your page in the order you prefer. For a more exhaustive study of the effects of directional cues, I wrote a post that uses photography to illustrate each of the methods above: Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages. Doctors Orders: Learn to point. It might be considered rude in some cultures, but in conversionland it’s actively encouraged. Make the intended action of your page as obvious as possible - subtlety is for shy folks. Add at least one directional cue to an existing landing page. If your design is quite restrictive, you can try breaking the visual boundaries by placing an arrow outside of the page edge, pointing in towards your CTA - this disruptive visual tactic can be very effective at directing eyeballs. STEP 7 - Find the Optimal Balance of Data vs. Conversion Rate Lead generation is about two things - the size of the barrier (how long, personal or complicated the form is) and the size of the prize (what you are giving away in return for the data). If these are out of proportion you risk losing customers. It’s a delicate balance to achieve: make the form too long and people walk away from the perceived effort, make the questions off-topic or too personal and you wind up with false data. Conversely, if the form is too short you can skew your leads towards those just seeking a freebie instead of real, determined and relevant customers. It can also result in you not being able to qualify your leads accurately. The other factor that complicates all of this is the giveaway you are offering. If your eBook, coupon or webinar isn’t good enough to warrant the information you are asking for folks will bounce. For a webinar registration keep the info to a bare minimum - name, email and maybe company and role if it’s B2B. If you’re giving away an eBook, it needs to be one of two things: significant in size or significant in it's exclusive data content. Above all, quality is what counts. You can tease people into completing your form to get your super awesome whitepaper, but if it turns out to be smoke and mirrors, you’ll have a lead that’s disappointed and likely to unsubscribe immediately.    Doctors Orders: This is where A/B testing becomes really useful. Set up multiple versions of your form and test them to find where the balance lies. Is it acceptable to remove a few questions in order to get more leads? Does your conversion rate even get affected by the addition of extra questions. Only testing with your target audience can answer these questions. STEP 8 - Be Honest About Your Writing & Edit Ruthlessly Never publish the first thing you write. Unless you are in the business of reportage poetry (I may have just made that name up). Campaigns and their associated messaging need to be refined over time through testing but also through editing. Steve Krug (author of the classic usability book “Don’t Make Me Think”) made the best observation on the subject I’ve heard: delete 50% of your page content, then throw away half of what’s left. Doctors Orders: Try removing 2 sentences from the main body of copy on your landing page. I bet it won’t hurt as much as you think. If you have 5 bullet points, try going with the 3 most important ones. Keep deleting extraneous words and redundant phrases until your copy is as tight as a Scotsman being asked to pay a bar tab. Like everything you change on your pages, you should make your edits on a duplicate page and run an A/B test to verify if it produces higher conversions. STEP 9 - Make it Easy to Share The impulse to share content can be fleeting, so don’t make people work for it. While not applicable to all landing pages, those with special offers or special content (perhaps a great video) - should have a simple way for people to spread the word for you. There are two great ways to make this work: Use Twitter @Anywhere to add widgets that allow people to tweet your offer. Make it part of the contest rules that they follow you and tweet your message in exchange for entry into the contest (free marketing). Place sharing widgets such as retweet buttons on your confirmation pages (see step 12 for more on this) Doctors Orders: Design for your audience. If you’re driving Twitter traffic, retweet buttons are familiar and easy to use. The beauty of Twitter @Anywhere components is that they utilize Ajax style interaction and don’t take you away from the page. Similarly if you are funneling Facebook traffic, add a “Like” button to the page. Most Facebook’ers are logged in all the time and the button will add your landing page into their timeline with a single click.  STEP 10 - Leverage Social Proof & Trust Devices Testimonials work, if they’re real. Avoid stock photos and scripted hyperbole as most people can spot a fake testimonial a mile away. Try a mixture of testimonials that describe how your product or service has benefited someone’s experience, coupled with the enthusiastic style that say “you guys rule!”. I’d only use the latter from a well known industry expert or celebrity. To modernize your landing pages, illustrate social proof by showing your standing in a relevant social network. There are many widgets available that can show how many people like or follow you. Social capital and the herd mentality of network participants can help convince prospects to become customers. Doctors Orders: Ask 10 of your customers for a fresh testimonial and add the best to your landing page. Remember to state your usage intentions and ask for a photo if possible. If you have a decent social network presence, try adding a live feed widget based on a specific phrase or #hashtag search to show who and how people are interacting with your brand. STEP 11 - One Page, One Purpose Imagine a web page that exhibits the same tendencies as a kid with ADD. If your content can’t decide on one thing to do at a time, then your visitors certainly won’t want to take the time to figure it out. The principal of congruence states that each element on your page should support a single focused objective. A good way of looking at this is to imagine a series of arrows all pointing to the center of a circle where there is a big button (your CTA). Each arrow represents a piece of content on your landing page, and you need to ensure that they are all in conceptual alignment. Contrast this to those same arrows all pointing in different directions (conceptually). To maintain focus, don’t talk about other products or services - you can use a different landing page and ad source for those. An exception to this is on an ecommerce product page that provides the ability to add extra products to the cart as add-add-on's to your main conversion goal. Doctors Orders: Try this exercise. Explain the purpose of your campaign to a colleague. Now read the content of your landing page out loud and ask her to stop you if you veer away from the central purpose as previously stated. If this happens, remove the offending content and start over. You will notice a lot more about your writing style by saying it out loud. For visual elements, try writing the goal of your campaign on a piece of paper, then print and cut out the images from your landing page and place them around the goal. Remove or replace any that don’t seem to be in total agreement with this goal. STEP 12 - Post-Conversion Marketing Post-conversion marketing is one of the most overlooked stages of the conversion funnel. The confirmation page from your lead gen form, ecommerce checkout, or registration form is the perfect place to start capitalizing on the positive mood of a newly qualified customer. In the case of lead gen, you achieved the conversion goal of your lead gen page and you are probably going to start sending your new lead a series of email messages to encourage them to step up to the next level. Note that it can take up to 6 or 7 contact incidents to make this happen (according to email provider Constant Contact). To increase your engagement potential, try to add your leads to other channels in your sphere of marketing influence (from your confirmation page). This amplifies the reach of your messages and can be the difference between being heard and being forgotten. Some common examples include: Follow us on Twitter (so they see regular updates) Like us on Facebook (so they see updates and become part of your community) Download our free eBook (to keep your brand in front of them and increase your “thought leadership” score Visit this page (send them to other content they may find interesting) Share this with your friends/colleagues (leverage their network) Bookmark us on Delicious Doctors Orders: Go beyond a simple “Thank you” on your confirmation pages. Start by adding one new link to the page and track how much extra traffic visits that target.  WHAT NOW? Now you have the tools and advice to break those bad conversion habits and rehabilitate your struggling marketing funnel. Did you do the scorecard exercise? Are you on the epic end of the scale or the “I did like, 19 things wrong!” end of the scale? The scorecard is there to provide you with a "to do list" of conversion improvements. Take every question you answered No to and create a personal task to fix it. Then implement a new A/B test to see how well your new landing page fares. SHARE YOUR PAGE & SCORECARD SCORE Show me your landing page and score and see if I agree with your assessment (I’ll run through the checklist too). Good luck with your rehab, and remember, your landing page can always be better. Oli Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by RobOusbeyAt a small or medium sized company, you might be part of a very small team with responsibility for SEO, or you may the only person - and it might not even be your full time job. In these cases, people often tell me that the greatest struggle is finding time and resources to do link building for their site. Rather than pitching your boss to hire a new team member to assist with SEO and link building, you may have more success (and get more value out of) asking for a little time with members of different teams from different disciplines.   These staff may be able to give an hour or two each week explicitly to spend on 'link building', or you may be able to introduce them to the concepts, and help them to build link building in to their regular activities.   In this post, I'll focus on the responsibilities and activities your colleagues may have, rather than specific employee positions, since the person with responsibility for different jobs varies greatly depending on the organization.   I'll also give real examples of tactics used in the past, but collected together for a fictional company - RobTech. This company produces "practice management software" for doctors and dental surgeries; it usually sells direct, and gets a lot of leads through their website. Let's take a look at how different internal activities could support link building.   Sales There's potential to get links from satisfied customers and even people who haven't bought your products/services.   Example: RobTech's sales funnel typical begins with the visitor filling in an enquiry form on the website, then having an online product demo with a member of the sales team. After the demo, people either buy the software, turn it down because they don't like it, or turn it down saying that they like it but can't buy it right now (often because of the cost.)   This third group is often a valuable opportunity for publicity and a link. In response to their rejection, the sales team member replies to say "Thanks, I understand why you can't buy the software at this time. I notice you have a blog on your site; since you liked the software, I was hoping you might be able to do a brief write-up / review for me?"   They also send some screen shots and other resources to make writing the post much easier. Only around 20% actually write a post, but they are from high-quality sites, and always include a link.   Conference Speakers If you company ever attends exhibitions to demo the product, or speaks at conferences, there's a chance that people will want to write about what they saw. The sign of a great presentation is when it was so interesting that attendees are desperate to share it with others - but we can make the process of sharing it (through writing or blogging about the company) even easier.   Example: RobTech's Product Director speaks at five or six conferences each year. He sees many people finish their presentations with a website URL, and maybe even a link to download the slide deck. Instead, he makes sure that all RobTech's presentations are made available with extras. A page on their site contains the slide deck, high quality versions of the images used, full data sources for charts and tables shown, and links to each of the other RobTech resources and white-papers mentioned in the presentation.   He calls this the 'Journalist & Blogger Pack' - it includes a note to encourage people to use and share the contents, but asks them to credit RobTech with a link to the site. It only takes a little time to upload the appropriate content to a special URL each time, but it has increased the number of bloggers and publishers who include RobTech in their 'conference round-ups'.   Public Relations I'm fascinated by the crossover between PR and SEO. You're lucky to be in a very strong position if you have a PR team that is experienced in persuading newspaper/magazine journalists to write about you - but you need to teach them how to use their skills online.   Example: RobTech's PR team began by approaching the two biggest online-only medical news websites, and quickly managed to place an article in both sites. They've since looked at other sites outside the niche, and have received coverage (and links) from a technology news site (in an article about 'The Doctor's Surgery of the Future') and a web design site (which reviewed their new site, purely from a design perspective.)   One PR team member has been spending a few hours a week reaching out to bloggers in different niches to introduce them to a new product demo video; some bloggers linked to it in their 'weekly roundups' and one blogger embedded the video and wrote about it.   Copywriting Many companies have people responsible for writing various official text, from marketing copy, to online product descriptions, to technical and help documentation. There's every chance that they'd appreciated the opportunity to spread their wings and write something for you to help with SEO, so introduce them to the concept of linkbait, and see if they can come up with anything.   Example: The girl who manages the knowledge base for RobTech (basically a very dry list of error messages and how to resolve them) came up with the idea of 'The Top Six Moments of Dr Nick Riviera', which was simply ten embedded YouTube videos, but got to number one on Reddit, and received a lot of links. The guy who writes technical descriptions for the website wrote a short page about "Ten things you don't want to hear your dentist say (while he's peering into your mouth.)" which was well received by bloggers and got a few good links.   Personnel / Human Resources There's a big opportunity for larger companies that are regularly recruiting, since many job ad sites allow links to be included in adverts.   Example: RobTech have updated the standard template for their job adverts; alongside the request to email your CV and cover letter to the HR Director, they also say 'find out more about the company and what's it's like to work here on our recruitment page.' A fair number of these links are nofollow-ed, but a good number do pass value - and this change came from just a 15 minute conversation with two people who'd never heard of SEO before, so the ROI here was technically awesome.   Procurement If you take use the products or services of other online companies, ask them if you they'd be interested in you writing a case-study or testimonial for them.   Example: RobTech used a local removal firm to help the relocate the office last year. They wrote a few sentences about how pleased they were with the service, which the company now uses on the front page of their website, including a link to the site. The company also uses a specialist web service to encrypt and store private patient data; that company's site now has a full case study about how RobTech uses the service, which includes a couple of deep links to useful landing pages.   Designers & Creatives If your company has creative employees that aren't being fully utilized, there's often an opportunity for them to create link-worthy content.   Example: After the new website had launched, RobTech's designer had a few days free. She took some of the rejected designs that weren't used for the site, had a developer turn then into HTML files, and offered them up as free downloads. The page has received a significant number of links from free CSS template sites; they've since added a collection of free vector images which did very well on DesignFloat.   Although the links are not from their target niches, they've usefully contributed to the site's authority.   Corporate Social Responsibility If your organization gives donations of money or time to charities, or undertakes other 'CSR' initiatives, don't just be satisfied with the 'cosmic karma' this provides. Find the person who manages this for your company, and show them how to turn it into 'link karma' as well.   Example: RobTech gives an annual donation to local dog shelter (the CEO is an archetypal 'dog person') - and the shelter now has a badge in their sidebar, thanking the company for their donation. Even more successful has been the 'technology recycling' drive the company runs one weekend each year. This year they put up a page on the site about the event, which received links from a variety of local sites, including the mayor's website.   Summary Many of these example might not be exactly appropriate to your organization, but I hope that you can see at least a few opportunities to bring more employees into your own ad-hoc link-building team. Figure out who you'd like to be involved, and speak to a boss today about getting them to free up just a little time to help do your bidding.    Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishToday, instead of playing in the uber-rare Seattle sunshine, I spent the day polishing off the PRO Training seminar schedule and it looks amazing. I'm excited to see these sessions myself (and I rarely sit through presentations). Check it out for yourself below; if you're inclined and available, we'd love to see you.Oh, and don't worry, I'm not cruelly sharing when we've already sold out. We still do have some seats left. Dates are Monday & Tuesday August 30th + 31st with the tools training half day Wednesday, September 1st. However, I would strongly urge you to register soon, as we've sold out by early August in each of the past 4 years.Top 5 Ways Our PRO Seminar is Different"Tips" Focused Content Many sessions that I attend have discussions and opinions as featured content. Although I think that can be great, our focus is 100% on providing value you can apply back to your sites + campaigns immediately. I've talked to every speaker and reviewed every outline - the sessions at our seminar are exclusively focused on making you smarter, faster and better at your job.Single-Track, Deep Dives by Only the Best Speakers Rather than panels of 2, 3, 4 or more speakers on an hourlong session, we have only a few sessions each day, enabling us to pick only the most talented, compelling speakers for our event. You can't pitch to speak at SEOmoz - it's by invitation only and those invites come because we've seen you speak many times and been seriously impressed. There are only 14 speakers in total at the event and every one is an oustanding presenter - we know because we've watched them.The Same Incentives for all Participants At many events, the real revenue comes from sales of booths, promotional materials or sponsored sessions. SEOmoz has none of these. Our primary goal with the PRO Training isn't to make money (being fully TAGFEE; this year, we anticipate the seminar to generate less than 4% of our gross with relatively slim margins), but to spread knowledge of SEO in a deep, meaningful way and meet many of our community members in person. We also pay for our speakers' transportation and hotels so they don't have the burden of selling to recoup travel costs.Less than 1/2 the Price of Other Events With a PRO membership, the event costs just $649. Add in a hotel for 2 nights and a flight from most US locations and it's still less than a single ticket to many of the larger conferences (e.g. the on-site price for Web 2.0 NYC or SES SF is $1,995).No Vendors, Pitches, Booths or SalesThere's no expo hall, no sponsors, no SWAG in a bag, no salespeople seeking to close a deal at lunch, nada. This event is about learning from experts, networking with peers and coming home with phenomenal, actionable information.The Full PRO Training ScheduleMonday, August 29th9:00am - 9:45am: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP The expansion of new results types in the search result pages has SEOs asking if traditional rankings are dead. They're not, but there are a whole lot more opportunities to get SEO traffic. In this session, Rand Fishkin explores the world of real-time, social, news, images, video & expanded listing results with specific recommendations for how to get included, stand out and win clicks.9:45am - 10:30am: How to Win Rankings and Influence Competitive Local/Maps Results As Google Maps and the 3/7/10-pack results have become more competitive, SEOs have been thinking less about the question "what are the local ranking factors?" and more about "how do I get maximum visibility in local results?" David Mihm explores the answers with specifics about how to draw eyeballs and clicks from the maps listings.10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Break10:45am - 11:45am: The Science of Twitter Success What makes some Twitter updates spread across the web while other languish in obscurity? Hubspot's Dan Zarrella examines the science of tweets, retweets and clicks and provides specific, actionable tactics for how to improve the results marketers derive from promotion of their content on Twitter.11:45am - 12:30pm: Presentation Off: How to Pitch SEO Distilled's esteemed director, Will Critchlow, has never lost against Rand, but they've also never faced off in the US. Watch Rand and Will on SEOmoz's home turf as they break down how to pitch SEO internally to your team/managers or externally, to a potential client. Specific strategies of how to win the battle for marketing dollars will rule the day. Voting to be determined by a show of hands immediately following the presentations.12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch1:30pm - 2:00pm: Earning Direct ROI on Social Media Social media tends to send traffic that clicks once, visits fast and leaves without much engagement. Yet, we know that over time, these branding touchpoints and positive references can lead to awareness, influence and, ultimately, conversion. In this session, SEOmoz's community manager, Jen Lopez, shows real life examples of how social media can lead directly to conversions. She'll also cover how to track clicks to and conversations about your site/brand that happen across the web and map these to the metrics that predict web success.2:00pm - 2:45pm: Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO Large sites frequently struggle against indexation, navigation and organization issues. In this session, Marshall Simmonds, chief search strategist for the NYTimes, About.com, and many other large content-based sites will present solutions for effectively analyzing the problems inherent with large sites, identifying solutions and implementation. Specific topics include controlling faceted navigation, creating index-worthy category and sub-category pages as well as XML sitemap & internal link optimization.2:45pm - 3:00pm: Afternoon Break3:00pm - 4:00pm: Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO You're familiar with optimizing for a keyword by placing it on a page and acquiring anchor-text targeted links, but this session goes in a completely different direction. We'll be pulling back the curtain on a new way to rank higher, and a process to do it! Led by Ben Hendrickson, SEOmoz's Senior Scientist, this session will go heads down in the math and science of how search engines crawl, index and rank web pages.4:00pm - 4:30pm: Constructing Effective SEO Audits As the director of consulting at SEOmoz, Lindsay built dozens of audits for clients like Microsoft, Etsy, SimplyHired and more. In this presentation, she'll share her methodology for delivering a site audit that clients and managers will appreciate and actually use!4:30pm - 5:30pm: Conversion Rate Optimization One of the web's foremost experts in conversion rate optimization, Tim Ash will be sharing case studies and specific tips for how to make more of the visitors who click into customers.Tuesday, August 31st9:00am - 9:45am: 10 Sites the Earned Amazing Links: How they Did It & What we Can Learn Sometimes, the best way to learn is through direct observation. In this session, Rand will walk through 10 sites that achieved top rankings through remarkable link acquisition strategies. He'll explore not just where they earned links, but why those links were created and what other SEOs can take away from the success stories.9:45am - 10:30am: Reverse Engineering Your Competitors' Rankings Why does that page rank above yours? Until you know the answer, you're optimizing in the dark and potentially wasting massive amounts of time, energy and resources on metrics that won't move the needle. In this session, Wil Reynolds, head of digital agency Thinkseer, walks through their process for strategically de-constructing the search results, determining the keys to ranking and executing on those metrics.10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Break10:45am - 11:30am: Manual Link Building: That's Right; It Still Works Picking up links one-by-one may not be highly scalable nor incredibly fun work, but it does work. In this session, Distilled Consulting head of US operations, Rob Ousbey, walks through the power and process of manual link building. If you're ready to put your shoulder to the grindstone, you can have a serious impact on your business with these tactics.11:30am - 11:50am: Top 10 Tips for Community Building The power of user-generated-content and user engagement to build up a site's reach, branding and SEO is phenomenal. SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin walks through his top tactics for attracting an engaged audience.11:50am - 12:10pm: Top 10 Tips for Blogging Blogs are still one of the most powerful ways to build content, draw in links, grow your branding & attract new customers. Ian Lurie, founder of Portent Interactive and Conversation Marketing has a list of unbeatable tips to maximize the value you get from blogging.12:10pm - 12:30pm:Top 10 Tips for Paid Search Optimization Paid search will draw in $25 billion dollars in the US alone this year - a lot of that won't make much of an ROI. Joanna Lord wants to make sure that doesn't happen to you. Join her as she walks through 10 amazing tips to get high value out of paid search without spending a fortune.12:30pm - 1:15pm: Lunch1:15pm - 2:00pm: Designing Your SEO Strategy Formerly the head of technical marketing at Yahoo!, Laura Lippay's responsibility included managing SEO across dozens of the web's most visited sites. In this session, she shares her process from years of experience and her popular blog series on SEOmoz covering the design and execution of an SEO strategy.2:00pm - 2:45pm: Advanced Keyword Selection + Targeting The basics of keyword research are well known, but discovering terms and phrases that are on the verge of becoming popular, in the middle or tail of the demand curve or have cyclical demand can be a huge advantage for your website. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search for Distilled, presents killer tips on how to select the right keywords and use them in the right ways to maximize your search traffic potential.2:45pm - 3:30pm: The End of Analysis Paralysis: Tracking What Matters & Ignoring the Rest Too often, the overwhelming quantity of data we get from tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, Conversion Rate Tracking + Testing Software can overwhelm us. SEOmoz's Joanna Lord is here to put an end to the overload and give striking examples of how to build an analytics dashboard that records what matters and ignores what doesn't so you can make the right decisions about what to invest in.3:30pm - 3:45pm: Ice Cream Break3:45pm - 4:30pm: How to Make SEO Data Reporting Sexy Ready to take your data visualization skills to the next level? Join Distilled's Will Critchlow as he remakes the tedious process of SEO reporting on keywords, links, traffic and SERPs into something not only beautiful, but useful and ready to apply to the real world. Your clients & managers will be head over heels when they see the amazing, actionable data visualizations you present.4:30pm - 5:30pm: No More Secrets: SEO Veterans Spill the Goods on Tactics that Work 6 Expert Practitioners of SEO will share their most powerful & actionable tips for all things web marketing. If you're seeking an unfair advantage over the competition, listen closely - it doesn't come any better than this. Join Ian Lurie, Will & Tom Critchlow, Laura Lippay, Wil Reynolds & Todd Friesen for a remarkable session.7:00pm - 12:00am: SEOmoz Annual Garage Party! Bowling, billiards, beer and more! Don't miss our favorite party of the year, replete with free drinks, food and entertainment.Wednesday, September 1st (Tools Training)9:30am - 10:30am: A Deep Dive Into Link Research w/ Linkscape, Open Site Explorer & Keyword DifficultyThese three tools comprise the most powerful resources available for advanced link exploration, algorithm reversing and competitive analysis. In this hour, Rand Fishkin shows how to apply the full spectrum of data to strategize, measure and acquire links.10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Coffee Break10:45am - 11:45pm: Getting the Most from the New (REDACTED UNTIL LAUNCH)Obviously, I can't provide a description without giving too much away. Needless to say, though, it will be big :-)11:45pm - 12:15pm: Adding Value to Your SEO w/ Q+A, the mozBar + SEOmoz LabsRand walks through the best practices and some hidden ways to employ PRO membership utilities from Labs, Q+A and the mozBar. There's a lot of information and functionality to be found here and with Ran'd guidance, you'll be able to get maximum value from these products.12:15pm - 1:00pm: A Sneak Peek Into SEOmoz's Product Roadmap & Call for SuggestionsJoin Adam Feldstein, head of Product at SEOmoz and Rand Fishkin, CEO, for a look at the product roadmap for SEOmoz over the next 6 months. We'll be soliciting your feedback, too, so please come ready with your ideas!Bonus: Oilman is Our MC!We've employed copious quantities of beer, cookies and B-rated action movies on DVD to compel Todd Friesen, aka Oilman, to MC the event for us. We're honored to have Todd run the show, make sure our panelists stick to their time slots and badger anyone who tries to hold back critical information. In exchange, he's promised to wear his pearliest white hat and make sure every attendee has a phenomenal experience.That smile means he's up to something... (via jenn.matthews)Thanks Todd! We're showing our appreciation by bolstering your follower count on Twitter.Looking forward to seeing many of you at the PRO Seminar and showing off our big August launch too!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover Guess who's back. Back again. Danny's back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week's Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won't see coming! See my stats for this video   Embed Video:   Apply for an Internship Leverage Start-ups - Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can't afford to pay people :-) Use the "Godfather Approach" - Make the company an offer they can't refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,) Dive Right In Build Test Sites - After reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms. Offer to Help Charities - Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering. Create a New Niche Leverage What You Already Know - Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche. Educate Others For Free - Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn. Join the Community Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences - Get your name out and build your network by participating online. Take Advantage of Osmosis - Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place. Follow me on Twitter, Fool! or Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt) If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by richardbaxterseoBuilding a solid foundation in your site architecture using search engine friendly navigation is a founding principle in good search engine optimization, but what does that actually mean, and what recommendations can you make to enhance your clients (or your own) SEO?   In this article, we’ll look at a few examples of well coded, search friendly navigation and look at ways to enhance your site architecture for SEO.   Technically speaking   What makes for a spider friendly navigation? In today’s out of the box CMS world, most navigation is already pretty SEO friendly, but just every now and again you come across a real car crash of a navigation that needs rebuilding from scratch.   If you’re reviewing a website with a suspect navigation (or "dodgy", as my friends in the US love to hear me say), you’ll probably see some of the following signs:   -          No drop downs work with JavaScript disabled -          Global / header links are image based rather than text -          A heap of internal links disappear when you’re browsing the site with JavaScript and CSS disabled -          The SEOmoz toolbar reports a lower than expected number of internal, followed links -          The Google cached, text only version of your page is missing those precious internal links too    Search engine friendly navigation requires only properly structured HTML combined with  CSS for all the fancy bits. Technically speaking, if you’re specifying a new navigation for your website, you should be asking for a "cross-browser drop-down cascading validating menu". Can you say that 5 times in a row?   The HTML is fiendishly simple, and you should be looking out for something like this unordered list of links in the cached (text only) or CSS / JavaScript disabled view of your web page: Home About History Team Offices Services Web Design Internet Marketing Contact Us United Kingdom France USA Australia If you want to see a great list of examples you’d be well advised to bookmark CSSplay.co.uk’s CSS menus page and, while I was researching this post, this CSS styled paginated navigation caught my eye, via this post. If you want to see a live example, take a look at this site with JavaScript and CSS disabled in Web Developer Toolbar:         There are so many other examples out there; I think I spent more time clicking around the interwebs than I did putting this post together! If you have some good examples of amazing, search engine friendly navigation be sure to add them in the comments.   Using CSS navigational elements for SEO   Drop down menus needn’t always be “drop down”, as such. Think about it – have you ever had a problem where design wise, it was too difficult to increase the number of internal links you have in a navigational section on your website? Next time you’re in that situation, think about how you might use this approach to increase the number of links on your pages.   Interested in testing this for yourself? Take a look at these navigational ideas:   -          View all hotels in Prague -          See events within 500m of this location -          See more case studies on CRM -          See all flights to Turkey-          Other users also bought / most popular products in this category-          List the top 6 countries by continent (see example below) Breadcrumb navigation that expands with a CSS drop down:A simple example expanding a list of options for a user searching for flights:Improving your navigation can have a positive impact on your site architecture. By making sure these fundamentals are covered, you can build your marketing efforts on a solid foundation knowing your website is crawlable and super-friendly to search engines. What are your favorite examples of great navigation?Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishAnother great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled "Startup Competitive Advantages that Work." It's definitely worth a read, even if you're not at a startup. As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn't help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we're in - domination of the organic search results - can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it. The core of Jason's post is below: The first step is admitting you have a problem. Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven't already. To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don't have an "edge" just because you're passionate, hard-working, or "lean." The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought. Like what? And he's got a number of terrific answers, but SEO, and more broadly, phenomenal organic web marketing, isn't among them. Before I tackle why I think it belongs there, let me explain the difference between "good" SEO and defensible, "competitive advantage" style SEO. "Good" SEO means You have a solid quantity of unique, quality content that users and customers will find useful. Your pages and links are crawlable, indexable and generally search friendly. You've done your homework with keyword research and update it regularly (monthly - quarterly) as new terms/phrases rise/fall in demand. You've engaged in some decent link acquisition campaigns, garnering links from a few authorities in your industry, some blogs, maybe a few article sites, press releases, link exchanges and the like to the point where you have similar metrics to your competition. You've engaged in social media and have profiles on the major sites, have a few tweets every week that point to your site and a few hundred fans on Facebook. In other words, you've followed best practices, done the "right" things and while an SEO audit might reveal some missed opportunities and an error here or there, you'd generally come away with an "A" on your SEO report card. "Competitive Advantage" SEO means Your site produces content people love to visit and love to share in a scalable, hard-to-replicate way Your on-site SEO is "best of breed." Note: This isn't much different than good SEO - on-page/on-site optimization is unlikely to ever be a competitive advantage. Your keyword research is baked into the content generation process. The material your site produces fulfills keyword demand just as, or even before it exists by tapping into the subconscious of the web and the culture of ideas/questions in your industry/niche. Website owners and content creators have a powerful psychological incentive to link to your work frequently, just as those who participate/contribute to the social web are incented to share via their network of choice. Some Examples of "Competitive Advantage" SEO Sites: StackOverflow Yelp Wikipedia LinkedIn Mashable Last.fm NY Magazine Amazon Cheezburger Network Wordpress AllRecipes SmashingMagazine All of these have content pouring out of them, generated rapidly, scalable, and in time with query demand. They have broad networks of patrons and participants that incent the spreading and sharing of their content through links and social networks. They employ content+SEO+sharing in a high-return equation that's nearly impossible for competitors to match. I'll illustrate: That's not to say they can't be beaten, but runner B (a new competitor) is going to have to go dramatically faster than runner A (the market leader) if they want to catch up before runner A sees them coming and turns up the jets. SEO Can Be a Competitive Advantage This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages. It's massively hard to duplicate It's prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines) It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so) It's certainly not the only option, but it can have a dramatic impact. If you're starting a company, starting an SEO campaign or just want to renew your vision for how your site will go from ranking for a few keywords to becoming a dominant market player, it's, at the least, a strategy worthy of consideration. p.s. If you're interested in some more practical SEO advice this morning, my slide deck from the Blueglass LA conference - Strategic SEO Link Analysis - may be able to scratch that itch.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishIt's that wonderful time of the month again! Linkscape, SEOmoz's web index powering our mozbar, API, Open Site Explorer, the classic Linkscape tool and many features in Labs and elsewhere pushed out new data (over the weekend) from a web crawl that ended earlier this month. There's lots of fresh info to explore on your sites, including new links and metrics, but I wanted to show off some spiffy new features, too.First up, by popular request, we've got a calendar of Linkscape updates available on the API Wiki:This should be updated regularly with ETAs for new Linkscape updates and as promised, we're sticking to our schedule of new data every 4 weeks.Next is a picture of how the web looked in our latest crawl. For those of you who, like me, geek out on data about the web, this stuff is pretty cool:_I also grabbed some information about the use of internal vs. external links and usage of nofollows & rel=canonical tags:Percent of Pages with Rel=Canonical: 4.63%Percent of Links that are External vs. Internal: 15.2% External vs. 84.8% InternalPercent of Links that use Rel=Nofollow: 2.08%Percent of Internal Links w/ Rel=Nofollow: 1.44%Percent of External Links w/ Rel=Nofollow: 5.67%Last, but certainly not least, we've got some great new calls in the API to request data. You can see a visualization of just a few of these below:In speaking to lots of users of our Linkscape data, I hear the following requests, all of which are on our roadmap:Historical data - show the links I've gained/lost since the last indexHistorical data - show my link counts and metrics from the last 6-12 months of index updates (this is challenging, as what we crawl changes month to month, but we believe we've got a workable solution coming by Q4)IP Address / Origin Country - show the country and IP address of the link sourceFresher & Faster Updates - this should be arriving by Q3 of this year, as we move to a more recursive model with fresh data updating possibly as quickly as every 1-2 weeks, while the larger, less-change prone portion of the index updates only 1X per month or twoDeeper Crawls on Large Domains - also on its way for Q3Text Surrounding the Anchor - another project in the works; we're first testing to see if it has correlation/impact on rankings (this should be exciting research)If you have a feature or request that's not listed, please let us know! We want to make sure you're getting all the link information you need with the highest possible freshness and quality.A big thanks to Kate, Ben, Chas & Phil from SEOmoz's engineering team, who put effort into this month's update.Do you like this post? Yes No

We've released a new version of iJoomla SEO with the following changes: The ad has been removed from the settings page, as many people requested Links have been added to each feature’s video tutorial A bug we found in the redirects feature has been s ...

We all love Joomla because it's such an awesome CMS with a ton of great extensions and templates. But it’s not always easy to use and there are times when even the most experienced developer runs into trouble. So when problems crop up, what do you do? Joomla.org has an active forum that can be pretty helpful, and other third party develope ...

We've just released iJoomla RSS Feeder for Joomla 1.5. Users of Joomla 1.5 will need to keep the Legacy mode turned off, and we're still in Beta so if you find bugs, do let us know. Post them on the forum and we'll get squishing.  

use-after-free

several vulnerabilities

integer underflow

insufficient input sanitising

several vulnerabilities

several vulnerabilities

buffer overflows

buffer overflow

denial of service

several vulnerabilities

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. First you need to download .deb package from here now you need to install this .deb file by double clicking on it or using the following command sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb If you see [...]

But for some reasons the cookie-management has only 3 modes, without the ability to define whitelists or blacklist with specific domains, probably the google-boys knows who would be blacklist-chartleader. However, for me this is a knock-out criterion and as I couldn’t find a better solution, here is a quick and dirty workaround for a domain-blacklist, [...]

If you forgot your root password for your debian server use the following procedure to reset. Boot to the GRUB menu. Then, press (for edit) before Linux has a chance to boot. Using your keyboard arrow keys, move the cursor down a line or so, and press (for edit) again, you should now [...]

Learn the basics of the Linux operating systems. Get to know what it is all about, and familiarize yourself with the practical side. Basically, if you’re a complete Linux newbie and looking for a quick and easy guide to get you started this is it. You’ve probably heard about Linux, the free, open-source operating system [...]

The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind of work environment, from a desktop PC to the sever facilities of a big company. In this ebook “The GNU/Linux Operating System”, the main contents are related with system administration. You will learn how to install and [...]

The Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible is a guide that’s both great for Linux initiates, and invariably useful for Linux intermediates. With over fifty pages of copy-paste tutorials, this guide belongs in the virtual library of every Linux user. The Incredible Guide to Ubuntu (Karmic Koala) The Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible is a guide that’s both [...]

This guide is designed to be as user-friendly and easy to follow as possible, it should provide the first point of reference to any Ubuntu newcomer with lots of information. The manual has step by step instructions and includes lots of screenshots to show you how to do tasks. It also includes a Troubleshooting section [...]

The Ubuntu team is happy to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. Our newest release, the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, brings a host of exciting new features for users. This Screenshots Gallery includes installation process,Desktop screeshots Related posts No related posts.

** Guide Updated ** This guide is an evolution from this original guide. Unless the Kerrighed Team comes up with a substantially different version, this is the only update to this guide I will ever make as the steps are pretty much the same for all svn versions I have tested. On this version: - [...]

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. This is the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release, which brings a host of exciting new features. Note:- This is beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be [...]

This article describes the prerequisites and steps needed to replicate dynamic routing protocol routes (OSPF, BGP, RIP) to your passive firewall in an NSRP cluster Procedure to follow Starting in ScreenOS 6.0.0r1, you can use the command from ssh terminal of your firewall set nsrp rto-mirror route Which will replicate all dynamic routes from the [...]

Adding Custom Certificates To CIITIX-WiFi CIITIX-WiFi is a turnkey solution to your WiFi hotspot needs. Built onto the rock solid stable debian linux, setting up a secure (TTLS) WiFi hotspot is just a minute away. This guide shows how to set up an AAA server (authentication, authorization and accounting) with CIITIX-WiFi. CIITIX-WiFi comes with certificates valid till 2020 but  in case someone want to use their own certificates this tutorial can come in handy.

Chrooting Apache2 With mod_chroot On CentOS 5.4 This guide explains how to set up mod_chroot with Apache2 on a CentOS 5.4 system. With mod_chroot, you can run Apache2 in a secure chroot environment and make your server less vulnerable to break-in attempts that try to exploit vulnerabilities in Apache2 or your installed web applications.

The Perfect Server - OpenSUSE 11.3 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3] This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSUSE 11.3 64bit (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP, CGI and SSI support, Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH, TLS and virtual mail users, BIND DNS server, Pureftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

How To Change The Date And Time From The Console This short tutorial explains how you can modify your system date and time from the console.

The Perfect Desktop - Mandriva One 2010.1 Spring With GNOME This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2010.1 Spring desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Ubuntu 10.04 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 10.04 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

The Perfect Server - Mandriva 2010.1 (Spring) Free (x86_64) [ISPConfig 2] This tutorial shows how to set up a Mandriva 2010.1 (Spring) Free (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box). This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of Mandriva 2010.1.

How To Run Your Own Name Server With ISPConfig 3 And Fast Hosts This tutorial shows how you can run your own name server for domains that you register with fasthosts.com. Of course, this works with every other registrar as well, although the procedure might differ a little bit. We will use the ISPConfig 3 server as the primary name server and also acting as the secondary. This may be suited best to a single server setup. To do this, you need one server with ISPConfig 3 installed and a Fast hosts account.

Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool Some of you may know the commercial Flexnet Licencing Application (©Macrovision). It's a client-server based solution for managing the usage of socalled Flexnet-enabled applications. You can hold licenses of more than one product on one license-server. As you typically have to buy licenses and licenses can be expensive it would be nice to have a monitoring solution, to see the utilization of the precious licenses, wether they are underutilized (so money is wasted) or are always fully utilized (so that you can suspect that sometimes people can not do their work, or only delayed) which is also a waste of resources. As far as I know there are commercial applications for performing such reports, but again you have to spent money. Why not build a simple system yourself, which shows the actual and past usage in an "MRTG style"?

Ghosting The Machine This is a short but potentially extremely handy guide to ghosting one Linux box to another (or simply making a full backup of a desktop/server). You might have a small office where you customise one desktop just how you like it and need to roll this out to N other PC's or simply want a backup of a server or desktop to another machine or even to an image file. The main tool here is netcat which is extremely powerful and has a multitude of other great uses that won't be covered here.

Online advertising sector achieves 10% of Irish Adspend 2009.

iPad expected to be bestselling electronic item this Christmas, suggests DSGi.

The Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) experienced a growth in its advertising in the last quarter as revenues rose by 46 per cent for online ads and 19 per cent for retail display marketing.

Facebook has introduced a new safety page, which will highlight initiatives to keep users of the social networking site safe.

Alex Kuhnel, Product & Delivery Director, Experian Digital Advertising Services

This intensive one-day course will introduce you to the importance of web analytics, teach you how to develop a digital ROI strategy, give you access to the latest brand tracking case studies and look at different testing techniques to help you improve website performance.

The IAB and ESPN conducted research before and after the World Cup looking at football fans and their media consumption habits, attitudes to social media, mobile usage and interaction with brands during the tournament. In addition to presenting the results, the event will examine the cultural differences between UK sports fans and fans watching sport in other countries and the implications this has for international brands and their digital strategies.

The first research breakfast event gives IAB members the chance to catch up on any recent pieces of IAB research that they might of missed. At this event you’ll have the chance to explore the findings from three key pieces of IAB research: Customer Conversion Journey, IAB/PwC Adspend Study and the Understanding Media Agencies research.

Our first dedicated measurement seminar this year, this event will delve into the world of online measurement. Taking a look at UKOM, the IAB social media measurement framework, mobile measurement and key case studies, this is an event not to be missed!

The IAB in association with the video platform Brightcove has prepared a series of three short, summertime power hours on key video marketing topics to help you chillax and synergise your inner video love.

Remember when the world was young and finding a copy of your book on Fly Fishing meant hours crawling through the local yellow pages or trusting to luck that ‘Six Gun’ Tex McCain was really a reliable plumber? Thankfully these days we have the magic of the internet, where anyone can have a fully functional, great looking site for their local business.  Unfortunately this does leave smaller business or individual users with a problem: How are you going to market your site?There’s a mountain of marketing guides out there, but there is a tendency to assume you’re trying to build a multinational media empire. If you’re just trying to get a few extra people through the door of your cake shop then a lot of this advice really isn’t going to be suitable. Having a great LinkedIn network is fine, but are those international jet-setters really going to stop at your small Hardware Shop?If you’re trying to raise localised traffic it can be hard to know where to start, and let’s be honest, if your site isn’t in the top ten when someone Googles ‘Launderette, Stevenage‘ then there’s no point in having a site. So let’s see what you can do to get yourself a decent search ranking...Know your enemy Firstly, do your research. A few keyword searches with local names will let you know which local businesses are showing up. Check out their pages and see what they are doing. You can use sites like wordtracker.com to see how and why their SEO is working and utilise it yourself. Location, location, location Make sure you have your address displayed on every page so that search engines have something to grab hold of, and add this to any copy on the site as well: ‘Yarmouth Electrical Goods’ for example.Likewise try to add your district name in ’located within easy reach of xxxxx train station.' Be as specific as you can while making it sound natural. You can also reach out to the local community through your page.Try adding an events calendar or blog, and exchange links with other local businesses and blogs. This will add to your non-specific search traffic, raising awareness of your business. Put yourself on the map More and more people are now searching for businesses through Google Maps, Bing and Yahoo Local or direct from their iPhone or mobile maps, but a lot of local businesses still don’t take the time to exploit this. By taking a little time to build information rich profiles for these sites you’ll give your business a massive advantage over your competitors. Go and visit  Google Places (formerly Google Maps Local Business Centre), Bing Local Listing and Yahoo Local Business for starters. These engines all want the info because it makes their job easier, and it will ensure you rank highly in map searches.You can also add your business in different categories and localise them. Be sure to put in ‘Garden Centre’, but make sure you also add ‘Sheffield Garden Centre.' With Google maps you can add up to five categories so make sure you use them all! Exploit niche markets If you’re set on marketing locally, then there are some major league strategies that will still pay dividends. Have a look online and you’ll probably find a Facebook group or two for your town, so why not start your own group? You can promote this through Twitter, Facebook, MeetUp. Anywhere.Likewise, try using your Twitter to offer promotions or post printable coupons on your blog or FB and ask group members for feedback. The more you get them talking the more they’ll be likely to visit you and your site and add links to their own sites.If you can help promote a local event or association here that’s good too. If you’re sponsoring a local school fete then you can guarantee that some proud parent will have filmed it. Get that on YouTube and make sure your business is mentioned there too. Every mention counts. Don’t get mad, get helpful Have a quick search online for local directories. Nowadays its common practice for these to have ‘add review’ boxes, meaning one bad comment could be losing you a lot of business.It’s important to be proactive here. Check out sites like Yelp and Local.com, see what people have said about you. If there’s a problem then try to help solve it and let other customers know why the problem occurred. You’ll foster great customer trust by taking a few minutes a day to personally reply to any negative comments and hopefully garner a few positive ones in the process. If a local paper printed a positive review of your café, you might display it in the window, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same with online testimonials, and if you have a lot of reviews then you’ll have a higher mention rate online, all helping your search position. Get natural listings Speaking of listings, take the time to fill out all those trade group forms you’ve been studiously ignoring all year. If you haven’t got the time to list yourself everywhere manually, there are plenty of universal listings sites that will submit your info for you for a small fee, meaning you’ll have more mentions and links all of which contribute toward organic SEO growth.Social media marketers constantly talk about building communities. Remember above all that you already have one. If you want to get your business noticed online (and in the real world) get out there and get involved.

If an industry's broken, can regulation fix it? That's one of the issues that is currently being addressed in the respect to journalism. The Federal Trade Commission is convinced that original reported journalism cannot be sustained by the current environment online. To fix that, the organization is considering a few remedies. One could be a 5% consumer electronics tax. Another is regulation that will prevent low cost news aggregators from scavenging newspapers' reported content. But there are more than a few things that stand in the way of such regulation. Including Google. In a blog post called Business problems need business solutions, Google explained in no uncertain terms that regulation isn't the way to save journalism. The FTC draft proposal is a compilation of recommendations and discussion topics to spark the debate around the future of journalism. But a lot are close to home for Google. That's why the company has now responded. According to the Google Public Policy blog: "We strongly disagree with a number of policy recommendations set forth in the Staff Discussion Draft, such as the suggestion that Congress enact a federal hot news doctrine -- something that would not only hurt free expression, but also the very profession of journalism that the proponents of hot news say they support." The "hot news doctrine" would prevent any website from reporting the same facts as a traditional publisher for a set period of time after news breaks. But increasing the inefficiencies in distributing the news would not neccessarily fix journalism's problems. For instance, newspapers have voluntarily shared news items for years before aggregators came into the picture. But the pace of revenue declined has quickened rapidly with the adoption of the internet. According to the FTC: Newspapers' revenues from advertising have fallen approximately 45% since 2000. Classified advertising accounted for $19.6 billion in revenue for newspapers in 2000, $10.2 billion in 2008, and is estimated to be only $6.0 billion in 2009. But Google is quick to point out that it has not stolen any publications' profits: "The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No policy proposal will be able to restore newspaper revenues to what they were before the emergence of online news. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice." Ouch. Google insists that the future of the newspaper industry depends on innovation, not handicapping the competition. Google's post continues: “Innovating to create products and services that consumers want to pay for is the only way to guarantee long-term subscription revenue growth, and none of the policy proposals are designed to foster that kind of innovation.” Publications aren't likely to care for Google's response. As The New York Times wrote last week: "The potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses. But Google isn't going to let anyone see the details of its top secret algorithm willingly. And while it's fair for companies to worry that Google is favoring its own content over theirs, the idea of newspapers maintaining more ownership over their original content is a difficult to enact. As Google points out: “Facts, hot or cold, cannot be protected by copyright since there is no author of them.”

Personalization vs. privacy. Behavioral targeting vs. big brother. When does it get creepy? It's rare that I catch myself being a full-fledged consumer. I'm not talking about the guy who has not spent the last 25 years in sales and marketing - the guy who has not spent studying and writing books and lecturing about online marketing since 1993 - the guy who does not climb all over every random video to bask in the glory of the Old Spice Guy. But it happened again today.The Barrett Strong version is a classic, but I'm more enamored of the Beatle rendition of "Money (That's What I Want)." It's just the way I am. And because I am that way, Pandora told the makers of the yet-to-be-released all electric Leaf that I might like to see an ad for the car I've been waiting for. I had heard about the Leaf. I had seen pictures of the Leaf. I had been to the Toyota website more than a few times waiting for the full story to be revealed. I wanted to know when this thing is going to go on the market. I already own a Prius and am desperate to dump the SUV taking up all the rest of the space in the garage. So here I am, enjoying some soothing melodies and a few rockin' pneumonia tunes on Pandora on my iPhone. When I went to give "Money (That's What I Want)" a thumbs-up, I see an ad at the bottom of the screen that says "Meet the future" with a picture of a Leaf! I've been waiting to meet this car and here it is, in the palm of my hand! I clicked on it and consumed everything there was about this car that fits my wallet, my world view, and my garage. I read the specs. I played the videos. I entered to win one! I even entered my name and email address to reserve one. I am serious about wanting to test drive one of these cars. Then I went over to the Toyota website to try and find when this puppy is going to be available. It was then, after being nonplussed that there was NOTHING on the site at all about this car, that I noticed something that floored me. It's not made by Toyota. It's a Nissan product. I knew the model name, but not the brand. I am hot to trot for this product and totally misinformed about where to look for it. Rack up a major #fail for the media planners and buyers, magazine ad people and direct mail types and a major win for the mobile marketing team. So how did they find me? Pandora uses a patented algorithm to assess the songs I like and find others that fit into the same "DNA" range. Tempo, style, lyrics, era, you name it. And based on that, they can offer me up to Nissan on a silver platter. The more people like me who consume the Nissan Leaf app from Pandora, the better Pandora can target ads and the higher the ROI on their ad spend. Some of my (non-internet-marketing) friends shudder when I tell them this story. "Creepy," they say. "Invasion of privacy!" they holler. "No, that's not for me," they insist. But they'll fall for it too as long as they don't have to watch how this sausage is being made. As soon as they see an ad for something that interests them, they will click. This is not about being tracked and harassed. This is about being served. I gladly tell Amazon that I am a voracious John Grisham reader and am pleased when they recommend something else. But when my taste in music brings me together with a product I've been anxiously waiting for all I can say, "That's what I want."

Skype has an interesting business model. The wildly popular internet phone and video service lets people call other Skype users for free, and pay a small fee to dial terrestrial phones. But if everyone started using Skype, the company could put itself out of business. Before that happens, Skype is trying to increase its advertising options. This week, Skype announced Click & Call Advertising, which converts business phones numbers online into free call links when companies advertise with Skype. Skype might be on to something here. Skype now has 560 million registered users worldwide. And now businesses that pay for the priviledge, will enable Skype users call them for free. From Skype's blog: "Click & Call Advertising with Skype works simply by allowing participating advertisers to have their phone number highlighted with a blue Free Call button anywhere online that their numbers are displayed. When the button is clicked, the Skype software launches and the call is connected – at no cost to the caller." Currently, the ads are only viewed by PC users, but they will soon be available on Mac screens as well.  The move is interesting because it enables the company to continue what it does best — offer free calls online — while bringing in some revenue. Skype currently handles about 12% of all long distance calls. The new feature is also a good deal for advertisers who are competing for business with similar companies nearby. Search results display the numbers for various results, but if someone happens to search for pizza, chances are they will call the free number rather than another they haven't heard of. One slight glitch could be the way that phone plans have changed in recent years. For many consumers, mobile and even landline phone calls are included with monthly bills. Unless searchers are coming up on reaching their allotted monthly minutes, free individual calls may not rank as important in their decision making factor. However, it's a smart move by Skype. As the company writes, "Advertisers are now able to acquire new customers using Skype to drive calls in a highly efficient and measurable way." But so is Skype. The company has plenty of name recognition at this point, but for web surfers with mobile phones and no international friends, Skype's business proposition may not be immediately obvious. However, if you're online and see Skype enabled numbers popping up every time you do a search, the idea of creating a Skype account may seem more beneficial. And if Skype can keep coming up with new ways to get advertisers to pay for its services, the company might have a winning business model very soon. It's not too far of a jump to go from advertisers paying for calls to their own businesses to having them foot the bill for other paid calls (after showing a brief ad).    

Dispense with web analytics? Heresy! But that's exactly what Adready's new Director of Marketing Jonah-Kai Hancock did - and watched as his new lead scoring model, integrated with a CRM tool, helped conversion soar 189 percent, while leads grew 196 percent. Here's how he did it. Jonah-Kai Hancock: About four months ago, I joined AdReady and was part of this new process. From a lead-gen standpoint, our marketing function was very basic. A lot of people would come to our site, and we didn’t have a lot of web forums. We didn’t have a lot of thought leadership pieces. We really didn’t have information people could get to. We didn’t have ways to capture people who were coming. Our visitors - we really had no idea who they were.One of my main initiatives was, how do we increase for the sales team and from my standpoint as well visibility as to who’s coming, where are they coming from, what are they searching for on our web site, and what kind of content are they downloading? What do they find valuable? A couple things happened 1) I worked with Optify. 2) We built a lead score model. So for all the different people who come to the web site, there’s a lead score. That allows the sales rep to see who’s coming and how qualified they are. In addition, as a sales rep I also get to see what you did. What pages were you looking at? I have a little more information. “Hey, you know what? You were very interested in a precision campaign white paper.” As I talk to you, I know more about what you looked at.The best part was we actually increased our marketing qualified leads. I’ve got suspects who come to my web site. I’ve got prospects, who may or may not be somebody I want to sell to. Then I have a marketing qualified lead. From those [general] prospects into a marketing qualified lead, we were able to increase that figure by 189 percent. Q: How are you qualifying those leads. What are you looking at?A: I’ll say, crawl/walk/run. When I came to AdReady, there was no concept of a lead scoring model. For each of prospect, if they’re an agency, an advertiser, or a publisher, we have a lead score. We referenced their digital display spend. We looked at the accounts. We built up a lead score that was based on their account, how much they spend on display, how many pieces of creative. One of our largest customers is Alaska Airlines. If I’m an Alaska Airlines, I’m gonna have over 3,000 pieces of creative because my display campaign for Seattle to New York City needs to look different from Seattle to Las Vegas.Based on what we know, we gave point totals to all those and create a lead score. We mocked up that lead score in Optify. So that’ll give the sales rep an initial kind of “OK, this is a good company.” Then we build up another lead score that’s a little more granular based on the information we find out while talking with them. I say crawl/walk/run just because it’s a very basic model. I’d much rather have a lead score model that was very verticalized and a lot more robust. This is our first stab at it. It’s been great. Obviously, statistics speak loud, but so does overall [sales team] happiness. Q: What kind of lead volume are we talking about? A: Any given day, we’ll have over 100 people fill out forms. We’ll probably have over 2,000 unique visits. Of those unique visits, about 100 would fill out a form and become what I would call a lead, a prospect lead. It’s not qualified yet because the sales rep hasn’t worked it. In addition to the efforts they have with ongoing sales efforts, we’ll get those numbers in. Our sales cycle is 30 to 60 days. We have a high volume deal closure rate. It’s very fast-paced for the sales reps. Any help we can give them to filter through their lists is greatly appreciated.Q: How are you using these scored leads? Does it determine the priority in which you respond to them, or who on the sales team gets them? A: The sales team gets them based on their verticals. Once they hit the sales rep, it gives them a priority on what to look at. Who do they look at first? I’ll look at a higher scorer first because they’re a more qualified lead. With regard to what I do with it, I’m running different campaigns. The marketing funnel and the sales funnel are two different things. I give them a marketing qualified lead, but then it goes into sales qualifying. The reps have qualifying questions. On the marketing side, I’m scoring these. Not all people buy. People come back into my funnel up at the top of it. I run different types of drip campaigns and other types of marketing activities for lead-gen based on how they responded to those campaigns, how many touchpoints they had. I could use Salesforce. I can go in and I can say, “Give me every prospect or lead that went to my advertiser’s home page and downloaded my white paper.” I could add to that, “And spent more than two minutes on this page.” So, I could run various levels of reports to build up those leads. I use the lead scores and also just the data we store from Optify to help guide where do I push people, and who do I pull for different campaigns I want to run.Q: Are you also using this to determine marketing expenditure, media mix and that sort of thing? A search lead is more or less valuable than somebody that comes in from display, etc., or an email?A: We track them all. We track all our display, and we’re a display company. I know which ones generate the best response, I track, and I have metrics. But we don’t treat leads differently based on what medium they came from.Our highest qualified leads tend to have attended a webinar. If they click through an email, they’re not really qualified yet. They’re just interested. Those are the ones I'll manage from a marketing standpoint. I’ll reach out to them periodically.Q: What exactly increased 196 percent? A: Let’s put numbers to it. If I have 100 people hit my web site, 80 percent of those I can give a lead score to. They come in as a prospect. That’s my 80 percent number. As a sale rep, I’ll take that lead with a lead score attached to it. I’m gonna focus my efforts on some of these leads, because others may be horrible leads. So, of those 80, let’s say 30 of them were good leads. How do I know? Because I’ve given them a lead score based on the criteria I talked about. How much they spent on display. Are they a target company? What’s the level of this person’s title? Let’s say 30 of them. Of those 30, I have metrics I track. Of those 30 before, let’s say maybe 10 percent became actually marketing qualified leads a sales rep is going to work. With what we’ve been able to do with lead scoring and the filtering of leads, now that number from 30 is gonna be around 20. And that 20 versus that 10 is a 196 percent difference. At each step of the funnel, I was able to increase whether I’m a suspect, I’m a prospect, or I become a marketing qualified lead. A marketing qualified lead is where a sales rep takes it and says, “OK, this is marketing qualified. I’m gonna run with this.”  At each of those steps, I was able to increase my numbers, and I was also able to increase my visibility at every step. Q: Are you constantly tweaking this scoring formula?A: Absolutely. We’re actually gonna do another revamp probably in about a week or two. Q: How often do you look at it? Is it revised quarterly or monthly?A: We’re looking at it about every two weeks right now. Q: Is it determining some of your other marketing activities like the creation of marketing content? You mentioned white papers.A: I look at reports and see how many leads I generated from which white papers. I do run reports where I can look at the number of leads I’ve got from each of our different marketing campaigns. I can also reference that with the lead score. So I can tell you this white paper has produced this many leads, but maybe they were all really bad leads based on the lead score versus this white paper which didn’t generate as many leads, but they were a lot more qualified. So where do we invest? I use that information on my monthly drip campaigns. If I find a different white paper or different content is producing more qualified leads, I’ll use that to try and get people to get interest. I do a monthly webinar series with some lead-gen. We do media buys. [I gauge] the pulse of my industry. What are people downloading and what are they looking at? We do get a lot of small agencies that just wanna learn about display - they’re not very qualified. They don’t wanna buy. But we can get a lot of leads from certain pieces, but they might not be qualified. So, that kind of guides my efforts on which pieces I'll use and also, what are people really interested in. Demand side platforms? Real time bidding? Creation tools? Q: Where does Optify come into the picture? It sounds like a portion of this you could be doing on your own. A: I could, but I don’t have the time. I’m director of marketing of a two-man team. Optify sits on every single one of my pages. Each of the sales reps has their 100 accounts they focus on. We load those into Optify, and each sales rep gets a daily e-mail summary of the people that have come to the web site in their target verticals. In addition, if somebody from one of their target verticals comes to our web site, they’re instantly alerted that a person from that company is on our web site. Everything outbound is coded with Optify trackers. We use ExactTarget for our mass distribution email. Every link, we code. So if I sent you my newsletter and you clicked on one of the articles and it sent you to a press release or a white paper or an archived webinar from the newsletter, my lead generation touchpoint was actually the newsletter. Then we associate that back to the leads in Salesforce.Q: Has this replaced traditional web analytics for your company?A: I have Google Analytics. I don’t use it as much. It’s a very complex application. Optify integrates with my CRM. My sales team knows how to use it. It’s giving me enough information that I can make educated decisions. I’ve used Marketo in the past [and] Omniture. I’ve used marketing automation - they were great tools. I don’t have the budget for that other stuff, in all honesty.Q: It’s really annoying when you don’t have an unlimited budget.A:  I know, right? I also use Optify for end-to-end Twitter tracking. We have a pretty big Twitter following. I run all my tweets through there. If people respond, I know they came to our site based on a tweet. Q: Which you can also do through regular web analytics.A: Absolutely. But again, it's integration with Salesforce. At the end of the day I could do everything I want with web analytics. All the information is in my head and helps me make decisions, but there’s so much of it the sales team needs. We have a really fast sales cycle. If I can’t give them information in a nice, concise, clear package, it’s useless to them. And it’s really valuable information they should have their hands on. So the integration points are very important. There are business applications people develop that are very focused on business-minded people, then there’s the ability to use analytics. Hire some sort of a marketing analyst guru who could dig through all those analytics and figure out stuff?  There’s definitely a place for it. But just in our world and where we’re at, Optify suffices.

Matt Bailey wrote earlier this month on the problem that affiliate marketing seems to have in shaking off negative connotations. His points are entirely valid; affiliate marketers continuously have difficulties in effectively communicating the strengths of our channel. For those of us working within the industry there is an obvious irony here, given we continuously try to demonstrate how open and accountable we are whilst delivering transparent daily ROI. Therefore I thought it was about time someone extolled the virtues of our often maligned channel. Allow me to make the case for affiliate marketing: 1. We have ROI cracked. We’re performance marketers and have been for 15 years so the gradual shift by online channels to our reward model gives us a considerable headstart. PPC affiliates for example have always arbitrated between click costs and commissions earned making them leaner and keener to drive sales for advertisers. Forget about the bad old days of brand bidding. Spell out your PPC terms and conditions and explore the gaps in your own PPC campaigns that affiliates can plug. 2. We might be a fragmented industry but this has crystallised the importance of working collaboratively. Every other month around 50 agency, network and advertiser staff along with a selection of some of the biggest affiliates gathers to discuss the major issues facing us as an industry. The IAB’s Council for the affiliate industry is significantly bigger than the IAB’s other online Councils with issues discussed frankly and openly. As a consequence we have best practice guidelines for advertisers and affiliates, codes of conduct for publishers using voucher codes and downloadable software and a multi-party working group for multi or value attribution models. We’ve been discussing looking beyond last click as a payment model for two years now and a sophisticated level of debate has generated comment from major industry players on next step and best practice approaches (follow the Council @IAB_AMC). 3. Contrary to popular opinion brand control runs through everything we do. The idea that advertisers lose control of their brands when they launch affiliate marketing campaigns is something that may have been the case five years ago but could an industry that generates £5bn of sales have experienced double digit year on year growth if there weren’t sufficient checks and balances in place to protect advertisers? Many networks have developed search monitoring tools as well as adware and spyware detection technology aimed at nipping any rogue elements in the bud. Advertisers have the ultimate veto of course in who they choose to work with. Matt Bailey also covered this issue in great depth in a post last week; if you don’t feel you have control over your affiliate campaign you’re not doing it right. 4. Fancy billions of free impressions and acres of free editorial coverage? The one area of affiliate marketing that is always overlooked is all that juicy branding you get for absolutely nothing. If you’re an advertiser your affiliates have so much trust in you to run optimised, well designed, usable sites that don’t have fulfilment issues that they’ll push huge amounts of free branding to you via their links. Pretty much every major affiliate programme in the UK will be generating millions of impressions as well as thousands of clicks all eulogising why consumers should buy your products at no additional cost to you so why wouldn’t you want to take affiliates up on that offer? 5. Affiliate marketing offers advertisers the privilege of working with some of the most entrepreneurial individuals and highly trafficked sites in the UK. Let’s think of it as affinity marketing and the sites as publishers, some of them have millions of unique users a month and offer marketing plans, newsletter coverage, tenancies, homepage exposure, solus emails and other partnership opportunities. And the resulting performance from such a carefully defined relationship can be significant. 6. And at the end of the day, if that’s not enough we’re an open, honest and above all, sociable bunch. Every couple of months hundreds of us will gather for informal networking drinks just to chat about the burning issues of the day, the lubrication provided by affiliate networks collaborating to foot the bill at the end of the night. There are probably countless additional things I could have mentioned but in the interests of brevity I stuck to a handful of the most obvious ones. Affiliate marketing is all online; it’s email, social media, paid search, natural search, mobile, vouchers, cashback and price comparison, all together under a performance roof. Approach with a broad brush and fail to understand its complexity and you will be disappointed. Embrace it and dedicate resource and you’ll appreciate what a powerful sales channel it truly is.

When shopping for something which can be bought both online and in store, 34% of UK shoppers would prefer to buy online, with 55% opting for the high street.  While this stat shows that offline retail still holds an important place in customers' minds, 34% is still a sizeable portion of the sample.  These stats are taken from Econsultancy's Habits and Motivations of Consumers report, which looks at e-commerce consumer behaviour in both the UK and US. Factors influencing online purchases The survey also looks at the features on websites which make it more likely that consumers will decide to shop online.  Free shipping was the most popular motivation for 82% of UK and 80% of US consumers, and gives etailers that offer this option a clear advantage over competitors.  Plenty of well-known retailers have caught on to the power of free shipping, with the likes of ASOS, John Lewis, Amazon all offering some degree of free shipping, and just as importantly, promoting it heavily throughout the site.  Price guarantees were an influence for 72% of UK and 64% of US shoppers, and suggests that providing promises to match competitors' prices and even listing them on site can be a useful tactic for online retailers.  Offering alternative payment methods makes sense for etailers, as it allows them to capture as many customers as possible, appealing to those that may be concerned about card fraud or who simply don't have a credit or debit card.  60% of UK consumers and 48% of those from the US said that alternatives such as PayPal would make it more likely that they would shop online.  Availability of product ratings was a factor for 59% of UK shoppers, as was the availability of user-generated or consumer product reviews (57%). Online chat was less of an influence on purchases, with just 15% of UK and 22% of US respondents saying it would make them more likely to purchase online.  This is not surprising, since online chat is not widely available, especially in the UK. However, if it helps 15% to 22% of consumers to complete their purchase, then it is a worthwhile tool for online retailers.  E-commerce site issues We also asked consumers how often they encountered various problems when attempting to make purchases online.  The most common problems uncovered by the survey were slow-loading pages and being unable to have specific questions answered (which is where online chat can be useful). These were frequent issues for 13% of respondents, and somewhat frequent for 31%.  Other common problems included inadequate site search functions, with 34% finding this a problem either frequently or somewhat frequently, and insufficient information (41%) Online purchasing Respondents were asked how much their most recent online purchase cost. Nearly half (46%) of surveyed consumers spent between £0-£100, with the largest proportions (29%) being between £25- £100. 37% of respondents spent between £100-£500 which may well account for a large amount of electrical or computer purchases.   Other highlights from the report The continued importance of targeted and relevant email marketing came through in consumers' responses. 50% said that irrelevant information devalued emails they received. while 50% said that emails weren’t valuable because there was “no special advantage” to receiving them. 36% replied that receiving an email had prompted them to make a purchase online, whilst around a quarter (27%) reported that an email was the cause of an offline purchase. The younger the audience, the more mistrust there is towards advertising, though the majority of consumers appreciate receiving advertising messages when it is directly beneficial to them, such as receiving a discount on a product or service (57%).

Recently LinkedIn has undergone some dramatic changes that have transformed it from a business contacts site into a viable networking and promotion tool.   The site now gives you direct access not only to your customer base, but also to fellow professionals, meaning LinkedIn has forum capabilities sorely lacking from sites like Facebook. LinkedIn’s profiles are directly aimed at the business market, they are likely to be open and honest, giving you great information on your allies (and occasionally rivals) in a complicated marketplace.If you’re setting up a business empire then you need to be in touch with the movers and shakers out there and LinkedIn is a great way to do it. Despite this, a huge number of new users still primarily use it  as a job search and employment site.To make sure you get the jump on your competitors by avoiding the mistakes they are making and properly utilising the site, here are ten quick tips to get your profile ahead of the pack: Don't rely on default settings Every second profile I come across on LinkedIn has the same problem: settings left at default. With the URL it’s a fixable problem but with My Company it’s a nuisance. If you haven’t taken time to enter your current business or employer name in this field do it right now (Click websites, then ‘other’ in the options to fill this out), otherwise people have to scroll back up to see who you are and what you’re pushing, then scroll back to click it. Remember the old maxim: if content is not reachable in 3 clicks then people won’t bother. Above all else, eliminate extra effort for people trying to find you.   Set your URL. Make sure you take the time to change your URL. Much like Facebook’s much publicised move in 2008, you can set a personalised URL in LinkedIn, so make sure you exploit the branding and marketing potential this offers. Head up to the Edit Public Settings button at the top of your profile and change the Public Profile URL to your personal or business name.  Complete your profile. You may have a face more suitable for radio, but that doesn’t mean you can afford not to have a clear, businesslike photograph on your profile Likewise, don’t be tempted to cover up with a logo or a gravitar. LinkedIn is about people, so brush yourself off and smile. Recognition and personality is key in generating new business. Also, make sure you’ve really thought about that job description keyline. Nobody is typing ‘CEO’ into their search boxes, so think about your job title and how it relates directly to the service you provide. ‘Copywriter’ will work, ‘Internet Guru’ won’t.  Keep your friends close..and their friends closer You can currently join up to 50 groups on Linked in. Quite a few right? And how many people are there in the larger groups? And perhaps more importantly, what do they do? The average Google employee has about 50 -100 connections on LinkedIn but a group may hold hundreds, even thousands of talented people interested in what you are doing, all of whom you haven’t contacted previously. Not joining up is a massive failure in your networking plan, so get out there and share. Even if you can’t keep an eye on all the groups you’ve joined your name will still be out there.  Go Public It’s called social media for a reason. Google offers live and social searches, so make sure you’re profile stands out and is counted. LinkedIn is great for this because you can offer specific business information, and not worry about it being watered down or undermined by pictures of you feeding a dog cider at last year’s Christmas party. Don’t set your profile to private, but DO take care what you put on it. If it isn’t public then you may as well not bother in the first place.   Too Much Twitter The easy option when linking Twitter is to set it to automatic and let it run itself. The smart way however, is to take five minutes a day and update manually. Post relevant tweets and links. Your customers don’t want to know that you’re meeting Steve for a pint later, they want to know “Ten great ways to find the perfect mangle.” Whatever you’re selling, keep it relevant if you want to drum up extra business. All your tweets go on Twitter, things worth talking about and promoting go on LinkedIn. In essence you should strive for a balance, don’t put out too much noise. Instead let people know what you are involved in, your interests or projects you’re helping on, not your laundry list.  Whose company? Again, LinkedIn is all about business, so having a separate page clearly detailing yours is just common sense. The added bonus? You’re automatically tied into your employees' networks, giving you broader influence and opening up new marketing opportunities. Initially businesses may have been concerned about receiving bad word of mouth from ex-employees because of this, but given the reach social media has these days then any negativity will find its way out, so you really can’t afford to miss out on the positive side of a full business site because of any hesitation you might have about this. And hey, you aren’t the kind of business that treats people badly anyway are you?  Only 100,000 links on the clock, honest mate… Don’t be a salesman. Yes, the bottom line is you’re here to promote your site and your business, but don’t go at it like a market trader. LinkedIn is not the place for your sales pitch. If you do, you’ll end up looking like a spammer. Send out thanks for connecting notices, but don’t add a salesline. It’s crass and off-putting especially when the people connecting to you are already taking an interest in who you are and what you do. Don’t go for the heavy sell.   Keep talking Again, social media is about connecting, and while it’s great that people have a list of your stats on hand, talking to them is the best way to make sure they remember you and your business. Take part in relevant discussions whenever you can. In addition to great opportunities to promote yourself, you’ll end up with valuable information and the people you are questioning will remember your name. Get talking as often as possible. Getting feedback is free and sharing your own viewpoints and expertise will help you build an industry reputation. Even if you’re a relative nobody, you can still tell Bill Gates on how your product will unblock his sink.   Are you listening to this? Not responding. If someone comments, get back to them in a timely fashion. You wouldn’t ignore emails at work, so don’t forget to comment on comments. Exactly as you would with a blog, if someone is checking your profile out and questioning or suggesting something then get involved and create a dialogue with them. Let them know you’re listening by responding to or making recommendations, although be sure not to dole out opinions too readily or you’ll end up seeming overly self-satisfied. It’s fine to give the odd recommendation to join a group, and hopefully your connections will be savvy enough to offer them back so that you both benefit. It’s not a direct approach but it’s a friendlier one that will work better if you’re playing the long game (as any good business should be).   Follow these simple steps and you'll have a straightforward and useful LinkedIn profile that will help you connect with the most valuable people in your industry quickly and easily.

The iPad? Hot. Social media? Hot. Magazines? Not so hot. What do you get, however, when you put them all together? One startup is trying to find out, and some notable venture capitalists and angel investors were eager enough to pony up $10m to help it.The startup is called Flipboard. Its iPad app is already for sale, and the company will demo it to the world today at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference. What is Flipboard? Flipboard is an attempt to take all of the important content from your favorite social media sites and turn it into a digital magazine that's presented beautifully on the iPad: Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started...The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link - instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content. In other words, Flipboard is a new take on the not-so-new concept of a personalized magazine or newspaper. The notable differences, however, are that Flipbook is based on user-generated content and content 'recommended' through your social graph. And it's being presented through an iPad app. That combination has investors intrigued. Well-known VC firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures have invested, as have notable angels including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Ashton Kutcher. That's not particularly suprising. Not only does Flipboard look like a really nifty app on a superficial level, the co-founders are both experienced tech veterans. Mike McCue is the former CEO of Tellme, which was acquired by Microsoft, and Evan Doll is a former senior iPhone engineer at Apple. Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr told AllThingsDigital, "This is the next wave of social media and redefine what magazine is…and I think it will be one of defining apps on the iPad." Flipboard may look very slick, and the people behind it may have the right pedigrees. But that doesn't mean that turning Flipboard into a successful business will be easy. For one, there's the business model. Right now, Flipboard is free, and it's unclear how the company plans to make money, or whether users (or advertisers) would be interested in paying for it. Second, as hot as the iPad is, all things being equal it is still a relatively small distribution channel. And finally, for Flipboard to become more than just a shiny novelty, it has to deliver true utility (read: compelling, relevant content). On that note, Flipboard also announced that it has acquired a semantic analysis company called Ellerdale which Flipboard says will enable it "to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks." That, of course, is the Holy Grail many companies in the social media space are searching for today. If Flipboard succeeds in finding that Holy Grail, it will simply have to hope that the iPad is the Ark. Photo credit: Flipboard.

Instigating a truly multichannel campaign can be a daunting one. You know your business better than anybody, but it's still always helpful to have a few pointers in the right direction at the beginning. So which industries can we look at to provide a solid example of a truly successful and joined up multichannel campaign that leads customers across channels and encourages them to interact more fully with a brand? Fortunately there are several places to look, but one of the more obvious can currently be found shoring up your local multiplex: Inception. Christopher Nolan's latest film has had a blockbuster opening weekend, figures stand at $60.4m at time of writing, and has already garnered some great feedback from critics. However, what's really interesting to marketers is happening offscreen. Nolan and Warner Bros. had made a point of releasing very little advance information about the film, so even with the not-insubstantial resources at their disposal it's amazing that they were able to transform a completely unknown entity into the 'must-see' release of the year in such a limited time. In doing so, Warner showed their understanding of digital marketing and cross-streaming to produce a marketer's dream campaign.Initial points go to the company for their intimate knowledge of their audience. For example, Warner went to great pains over its blog outreach campaign, utilising major and minor movie fan sites to help spread titbits of pre-release information. While they were kindest to influencers like Ain't it Cool News, they also took time to develop fun products for the fanboy in the street, beginning with a 'must read' online comic book prequel, The Cobol Job. The book introduces us to the characters and rules of Nolan's filmic world, and more importantly gives those reading it a little something extra. Most major movie fans want to know more, to be ahead of the man in the street when it comes to a film's expanded universe. For proof of the success this kind of incentivisation can have consider the thousands of yearly Star Wars and Star Trek conventions that occur all over the world. These events are designed around people who want to say “I am the biggest fan, the central source of knowledge”. While this may be too niche (or downright geeky) to attract mainstream audiences, Warner knew in advance that they'd be utilising one of the best connected and most highly motivated online groups available.Of course, fan approval is all well and good but it won't necessarily pay the bills for a $200m film production. In order to engage the casual viewer, word needs to spread beyond the dedicated enthusiasts but luckily these days there's a handy crossover point called Facebook. Warner's Facebook page for the film is a lovely exercise in landing pages to start with, but it's the interactive features that really engage fans. Facebook has a huge gaming community, so the 'Mind Crime' game was a perfect tool for generating viral spread. Of course, Warner also knows that not everyone is socially networked (at least, not yet...) so they've done some fun things with the main website too, including fun greenscreen apps tht put you directly into the action via your mobile, and for those wanting something a little different, the “Mind Crime Prevention” app should do the trick, with a nifty (if ultimately pointless) interface that will “allow you to tell dream from reality”. What's striking about all of these is the effort that's gone into making the viewer feel part of the overall experience through an integrated, expanding augmented reality.The movie is currently trending on a huge number of independent networks so Warner's forethought is really paying off, building buzz before, during and after the release. The movie industry has been pulling off unique and involving marketing campaigns and promo stunts for years (check out 'The Tingler' for proof), and is one of the most forward thinking when it comes to social marketing and innovative digital technology. It's worth contrasting this against that similar old media behemoth, the music industry, who have consistently struggled to find a new marketing model that competes with free sharing and piracy. While the movie industry has been affected, it's certainly not to the same extent, and while we can't all have Leonardo Dicaprio fronting our campaigns, the willingness to involve fans and make them feel a valuable part of the marketing experience is something we can all learn from.

Rupert Murdoch is just getting started with Newcorp.'s digital paywalls. After the (comparatively) great success that The Wall Street Journal has had charging for its website, Murdoch is looking to get more revenue for the company's other digital properties. First to go behind a paywall was The London Times. It may be too early to tell, but if the first two weeks results are any indication, charging for general interest publications is going to be a hard sell. It is expected that readership dwindles when publications go behind a paywall, but publishers aren't usually expecting the kind of drawback that we're seeing with some early paywall experiments. Newsday now infamously attracted only 35 people subscribers to its website after three month behind a paywall. At The Times, simply asking readers to register to view the site in June led to a major loss of viewers. And now, two weeks into the paper's full paid experiment, it looks like only 1/10th of those registered viewers became paying subscribers. It could be worse. The paper was expected to lose 90% of its viewers. Of course, paying readers are more valuable than drive by clickers. But no publication wants to see 90% of its viewership disappear. However, readers aren't stupid. If they feel like they can get similar content elsewhere, they will go where it is free. For a general interest paper, that is a very high likelihood. And while The Wall Street Journal has seen success charging for its site, it has two things in its favor that other News Corp. websites do not. Highly specialized financial news. Corporate subscriptions. Without those two elements, websites like The Times and Hulu need to get their paid model down to a science to bring in revenue without scaring off potential users. The Sunday Times has the 40th-largest newspaper circulation in the world, and the daily version of the paper ranks at No. 100. It is guaranteed to lose some digital influence (and popularity) behind the paywall. On the positive side, The Times is faring better than Newsday (at least). Meanwhile, according to unofficial numbers, The Times has 15,000 paying subscribers. In addition, there are an impressive 12,500 iPad subscribers. iPad users aren't paying as much. The Times charges web visitors £2 per week or £1 per day. On the iPad it costs £10 per month for six days of content. But that number is worth keeping an eye on. And bodes well. Perhaps not directly for The Times, but for paid publications. Considering how few people actually own an iPad, it's important that so many are ponying up for a paid newspaper subscription. If such a large percentage of viewers are paying to view a newspaper on their iPads, it may actually be the case that Apple's device is the monetization vehicle that publications are hoping for. If viewing a magazine or a newspaper is that much better on an iPad, and people are willing to pay for the experience, the transition from print to digital might not be as painful as some had feared. Of course, those viewers could just be bairgain shopping for the cheaper product.

Facebook's recent privacy issues haven't put a dent in the social network's traffic or user levels, but if a new study from ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index has anything to do with it, that might be changing. The study found the social network ranked close to cable companies and airlines in terms of customer satisfaction. And according to Foresee, customer satisfaction is a pretty clear indicator of future corporate success.  Despite ongoing privacy issues, Facebook keeps steamrolling past growth figures. More people than ever log onto the site every day.  Facebook is set to announce reaching 500 million users this week alone. And the site's U.S. users climbed to 141.6 million last month, up 84% from a year earlier, according to comScore. But according to Foresee, the social network scored in the bottom 5% of a customer-satisfaction survey.  Facebook scored 64 out of a 100-point scale, according to a report based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which was developed by the University of Michigan's business school. That ranks Facebook close to the IRS, airlines and cable companies in terms of customer satisfaction. Facebook is also doing a lot worse than other digital brands, Google scored an 80 and Yahoo received a 76. Wikipedia.org ranked the highest among social-media companies, with a score of 77. YouTube got a rating of 73. Only MySpace scored worse than Facebook, with a 63. Interestingly, privacy wasn't people's main concern with using Facebook. More at issue is Facebook's changing consumer policy, which apparently has disrupted users. Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, says that Facebook has undeniable growth and success over the last year. However, "low satisfaction means you’re starting to put that growth at risk.” Foresee uses the ASCI to assess future growth at companies, and the results come from interviews with approximately 70,000 customers annually. According to the study:  "Companies that did well in the ACSI saw their stocks increase by 75% on average in 2009. In contrast, stock prices for those with declining ACSI scores rose 22% over the same period, which is slightly less than the 26% gain for the S&P 500. Based on surveys of more than 23,000 visitors to the top 100 e-retail websites, our research shows that when compared to a less satisfied visitor, a highly satisfied visitor is 73% more likely to purchase online, 47% more likely to purchase offline, 53% more likely to remain loyal, 72% more likely to recommend, and 66% more likely to be committed to the brand. This finding makes intuitive sense for many business leaders, but the ACSI is able to quantify the impact of a satisfied online shopper on a retailer’s overall business operations." Foresee says a big issue at Facebook has been advertising. According to Freed: ”Their monetization strategy is not meeting the expectations of consumers." That could be because users who grew accustomed to free site unencumbered by advertising are not liking the way social sites are starting to populate with different advertising products. According to the study: "Commercialization of social media sites may be impacting satisfaction. The strategy of starting out as a free service with no advertising or revenue source is an effective way to build traffic and loyalty, as is evidenced across all of these sites. However, starting out that way also trained customers to expect an experience on these sites that is relatively unencumbered by advertising and commercialization." And equally troubling is the rankings that digital sites received for product purchases. According to Foresee, only 12% of Facebook users who responded to the survey had purchased products or services recommended to them on the site. The numbers were worse for MySpace (8%) and Wikipedia (10%), and not great for YouTube either (14%). YouTube and Wkipediea may not be known for product recomendations, but both MySpace and Facebook are trying to position themselves as great places for marketers to spread the word about their products. As long as Facebook continues to add users, consumer satisfaction may not be the biggest issue. However, Facebook can't forget the number of formerly popular social networks that no longer exist. Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw tells The Wall Street Journal: “Building a simple, useful service is the best way to earn and sustain the trust people put in us. That’s why we spend so much of our time and energy focused on improving the products we offer and introducing new ones. We look forward to the next survey.” For now, there's one major benefit that Facebook can fall back on to counter these results: None of its competitors are scoring any better.

Is Foursquare about to go 'mainstream' like Twitter before it? The Telegraph thinks so. In terms of size, Foursquare is still just a baby. Its growth is impressive and it just surpassed 2m registered users, but in the overall scheme of things, that's still a relatively small number. But soon, Foursquare and Twitter may share a potentially important business accomplishment: deals with major search engines.According to The Telegraph, Foursquare is negotiating with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! about search partnerships similar in nature to the ones Twitter previously signed with the same search engines. According to Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, "Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search...We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment." Being able to track tending locations has understandable appeal. Location-aware search is increasingly important, and 'real-time' is too. If location-based services like Foursquare can help search engines determine 'what's happening' where and when, there are plenty of applications for search engines to experiment with. Someday, data from services like Twitter and Foursquare could be applied more broadly in the SERPs. From this perspective, it's smart for search engines to ink deals with companies like Twitter and Foursquare. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be cautious. Becoming too reliant on data supplied by third parties who charge for access to their data introduces some obvious business risk. And it means there will likely be some limits on how far search engines can go; after all, since they don't own the source of the data, they have limited control over how it's collected and delivered. Case in point: when Google announced that it was buying ITA Software, it detailed why it didn't just license ITA's technology: Why do you have to buy ITA Software, when you could just license their QPX service from them like other websites do? We think we can make more significant innovations and bigger breakthroughs in online flight search by combining our engineering expertise with ITA Software's than we would by simply licensing ITA Software's data service. A similar argument could be made when it comes to data from companies like Twitter and Foursquare. If it's as valuable as many believe it could be, licensing deals may not be enough. So should Google, Microsoft or Yahoo buy Foursquare (or Twitter)? According to some reports, Google and Yahoo have tried and either failed, or pulled back. Which raises perhaps the most important point: if the data from services like Twitter and Foursquare proves to be as valuable as many believe it could be, one or more of the major search engines may have little choice but to try to make an acquisition offer that can't be refused. If the data, however, proves to be less valuable, Foursquare and Twitter may find that these licensing deals were ill-conceived in the long run. The bets are lined up. Who will win? Only time will tell, but Twitter and Foursquare investors are clearly confident about their odds, and if they're right, it's bad news for the search engines.

Google is the internet's 800 pound gorilla when it comes to advertising, but that doesn't mean that it has exploited all of the areas for growth potential. A significant one: small, local businesses. While many small businesses use AdWords, or have given it a spin, even more aren't using it. There are plenty of reasons why. Many small business owners find paid search challenging to set up and manage, and if not set up and managed properly, campaigns can be very costly and ineffective. One costly, ineffective campaign can potentially cost Google a customer for life.One of the ways that Google is trying to lure small businesses into its customer ranks is through an offering called Google Tags, yellow markers which appear on Google Maps business listings and when rolled over, can highlight coupons, photos and other advertiser-supplied content. Unlike Google's cash cow, AdWords, customers participating in the Google Tags program aren't charged per click. Instead, Google charges Tags customers a monthly flat fee of $25. That, in theory, makes pitching Tags to the mom and pop business down the street a more straightforward process. To entice more businesses to sign up, Google is running a promotion this week. Through Friday, July 23, Google is offering a 30-day free trial of Tags to new customers. While free credits for new AdWords advertisers are widely distributed by Google and its partners, the fact that Google is running a promotion for Tags just might highlight a recognition that recruiting small businesses to AdWords is often a multi-step process. And one of the best ways to start that process is to hit business owners with a product offering that is easy to understand and has a fixed price. There are millions of small businesses in the United States alone. And while Google could sign up a million of them at $25/month and still not do much for its bottom line, if Google can successfully graduate small business customers from offerings like Tags to AdWords, its may just find its second wind when it comes to revenue growth. The key for Google, of course, is getting Tags customers, who don't receive placement with their listing, to ask the question: "I love my listing, but how do I get it higher?" If it can do that, Google won't have to worry about less-than-stellar earnings for a while.

Email marketers' lives just got even tougher with the recent changes to the Windows Live Hotmail user experience, which enables users to better organise their inbox. The changes include the addition of a trusted senders icon to prevent phishing; the ability to "sweep" or automatically file "grey/gray mail," email that subscribers signed up for but no longer want; and the use of one-click and time-travelling filters, which remove messages that reach the inbox but are later discovered to be from senders with a poor reputation.The good news is that email marketers can proactively ensure their emails continue to reach the inbox, in spite of the changes. Working to maintain a high email reputation score and keeping complaints to a minimum will certainly benefit all marketers, not just those with a large portion of Hotmail subscribers in their email databases. In addition, it is just as important to pay attention to performance data and what that data says about the inactive portion of an email database. Marketers with a large segment of non-responsive subscribers will need to do some housekeeping to ensure all of their email campaigns continue to reach the inbox. That housekeeping comes in the form of a win-back campaign. While some marketers may shudder at the thought of streamlining their email database, implementing a win-back strategy is actually a win-win scenario, despite what some recent industry articles have advised. Sure, it may be easier to ignore the inactive segment and continue to mail to these subscribers because it doesn’t really cost anything and they may choose to respond at some point. This approach may provide some short-term gains in the form of additional opens, clicks and conversions, but it ignores the long-term damaging effects of mailing to an email database with a large non-responsive segment. In other words, there is a very real cost to continuing to mail repeat non-responders. Marketers may be surprised to find that 40-70% of their address book may in fact be dormant. With some ISPs beginning to use engagement metrics as part of the reputation data that is used to filter mail, marketers who continue to mail subscribers that no longer interact with their messaging could see their emails getting sent into spam folders and possibly blocked at the ISP level. Moreover, inactive subscribers have little economic benefit to the marketer, but are at risk for driving down the reputation metrics that we know are in heavy use today – including generating spam complaints and eventually turning into spam traps or dead addresses.   The bottom line is that the deliverability of their entire database could be affected, preventing those subscribers who regularly open, read and click on their messaging from consistently receiving it. As a result, implementing a win-back campaign is no longer simply a nice-to-have strategy, it’s now essential for the health of marketers' entire email databases and it directly impacts on email deliverability, as well as response rates. So, where to start? Below are four initial strategies to help map out a successful win-back plan: Define the inactive segment. For example, for a publisher sending daily newsletters, is the inactive subscriber someone who hasn’t opened or clicked in one month? For a retailer sending weekly promotional mailings, is it someone who hasn’t purchased after six months? For social networking sites, is it someone who hasn’t clicked on the links in transactional messages or updated their profile in one year? Defining this segment will help determine what percentage of recipients are inactive and the type of audience to reach out to with a win-back campaign. Create a series of win-back mailings designed to grab the subscriber’s attention. Include an incentive to act, such as a coupon or free delivery offer. Consider other types of incentives, such as downloadable content, a survey or a contest. Whatever is sent, focus on making an impact. Be sure to send win-back campaigns from separate IP addresses; it’s likely that some of the inactive portion consists of spam trap addresses. Inactive subscribers may also be more likely to complain, so using a separate IP will protect a brand's existing reputation. Get rid of the dead wood. Reach out to persistent non-responders with a last chance re-permission message. Once it's determined who’s still interested and who isn’t, send a final message asking to re-permission these subscribers back on to the email database. Include a deadline to increase the urgency of the message. If the subscriber doesn’t click on the link or take a desired action, remove them from the database and stop messaging them. Almost every email marketer likely has some Windows Live Hotmail addresses on their database; in some cases, those addresses will make up the majority of it. There's more details on the Windows Live Hotmail changes in my colleague Tom Sather's fascinating blog post. Poor email reputations will result in marketers emails failing to reach millions of inboxes. With ISPs strengthening their defences against spam, the onus is on email marketers to protect their email reputation and differentiate their messaging and their practices from spammers. This includes being proactive about inactives: don’t fall foul to the silent, but deadly, non-responsive subscribers.

Jonathan Hsu, CEO for the past two years, becomes chief executive at New York City start-up RecycleBank.

Advertisers can select keywords that populate an ad with relevant content from across the Web.

Yahoo's dips in page views and user duration aren't as large as comScore previously reported.

During a Senate Committee hearing today the Federal Trade Commission Chairman said the agency is assessing the viability of a do-not-track list for online advertising.

Hire comes six months after ouster of former chief exec John Greco.

Label-owned music video site uses industry ties to create exclusive branded performances.

The firm's exclusive multi-year deal with Google is almost up, so what's next?

The hotel industry has few reservations about the importance of social media. Getting a grip on it is another story.

The company's Universal Audience Platform launched today with 21 NBCU properties, including Bravotv.com, NBC.com, Oxygen.com and Syfy.com.

Josh James, founder and former CEO of Omniture, is replaced by Brad Rencher.

Jonathan Hsu, CEO for the past two years, becomes chief executive at New York City start-up RecycleBank.

Advertisers can select keywords that populate an ad with relevant content from across the Web.

Yahoo's dips in page views and user duration aren't as large as comScore previously reported.

During a Senate Committee hearing today the Federal Trade Commission Chairman said the agency is assessing the viability of a do-not-track list for online advertising.

Hire comes six months after ouster of former chief exec John Greco.

Label-owned music video site uses industry ties to create exclusive branded performances.

The firm's exclusive multi-year deal with Google is almost up, so what's next?

The hotel industry has few reservations about the importance of social media. Getting a grip on it is another story.

The company's Universal Audience Platform launched today with 21 NBCU properties, including Bravotv.com, NBC.com, Oxygen.com and Syfy.com.

Josh James, founder and former CEO of Omniture, is replaced by Brad Rencher.

Customer reviews about your brand aren't that scary. What's scary is not being involved in the conversation.

It's time to write your meta description tags for human beings.

If you're like most sites, you're failing significantly at meeting your visitor's expectations from search engines. Here are five ways to rectify that.

27 questions to determine branding effectiveness.

Information architecture is nothing more than taking the time to understand and then design your site around your user base.

Don't confuse cost (what you pay) and value (what you get).

A critique of one e-mail with disabled images offers a lesson for marketers on how small changes can make a more effective e-mail.

Paid search is expensive traffic, so sometimes you have to look to Web properties a click or two away from the original SERP.

Marketers in Hong Kong are trying to coax brand marketers to embrace digital channels, leaving many wondering if their efforts would be better spent on initiatives in mainland China.

The best redesigns are the simplest and the ones that keep evolving.

Despite a drop in time spent with the site, Facebook's unique audience continues to grow.

Automotive advertisers increased their spending on paid search ads by 13 percent in May.

The long-form video content site lost viewers in June, but is serving over double the amount of ads as its competitors.

ComScore says gains are result of contextual search links placed on Microsoft and Yahoo properties, rather than user migration from Google.

Microsoft's Bing engine continues to grow its share of spend and improve ROI, but at Yahoo's expense rather than Google's.

Yahoo has released demographic data on visitors to its properties from the Apple device three months after its U.S. launch.

The top search terms by search volume, according to data by Hitwise.

U.K. searches for the beer brand grew 25 percent week-over-week for the seven days ending June 19.

Yahoo Sports is beating rival ESPN.com for traffic that's specific to the global soccer event. But each have benefited from the unprecedented American fervor for the World Cup during the past two weeks.

According to Hitwise, three segments of the U.S. Hispanic population were more likely to visit World Cup-related content than the overall online population.

Share of ad impressions to Apple smartphone devices from Millennial Media's network falls below 50 percent in May.

Brands sponsoring the World Cup and its competing teams witness growth in searches from U.K. users.

A year after the launch of the Bing brand, Microsoft's share of U.S. searches has grown by 50 percent.

U.K. users visited social networking sites more than they did search engines during May, according to Hitwise.

Retail advertisers paid 25 percent more for search ads in May than they did during the same period last year.

Using these seven tips will help get your PPC ads some real attention and get the right kind of clicks. ...

Taking the time to identify your market and focusing on how to build relationships with those relevant sites will put you above SEOs who are still focusing on outdated tactics. ...

For your foreign language sites to be effective, they absolutely have to be localized for individual countries. Here's why. ...

Search reputation management isn't easy work. Here's how B2B brands and organizations can protect their first impressions in the SERPs. ...

If you've spent time analyzing search results for a variety of queries, you've likely seen results you can't easily explain. Here's why this happens. ...

Creating your own social media dashboard gives you the ability to show the impact of your social media efforts, and it will put you in great position to bide time until a truly robust social media measurement tool is available. ...

Four areas where our industry is straying from the basic fundamentals of good search marketing, and how to correct the course. ...

Get ready people. Real-time bidding works a great deal better than old school display. ...

A quick guide on how advertisers can leverage Google's Product Extension feature within AdWords and display product images and details in line with your PPC ads. ...

How to best use real-time search, social networks, and question-and-answer sites to improve the product purchase process. ...

Understanding user behavior, and having the most granular data available, can give you the advantage and help drive business in PPC and beyond. ...

Latest update and tips on the upcoming merger, plus what it means for your adCenter and Yahoo PPC accounts. ...

Why Japan is the most difficult country to provide both natural search engine optimization and paid search marketing service for. Part one of two. ...

Sorry to break everyone's Utopian social media bubble, but measuring ROI for social media efforts isn't terribly difficult. And despite what anyone says, it's all about the money. ...

This six-step process for building a keyword list will help you craft effective ad groups and landing pages for PPC success. ...

If you haven't seen him yet, check out the YouTube video of Isaiah Mustafa asking ladies, "Should your man smell like an Old Spice man?" As of today, the video has 11,740,466 views -- making it the most viewed video on YouTube during the past month.Click to read the rest of this post...

According to comScore, social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8 percent of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7 percent of men. This is just one of the highlights of a global report released today by comScore on women's online usage entitled, Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.Click to read the rest of this post...

According to new research from Econsultancy, companies worldwide are increasing their investment in site search because they want to improve the experience for website users and increase site usage and sales. Click to read the rest of this post...

An overview of some of today's ad/tech news. Click to read the rest of this post...

Yahoo Japan -- an independent entity from Yahoo -- has decided to forgo the Bing transition and will be using Google search results, Reuters announced today.Click to read the rest of this post...

Most reporters are focused on the United States Copyright Office declaration that it is it legal to unlock or 'jailbreak' a mobile device from the manufacturer and network provider from which it was purchased from, which permits users to install unapproved software under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) fair use provisions. The request was made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) particularly as it applies to AT&T and Apple's iPhone Software License agreement.Click to read the rest of this post...

The rumor is growing fast. Now the New York Post has it that Google could launch its search-related music store as early as this holiday season, i.e. November-December.Click to read the rest of this post...

The advertising industry is launching its own PR campaign by way of setting up an Institute for Advertising Ethics. The sector has always had a negative image and the likes of the "Mad Men" series are certainly surfing that tide to... sell. With the market staging a robust recovery the industry is planning ahead and wants to tweak its reputation. Here's how. Click to read the rest of this post...

NBC Universal (NBCU), the media and entertainment company, has launched its own advertising platform UAP to serve its own network of owned and operated sites, Mediaweek reported, quoting company executives. Click to read the rest of this post...

When AOL is in the news, it means business... CEO Tim Armstrong said advertising would be AOL's primary source of revenues in his turnaround plan for the company. As such, AOL already demonstrated its willingness to leave non-viable operations behind by selling its failing and ailing social site Bebo for a reported $10 million. Now it's building a new future, starting with the launch of an innovative political ads platforms and at the same time looking for its future head of music operations. Click to read the rest of this post...

AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search as its $700 million-a-year deal with Google is set to expire in December. Whether it renews its agreement with Google or switches to another search company, AOL is likely to sign in its partner for the few years to come by September, according to various reports. Click to read the rest of this post...

Microsoft's Greg Nelson and Yahoo's Mark Morrissey recently gave interviews to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. Nelson and Morrissey are in charge of a two-year effort to coordinate the massive search and online advertising partnership that their companies struck last year. According to Swisher, their job "essentially is the search equivalent of herding cats."Click to read the rest of this post...

This past week, Matt Bailey, the president and founder of SiteLogic, Cindy Krum, the Chief Executive Officer of Rank-Mobile, and I taught half a dozen of the modules in the Rutgers Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing certificate program. Rutgers incorporated "cutting-edge digital technology" into our teaching approach for this program - supplying all participants with their own free Apple iPad tablet, containing the pre-loaded program materials.Click to read the rest of this post...

According to Glenn Blain of The New York Daily News, Governor David Paterson of New York has signed into law a measure giving New York City greater power to crack down on so-called "illegal hotels." However, Dennis Schaal of Tnooz reports that Paterson issued a statement saying that he, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the bill's sponsor support an amendment to the bill which would mean the law would not go into effect until May 1, 2011, giving property owners time to adjust to its provisions.Click to read the rest of this post...

If you scour the rates and registration details for SES San Francisco, you'll find something that I haven't seen before. There's group pricing for 4-6 passes, 7-9 passes, 10-19 passes, 20-29 passes, and 30+ passes.Click to read the rest of this post...

Webmaster Level: AllWhen Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we're now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don't want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon

Webmaster Level: AllWe know that some of you, or your clients or colleagues, may be new to online video publishing. To make it easier for everyone to understand video indexing and Video Sitemaps, we’ve created a video -- narrated by Nelson Lee, Video Search Product Manager -- that explains everything in basic terms:Also, last month we wrote about some best practices for getting video content indexed on Google. Today, to help beginners better understand the whys and hows of implementing a Video Sitemap, we added a starting page to the information on Video Sitemaps in the Webmaster Help Center. Please take a look and share your thoughts.Posted by Amy MacIsaac, Content Partnerships

Webmaster Level: AllHave you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search: http://www.example.com/foo.html http://example.com/image.jpg http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv Grilling tofu for summer Here's an example of what you'll see in Webmaster Tools when a Sitemap containing multiple content types is submitted:We hope the capability to include multiple content types in one Sitemap simplifies your Sitemap submission. The rest of the Sitemap rules, like 50,000 max URLs in one file and the 10MB uncompressed file size limit, still apply. If you have questions or other feedback, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content -- something that lets your expertise shine -- people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and "spread the word." Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site's reputation in a positive way.Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We've seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site's source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them. Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it's important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easilyFinally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users' attention.As usual, we'd like to hear your opinion. You're welcome to comment here in the blog, or join our Webmaster Help Forum community.Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin

Webmaster Level: AllWe'd like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txtSometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:PlaypageContent and playerThumbnailMore information about robots.txt.Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played inIs your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don't need to include this.Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can result in the search engine's index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn't exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards. To signal that a video has been removed,Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages. Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the element) or mRSS feed ( tag) submitted to Google.For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search answers check out our Help Forum.Posted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager, Video Search

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)Today, we're announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.Some background for those of you who don't build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here's a good explanation of how it all works.) So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish. To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we've built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you. With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published. Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles. We've built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it's a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.Posted by Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllToday we’re releasing a feature to help you discover if your site serves undesirable "soft” or “crypto” 404s. A "soft 404" occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn't exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. Soft 404s can limit a site's crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content. The web is infinite, but the time search engines spend crawling your site is limited. Properly reporting non-existent pages with a 404 or 410 response code can improve the crawl coverage of your site’s best content. Additionally, soft 404s can potentially be confusing for your site's visitors as described in our past blog post, Farewell to Soft 404s.    You can find the new soft 404s reporting feature under the Crawl errors section in Webmaster Tools.Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users:Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster ToolsFor the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URLDoesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 responseConfirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster ToolsIf you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.We hope that you’re now better enabled to find and correct soft 404s on your site. If you have feedback or questions about the new "soft 404s" reporting feature or any other Webmaster Tools feature, please share your thoughts with us in the Webmaster Help Forum.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

We’re kicking off June with the start of a new round of webmaster Q&A on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel. You submitted and voted on questions for Matt Cutts to answer, and Matt sat in the studio for a full day sharing advice for webmasters.For those of you who watch each video (and who doesn’t?), we’ve worked hard to keep things interesting. Not only did Matt wear different colored shirts, we changed the backgrounds as well! Just don’t submit any screen grabs to We Have Lasers, okay?To get you started, here’s the first video, which addresses a question about geographic targeting in Webmaster Tools:We’ll be posting links to new videos as they’re posted on our Twitter account, so follow us there or subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified of new answers.Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Webmaster Level: All The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.Written by Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team

Webmaster Level: AllSince we released the latest version of Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools we've gotten a bunch of feedback, most of which was overwhelmingly positive. Today, we're happy to bring even more improvements to Top Search Queries that we've implemented as a direct result of your feedback. First of all we've shortened "Top Search Queries" to be just "Search Queries" to better reflect all of the data provided by this feature. In addition to the name change you'll notice that Search Queries has several new updates. As requested by many of you, we're now showing an "Average position" column right on the main Search Queries page. This provides a quick at-a-glance way to see where your site is showing in the search results for specific queries. The other change you'll notice is that we're showing a "Displaying" number for Impressions and Clicks. This number represents a total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table. The number in bold appearing just above it is a total count of all queries including the "long tail" of queries which are not displayed in the Search Queries table. When the "Displaying" number is not visible, such as when you select a specific country from the "All countries" drop-down menu, then the bold number is the total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table.We've also added an Average position column to the Search Queries download.The other addition we've made to Search Queries is a "Starred" tab. Next to each Query on the Search Queries page there is now a clickable star icon. You can click the star icon for all of the queries that are of most interest to you. All of the queries that you "star" will be consolidated under the Starred tab providing a super easy way to view just the queries you care about.We hope that this update makes Search Queries even more useful. If you've got feedback or suggestions for Search Queries please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: AllUpdate on May 19, 2010: We have several translated versions of this post! If you're more comfortable reading Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, or Farsi, the links above will take you to your preferred version. Thanks again for your help.We pay attention to dozens of different languages in our spam fighting, but sometimes we really want to drill down and concentrate on a small number of languages. We’d like to ask for your help to identify webspam in Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech and Farsi. If you know of sites that violate our webmaster guidelines in these languages, please send us a spam report. We use this information not only to look at the sites listed in reports, but also to improve our effectiveness in the rest of your language on the web.Thanks in advance for any data you send our way about spam in these languages. Of course, you’re always welcome to submit spam reports in other languages too!Written by Viktor Nebehaj and Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

(Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog)UPDATE July 13: We have changed the name of the codelab application to Gruyere. The codelab is now located at http://google-gruyere.appspot.com.We want Googlers to have a firm understanding of the threats our services face, as well as how to help protect against those threats. We work toward these goals in a variety of ways, including security training for new engineers, technical presentations about security, and other types of documentation. We also use codelabs — interactive programming tutorials that walk participants through specific programming tasks. One codelab in particular teaches developers about common types of web application vulnerabilities. In the spirit of the thinking that "it takes a hacker to catch a hacker," the codelab also demonstrates how an attacker could exploit such vulnerabilities.We're releasing this codelab, entitled "Web Application Exploits and Defenses," today in coordination with Google Code University and Google Labs to help software developers better recognize, fix, and avoid similar flaws in their own applications. The codelab is built around Gruyere, a small yet full-featured microblogging application designed to contain lots of security bugs. The vulnerabilities covered by the lab include cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (XSRF) and cross-site script inclusion (XSSI), as well as client-state manipulation, path traversal and AJAX and configuration vulnerabilities. It also shows how simple bugs can lead to information disclosure, denial-of-service and remote code execution.The maxim, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is only true if the eyeballs know what to look for. To that end, the security bugs in Gruyere are real bugs — just like those in many other applications. The Gruyere source code is published under a Creative Commons license and is available for use in whitebox hacking exercises or in computer science classes covering security, software engineering or general software development.To get started, visit http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/. An instructor's guide for using the codelab is now available on Google Code University. Posted by Bruce Leban, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllIn this final installation in our URL removal series, let's talk about following up on your removal requests, as well as when not to use Google's URL removal tool. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the previous posts in this series:Part I: Removing URLs & directoriesPart II: Removing & updating cached contentPart III: Removing content you don't ownCompanion post: Managing what information is available about you onlineUnderstanding the status of your requestsOnce you've submitted a removal request, it will appear in your list of requests. You can check the status of your requests at any time to see whether the content has been removed, or whether the request is still or pending or was denied.If a request was denied, you should see a "Learn more" link next to it explaining why that particular request was denied. Since different types of removals have different requirements, the reason why a particular request was denied can vary. The "Learn more" link should help you figure out what you need to change in order to make your request successful. For example, you may need to change the URL in question so that it meets the requirements for the type of removal you requested; or, if you can't do that, you may need to request a different type of removal (one whose requirements your URL currently meets).If a request has been marked "Removed" but you still see that content in search results, check the following:Is the URL that's appearing in search results the exact same URL that you submitted for removal? It's fairly common for the same, or similar, content to appear on multiple URLs on a site. You may have successfully removed one URL, but still see others containing that same content.   Solution: Request removal of the other URL(s) in question. See this article for help.Keep in mind that URLs are case sensitive, so requesting removal of http://www.example.com/embarrassingstuff.html is not the same as requesting removal of http://www.example.com/EmbarrassingStuff.html   Solution: Request removal of the exact URL(s) that appear in search results, including the same capitalization. See this article for help.When a request is marked "Removed," that can mean different things depending on what type of request you submitted. If you requested removal of an entire URL, then "Removed" should mean that that entire URL no longer appears in our search results. If you requested removal of the cached copy of a URL, "Removed" means that the cached copy has been removed and will no longer appear in search results; but the URL itself may still appear.   Solution: Double-check what type of removal you requested by looking at the "Removal Type" column. If you requested a cache removal but you want the entire URL gone, make sure the URL meets the requirements for complete removal and then file a new request for complete removal of the URL.When not to use the URL removal toolTo clean up cruft, like old pages that 404.The tool is intended for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as confidential data that was accidentally exposed. If you recently made changes to your site and just have some outdated URLs in the index, Google's crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time. There's no need to request an urgent removal through this tool.To remove crawl errors from your Webmaster Tools account.The removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. There's currently no way for you to manually remove URLs from this report; they will drop out naturally over time as we stop crawling URLs that repeatedly 404.To "start from scratch" with your site.If you're worried that your site may have a penalty, or you want to "start from scratch" after purchasing a domain from someone else, we don't recommend trying to use the URL removal tool to remove your entire site and then "start over." Search engines gather a lot of information from other sites (such as who links to you, or what words they use to describe your site) and use this to help understand your site. Even if we could remove everything we currently know about your site, a lot of it would come back exactly the same once we'd recrawled all the other sites that help us understand your site and put it in context. If you're worried that your domain has some bad history, we recommend filing a reconsideration request letting us know what you're worried about and what has changed (such as that you've acquired the domain from someone else, or that you've changed certain aspects of your site).To take your site "offline" after hacking.If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, you can use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created, e.g., http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed; instead, simply clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site so that we can reindex the new, cleaned-up content as soon as possible. This article contains more details on how to deal with hacking.To get the right "version" of your site indexed.When a request to remove https://www.example.com/tattoo.html is accepted, http://www.example.com/tattoo.html is also removed. The same is true of the www and non-www versions of your URL or site. This is because the same content is often available at each of these URLs and we realize that most webmasters and searchers don't want these duplicates appearing in search results. In short, the URL removal tool should not be used as a canonicalization tool. It won't keep your favorite version, it'll remove all versions (http/https and www/non-www) of a URL.We hope this series has answered your questions about removing content from Google's search results, and helped you troubleshoot any issues that may arise. Join us in our Help Forum if you still have questions.Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate...k, i, s, s, i, n, g! Perhaps you heard our announcement that speed is a signal in rankings, but didn’t know where to start. We’d like to help foster a lasting relationship between you and a responsive experience for your users. Last week I filmed my updated presentation from "The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters" which includes three first steps to understanding site performance. So grab headphones and some popcorn, then verify ownership of your website and download a plugin, and we’ll all be comfy with site performance in no time.Just curious about the Q&A? No problem! Here you go:Is it possible to check my server response time from different areas around the world?Yes. WebPagetest.org can test performance from the United States (both East and West Coast—go West Coast! :), United Kingdom, China, and New Zealand.What's a good response time to aim for?First, if your competition is fast, they may provide a better user experience than your site for your same audience. In that case, you may want to make your site better, stronger, faster...Otherwise, studies by Akamai claim 2 seconds as the threshold for ecommerce site "acceptability." Just as an FYI, at Google we aim for under a half-second.Does progressive rendering help users?Definitely! Progressive rendering is when a browser can display content as it’s available incrementally rather than waiting for all the content to display at once. This provides users faster visual feedback and helps them feel more in control. Bing experimented with progressive rendering by sending users their visual header (like the logo and searchbox) quickly, then the results/ads once they were available. Bing found a 0.7% increase in satisfaction with progressive rendering. They commented that this improvement compared with full feature rollout.How can you implement progressive rendering techniques on your site? Put stylesheets at the top of the page. This allows a browser to start displaying content ASAP.Page speed plugin, videos, articles, and help forum are all found at code.google.com/speed/.Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Level: AllAs part of our efforts to make search results more useful to our users around the world, we’re announcing the international availability of rich snippets. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you already know that rich snippets let users see additional facts and data from your site in search results.For example, we recently launched rich snippets for recipes which, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet and makes it easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for:We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets - and we know that many of you have already started marking up your content - so today’s announcement is very exciting for us.In addition to adding support for rich snippets in any language, we have published documentation on how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in the following languages: simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. (You can change the Help language by scrolling to the bottom of the help page and selecting the language you want from the drop-down menu.)We encourage you to read the documentation to take advantage of the different types of rich snippets currently supported: people profiles, reviews, videos, events and recipes. You can also use our testing tool (in English only, but useful to test markup in any language) and start validating your markup to make sure results show as you would expect.Finally and as you’ve probably heard by now (several times), we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show rich snippets for your pages. We’re doing this to ensure a good experience for our users; but rest assured we’re working hard to expand coverage and include more web pages. Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Yu Watanabe