December '09 Joomla Template 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 for Photoslide GK3).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. For reduce the number of HTTP requests generated by images, we used the CSS Sprite technique. An overview of the key features of this template are as follows: 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”.

November '09 Joomla Template 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. GavickPro JomSocial Coupon We got a $50-OFF coupon code for our members to use to get $50-OFF JomSocial Pro & JomSocial Standard. 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: Styles used on particular modules positions (xhtml, raw, gkround, etc), Margins, complements and the framing size for each of the main template’s blocks, Switching on/off columns’ alignment in particular blocks, Other innovative features: Main body position may be specified and saved in relation with the component content (they may occur interchangeably or together on the positions specified), Possibility of specification the default font size on the site, Possibility of choice of font family used in the template, New message for users IE6 browser and older versions An overview of the key features of this template are as follows: Tableless design and 100% css based. 3 color themes: Blue, Green/Purple, and Red. Build support for JomSocial v.1.5 – 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.

Now Available The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.15 [Wojmamni ama naiki]. This release contains important security fixes to some bugs that were introduced in version 1.5.14. It is strongly recommended to all Joomla Users to upgrade as soon as possible.   The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community. For more info visit: www.joomla.orgDownload: Joomla 1.5.15Download: update package

Osctober '09 Joomla Template “It calls us to experience, feeds us with knowledge and seduces us in ambition.” Pulsing at a frantic pace, the technological revolution is raging, always bringing us new and innovative solutions to meet new challenges. If today is fiction, tomorrow's reality. Every day, millions are looking to something new in the internet. This is something never seen... Something never heard before. So, is functionality and reliable solutions or the best products enough to your business success? Or do you need also the ultimate professional website presentation? Maybe you’ve got what millions are looking for. Are you willing to know? An overview of the key features of this template are as follows: Tableless design and 100% css based. 6 Colors Themes Styles (Blue – Green – Pink – Red – Yellow – Orange) and 2 Backgrounds Options Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with exclusive built-in template module style. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive built-in template module style. Build support for News Show Pro GK1 module with exclusive built-in template module style. Build support for News HighLighter GK1 module. Disable option for mainbody appearance on front page. Option of module as component by setting module on mainbody position. Option of Column position to left or right display. Configurable Column position width. Login and Register buttons options with modalbox effect display. Easy footer content configuration on template parameters. Build support for WYSIWYG editor with friendly Gavick Typography plugin. Compressed engine option for each modules. Support for template language translation, using language file. 2 layout options: 2 columns (component + right) and 1 column (component). All 26 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 Optional IE6 Warning / Upgrade Notification 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”.

new, support forum subscription plans We inform that as from this date on, the technical support of our extensions for Joomla is free only for GavickPro Members. Unlike what happened till now, those who do not have GavickPro Membership Subscription will not have unrestricted access to the support forum. However, we will maintain free access to all our extensions to download, provided with respective support Manuals and for free use. All those who wish to access to our technical support forum, will have to choose from the following subscription plans: 6 months access for €8 12 months access for €12 18 months access for €15 We know that this is not pleasant for most of you, but believe us that it was not easy decision to take. However, we must take her as a critical foundation to support all the projects that we are developing now and for those that we want to achieve in the future, so we can provide more and innovative solutions to our supporters.Thank you for your comprehension. From all GavickPro Team

August '09 Joomla Template Let the sounds of music flow, to inspire communication beyond all cultural boundaries with Hit Music. On this month template find your music, on the most professional and astounding presentation. From the latest news, reviews, to billboard music charts, articles, videos and much more, you'll find all the rhythms in the most unexpected ways, up to the minute breaking information from the world of music. Having a bad day? Need some fun songs to boost your mood? Listen to the song with your heart and say it loud - "Let my music fly with me far away!" An overview of the key features of this template are as follows: Tableless design and 100% css based. 3 color themes: Red, Blue and Green. Build support for PhotoSlide GK3 component with exclusive Image Show template style design. Build support for TabsManager GK3 component for tabs content display with exclusive template design. Build support for the News Show Pro GK1 module (now with new features added, with special novelty of automatic creation of thumbnails ). Disable option for main body appearance on front page. Option of module as component by setting module on main body position. Option of Column position to left or right display. Configurable Column position width. Configurable Header1 position width. Login and Register buttons options with modalbox effect display. Style Switcher option on frontend. 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. 2 layout options: 2 columns (component + right)  and 1 column (component). All 21 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 Optional IE6 Warning / Upgrade Notification 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. Delivered with "QuickStart Package".

powerful tool of exposure news, articles and content Congratulations!!!  You just found another amazing Joomla!1.5 extension. From probably the most powerful tool of exposure news, articles and content in Joomla, and without any doubt one of the most popular, acclaimed and sucessfull extension ever created, the Gavick News Show module is now a team. So, give welcome to the new News Show Pro GK1 module, ready to impress even more your website visitors. Especially for you, another gift from GavickPro Team. Now, you have two perfect partners, ready to help you achieve the more demanding standard of presentation, that all successful sites require.   And guess what? It's free! How about that?!...   You don't believe it!?... Well... So, it's not free...but we will give you 100% discount! What? You want more? Get it now!   An overview of News Show Pro GK1 module key features: Joomla 1.5 native. Content control display from any section, category or articles ID's. Left, right or bottom selection position of list with links. Horizontal and vertical news presentation (columns and rows configuration). Two modes: standard mode and category mode, Show text, image, author, date, section/category name and button "read more" option, with order customization. News amount sorted by date, order, frontpage order, random or hits. Use of multiple modules on same page with unique ID configuration. Pagination for articles and lists with links Timezones adjustment, date format and native language of month / days customization. Different language translation support included. Partnership with PhotoSlide GK2 (naturally, you need to install the PhotoSlide GK2 to use this respective plugin). On/Off front page articles display in modules. Clean (X)HTML in content. Easy and friendly administration. SEF URLs. Used Javascript Framework: Mootools 1.11. Option for compressed engine script use. Fully compatible: Firefox, IE7, Opera 9.5, Safari, Netscape, Google Chrome, Camino, Flock 0.7+. View the News Show Pro GK1 in live demoDownload the News Show Pro GK1 here More info at GK Tools

The Reaction Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.2 and has various fixes including layout and position fixes in the gantry framework as well as an issue with registration and minor css fixes.

The Reaction Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.1 and has various fixes, ranging for PHP5.3 compatible, Gantry updates, module position errors, parameter errors and tweaks to the logo.

The Affinity Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.9 and has compatibility fixes for the latest version of JomSocial and php 5.3

All of the RocketTheme Joomla 1.5 RocketLauncher template packages have been updated to include the latest Joomla 1.5.15 security release and are now available in their respective template download sections.

The Affinity Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.8 and has compatibility fixes for the latest version of JomSocial

Iridium, the November 2009 Joomla Club Template release, is a theme bursting at the seams with features such as the 6 unique style variations, the sophisticated styling of various popular RocketTheme extensions, and the standard, high performance and adaptable framework. This joomla template is perfect for a content driven site, that wishes to have some flair. Its flexibility allows you to select the level of graphical intensity for your elements, from the style variation, the combination choice and module variations. A truly powerful design.

The Infuse Joomla 1.5 template has been updated to version 1.5.2 with fixes regarding issues with style preset and stylechanger inconsistencies and errors. Also included are fixes for header element handling, minor graphical tweaks, and more.

RokTwittie has been updated to version 0.8 which adds a new merge option, as well as changes to the code which results in more reliable output.

RokTwittie has been updated to version 0.7 which fixes an error with parameters causing tweets to disappear, as well as a translation fix.

Reaction is the January 2010 Club Template release.Reaction has 6 unique style variations in 18 combinations. Each preset style has 3 background levels: Low, Medium & High, which represent different levels of detailing. Therefore, with a simple parameter switch, you can pivotally change the theme from a conservative to a vibrant design.

HiveMind, Akiraka, Mixxmag, Populus, Vertigo phpBB styles have been updated with minor bugfixes and are now available in their respective style download sections.

All of the RocketTheme phpBB styles have been updated to the latest phpBB 3.0.6 release and are now available in their respective style download sections.

Iridium, the December 2009 phpBB3 Club release, is a theme bursting at the seams with features such as the 6 unique style variations and the standard, high performance and adaptable framework. The template is perfect for a content driven site, that wishes to have some flair. Its flexibility allows you to select the level of graphical intensity for your elements, from the style variation and the combination choice . A truly powerful design.

Infuse, the November 2009 Club Style release, is an infusion of artistic flair and functionality. The theme boasts six, individual and unique, style variations, meticulously constructed to perfection. The theme is accompanied by 6 Style Variations, each with 3 different background options, culminating in a total of 18 possible combinations.

A few days ago I blogged about what we wanted Gantry to be, in this post I'm going to delve into how Gantry looks and works. Gantry involves a bit of a paradigm shift when it comes to thinking about how a template works and is configured. We've tried to make this as simple as possible while still allowing the most flexibility so I'm going go over it from front to back.

When I was writing the previous blog post about Mac applications I had a need to add some custom elements to provide the layout that I wanted. Now it's quite common for people to just input some tags in their content but don't do it! It might 'work' but it's not valid XHTML. All style declarations should be in the element of your page. Unfortunately it's not very easy to add style declarations here when you only need them for one page. Traditionally you would have to edit your template CSS file and add the elements there. It's a hassle and also it means those styles are going to be in the CSS for every page of your site, if you need them or not.

2009 has been a very busy year for RocketTheme. At the start of the year we introduced our new RocketTheme version 2.0 site which was a complicated process to say the least. With that launch we also unveiled our phpBB3 Style Club that now contains nearly 30 fantastic styles for phpBB3. In June we launched our Extensions Club that provides access to some really unique extensions for a small membership fee. We also made this club complimentary for our existing Joomla template club members. This month we introduce our new WordPress Theme Club into the RocketTheme family.

Affinity is the January 2010 release from RocketTheme and features great new widgets like RokStories and RokTabs, and brand new theme settings page giving you more freedom than ever! The perfect compliment to its Joomla and PHPBB3 counterpart.

Reaction is the January 2010 Club Template release.Reaction has 6 unique style variations in 18 combinations. Each preset style has 3 background levels: Low, Medium & High, which represent different levels of detailing. Therefore, with a simple parameter switch, you can pivotally change the theme from a conservative to a vibrant design.

RokNewsPager has been updated to version 1.2 which adds comment facilities (JComments and K2) as well as a display option for authors and publishing dates.

RokStories has been updated to version 1.3 which fixed a JS error with layout3 (Compat Showcase)

Appointment Booking Pro is the commercial, appointment focused spin-off of the Resource Booking component for Joomla. New features in the Pro version: Resource specific Time Slots - each resource (person, place or object) can have its own timeslots defined. Copy Time Slots from day to day or resource to resource. Resource specific days - each resource can specify days to allow booking. Optional auto-accept Front-end booking cancellation Front-end booking administration (admin assigns resource administrators) More.. Please note: The October 2008 reviews below mention a price of $25. The current price, since Nov 2008, is $49. New stuff: Unlimited number of User Defined fields Front-Desk view (month/week/day) Google Calendar support JCalPro2 support Limited Community Builder support Service based cost / service based duration Resource specific UDFs 1.4.3 new stuff (just a sample): - 'Seats per Booking' with any number of seat types/costs. - Coupon system - any number of coupons, expiry date, max usage, etc. - Front Desk View enhancements - colour coding, 'Add Booking' 1.4.4 new stuff (just a sample): - Extras - define any number of extra charge items. - Resource specific seat types - Resource specific Coupons - Limited JomSocial integration - pull JS profile data in to pre-fill the ABPro booking screens. Now Available - Free iPhone application (iABPro) - Free BlackBerry application (ABPro_bb) - Free Android application (R.ABPro) Simple mobile device, native app, front ends for resource administrators to manage daily bookings via their smart phones. Requires plg_abpro plug-in, also free to registered users.

Survey Manager (com_surveymanager) allows you to create your own forms for questionaires or surveys. The frontend of the component allows your site visitors to complete the forms, submit them, view their submissions, etc. NOW Joomfish v2 compatible! The backend admin system provides full control over which forms are shown and has facilities for manipulating the submitted data as well as creating and changing the forms as required. Also downloading the submission data as CSV files. Supports Data Types:- Boolean, Date, DateTime, Integer, Text, Time, Email, Captcha, Derived, image and file. Field Types:- checkbox, radio, select, text, textarea. Compound questions. Several useful standard reporting and graphing functions are also available. Whole forms, form sections and questions can now be copied. ------------------------ Changes since version 1.5.8 Stable Update 1: 1. Made the new 'Thank you' message only be displayed when the last section of a multi-page form has been submitted. 2. Placed Previous / Next links at the top of the survey as well as the bottom. (Useful for sections with many questions.) 3. Made explanation field on the Survey_Questions much bigger in case required. Added 'Additional_Info' field to the same DB table and also to the admin pages and frontend submission display code. 4. Made the look and feel of the component easier to change for people who don't know CSS by adding a colour picker to the CSS admin page. Changes since version 1.5.8 Stable: 1. Corrected a bug in the generation of boolean select lists. 2. Corrected another bug in the handling of new option values for derived fields. (Where there was more than one on a form.) 3. Added a 'Thank you' message to be displayed at the end of a survey when it's been 100% completed. 4. Added 'show_correct_answers' global parameter to control the display of the correct answers as well as the users upon saving. Added colour coding of correct and incorrect answers too. 5. Improved the help information on the question admin pages.

This Joomla! extension allows you to create a handy and good-looking events calendar to represent and manage any type of events. It provides an ease-to-use scheduling solution with advanced features and familiar user interface (like the one you can find in Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook Calendar). Easy and intuitive dynamic interface of the scheduler enables you to add/modify/delete events on the fly, and easily change events dates and time by simply dragging the event boxes. There is a possibility to set up different levels of permissions to people who will use the calendar. The scheduler can be configured to display events in Day, Week, or Month view, as well as in any custom view. If there is a need to display recurring events, users can create events which will be repeated on daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. The main features include: * Day/Week/Month/Year view + ability to create custom view * Agenda view (see all oncoming events) * Drag-n-drop support to configure event date and time * Customizable appearance * Skin Builder (allows changing colors for each skin element) * Single/multi-days events (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis) * Customizable time scale * Recurring events * Multilingual

In a couple of weeks there's going to be an important Joomla Developer Conference in New York. Starting with a social evening on the Friday 4th, the conference itself is a two-dayer over the weekend of the 5th and 6th. There's also a hands-on development event on Monday. The location is beautiful: the Faculty House at Columbia University. Click here for full hotel and attendee information. Click here to register for the two day conference. Around 40 tickets are still available and they cost $100. Read more...

We've always used Joomla as our blog platform of choice here at Alledia. People are  always surprised by that, which is pleasing ... it took a lot of work. We needed a whole variety of different extensions to create the normal features of a blog. Because it requires quite a bit of effort, Joomla developers have long looked enviously at Wordpress and the default blogging features it has. Several have tried to bridge Wordpress into Joomla including MojoBlog. The latest and perhaps the most comprehensive is WordPress for Joomla by corePHP.com. Read more...

I had time to take a good look at the Alpha version of Joomla 1.6 this weekend. The Art of Joomla is doing a great job of explaining new features. I'll also blog later about the new SEO features ... they've taken on board of a lot our recommendations including the ability to control the metadata for each page! However, today thought I'd hightlight some nice usability improvements. Several common frustrations that beginners had with 1.5 seem to have been resolved: 1) The "Menu Manager" Has a Purpose In 1.5 beginners always expect the Menu Manager to do much more ... such as actually manage something. In 1.6 the Menu Manager is much more closely integrated with the display of menu links. Oh, and you no longer get those four confusing boxes when making a new menu: Read more...

The HotBrackets Tournament Brackets component for Joomla! allows you to display Single Elimination, Double Elimination and First Round Consolation tournament brackets on your site. This component only displays the bracket. All administration of the bracket is done through HotBrackets.com

This is a module to show the Virtuemart product images in a very fancy way. Width and height change from the administrator. Selected category display in to the slide show.

Captcha is an essential functionality to avoid spam. In recent days, we observed that many users are annoyed by lots-and lots of spam on there Joomla based websites. To resolve the issue, we shipped ReCaptcha with JomSocial Profile Types, but recaptcha does not offer a appealing look. Therefore we targeted a general plugin which can be used to provide captcha functionality through out the joomla website. Currently the product can provide captcha for * Joomla Core Registration * Joomla Contact Component * Joomla Password reset or forget username and * JomSocial registration and group creation We are improving the product day by day and adding support for many other components.

The Problem : The standard Joomla 1.5 stable has no means to allow or require admin (or other) approval / verification before a user is allowed to login to a site - that is - after they get their verification email, all one has to do is click and then login to the site. It would be just absolutely fantastic if the admin - besides being notified of a new user - could actually approve or deny an application for registration. See at Joomla Forum The JoomlaXi Solution : We have developed a plugin, called Admin Approval Plugin. Once it is installed on your site, the administrator of website can selectively approve the joining request. Features 1. No core hacks, its a plugin. Easily and quickly installable. 2. One click approval link in email for admins, no hassles. 3. You can customise the emails from language file. 4. A welcome email is also sent to user, customize it with the ease. 5. This also integrates with our JomSocial Multiple Profile Type Plugin

This component will allow you to upload data from an Excel spreadsheet directly into articles! This means that each row from your excel sheet will populate one new article on your site. Website creators, which want to populate a site quickly after finishing it with existing articles, will find this particuarly useful as it eliminates a time consuming, manual process.

The first ever Joomla! event specifically for third party developers will be in New York City on December 5 and 6.Focused on the transition to Joomla! 1.6, the Joomla! Developer conference will feature all four development coordinators (Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Ian MacLennan, Mark Dexter), master Joomla! developer Andrew Eddie, Hannes Papenberg from the 1.6 release team and MooTools team member Aaron Newton. Joomla! 1.6 is currently at alpha 2 status, so this is the time for extension and custom developers to begin working with its new features such as Access Control Lists, JForm, nested sets and other enhancements. The conference is appropriate for developers who have experience working with Joomla! as extension developers, custom developers, and in house staff. Tickets are $100. The Joomla! Project thanks Rochen Performance Hosting, Joomla! Showroom and the Joomla! User Group New York for their sponsorship of the event, which, among other things, is supporting the attendance of six student and young non commercial developers at the conference.

Joomla! is a finalist in the "Hall of Fame" and "Best Open Source PHP CMS" Awards sponsored by Packt Publishing. We'd encourage all Joomla! fans to vote for Joomla for both awards. With the exciting news about the implementation of Access Control Lists (ACL) in Joomla 1.6 and the incredible growth of all parts of the Joomla Project, now is a time to celebrate the great successes of this community. Over 1000 sites in the Site Showcase, 3500 extensions in the JED, 150 Resources in the JRD and almost 13 million downloads, what a great set of accomplishments by everyone in the Joomla community. Remember that you can also vote for best extension and best template and nominate someone who you think is a Joomla MVP. There are so many great contributors who could be nominated. Think of all those people who make the JED, JRD, Showcase, Forums, JoomlaCode and Joomla itself possible. Thanks to everyone who nominated Joomla for the Best Open Source PHP CMS Award and for all you do to support Joomla.

Today we release Alfa version of Mighty Assistant component. It is not merely a new extension. It is a new customer experience. This component is developed to make life of our customers much easier. Mighty Assistant completely changes the Download Section, Release & Update log and License Manager. This component is a convenient tool allowing to control all downloads and subscriptions, be in the swim of news and updates, to know current version and license state, go through installation process, check System Requirements and much more from one place. This component is a free extension only for MightyExtensions clients. The only thing that you need to do is just to install it on your website,  open Mighty Assistant, synchronize and see what is new.

Analytic 2.0 is going to be next generation site analysis. It will allow visitors of the sites not only to see publicly available reports but generate private reports. Private report will show analytics only on data posted, viewed, commented, ... by currently loged in user. Something like "Statuses of my tickets in support desk" or "Seller sales" or "Order statuses". Yes text means a lot, but chart diagrams sometimes may say more about your site then any advertisment. And charts usually not lie unlike text advertising does sometimes :) so visitors can have deeper confidence to your site. Try yourself here, and tell us what you think?

Touch 1.1.7 Today we released Touch 1.1.7 which is very stable. To be true, Touch is much more then we expected it to be. We tried to create profiling system for b2b ecommerce websites based on our Commerce solution but it turn out to be very powerful social network application with no analogy on today’s market. Resources 1.5 Next version of Resources we release coming week is 1.4.7. It is a last 1.4 series. So harry up to report all errors if you want them to be fixed there. After 1.4.7 next version will be 1.5.0. We do not plan many new features there, though we prepare some surprises. The main goal of 1.5 is optimization. We will optimize DB, queries, we will implement 2 levels of cache for whole HTML pages and on the query level. We already have scheme where number of queries decreases to 30%. The expected speed growth at least 70%. Analytics 2.0 New Analytics is just about to be released. It is in testing mode. The main new feature is: reports are visible on frontend. In fact it is accessible only from frontend. Users can see reports for their own items. Foe example for ecommerce, sellers will be able to see sale reports, or user may see report on popularity of own blog items, or, ... almost whatever you can imagine. I mean the same as it used to be but on frontend and with more features in there. Beta testers are welcome.

Joomla! is one of the most popular Content Management Systems all over the world and wins new admirers every     day. Though Joomla! is not the easiest CMS among existent its appeal is under the great functionality it offers for   webmasters. Joomla learning process becomes easy in the modern world due to huge amount of Joomla tutorials. One of such tutorials The Joomla Book - A Users Guide to Joomla 1.5 by Barrie M. North I want to review here. The first thing that I found very significant is that author was very thorough to describe all the details of Joomla structure and made it easily understandable for even complete newbie in Joomla world. The Manual starts from the introduction to what is Content Management System and Joomla history. You will also learn from this book all the nuances of Joomla installation process;  Joomla! administration basics; Step by step description of the content organization on your website; Creating menus and navigation; What are Extensions and what potential they give you; How to expand your content and how to get traffic to your website. As addition you will learn how to create a pure CCS template and at last few chapters at the end are devoted to creating concrete sites (school site, restaurant site and blog site). All the material is supplied with detailed screenshots, quick notes and summaries which you can come back periodically to consult. In general book is written in easy understandable language with comprehensively explained terminology. Appendixes at the end of the book will provide you with help sites and forums, Joomla case studies, SEO notes and how to install WAMP. As a conclusion I want to add that book will be very helpful for novice and medium experienced Joomla users and definitely deserves consideration of those who plan to manage their website on one's own.

Priority Important Product Assistant Item Type Component Link to file 1 com_mighty.assistant.v.1.0.Alfa.2.zip (Size: 572 Kb | Hits: 105) We are proud to present our new component - Mighty  AssistantCurrently alpha version.This component is developed to make life of our customers much easier.This component includes the ability to install the license, so if you install Mighty Assistant, the component license Manager disappears. If you need a component license Manager reinstall. Notice: Please read the instructions (the button help).Always make backup befor run any update. More information can read in our news.

Priority Regular Product Membership Item Type Component, Plugin Link to file 1 com_jcs(php4).update.from.v.2.0.to.v.2.5.1.zip (Size: 326 Kb | Hits: 703) Link to file 2 com_jcs(php5).update.from.v.2.0.to.v.2.5.1.zip (Size: 341 Kb | Hits: 2945) Link to file 3 com_jcs.sql-patch.2.5.1.zip (Size: 940 B | Hits: 69) Link to file 4 plg_jcs.component.4.4.1.zip (Size: 6 Kb | Hits: 5539) Link to file 5 plg_jcs.content.3.3.9.zip (Size: 4 Kb | Hits: 4637) Link to file 6 plg_paypaypal.3.8.5.zip (Size: 17 Kb | Hits: 2672) Link to file 7 plg_payoffline.2.5.7.zip (Size: 9 Kb | Hits: 3167) Link to file 8 plg_pay2co.2.6.zip (Size: 18 Kb | Hits: 1165) Component Added - option "Date From" - if you specify this option, the subscription is activated on the day specified in the Date From,regardless of the date of purchase. Added - option "Date To" - if you specify this option, the subscription expires on the day specified in the Date From, regardless of the date of purchase. Added - option "Plans to be deactivated" - deactivates the selected plans with the purchase of current Added - On the plans (for back-end), information on how many subscriptions purchased, now displayed in the following format: (total number of subscriptions / subscription active / inactive / expired subscriptions) Added - In the history of subscriptions is now possible to trace how the coupon was used to purchase Plan Plugins: Added -  parameter Subscription Sign (Picture) for subscribed users. This parameter defines Picture Location (relative to Joomla root directory) that will mark article title for logged in users who have a subscription. Added - option "Place text after image" this parameter defines Text Alert that will mark article title for logged in users who have a subscription. Do not forget to Update install the SQL patch 2.5.1

In order to upgrade your Membership component to the latest version, take the following steps: Back up your Membership's files. Check the version of Membership that you are currently running. It can be checked in the Mighty Membership->About section. Install the com_jcs.update.from.v.2.0.to.v.2.x.x.zip file. Choose either com_jcs.update.from.v.2.0.to.v.2.x.x.zip for PHP4 or com_jcs.update.from.v.2.0.to.v.2.x.x.zip for PHP5,  which ever php version your server is currently running. Install SQL Patches which versions are higher than the version of your old Membership. For example, if before upgrade you were running Membership v2.2, then you need to install SQL Patches v2.3, v2.3.2, v2.4, v2.4.6 and v2.5.1. Upgrade Plugin - Content Controller and Plugin - Component Controller If you're using any of our payment plugins, please check if yours are of the latest versions. If they are not, please upgrade them. Versions of payment plugins can be checked in Extensions->Install/Uninstall->plugins Re-save the Membership configuration page. If your old Membership’s version was lower than v2.2, re-save all your subscription plans. The upgrade is finished!

1. Install plugin taber and publish it.2. Content>Types>Fields, edit fields for the type where tabs/sliders supposed to aply.3. Make slice with taber plugin and fields we would like include in tabs/slidersExample: First field is taber. In configuration Params set type. This is what will be showed tabs or sliders, accordingly what you choose for the first should be the same for all tabers. Important! Part for the first tab should be Open, for the rests New Page and at the end Close. You create first field as taber with 'open', than follow next field(s) for content this tab will include, that another taber field with 'new page' and again field(s) for content of this tab... etc. At the end after content field(s) create last taber fied with the 'close'.That's almost all. There is important note yet:for all tabers in the Layout set:Align Table Row: NoBreak Before: NoBreak After: No into the Label set:Show Lablel: NOWrap Lable: NO

Components User, Resources, PeopleTouch, Inbox Video Series Social Network Service Language English Length 4:07 Size 7.7 Mb Step 3. Adding component JoomSuite User

Components Resources Language English Length 20:00 Size 10 Mb Get ideas on how to start the usage of Resources. This totorial is created by sem7urg.

Components Resources Language English Length 00:13:24 Size 20 MB This tutorial will show you how to use JoomSuite Resources to create a Gallery. This tutorial is also very useful to understand about the basic features of this Component and how it can help you to build whatever you want.

Components User, Resources, PeopleTouch, Inbox Video Series Social Network Service Language English Length 3:56 Size 7 Mb Step 8. Setting Parameters for plugins and modules. Creating menu items for PeopleTouch.

Components User, Resources, PeopleTouch, Inbox Video Series Social Network Service Language English Length 4:07 Size 8.2 Mb Step 1. Let's go "Shopping"

Components Member, Resources Language Swedish Length 21:39 Size 20 Mb I denna video visar vi hur man sätter upp en suppport avdelning och även lite hur man använder member. Video by Wolverine. Se mera filmer på desimedia.se.

Components User, Resources, PeopleTouch, Inbox Video Series Social Network Service Language English Length 3:12 Size 5.5 Mb Step 2. Work with Resources

Components Resources Video Series Resources 1.4 - Case Studies Language English Length 16:09 Size 19 Mb Tutorial show how to create forum based on resources. Here you can discus advantages and disadvantages of this idea (please, do not discuss video there).

Components Resources Video Series Resources 1.4 - Case Studies Language English Length 10:15 Size 11 Mb This case study cover not only how to create music stock on your site but also how to allow users to have own categories and homepages in a section. Applicable for almost anything.

Components Resources Video Series Resources 1.4 - Case Studies Language English Length 09:43 Size 10Mb How to use Resources to create event / calendar section.

Components Resources, PeopleTouch Language Swedish Length 56:09 Size 30 Mb I denna film visar jag hur du använder tabs och slides i Resource, Touch Video by Wolverine. Se mera filmer på desimedia.se.

Icon Version 2.6.0 Encrypted No PHP Any Availability Free Download mod_jsc_content_list.v.2.6.0.zip (Size: 11 Kb | Hits: 4732)

Icon Version 1.1 Encrypted No PHP Any Availability Free Description This plug-in works with Mighty PeopleTouch components and allows to increase buyers karma. Karma increases when the product is shipped to buyer (paid successfully). Download plg_type_karma.v.1.1.zip (Size: 2 Kb | Hits: 439)

Icon Version 1.3 Encrypted No PHP Any Availability Free Description This pack contain fields like product properties, product properties rent, price, product type,  and more in the future. Install as fields of Mighty Resources. Download fields_commerce.unpack.first.zip (Size: 146 Kb | Hits: 2084)

Icon Version 1.1 Encrypted No PHP Any Description This is plug-in of group 'User' which prevents double login to Joomla.How does it work? If this plug-in is installed and enabled it is checking current session of user. If session was before the new login, plug-in deletes the previous session from DB and leaves the new one. Therefore 'User - Double login' plug-in must be second after Core Joomla 'User - Joomla!' plug-in. Features:Automatically stay after Core Joomla 'User - Joomla!' plug-inSeparate front-end and back-end loginations, if 'NO' front-end session will be deleted if user login to back-end and vice versa. Download plg_doublelogin.v.1.1.zip (Size: 1 Kb | Hits: 8935)

    TCL (Tiny Content List) is powerful Joomla module to expand JoomSuite Content component capabilities. By default JoomSuite Content has module to list specified content titles, but..., but...... But sometimes we need more and even a lot more than more. Version 1.0.0.0 License Other Type Non-Commercial Extension type Module

Because the recent "hack" of Jomsocial Avatar and Profile Linkin wont work in new release of Resource i customized the old hack to work with actual version of rescource an jomsocial. HowTo: File Url: components/com_resource/helpers/helper.php Backup your actual helper.php create a new helper.php Copy all of the code above into new helper.php have fun cheers jan  

What it does?Displays Information from Amazon for a specific article.New in this version:Turn on/off reviewsTurn on/off similiar products What do you need?PHP PEAR with Services_Amazon 0.8.0 installedAmazon Associate IDAWS Account (Public and Secret Key) How can i see if Services Amazon is installed?If you own a server use the comman line and type "pear list". If you have a shared hosting account then you should ask your provider. Version 1.1 License GPLv2 or later Type Non-Commercial Extension type Plugin

Level Intermediate

Level Advanced

Level Intermediate

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.

We are proud to announce the release of the new version of Xmap - The sitemap generator for Joomla!. This version fixes some small errors in the previous version and introduces some new features.

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Google recently announced their fade in homepage. From a marketing perspective I think it is interesting to try to figure out why they did that. Marissa Mayer wrote: the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change... and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed. I think there are 3 big reasons to consider such a test it is now impossible for any competitor to win by being viewed as more minimalistic (on the homepage, anyhow) as Google noises up their search results with various verticals (from their universal search) they want to remind searchers how beautiful and minimalistic and elegant Google is to get people to pay more attention to the ads below the search box (making them appear a second later makes them POP much more than if those directed ads were there right off the start...and as Google enters more verticals with new features they will use that announcement area on the homepage much more often) The blank page conveys simplicity even as Google dominates new verticals by becoming more complex. Such initial perceptions matter a lot in marketing. You see people quote your site as being advanced or basic or some such, and when some such statements skew in the direction that is opposite reality that comes down to mis-perceptions. We are planning on doing a new site design soon(ish) because while our site design was perfect for what it was back then (a personal blog about SEO) as our site has bolted on so many pieces (training + community +newsletter + tools) that I think the design doesn't fit all the stuff we have added to it. If you shift with the market but do not shift your design it is a bit of mixed messaging, and anything that increases doubt or confusion is a tax on conversion.

Recently on Twitter a couple people mentioned that we should create tools similar to our Firefox extensions for Google Chrome. Then on TechCrunch there was a comment "As soon as I see the SEO Book toolbar for Chrome, I’ll be glad to uninstall Firefox." I read that and thought news to me. First of all I think it is a bad idea because if Google owns the search engine and the browser then maybe that is not the best spot to have your SEO research stuff hooked up, but even beyond that I don't think we would make $1 more by creating those tools. Why? Because the people who use Google Chrome for SEO research are not the type of people who want to pay for anything related to SEO (outside of buying links perhaps). My buddy Patrick from BlogStorm mentioned 'Imagine all the links you would get from people writing about the "Top 10 Chrome Extensions for SEO"' but when you think about it, what kinds of "customers" would those links bring? Entitled demanding and rude non-customers who pollute our sales funnel and waste our time. Eh...not really worth it. Today a person running a COMMERCIAL SEO company told me "One of my employees loves the hubfinder and is now distraught that it's not free anymore. What would it take to get access to that tool?" And I responded with "if they are distraught over $300 then frankly they are quite pathetic, IMHO." He wants to CHARGE his clients, PAYS his employees, and then wants my time FOR FREE to ask how he could get FREE access to the fruits of our labor. Distraught? Really? I couldn't imagine having the audacity to send that message. And the truth is...that is 99%+ of the SEO market...everything should be free except whatever they sell. But we have to PAY $1,000+ a month for a web host, PAY for our vBulletin license, PAY for our SupportSuite license, PAY to license data from other sources, PAY to create tools to collect data, PAY to create new tools, PAY to maintain tools, PAY to advertise, PAY for a design + redesign, PAY for additional servers working creatively on future projects, PAY for the risks associated with being a well known public SEO, PAY to fly out to speak at SEO conferences & share information, PAY for upgrades to the site, SPEND lots of time on creating content for the blog, PAY PAY PAY etc etc etc We have subscriptions with services like Compete.com and WordTracker because to us they are worth it.Which is why we buy AdWords ads, certain links, access to other sites and services, desktop software like AdvancedWebranking, etc. I have easily spent $100,000's on consulting, tools, and info-products. Was every purchase profitable? No. But in aggregate, there was plenty of profit to be had. The people who are selling stuff but who are afraid to spend any money themselves often sell trash. They are not convinced in the value of what they sell (often because it is lacking). Or as Seth puts it... Money is more than a transfer of value. It's a statement of belief. An ad agency that won't buy ads, a consultant who won't buy consulting, and a waiter who doesn't tip big—it's a sign, and not a good one. You don't create a real business by being the free infrastructure for someone else's business while giving it away AND providing 1:1 support. That is why open source works so well...give away the software, but if they want 1:1 support from the source they pay for it. $$$ Yes we could use more links, but that is not a weakness in our business right now...we have something like a quarter million people using our stuff. If anything, I would love to donate some of this site's links to a few of our affiliate websites. ;) Imagine having a quarter million+ non-customers. If you are at that scale your problem is not finding a way to get more people at the top of the funnel. At that scale the issue more becomes filtering out the bottom portion of the market without offending the people who might potentially become customers. Assume 5% of the 250,000 people are entitled ___holes. Assume another 5% of them are great people who just happened to have a minor issues in the conversion process (forgot their username, picked the wrong username, registered under the wrong email address, didn't get the welcome email, etc.). Could you imagine handling 25,000+ personal emails a year? Add in paying customers & media inqueries and now your up above 30,000. And that doesn't even include making close to 1,000 posts a month in our member forums and reading the nearly 100,000 posts that have been made there! I love the work I do (and love helping people), but I think this really expresses the sentiment nicely. I had to add the following to our support feedback section to help make the pollution from non-customers more manageable Free SEO Tool Issues? A Polite Warning for Non-customers We run the best SEO website with the deepest and richest customer engagement. But our resources are finite and our time is valuable. We Give Away Lots of Value, But Our Company is Small At the same time we have given away some of our free SEO tools to over 100,000 webmasters. We can not provide 1 to 1 support to an audience that large while still providing the amazing customer experience that our paying customers have grown to appreciate and expect. If you are not a PAYING member then we expect you to read the installation and usage documentation before filing a ticket. Did You Read The Usage Instructions? Please note that if you are not a PAYING customer AND your issue is with our free SEO tools then we will NOT respond to ANY requests where you have not read the installation and operating instructions from the associated download pages. SEO Tool Usage + Configuration Instructions For your convenience here are links to the official resource centers for SEO 4 Firefox, Rank Checker, the SEO Toolber, & the download page. (The download page requires you set up a free account and login to it). Need to Uninstall a Tool? If you would like to uninstall something here are 2 ways to do that. In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky stated something along the lines of popularity being an imbalance between supply and demand of attention. Which is precisely why filtering is so important. If you don't filter out the laggards and freetards you are only holding back your own potential while giving your paying customers an inferior service to what they deserve. Eventually it gets to where filtering through that noise becomes nearly a full time job. (Lucky for me I work twice as long as just about anyone I know), but anything that makes the sign up process more complex creates more noise (which potentially eats your time + harms your brand while creating 0 income). Plus the above quoted piece from our support section might turn off some potential clients...but it is always a game of filtering...help as many people as you can and hopefully try not to offend many people. What we are scarce on is time. And that is also what many people new to SEO are scarce on. And what people who are willing to pay for correct information with rich context are short on. Working through all the hype and misinformation and scammy offers can be a bit overwhelming. To a person who is new to SEO, it is already confusing enough to decide... which tools offer real value if they should use any software if they should use free or paid tools what combination of software to use And if we duplicate our tools for many different browsers then that ends up increasing the maintenance cost WHILE harming conversion rates (because people don't know what they should chose, or why you have so many tools doing the same thing). The capital and efforts spent creating (and maintaining) a second or third set of duplicative free SEO tools would be better spent creating more paid tool & content for our paying subscribers.

Do you ever think that SEO is "obvious"? "Common knowledge"? "Pretty easy, really"? Watch this: In this video, "Scott" from Google asked 50 people on the street if they knew what a browser was. Less than 8% of people surveyed did. Many people confused a browser with a search engine. Google Chome - or Google "Crown" as one woman put it - was unheard of. I bet you're feeling smarter than you did before you watched that video! Fact is, if you're reading this site, you're already waaaay ahead of most people in terms of internet knowledge and how it all hangs together. Pat yourself on the back. There is a downside, however. The Distorted Lens Of Familiarity We see the internet through our own lens, a lens that has been honed over the years by focusing on a specific thing. We study search engines, we experiment with algorithms, we hang on Matt Cutts every word - they should have asked the people if they knew who Matt Cutts was - "Matt Coutts?", we upload sites, we research keywords, we study user behavior, we build links, and more. Such attention to detail can provide clarity, but can also distort our view. We need to keep in mind that most people don't see the internet as we do. Most people don't know what a browser is. Most people cannot tell a paid search result from a non-paid one. People certainly do not understand that the site they are seeing in first position may only be there because some smart SEO has helped ensure that happens. What is "spam" to the trained SEO eye may be perfectly acceptable to the end user, so long as the user gets the answer they want. normal people can't tell the difference between AdSense style ads and all the other links on most web sites. And almost the same number don't know what "sponsored results" on the Search Results Page are either. It's just a page of links to them. They click the ones that look like they'll get them what they want. It's that simple Beyond the tiny web-savvy crowd, these people are your market. So it pays to put yourself in their shoes, especially when making decisions about how your site functions and displays information. According to research conducted by the Nielsen company, the average internet user now spends 68 hours online per month. That may sound like a lot, but it only comes out to an average of about two and a quarter hours a day You have a tiny window of opportunity. There are so many other activities, and web sites, demanding a visitors attention. The fact someone has even arrived at your site should be seen as something special. Here a few points I've found to be true. 1. When Designing A Site, Make It Stupidly Easy To Use Internet users spend less than one minute per page while surfing. You have roughly four seconds to get their attention. The average time spent on a page is falling, indicating that if people don't find what they want immediately, they will go elsewhere, and they can, because the supply of websites is endless. Ignore design rules predicated on the notion of information scarcity. A user won't wrestle with your site. Web design, particularly navigation, is not the place to get clever. Web design should be no more complicated than book design. You might notice every book shares the exact same user interface. As do cars. As do bicycles. I have no idea how my car works. People have explained the workings of the internal combustion engine to me, and I nod sagely, but really, I don't have a clue. Nor do I need to know. I just turn the key and hit the pedal. Your website design should ask nothing more of the user than a car does. Assume nothing, other than the user will point and click something obvious. 2. Make The Thing You Do Obvious Once a person decides your page is roughly what they are looking for, you have a further four seconds to direct them to desired action or get them to continue reading. On the average web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. If you make your money via Adsense, then place Adsense prominently on your pages. If you make money selling subscriptions, make a huge button that says "sign up for a subscription here". Place it where everyone can see it on their first - and possibly only - visit. If you want people to donate to your charity, make the donate button big and bold and place it prominently on every page. Pretty obvious, right. But it's amazing how many sites bury what they want a user to do. So, decide what is the one thing you want users to do, and relegate - or remove - all other distractions. The exception is a site to which users return to time and again. Make more features available to power users, but ensure there is always a clear, simple path for the first time user. Language can also get in the way of conversions. Assuming people know everything that you do (including acronyms and industry jargon) is an easy way to passively lose sales every day. ;) 3. SEO - You Don't Need to Sweat The Small Stuff There are people who spend their life finding and exploiting gaps in the algorithms, gaps that often exist only temporarily. I'm not one of those people. Neither is Aaron. I think SEO is most effective when approached holistically i.e understanding how the different stages of attracting the visitor then converting them to desired action relate to one and other. Identify the target market - keyword research and visitor profiling - and work backwards from there. When the visitor who - and lets remember, s/he most likely doesn't know what a browser is - searches for "lemon law" - what do they really want to achieve? Do they want to find information about this topic? Do they want to buy something? Do they want to compare one service provider with another? What's really on their mind? Sift through a list of related keywords until you can determine intent. Once you've figured out the intent, give the people the content they desire. Publish crawlable pages addressing that topic and intent, get the pages linked from other pages related to that topic and intent, and advertise your pages anywhere where your target market resides, either by buying space on high ranking sites or publishing your views, and links, on those sites. Read this. That's SEO in a nutshell. Leave the minutiae to the hackers, unless you are one! 4. The Most Successful Stuff Replicates Something The User Already Does Email is a killer app because it enables a user to do something they already do more easily - write letters to people. Search is a killer app because people have always looked for information, and search makes that process more efficient. The computer games industry is huge because people have always played games. Facebook and Twitter are huge because they are essentially txt messaging in another format. Txt messaging is a replacement for calling people on the phone. Skype. Amazon. Ebay. All the big, successful internet plays took an everyday task the user already undertakes, and puts that task in an online context. These services don't ask the user to do something genuinely new. Most applications that ask users to do something genuinely new - a lot of Web 2.0 applications, for example - fail miserably for this reason. Most users don't want to do anything genuinely new. The people who do - radical early adopters - are highly unlikely to be your target market. Try to frame whatever you do in terms of a task a visitor already knows well. Demonstrate, quickly and clearly, how you make that task easier or more efficient. 5. Even Google Users Are Not Typical Studies suggest that Google users tend to be wealthier than average, and have more experience with the internet than users of MSN and Yahoo. The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice, are more likely to have household incomes above US$60,000 than people who use competing search engines. Whilst these numbers are probably getting more mainstream as Google grows their market share, it pays to remember that your target market may not be using Google at all! One of the secrets of search marketing is that the conversion rates from MSN and Yahoo can blow Google conversion rates out of the water, especially if you're in the market of providing goods and services to the average punter. A good example of this was when Aaron recently shared ad click-through rates per visitor for some large sites...with Bing in the clear lead...nearing double the rate of Google users. Summary In summary, the key to internet marketing is to know your audience. Really know them. It is not that people are stupid, it is that they are likely to be unfamiliar. And remember that the average internet user is not you :)

Many of the people who become successful only do so after falling hard. And some of the people who never fell before becoming successful often let success slip away because they lack appreciation for where they are and what they have. Shoemoney recently published his monthly email newsletter revealing his personal story...and I thought it was well worth sharing. ---- I am hearing a lot of great stories from people who have gone through my free shoemoneyx.com course and doing some neat things generating revenue. Please keep sending me your stories. I love hearing them! That is why I made the program! Now I don't mean to pee in your cheerios but I want to talk to you and share something with you. Something I feel is really important. Making money online is easy. Profiting from it over the long haul IS NOT. Eventually everyone's ship comes in. When your ship comes in what will you do? Maybe your ship just came in? This is my personal story and dealing with my first big success and how I was able to position myself for the best outcome. I hit rock bottom about 8 years ago. I was 420 lbs, smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day, about 60k in credit card debt, and just had lost my job. I also sleeping on my friends couch. Its important to know what rock bottom feels like. Its important to know what its like to really be hungry. Its important to know what it feels like to drive a 1990 rusty van with no muffler. Its important to know what having massive amounts of credit card debt and what appears to be no way out feels like. Its important to have that feeling that you are a failure at life and maybe that's all you will ever be. Now I say that its important but to me it was ABSOLUTELY crucial in developing my mindset for success. I am guessing you have seen the image of me and the Google AdSense check for 132,994.97 for one month. Its actually hard to search for anything related to making money on the internet and NOT see it... The one thing I have never really talked about was the back story on WHY I took a picture of me and that AdSense Check for 133k before taking it to the bank to cashing it. As I am sure you know Google AdSense is run on your website and you get money when visitors click on your AdSense ad. Almost all of my traffic was coming from Google so I felt it was really a house of cards. If Google felt my website was no longer relevant for the keywords they were sending me traffic then over night I was done! At the time I was totally new to making money on the internet and I never thought it was going to last. I took the picture because I always thought that if my websites disappeared tomorrow I could leverage that picture into a book or something... I didn't really know... I always had in the back of my mind what rock bottom felt like and I never wanted to experience that again. In hind site it was even more brilliant then I ever thought it was going to be. Especially that that month was the last month that Google ever sent out paper checks for over $10,000.00 so really nobody will ever have a check. But I never took my success for granted and I diversified my website income into many other forms instead of just Google AdSense. I learned how to make money from donations, affiliate programs direct banner sales, selling my own products, and subscription. Within a few months my subscription revenue, Direct banner sales, and affiliate revenue each by themselves dwarfed my Google AdSense revenue. So I have all this money coming in from the website im all diversified but I still did not really feel safe. So I started the ShoeMoney blog (originally on googleninja.com before I obtained shoemoney.com) basically just talking about the ins and outs of making money. Because I had the Google AdSense Check for 133k and some pretty other large screenshots of revenue that I could use to make points on what I was talking about the blog VERY quickly became an authority in the space of making money online. So much so that in its first year that we implemented advertising on shoemoney.com we did over 2007 $100,000.00 in revenue. In 2008 we boosted that to $490,000.00 in 2009 shoemoney.com will make over $750,000.00 probably closer to 1m in revenue. But lets take a step back. Because we had built this authority we were able to leverage our audience into starting our own conference called the elite retreat. We started the event in 2006 and have sold out events every year since. Even at a price tag of $5,000.00 per person. In 2007 we leveraged the blog audience and our contacts and started our own advertising network called Auctionads. Auctionads is truly an amazing success story and one of my proudest accomplishments. We took a company from 0 to 25k active publishers doing over 3 million per month in revenue in less then 4 months and sold the company. That is simply unheard of. It would not have been possible without leveraging our previously accomplishments and taking them to the next level. So what drives me to keep doing more things? I can remember that feeling of hitting rock bottom like it was yesterday. ONLY now the steaks are MUCH bigger. I am now married and have 2 kids. I also have 20 employees that I am responsible for. So why am I telling you all this. I want you to recognize what you have and not take it for granted. I had to hit rock bottom to find myself and really develop a work ethic and drive for more. Maybe you don't? Always be leveraging your current position and looking for your next thing. I have no doubt that everyone reading this will come into money/success eventually. If you love what you do and you keep trying then its just the law of averages. Eventually its going to work. But when it does what will you do? Until next month, Jeremy

Following on from my our "Social Media Guruism: Mostly Harmless" yesterday, we received the following comment: On the surface, this seems like a great article...until you realize that it's really just like most tweets--a total waste of time. If you wanted to really provide something valuable, you'd show me how you directly measure your social marketing campaign...Oh wait, you can't. Why? First, cause you've probably never run one and you're just regurgitating what other people have told you. And second, because ROI really doesn't translate for most Internet campaigns. There's just no way to directly measure it because there are so many random variables. And I challenge anyone to prove that it can be Thanks for the response, Fearless Advisor! Really, social media marketing is no different to other forms of marketing in that it must eventually demonstrate value and be accountable. The "Why" Question One of the points I made in the previous article was that a lot of people seem to confuse the medium with the message. They are using a communication channel - in this case Twitter & Facebook - without first deciding why they are doing it. Sometimes, the answer might be no more complicated than "because it's new", "because it sounded good" or "because everyone else is doing it". However, if a marketing campaign is to be successful, and repeated, it must be measured. How would you know if it was a success, or be worth repeating otherwise? The fist step should be to ask "why"? The same question applies to any marketing campaign, be it search marketing, radio, television, or anything else. Why does this website exist? Why am I doing this and what result am I trying to achieve? Is it to boost traffic? Is it to make more money? Is it to cut costs in other marketing activities by replacing one with another? Is it to grow the RSS subscriber base? Get more links? Grow the mail list? A combination of all these things? And how do these relate back to the purpose of the site? Without that knowledge, the exercise is one of faith. Demonstrate Value The top social media marketers, just like the top search marketers, can create enormous value. And they can show it. If clients aren't demanding it now, they soon will. Back when I was doing search marketing for clients, I was in a sales meeting with a large mobile telecommunications company. I was doing my best to sell them on the benefits of search marketing and from the nods I was getting, I thought I was doing ok. At the end of the meeting, they said I was the first search guy who had talked to them in terms they could relate to - i.e. I was talking marketing, as opposed to hype and technology. Social media marketing is going through the same growing- up phase that search marketing did. As search marketing clients got more savvy and gained experience with the new channel, they started to demand more traditional metrics - meaningful metrics related to the underlying business objectives - that could be analysed alongside their other marketing campaigns. Measurement Ideas Measurement depends on the aims of the campaign. Here are a some common measurements used in marketing campaigns, and apply equally to social media as they do other marketing channels. Not all these measurements are appropriate, or achievable, but should serve as a starting point when considering measurement. 1. Increased Revenue This measurement is straightforward. What was the level of business the client was doing before the social media campaign, and what is the level they are doing afterwards? Has it dropped, stayed the same, or risen? 2. Competitive Advantage Has the client gained competitive advantage? Do a before/after comparison against competitors. Is the client doing better in Compete/Alexa/etc than their competitors after they ran the social media campaign? Have the competitors run social media campaigns? Can you do a similar before/after comparison on their success, or lack thereof? 3. Increased Visitor Numbers Are there more visitors now than there were before the campaign started? Break the visitors down by channel using referral data. Who are they? Where are they from? Are they the right demographic? 4. Reach/Spreading The Word Perhaps the most difficult aspect to measure. Research companies, like Neilsen, use Buzz Metrics and Blog Pulse to measure how many people are talking about a brand or company. Similarly, Google Trends can be used to pinpoint spikes in attention across the net. Is your message/brand mentioned more often after the campaign? Are there more mentions across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream media? 5. Search Activity Do more people search on a clients brand after the social media campaign? Do they use queries relating to the clients message, products or services? 6. Primary Market Research Big companies tend to do this more so than smaller companies. Run field studies, focus groups, and interviews to determine the level of brand awareness. 7. Links Has the client received more links? This is one of the huge value propositions of social media, especially when combined with SEO. Social media can be such a powerful link building method, second to none. Yeah, But How? Perhaps the social media gurus can tell us? :) These are the types of metrics clients will demand. If I were buying social media marketing services - and might well be in the near future - these are the metrics I'd demand. No one, except the clueless, will be impressed by follower numbers. There is no one tool that can measure and track all this data. Hey, perhaps there is a market opportunity for someone! But while we're waiting for such a tool to emerge, measurement is a multi-disciplinary approach, combining both tools and techniques. Consider analytics, behavior tracking, dedicated tracking codes for links, coupon codes that can only be seen on Facebook or Twitter, unique phone numbers used to track just that one campaign, customer surveys after they have bought something. I'm sure social media professionals have got a wealth of techniques and tools they use. It would be great if you could share your knowledge with the community in the comments :) Why A Social Media Marketer Should Do This The end result is that clients will spend more, on an ongoing basis, if they can see demonstrable value. A company may do a one-off campaign for fun, as an experiment, or because they think it is trendy to do so, but they'll soon move on to the "next big thing" unless social media can demonstrate how it helps them achieve their marketing goals. Some of the above is easy, some is difficult. It depends on the client and their goals. There will always be intangible rewards when it comes to brand building and raising awareness, but you can't know if you're winning the game if you don't keep score. I know some social media marketers already do this. Like the top search marketers, they will be the only ones left standing, and prospering once the hype dies off. And it will.

Marissa Mayer announces that Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in Google's search results. We look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information. Hmmm..."product"? Obviously something a bit smarter that simply providing raw indexing and display. This move follows Bing's recent announcement - today, in fact - they would do likewise. We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think. Microsoft has pulled off a similar deal with Facebook, which has six times as many users as Twitter. With two competing deep pocketed players signing up, how long can Twitter remain unsold? Will Google build a competing version of Twitter? Much easier to crunch link data and index in real time if you can backend updates with your own systems, rather than making sense of third-party date, like Twitter, which is probably a nightmare. Some cosy integration arrangement is probably part of the deal, of course. Read-Write-Web made the valid point that Google grew when they signed a similar deal with Yahoo. Now Twitter is doing likewise, serving their stuff to Google's massive audience. However, given Twitters notorious fail-whale flakiness, it remains to be seen if their system is ready for the roar of traffic that will soon come their way. What Does This Mean For SEOs? Go where the search engines do. Link to your content from Twitter. Publish excerpts and link-backs. Monitor real-time search trends, using Google's Hot Trends and trend data tools, such as TweetStats. Supply content to match demand. It will be interesting to see if real-time search, on a Google scale, produces new business models. The traffic bursts should ample reward for being seen first for popular real time queries. The news business relies on immediacy, and they just got a whole new wave of unpaid competition.

Marketing taps into our emotions, as Rory Sutherland shares in this great TED speech Online any good idea that works well is quickly cloned by competitors. Both the larger competitors with piles of money AND those who are driven by money so much that they would sell their own mothers for a nickel. This fierce competition for attention forces continuous (perceived) value add. Some of that is created through innovation and/or branding. But it also encourages sustainable margin creation by criminals through outright fraud. As long as there is an optimized conversion funnel, someone will step in and connect supply and demand. Take, for instance, the rise of fake security software: "They'll take your credit card information, any personal information you've entered there and they've got your machine," he said, referring to some rogue software's ability to rope a users' machine into a botnet, a network of machines taken over to send spam or worse. ... TrafficConverter.biz, which has been shut down, had boasted that its top affiliates earned as much as $332,000 a month for selling scam security software, according to Weafer. I am not so sure if earned was the right word. Stole, maybe? But when the product is layer upon layer of fraud, it is easy to pay out a high bounty for customers, especially when you use their computers to set up bot nets to further spread spam. Worse yet, any level of popularity or credibility you gain with a legitimate business needs to be protected because people will trade off it. Yesterday in our support section Brian Menhennett wrote Hello Do you know or know of a Mr ____ ___ who claims to be associated with seob____.net and takes money for search engine optimization in your name If you do can you please advise me of a contact email address. Kind regards And, after hearing my response that I did not know the guy, I got this back Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately if I cannot find or contact ____ ___, whom I paid $10000 to do a SEO job that was not completed, then I have no alternative than to spread the word on a campaign of facebook, twitter, myspace and other social media pages and blogs to advise potential customers of the situation. Again, unfortunately, as your company name was used to procure the $10,000 contract so your company will be included in the campaign. If you have any information on this person it would be greatly appreciated. So people register similar domain names, point them at legit sites, and then start selling to people who can't tell the difference. And then rather than taking the opportunity to learn from the honest person, such ignorant people want to smear your brand for their own ignorance and stupidity. As though lashing out at me will get him his money back or cure him of his ignorance. For every person who wants to learn to earn and become an expert there are hundreds or thousands looking for free money. And so they buy hyped scams from career con men...the only people willing to service them selling a "dream" package (with no substance) at the price they are willing to pay. A similarly polluting marketing strategy that harms legit sales strategies is the sell the "anyone can do it" angle. When you sell the story of "mentally ill blind grandmother who just got an 8080 computer last week accidentally unlocks unbelievable secret blueprint to make millions per month, working 1 hour per day, printing cash from the nursing home, with one hand amputated" there is a segment of the population that will buy into such pitches. And that type of desperate / gullible / greedy / intellectually lazy person is often the easiest to influence by advertising. They are the 8% of the web that clicks 85% of display ads. And once they buy one scam they will buy another. And then another. They are caveman clickers who buy buy buy. They tend to have thousands of Dollars of revolving credit card debt and a pile of useless junk they don't need. Debt slaves thinking that "this time is different." This is why Bing traffic converts better than Google does. And this is why AOL traffic often converts better than Bing does. Stereotypes can be bad, but demographics are visible in conversion statistics, just like they are in ad click-through rates. See the following chart built from millions of ad impressions and hundreds of thousands of ad clicks Automated ad networks syndicate whatever ads have the highest yield. When a product is layer upon layer of fraud it is easy to pay out a high bounty for customers - so ads promoting scams deliver a high yield, and are thus distributed everywhere. This is why the Fox News article blasting SEO as a scam carried the following wonderful advertisements by scumbag affiliates who set up fake newspapers to carry fake advertorials Where this becomes a problem for marketers is when you come up with an unbelievably good promotion that is honest. Why? Well people are going to become more skeptical of the altruistic offer, especially if they do not know you. We did one such promotion recently that failed because affiliates pushing offers like the above "security software" simply polluted the space with junk. A once remarkable formula now creates something that is either unremarkable or unbelievable - due to a proliferation of scams that (at first glance) look somewhat similar. A friend who launched a cool free software tool recently had the same problem - people asking "what's the catch?" The modern day robber baron bankers and slimy affiliates who whore out anything that makes a Dollar create an economic environment where people become more cynical and less trusting. Which makes it that much harder to give away value and hope for eventual returns to come in. If the publicity never comes then you just end up giving away money and getting nothing in return - a failed business strategy. Years ago a professor did not want to link to one of my sites because he thought it was too pure with no ads. It was simply too good to be true. If I dirtied up the site with ads it would have been more linkworthy to him! And in the years to come, as the lines between media and advertising continue to blur, many people will become more like that savvy professor. What is the solution? There are a couple options IMHO. You either need to dirty up your strategy to make it look less altruistic OR you need to be well known by the community BEFORE you launch a major promotion. Publishing becomes more about developing and maintaining relationships in the industry. Online marketers will need to be good at 1 or more of the following to remain profitable... promoting scams (or carry ads from 3rd party networks that promote scams) building an economic reward system directly in the distribution channel (like the often hyped internet marketer product launches) leveraging ego-bait marketing (a type of payment that costs ~ $0, except for when it backfires!) mastering conversion and value-add sales techniques becoming publishers who own media brands with strong user loyalty + affinity + distribution (even Google is recommending this, BTW)

Patrick Altoft highlighted how Matthew Trewhella (from Google) may have tipped Google's hand a bit about what was known as the Vince / brand update: Matthew [said] the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards it as their failure for not bring up the right result the first time. So what Google is doing is testing which results are going to give the least number of secondary searches and displaying those. In the past somebody might have searched for “travel insurance” and found a few good sites before remembering that the Post Office does travel insurance too and searched for them to get a comparison. For Google this is regarded as a bit of a failure because they didn’t bring up the Post Office in the first place. Understanding the bold part above also highlights why Google dislikes many affiliate based business models. Google views itself as the affiliate, and if Google sends the searcher through an affiliate page which does not add significant value (ie: no coupon, no in depth original editorial review, no value add comparisons, etc.) then they feel the extra click was a failure. Microsoft's ad lab offers a search funnels tool which allows you to view what searches occurred prior to or after a search for a particular keyword. If you look at some of the above branded keywords associated with credit cards you will see those brands ranking in Google's search results for credit cards. About 3 weeks ago Dave Peiris highlighted a similar set of theories about the Google update, noting how some of the related searches seemed to be driven in some cases by the next search query. If user satisfaction remains constant or increases slightly (as one might expect it to, since brand is in part driven by exposure, and we tend to like & trust things that we are aware of more) with such algorithmic changes then you can expect Google to keep pushing them on more and more keywords (at least until it starts to harm relevancy slightly). Why? Google would prefer to police a few thousand companies rather than policing millions of individuals (this is equally true for organic search and AdWords) AdWords is approaching a natural price ceiling in many markets based on direct advertiser ROI (and perhaps some related measures like lifetime customer value) as Google's display ad network grows they will get more taste of the branding ad dollars (from when you try to advertise to build a brand right on through when they are cashing in on your branding efforts by selling ads against it) promoting brands helps promote irrational and wasteful and abstract advertising campaigns that can only attempt to be justified when thinking about (and guesstimating) the broader branding impacts of the additional exposure advertising creates search volume. with fewer and fewer people clicking traditional display ads (8% of the Internet user base accounts for 85% of all clicks) Google needs to find a way to ensure that publishers are still getting some credit AND as Google plasters ads over 75% of the web they want to can claim such ads indeed did help drive conversions to further help justify the ad spend (hence the recent view-through conversion AdWords data-point) Many thin website models (unremarkable thin affiliate, AdSense publisher with thin keyword-targeted content, etc.) will slowly get chipped away at by such algorithms if Google moves this down the query stream (though they can't go too deep into the longtail with it or they would start impacting relevancy in a negative way). As an SEO, this query recycling concept (if expanded) means that you not only want to rank, but you want to deliver ***an experience*** remarkable enough that people actively search it out by name. And you want to be one of the first couple brands that people think of for your core target keyword. Search is already heavily influenced by a rich get richer effect and the concept of cumulative advantage. And with search engines potentially feeding search query chains back into the relevancy algorithms, it gets that much harder to come from behind in saturated markets unless you change the model or target different keywords. If you are late to the game and a #10 player it might make sense to brand yourself against the second largest keyword rather than being an after-thought in a more saturated keyword market.

Posted by randfishFirst off, apologies for my absence from the blog these past few days. It's been an incredibly busy time, trying to wrap things up before I leave for San Diego over the holidays. So much for a December lull... In this post, I'm going to try tackling a lot of the recent trends we've been observing from the engines and talk about my personal perception of what's to come over the next 12 months.  #1 - This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance. As Danny Sullivan notes, it's like we're back to Infoseek in 1997. If you want to rank #1, don't worry about quality content, relevance or popularity, just be the last person to Tweet about a topic and you'll come out on top (at least, for a few seconds). This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment stats have their usability folks up in arms already, and it's only to preserve face from a PR perspective (as well as an increasingly prideful attitude of "Don't like it? So what are you gonna do about it?" that Aaron Wall describes in a gutting fashion here) that this has stayed in place as long as it has (1.5 weeks). In 2010, I think this fades away. Perhaps not entirely, but we won't be seeing it for nearly as many queries with the prevalence we do today. Google may love real time, and it's certainly gotten them a lot of press (though very little of it is entirely positive), but they can't continue sacrificing quality for PR in this fashion. I think the engineers still run things over there, and the stats data is already making them balk. Although I don't have numbers, my impression is that we're already way down in the quantity of queries showing real time results compared to last week. #2 - Twitter's "Link Graph" is the Real Deal All that real-time integration bashing aside, I'm a firm believer in my original hypothesis that Twitter is cannibalizing the web's link graph. In fact, I think a rough history of "recommendation sources" looks something like: Google has always strived to keep up with the latest ways that content is being recommended and suggested. It's how they determined popularity and relevance with PageRank and I think Twitter's data is merely the next evolution. Just yesterday, they launched their own URL shortening service (I think this was more to get data, but it's also possible it was a pre-emptive PR strike against bit.ly, who launched their PRO service just a day later).  Google's not going to just take raw number of tweets or re-tweets. I think we're already seeing the relevance and reputation calculations in their decisions of which tweets and sources to show in the real-time results, and I expect that algorithms/metrics like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. will find their way into how Google uses the real-time data. Today, SEOs want to turn tweets into links so they can get SEO benefit. My feeling is that tweets are going to carry their own weight in helping pages rank in the not-too-distant future. #3 - Personalized Search is Here to Stay Unlike real-time's temporal nature in the results, I think personalized search is here for the long haul. Google released their "permanent" personalization of results last week, and Bing released their own just this week. As usual, SearchEngineLand's coverage is impeccable, though one big question remains in my mind: What metrics impact personalization? Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads - either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick? I'd love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they're dealing with. If it's proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new "paid inclusion" for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn "organic" positioning as well. Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn't fundamentally change the game, IMO: The Rich Get Richer - It's now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you're going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before. Branding is More Important - you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We'll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this. There is No Normal Ranking - Or, at least, there's no "normal" ranking that's "average" in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the "personalization" battle, and you may start to care less about the classic "rankings" battle. Whenever we encounter these "paradigm changing" events in the SEO world, I like to go back to my philosophy about SEO fundamentals. From what I can see, it looks like things haven't changed enough yet to warrant panic. It's been a massively dynamic 3 months, but we're not on the precipice of anything that's going to shift SEO in the ways some previous "game-changers" have. #4 - It's Going to Be a Two-Engine, 80/20 World The latest figures suggest that Google continues to slowly gain market share in the US, while Bing & Yahoo! compete for share that will eventually belong to them both (once the regulatory hurdles clear, which I think they will). I believe that a year from now, most webmasters will be looking at a scenario where Comscore/Hitwise reports Binghoo! has ~25-28% market share, but those engines combine to send a little under 20% of all search traffic (remember that they count searches on all Microsoft and Yahoo! properties - even internal searches - while Google tends to send the vast majority of their search traffic externally to other sites). #5 - Site Explorer & Linkdomain will Disappear Tragically, everything I hear out of Yahoo! and Bing is that Site Explorer is off to the great beyond. The expense of maintaining a web index isn't something Yahoo!'s willing to invest in once they don't have to, and Bing's given no indication that they're going to re-open the portal to link information. The best we can hope for is an acceleration in the functionality offered by Bing Webmaster Tools, but even that's unlikely to offer competitive link intelligence. I'm guessing other services will rise up to try to take Site Explorer's place, as the service had millions of monthly queries run against it. #6 - SEO Spending Will Rise Dramatically Forrester put out a great report on US Interactive Marketing Spend (a little pricey at $1749, but interesting). Two graphics struck me as particularly compelling: SEO trails only social media and online video as places where marketers (not just search marketers, but ALL marketers) will be shifting dollars. Meanwhile, SEO continues to outpace PPC in terms of CAGR. We've still got a long way to go before balance is established between the share of clicks SEO commands and the fraction of spend it receives, but the gap is slowly closing. #7 - 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization If I were doing another startup today, it would focus on software for conversion rate optimization. I think this is still the most under-utilized and highest ROI activities in the marketing department, but more awareness is on its way. CRO isn't just about testing; it's about building a process for improving converion over time. Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this, yet few invest. I think 2010 is the year, simply because it's an inflexion point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value. These guys are likely in for a blockbuster year; I wish I could invest :-) This graphic comes via my post on choosing which Internet Marketing Channel to Pursue. #8 - More Queries will Send Less Traffic Google & Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine. This is a good product practice for both companies, and I'm surprised Google's taken so long to move away from their "get people off Google" point-of-view, but it's definitely happening. Check out some recent examples: Everything I need to know is right there - the last game score, the record, the opponent, their next match day and time. The only thing missing? What channel it's playing on in my area. I don't even have to complete my query! Google's got that weather report sitting in the suggest box. They wrote about this feature here which launched last week. Google O/S had another good post on the topic. Thankfully, I'm not actually headed to Kodiak, but those results are pretty spiffy, and are likely to prevent me from needing to visit Alaskaair.com and get that flight info. The customer service number is something Bing's started to provide more and more (though there's one company even they don't have that data on). With Fedex, you don't even need to leave Bing to track a package (Google also offers similar functionality). My perception is that the more the engines can apply "instant answers" to search queries, the more they will, and the less any other sites will see traffic from those queries. It's a better user experience this way, and I'm certain it's one of the biggest things that engenders loyalty and return queries - something both engines are desperately competing for.     This post isn't intended to be one-sided, and I'd love to hear from you - do you agree? Disagree? Think I'm out of my head? Let everyone know :-)Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishI've been a big fan of Chris Dixon's excellent blog for a while now, so you can imagine that I was really excited to see him writing about SEO in a post last week. Chris kindly called out SEOmoz, which humbled me, but he also espoused some thinking in the comments that made me a bit concerned and was the catalyst for this post. Here's how it went: RAND: Chris - I think the biggest thing you've forgotten to mention is that 70%+ of the weighting/ranking used by all of the engines depends on links. If you're not thinking about how your content and pages will incent users/bloggers/writers/media/other sites to link to your work, you'll lose out to someone who does. A while back I got riled up about the lack of SEO in startup marketing and wrote about it - http://j.mp/4q9zkh - might be relevant/useful, though I did write with a bit more anger than was likely deserved. CHRIS: Rand - totally agree re links. But isn't getting links primarily about creating great content? Read the article you link to btw and am in complete agreement. RAND: Tragically, at least in my experience, the answer is a resounding no. Great content is easily missed by the web's link-heavy audience, while some pretty crummy content that's been marketed well (or made the right connections or comes from the right sources) will tend to overperform. The web's link graph isn't a meritocracy - like everything else in life, it's a popularity contest. Those who find the best ways to distribute, promote and market their works to the audience most likely to link to it are going to succeed much more so than just the "great content" producers. Just think of it like politics. The best, most rational, reasoned, intelligent arguments are the exception, not the rule. Instead, the conversation and media attention (and thus, public awareness) is focused on concepts that are easy to grasp, virally distributable (which often puts rumor and innuendo above fact) and fit a compelling narrative (rather than add complexity). A post on this topic - http://j.mp/4tYThK I would love to tell Chris that he's right, that the better the content, the better, higher quality and greater quantity of links that content earns. But, perhaps sadly, that's not the case. What those in the content world would call "better" does not always (nor even mostly) garner the links and rankings. Instead, those who have "better optimized" for attracting links tend to far outshine their peers with rankings and traffic. This may seem like a tragedy, or even a travesty of the democratic structure the web is supposed to represent, but in fact, it's the way all marketing has worked for generations. The "best" restaurants are often family-owned, hole-in-the-wall, never-marketed-themselves joints whose fabulous epicurean creations are a secret to all but the most diligent culinary Clouseaus. Meanwhile, the affront to humanity and cooking that is Olive Garden advertises relentlessly, conducts impeccable market research and appeals to the lowest common denominator in town after town to achieve geographic and market-penetration ubiquity (BTW - my wife is Italian and thus recoils at the very mention of this establishment and the tarnish it's brought to her beloved countrymen's kitchens). Like many parts of life - it's not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field. It's a strange, almost paradoxical leap of logic, but one you internalize this principle, it gets easier to accept and to spread to your clients and managers. p.s. I'm also a fan of Chris Dixon's startup, Hunch - I'd urge you to check it out and try answering a few dozen questions. The results are quite fascinating.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by willcritchlowBing recently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it. For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenu for mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form. The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like: linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site - more on this below) linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title) linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page) The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query - with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com. How do you use this for SEO? This is a linkbuilding tip post - the idea being two-fold: suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those links (more on this below but it's very effective for building highly trusted links) sometimes the "one-step-removed" linkbuilding model can work superbly well for identifying linkbuilding targets. If I were running a cooking blog (wait, I do - it took superhuman effort not to drop a shameless link there), it might be a good idea to look at something like this as a superb linkbuilding target list The information contained in the second approach is typically findable through other means (or the targets are likely to appear on your radar in other ways) and there is a lot of searching through chaff to find wheat. I wanted to run through a worked example today to show you how powerful method #1 can be: Worked example I had to pick a niche and a target for my worked example. I decided to imagine I was linkbuilding for a technical but not-specifically-web-related company. I'm trying to get links from trusted authoritative domains so I start with big educational institutions. As some of you may know, I studied at the University of Cambridge (ending with a year at the Statslab). I don't want them getting link requests from all you lot, so I picked Oxford (**). I'm pretending my imaginary client works in some area of telecoms and has resources and technical papers on subjects like wimax and spectrum usage. First up, wimax: Start with the linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk+wimax&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n Pick out an interesting-looking resource: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html Dive over to the labs tools to find ox.ac.uk links to this page: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/backlinks?uri=http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html&linktype=page This highlights this kind of page: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/details.php?id=O08C835H6J It turns out that conted.ox.ac.uk is a goldmine for linkbuilders. It's the Continuing Education section of the Oxford University site and seems to be very generous with linking out. I might suggest that my client gives a talk or writes a resource for a CPD course. At the very least, it might be worth creating some content to target this kind of page. Tip: I find it best to look for links to pages that aren't homepages because it's typically easier to find where the link originates from. Bing doesn't have an effective link: operator meaning that we have to use Yahoo, Linkscape or similar. Because we are then not using the same index, it can be tricky to track down the link found by linkfromdomain. Another example starting with spectrum auctions - sometimes it's funny where this kind of research can take you: A different linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk+spectrum+auctions&filt=all&first=11&FORM=PORE A different kind of interesting-looking (and, as it happens, off-topic) resource: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html A demonstration of using Yahoo! instead of labs tools to find the source of the link: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=link:http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html+site:ox.ac.uk&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35 Leads to a new strategy - find a way to write about this college and drop them a line: http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/news/media.html (Incidentally, I found a very similar opportunity on the Cambridge site, but no, I'm not going to tell you about it.) In an unexpected turn of events, I also found some pretty active blogs writing about my target subject matter on ox.ac.uk URLs. Even I'm not mean enough to fill up those guys' inboxes with outreach from you lot just because they picked the wrong university. (*) I don't know about anyone else, but I am rooting for a more balanced search market (particularly in the UK, where Google has a ~90% market share). I think competition is good for consumers and for businesses. (**) seriously, we don't get on (US folks, think of the relationship between Duke and UNC) but I'm not encouraging anyone to spam Oxford University. Really. I'm not. Even though the varsity match is this week. There are some other great resources on linkfromdomain - I really liked PPC blog's tip about expired and for sale domains. Rand has also written about the uses of linkfromdomain for finding spam you are linking to as well as teasing you with the fact that he "gave up" a similar tip to my worked example above at SMX Advanced.Technorati Tagslinkbuilding, bing, linkfromdomainDo you like this post? Yes No

Posted by inflatemouseThis 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.In late October Forum One Networks put out a white paper titled "Online Community and Social Media Compensation." I applaud their efforts, but, I think they create an unrealistic view of the job space in online media.  One, I think the surveyed companies over-represent corporate jobs. Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo! Their average respondent is in a department of 9-people and have at least one sub-ordinate. I suspect the truth of the job landscape is that there are far more web jobs (social media, web design/development, SEO, PPC and web analytics) in small business than in large corporations. Two, they fail to address critical issues like education, work experience and job duties. Forum One claims that in social media the average woman makes $75,624 and the average man makes $86,644. I feel simply looking at the averages is too shallow to make a good argument about compensation. So, I am doing something about it. I think the SEOmoz community has a wide range of people and will contribute a broader, and more realistic, perspective on what jobs on the web really look like. I put together an 18-question anonymous survey (it will take less than 5 minutes to complete) to create a better look at salary and compensation on the web. Once I collect the data we will make all of the findings transparent, free to download and creative-commons so you can use the data freely. Help the community by creating better data resources.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by great scott!Not unlike investing, when it comes to link acquisition diversity is key.  Evidence points to a strong preference by the engines for a diverse link profile rather than a homogeneous one, even if the links in a narrow profile are from strong sites. In this week's WBF, we'll look at why a wide variety of linking domains is better than repeated links, even from very strong domains: it's all about trust. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.Do you like this post? Yes No

iJoomla Ad Agency version 1.6.2 allows you to add images to text ads, which give the ads that "facebook" look and make it look less like an ad, and there for more clickable. Making your ads blend better in your site, ...

Only a couple of weeks after our major released of iJoomla Ad Agency version 1.6.0, we've now released a new version with some bug fixes and additional improvements: SEF support: compatible with: Joomla core SEF, sh404SEF, SEF Advance A ...

iJoomla Ad Agency Version 1.6 Is here! The new and much improved version of iJoomla Ad Agency is ready! Version 1.6 is packed with new features and enhancements that make it the best Joomla advertising extension, by far! If you’ve got the traffic, iJoomla ...

We're excited to announce the release of the all-new iJoomla SEO! It's loaded with powerful new features that will not only make SEO a breeze, but will also help you increase your traffic, monitor your keywords on Google, and get the edge over your competition! Here are just a few of SEO's exciting new features

Wicd is an open source wired and wireless network manager for Linux which aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings. (...)Read the rest of Wicd - Easy network connection manager in Debian (287 words) © Admin for Debian Admin, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: install wicd [...]

There can be a few occasions where you may need to manually purge the local DNS cache and/or the actual web cache of a Blue Coat ProxySG appliance. While both the DNS cache and web cache will eventually age out it can be helpful to sometimes speed up the process by flushing/purging the DNS and [...]

kexec tool for kexec reboots - This tool is used to load a kernel in memory and reboot into the kernel loaded in memory using the kexec system call. (...)Read the rest of Debian Tip:Use kexec for a quick reboot (23 words) © Admin for Debian Admin, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Use kexec for [...]

Cairo-Dock is an animated application launch bar for the desktop, comparable to the dock in Mac OS X or Rocket Dock (for Windows). Now, you can use Cairo-Dock with OpenGL (to use your graphic card!). (...)Read the rest of Howto install Cairo-Dock in debian (90 words) © Admin for Debian Admin, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us Post [...]

cpulimit is a simple program that attempts to limit the cpu usage of a process (expressed in percentage, not in cpu time). This is useful to control batch jobs, when you don’t want them to eat too much cpu. It does not act on the nice value or other scheduling priority stuff, but on the [...]

If you are using Windows and ubuntu as dual boot and if you want to access your windows partition you need to follow this procedure.This tutorial will explain how to access your windows partition in simple way.ntfs-config program allow you to easily configure all of your NTFS devices to allow write support via a friendly gui. For that use, it will configure them to use the open source ntfs-3g

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. This is the Ubuntu 9.10 beta release, which brings a host of exciting new features. Note: This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on October 29th, 2009. Full Story

How To Install VMware Server 1.0.x On An Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 1.0.x (1.0.10 at the time of this writing) on an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop system. This is for those who prefer VMware Server 1.0.x over VMware Server 2.

Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Mandriva 2009.1 This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 9.10) This document describes how to install a mail server based on Postfix that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I'll show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11.2 (GNOME) This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11.2 desktop 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.

A key government report assessing the impact of advertising on children in the modern world has acknowledged the importance of regulatory initiatives such as the IAB’s Good Practice Principles for Behavioural Advertising.

The Digital Foundation is the definitive course for preparing your staff for the digital future.

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The mobile web is poised to be big. Really big. In fact, Morgan Stanley is estimating it's going to be at least twice the size of the "desktop internet."  Within five years, the report predicts more users will connect to the web via mobile devices than PCs. Morgan Stanley's report on the topic is truely massive: a 424 page report covering eight major themes; and an accompanying 659 slide PowerPoint deck. Both are available for download on the company's website.The report cites five trends that will make mobile "bigger than you think": 3G + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices. Apple is cited for its market-leading iPhone and breakthroughs in user experience, Japan for its content and monetization models, and Facebook for bringing social networking to mobile. But the report stresses that these are early days with plenty of room for shifts and surprises in the various areas of mobile dominance. We wouldn't presume to summarize over 1,000 pages of mobile data in a blog post. Dig in at Morgan Stanley. Alternately, ReadWriteWeb has posted both documents on Scribd.

The self-inflicted wounds Facebook received from its new privacy setup are getting deeper as some users pull their information, and others quit the social network altogether. While I think that a lot of the criticism being leveled at Facebook is hyperbole, Facebook's new privacy regime does represent an almost 180-degree turn for the world's largest social network.When Facebook launched, it was a private network reserved exclusively for students and alumni at a handful of schools. But over time, as it has opened up to the world at large, it has also become more public. The motivation for this is simple: it will be impossible for Facebook to grow into the company it needs to be financially as a closed, private network. Right?Maybe not. Much of Facebook's popularity is derived from its private nature. Even as Facebook opened up its membership, it largely left in place controls making it possible for users to maintain their privacy. Those controls are now pretty much gone, replaced with a confusing array of options clearly designed to make it difficult for users to share less of themselves with the world.But Barry Schnitt, Facebook's Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy, has a solution for that: lie. That's right. He told the Wall Street Journal that users can falsify certain portions of their Facebook profiles. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid noticed the conflict between his comment and Facebook's terms of use, and reached out to Schnitt, who reiterated: ...you don’t have to indicate your current city or you can indicate that your current city is “Atlantis”, “Valhalla” or, again, anything you like. We hope people will use accurate information if they are comfortable doing so because that information helps them to be found by their friends, which is part of the point of joining the site. This might seem like an innocuous comment but Facebook's fortunes might hinge on whether or not Schnitt truly represents with his position.Here's why: Facebook is sitting on a gold mine. Although Facebook will reportedly pull in approximately $500mn in revenue this year, most of that from advertising, much of the Facebook gold mine hasn't been tapped yet. The gold in that gold mine, course, is user data of various kinds, from profile details to the social graph. It has immense value because it gives and will give Facebook the ability to develop innovative solutions that connect advertisers to members of Facebook's massive audience. How'd Facebook acquire its gold mine? As my colleague Meghan Keane pointed out yesterday, users have felt comfortable sharing their personal information and content with Facebook. And for good reason: prior to Facebook's about-face, much of it was hidden from public view by default. Something unique to Facebook in the realm of major social networks. But Facebook's new anti-privacy approach may very well kill the goose that laid the golden egg. If Facebook users think twice about sharing accurate information with Facebook, and go back and remove or falsify the information they've already shared, Facebook will suffer. But it's advertisers who may suffer even more. That's because the amount and quality of the data that Facebook can give them access to as they look to target Facebook users will decrease.Sure, Facebook can still use basic geolocation tools to figure out that you don't like in Atlantis, for instance. But what happens when users start removing other small but valuable pieces of personal information? In the aggregate, it could hamper Facebook's quest to realize the social networking dream: the ability to build a complete portrait of each individual user which can be used by an advertiser to target him or her with pinpoint precision efficiently in a one-to-one fashion.Facebook is still far from realizing that dream, but make no doubt about it: if any company has ever had the potential to pull it off, it's Facebook. But thanks to short-sighted thinking and confusion over its identity, that dream may remain just a dream. Better luck next time, advertisers. Facebook would rather own a stream than a gold mine. Photo credit: Andrew Feinberg via Flickr.

For the first of my guest posts for Econsultancy I wanted to take a step beyond the generic, oft-rehashed ‘SEO tips’ (you know, things like “include keywords in your page titles” and “create great content”) and contribute something based on my experience of working across a number of e-commerce sites.  Sales-based sites are where SEO really comes into its own in terms of return on investment, and it literally is the case that even the smallest tweaks can result in real increases in revenue. So here are seven ways to help transactional e-commerce sites boost their search rankings...1. Multiple categorisation A common instinct for e-commerce site architecture still seems to be the 'filing cabinet' approach: each product is assigned one category and one category only. But of course in reality any one product may fit into many different 'buckets'. A pair of trainers might fit into ‘mens trainers’ as well as ‘Reebok trainers’, ‘white trainers’, ‘tennis shoes’ and ‘cheap trainers’.  Now you may say to me “get with it mate, usability people have been recommending this for years!” True, and you may already be using a number of 'sort by' options to categorise your products. But do those categories form their own landing pages from which to target all those keyphrases, or are they simply ways of filtering results? The key is to make sure each of those categories is linked to using a clean, HTML anchor text link.You need to be careful, however. The arch nemesis of multiple categories on a site is duplicate content. A warning sign to look for is if your product URLs looks something like this: http://www.myawesomeshop.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name/ All very organised, you might think. But if your CMS produces URLs like these imagine what happens when you put the same product in two different categories... you end up with two completely unique URLs for the same product. That is a no-no for SEO. The best solution is to get your developer to do some URL rewrite jiggery pokery so you end up with URLs like this: http://www.myawesomeshop.com/product-name/ By having the product pages only one folder deep, you can have them listed in as many categories as you like and there'll only be one version of that product URL. Your doors are now open to the fun filled world of multiple categorisation. Happy days.   2. Only the First Link Counts There have been numerous tests by SEOs to show that if you link to the same page twice from any one page, only the first link 'counts' for Google. This has an important impact on many e-commerce sites which - including Amazon! - tend to have images linking to products or subcategories BEFORE the actual descriptive text link.  Here's a classic example from Argos:What this means is that the keyword-rich anchor text link isn't counted by Google because the first link is the image. You can use the brilliant First Link Checker tool to find out quickly and easily if this is a problem for your site.  So what to do about it? An easy fix to this would be to place the text link above the image, or not have the image link to the product page at all. But this is a bit of a usability fail: we expect to see the text below the image like a caption, and we also very much expect to be able to click on the image.  Here is a more elegant solution used by Biome Lifestyle:The image link still appears above the text link, but if you look at the HTML code it is the text link that appears first and therefore what Google 'counts'. This is achieved using CSS absolute positioning and pushing the text link below the image. A nice workaround.   3. Dealing with pagination and duplicate content Another extremely common scenario in e-commerce sites is that many categories contain more than one page worth of content. Rather than listing all of the items on a single page, the standard behaviour is to paginate products. Usually this takes the form of URL parameters – for example the URL of each paginated page becomes: http://www.mysite.com/category/?page=2 This is often the cause of an almost identical duplicate of the original category page – yes there are different products on page 2, 3, 4 or 10 – but usually each of these has the same page title, headings and copy, and is almost certainly targeting the same keyword as the main category page. This duplicate content tends to dilute the effectiveness of the original page.  There are a few ways you could go about resolving this: Add the Robots Noindex Metatag to the duplicated pages to exclude them from being indexed. Use the Parameter Handling Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to exclude paginated pages from the index.  This is essentially simpler (and lazier) way of achieving the same result as the Noindex tag – but just for Google. Use the Canonical link tag from paginated pages to ‘point to’ the original page and pass SEO value across to it. You might want to consider an advanced solution of using JavaScript # anchors for pagination – so all pages are loaded into one and the paginated URLs become http://www.mysite.com/category/#page=2 – since Google ignores everything after the ‘#’ what you end up with is one page with all the content in it. A quick disclaimer! Each of these techniques could potentially create other crawling and indexation issues if not applied carefully. I would test them out on one section of a site and measure the impact before rolling anything out sitewide. However the beauty of finding a solution to this on a site with potentially hundreds of pages is the cumulative ranking benefit it can bring - well worth the initial headache if you ask me.   4. Segmented site maps Aaah, the humble site map. That ubiquitous link in the footer of almost every site known to man, the one we've all clicked on once, thought "what’s the point of that" and never clicked on again. OK, I know some people do actually like using them - personally if I can't find what I want using the site navigation itself I'd sooner leave the site than trawl through a giant table of contents.But aside from helping lost puppies find their way on your site, the humble HTML site map (not to be confused with its slightly more mysterious cousin the XML Sitemap) is also much loved by search engines. It's like having a 'get to the point' button on your rather talkative spouse/mother/cousin/neighbour/colleague. They're a way for search engine spiders to very quickly access and crawl every page of your site with a minimum number of links to follow along the way. They can help improve the number of indexed pages, as well as helping with rankings by increasing internal links pointing to deeper pages.However, once you go beyond the very smallest of e-commerce sites, the classic "here's every single page on my site" one page sitemap becomes a bit useless. Once you start to go beyond a few hundred pages on your site, you either have to consider only listing categories in your site map, or you could try a segmented site map.Here's an example from Air and Water Centre. The main site map links to all the categories, but also to a sub-sitemap for that category:  This sub-sitemap in turn links to every product within that category:  What this has achieved is the ability for a search engine spider to reach every single page on the site within just two ‘clicks’ from the homepage. And that is good SEO juju.   5. Singular keyword pwns Plurals The most logical title for a category page is usually the plural version, which makes sense: if you're selling 'digital SLR cameras' you've hopefully got more than one of them! Chances are the page titles of your category pages look something like this: But the overwhelming trend as far as what people actually search for is concerned, is that singular keyphrases are far more popular than plurals. After all, people usually only want to buy one camera, not a boatload. A quick bit of keyword research shows that search traffic for 'digital SLR camera' is almost double that of 'digital SLR cameras'. This applies to the majority of purchase intent category keywords that I have come across:   Now the fact is if you're optimised only for the plural versions of your categories, you probably won't automatically rank well for the singular as well. Here is a simple formula for page titles to get started on ranking for both singular and plural versions without coming up with spammy looking titles: [Plural keyphrase]: Buy a [Singular keyphrase] at [Site name] So using our cameras example you might end up with something like: Just this tweak alone has brought me some great rankings for those elusive singular versions of category keywords which were previously ranking pretty poorly.  Of course, using the singular version in anchor text of inbound links is the next step.   6. Freshen up your pages regularly! Fresh updates to any particular webpage are a signal to search engines that the page is ‘alive’ as opposed to gathering cobwebs in the corner of your site.  This is becoming an increasingly important factor with Real Time Search becoming the latest trend all the cool kids are talking about (or slagging off), accompanied by the fact that ‘freshness’ has been gradually increasing in importance in Google’s algorithm for some time. This principle can be applied to e-commerce sites, but is rarely done. So, implementing some of the following could help you to get the competitive advantage: Including user reviews and user generated content is by far the best way of introducing freshly updated, relevant copy into your page – just look at most of Amazon’s product pages. Just make sure the text from these is actually being pulled into the page itself rather than sitting ‘hidden’ away within an iframe where a search engine cannot see it. For example Tesco’s use of Revoo for product reviews doesn’t actually help their on-page SEO because all the content sits on Revoo’s domain. If you have a blog on the site (and you should!), categorise your blog posts properly and have them feeding into category pages to include the first couple of lines from the latest posts. It takes a bit of implementation time but the result is constantly updated copy on your category pages every time you write a relevant blog post. Make a habit out of regularly reviewing and changing the copy on your category and product pages, especially on key target pages. Not only is this going to keep things fresh for your users (who by the way do occasionally read your copy you know), it’s a great signal to search engines that a page is ‘alive’ and there is often a rankings boost caused by this. This could set you apart from your competitors who generally stick to the same copy for years.   7. Build Links to Deeper Pages Long term SEO campaigns can very easily become never-ending battles to dominate those big 'glamour' terms at the head of the long tail which are the ones that individually bring the most traffic as well as feelings of superiority. But sometimes you can spend so much time throwing all your resources to these ultra-competitive keywords that you forget about those juicy long tail phrases such as product names. The fact is that although a number one ranking for ‘Sony Bravia KDL-40X4500 LCD TV’ won't get you as much traffic as a Top 10 ranking for ‘Sony LCD TV’, these terms do have much higher conversion rates as they are later in the buying cycle. They are also easier to rank for with a few inbound links (see Eric Enge's The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links for some science on the subject). So while your competitors are scrapping it out for those glamour terms, focus a good proportion of your linkbuilding efforts to some key deeper pages on your site. Hopefully these tips have been of some value to your SEO efforts. If you have any other gems, or questions about the above please drop a comment below. Also, if you find that they work, please let us know!

In the battle to get real-time results into search engines, there's one business that stands to benefit a lot: spam. It's simply a fact of social life online that as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and others all struggle to provide the most relevant up to the second information, they are ceding quality control of results. And that's only natural. Search engines have to relax their algorithms to get the most current information, which makes it exceedingly easy for spammers to win a spot at the top of search results pages. And as spamming gets easier for hackers, it also gets harder for digital marketers to get their results up on the page. Is there anything to be done about it?The short answer is no. Spam now accounts for 88% of all emails, and Symantec's MessageLabs division has detected and blocked 2,465 newly compromised websites per day this year, up nearly 8% from 2,290 in 2008. According to Cisco's 2009 Annual Security Report released last week, social media presents an increasingy high security risk because consumers trust information sent from friends more than other links. Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of SearchEngineLand, tells USAToday: "It's simple to attach spam or a link to a corrupted website... Tainted posts moving quickly and intermittently into search results could be very hard to filter.... It's an entirely new cat-and-mouse game." Web surfers are becoming more adept at avoiding traditional spam — they are increasingly wary of banking sites and unbelievable offers delivered to their email inboxes. But in social media, clicking on links from unknown users is increasingly common. The standard Google algorithm screens web pages for spam before including them in the top of results, but real-time search puts new and topical content at a priority. The benefits of real-time information bring with them increased risks. Trending search terms are important as they're happening, where they're coming from does not matter as much. From a user perspective, high levels of spam may be easy to ignore in real-time data. If search engines can figure out how to filter out irrelevant results, great. But users understand that getting the most current data currently involves receiving some less useful information as well. For spammers, thaat means the benefits are high. Getting into the top of Google's search results — albeit briefly — can be a huge win with little effort expended. Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products at Google, has faith in real time search, but admitted to TechCrunch that returning relevant results is harder in real-time: "We can’t simply apply the PageRank algorithm to content shared in real time, but we look at the ecosystem and detect signals we can use to reveal authority, for instance. It’s difficult, but there are data points out there that can be used for filtering." That said, she said she trusts real-time results “most of the time,” even if they don't come from friends in her social network. However, the service could have real costs for brands. Some think real-time will lead to more spending on PPC campaigns by marketers. According to High Position: "A simply constructed file, an authoritative landing page and a Twitter account is supposedly all it takes for spammers to get the upper hand; which means that the SEO industry may have to rely more heavily on PPC campaigns to produce consistent results, as the ability to produce authoritative organic results lessens." And the newness of real-time search is one guarantee that spammers will run rampant on the service for awhile. As Dave Snyder puts it at Search Engine Journal: "Seriously, any new feature that Google rolls out is a playground for SPAM. My head is spinning thinking of all the cool/evil implications of the service. I am sure lots of people are going to be testing how Google is choosing the results coming in the box. Some people might ask the importance of coming up for a mere moment in that position, but the sheer amount of traffic generated for a trending term can make even a 30 second window profitable." While Google may benefit from marketers spending more money to show up higher in results now that Twitter (and spam) occupy more real estate on the search results, in the long term it is in the search giant's best interest to return the most relevant results for users. Or it will be replaced by an engine that masters that better. Consumers are likely to become more savvy when it comes to social spam. And while it will be another irritation for digital marketers, it is likely here to stay. As as long as real-time spam remains profitable, it will continue to exist. Image: TwitterAppsGuide

Having introduced a new mobile website earlier this year, The Guardian's iPhone app was released today. The app, developed by 2ergo, is £2.39 to download, offers some useful features, such as offline browsing, and a customisable homepage. I've been trying it out this morning... Why an iPhone app? While the mobile website provides a very good user experience, there is simply more you can do on an app, such as the option to read articles offline, which is a major bonus. As The Guardian's Jonathan Moore explains here, a simple look at the visitor stats for the mobile site shows the market for an app. The iPhone accounts for the majority of mobile traffic, and the mobile site gets close to 1m monthly uniques. Homepage The look of the homepage is a big improvement, and I especially like the option to shoe either the latest headlines, or look through trending topics. You can also choose to browse by most viewed articles in the last 24 hours: Click the icon at the top right of the app's homepage, and you can customise the sections that appear on the homepage, the order of content, and the number of stories displayed per section by dragging them up and down: Navigation The user interface is smooth and the app is easy to navigate. At the bottom, you can switch between homepage, favourites, most viewed, and audio content, or you can navigate by section under the 'more' link. While other newspaper apps have limited the range of content accessible from mobiles, you seem to be able to access most of what is on the desktop website, though you can't access much in the way of older articles. For instance, if I search for columns by Charlie Brooker, I can only go back as far as November. The site search is excellent though, with an auto-suggest function to help users, and the ability to search through topics, sections, and by contributors: Article pages Articles are well laid out and easy to read. Text can be resized if necessary, though one improvement would be the ability to turn the phone for an article reader, as on the FT.com app. Elsewhere, the related subjects at the foot of the articles are more comprehensive than on the mobile site, while you can also click the author's name and see a list of their most recent articles. All of this provides more interesting further reading, and helps to keep people on the site:  Offline reading This is one of the most useful features of the app, and great news for people who want to read articles on the tube, or anywhere else with no 3G connection. It's simple to use as well; simply select the sections you want, and the app wil save all the relevant content: Issues There are a few things which could be improved on the app though; there are no hyperlinks within articles for instance, which, as The Guardian points out, is to keep users within the app rather than sending them to the phone's Safari browser. This is sensible, but it does mean that some articles, such as 'The people who ruined the decade' cannot be viewed on the app, as the links to the various parts of the article don't work: A few people also seem to have experienced one or two problems with being kicked out of the app, though I have managed to use it for a few hours without any such problems. The ability to both read and add comments from the app would also be a huge improvement and this, along with the complaints from app-less non-iPhone users. seem to be one of the major suggestions from the users commenting on the app. Conclusion According to Jonathon Moore, while The Guardian is not the first newspaper to develop an iPhone app, it aims to be the best so far, and it comes close to this. The app is definitely an improvement on an already very good mobile site, and I'm happy to pay the cost of the app for the offline reading function alone. I think the FT.com iPhone app is the best example of a UK Newspaper producing an iPhone to now, but the content on The Guardian has broader appeal, and this is the app I'll be using more often.

I don't provide SEO services these days, but every once in a while, a friend or associate asks for some advice. I usually respond with the same high-level (and somewhat useless) stuff: structure your pages and internal links well, produce great content, execute a strategy to acquire high-quality, relevant backlinks and don't worry so much about the things you can't control. But more and more, I've become inclined to ask "Do you really want to know?" While I've never been under the illusion that blackhat SEO was 'defeated', I've become increasingly resigned to the idea that it's far worse than most of us can imagine and Google just doesn't care as much as it says it does.As an example, I point to an acquaintance of mine who runs a number of ecommerce websites. He asks me for advice occasionally, and when I looked at some of his competition recently, I had to tell him that for all his hard work day in and day out, he really didn't stand a chance. The competition was spending thousands of dollars monthly purchasing low-quality links and despite the fact that this should have been obvious to Google, Google was rewarding, not penalizing, the behavior. Unfortunately, my acquaintance isn't alone in spinning his SEO wheels. 2009: Blackhat 1999 Still Works When the average person thinks of blackhat SEO, he or she probably envisions some evil SEO mastermind who ingeniously works to game Google's system. But all of the evidence points to an inconvenient reality: you don't really need to be all that sophisticated to engage in effective blackhat SEO. Some of the most basic techniques that have been around since the late 90s are still working quite well, as we saw recently with the Scotland Yard crackdown. I tried reaching out to a Google employee on Twitter to ask about the matter, but didn't get a response. okuggboots.co.uk, one of the scam websites shut down by Scotland Yard more than a week ago, still had a top spot in the Google UK SERPs until a few days ago. And other counterfeit websites which are no longer operational, including uggboots365.co.uk, still maintain top SERPs despite the fact that people have been complaining about them to Google for months. This really says it all: Google has some really serious flaws. Flaws that you rarely see discussed in SEO circles. After all, basic spam link hiding techniques were supposedly shut down years ago, right? And if you report the most egregious of spam, it will be taken care of, right? The question you might logically ask here: if you can use the most unsophisticated blackhat SEO techniques like hidden links to acquire top SERPs for a website selling counterfeit goods, get shut down by Scotland Yard and still maintain a top rank for lucrative keywords even after your site has been down for well over a week, what are the odds that Google is going to penalize your legitimate mom and pop website for, say, buying a few hundred paid links? The answer is pretty obvious. Real-Time, Real Spam Unfortunately, Google isn't stuck in 1999. Its bold foray into real-time search is providing new opportunities to game the system. As Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media has already taken the time to demonstrate, the integration of real-time search enables real-time spam. Obviously, it remains to be seen how easy it will be to manipulate Google's new real-time functionality, but if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on moderately sophisticated bots and a few good Twitter accounts that look legitimate. The good news for scammers, of course, is that real-time services like Twitter are already familiar spam havens. You don't have to look any further than Ugg boots to see that scammers are already well-versed in the art of Twitter spam. So if and when Google's real-time search becomes a meaningful driver of traffic, you can be reasonably certain that the scammers will position themselves to cash in. And if Google can't detect spam in its regular index, how is it going to filter it out of real-time streams? What Does This All Mean? Is SEO dead? In a pure sense, no. But given what has become quite evident, I think there are some rhetorical questions worth asking when it comes to 'legitimate' SEO: How can legitimate SEOs in good conscience tell their clients that old-school blackhat techniques and paid links are ineffective? Why are blackhat tricks and paid links promoted as 'risky' when the evidence says the opposite? Why shouldn't more companies employ techniques that are often frowned upon publicly, such as paid links? I'm not suggesting that everyone go blackhat or spend thousands of dollars a month buying paid links on no-name spam blogs. And I'm not suggesting that legitimate SEO efforts can't produce any results. But at the same time, one has to wonder how sensible it is for businesses (especially smaller businesses) to spend good money on 'legitimate' SEO efforts that may take months or years to show any meaningful results, and which may never produce any results in competitive markets in which there's a significant amount of blackhat and link buying activity. In other words, if you take a small business with a new website doing $0 in internet revenue right now, which is better: committing $1,000/month to a 'legitimate' SEO provider for six months or committing $1,000/month to paid links for six months? The conventional wisdom is that the former is the right approach and that the latter is a good way to get kicked out of Google's index. But given the amount of evidence that Google is either incapable of detecting bad behavior or less concerned with cracking down on it than is widely promoted, I suppose the question for whitehat SEOs is: why shouldn't more businesses do the latter? SEO comes under attack from time to time, and although the attacks are usually misguided, I'm increasingly of the belief that issues like this deserve far more honest attention from SEOs than they receive. Until Google's shortcomings are acknowledged and addressed, perhaps some of the criticism leveled at SEO isn't entirely misplaced.

Lady Gaga may have only earned $167 for 1 million plays of her Pokerface on Spotify this year, but there are still ways for musicians to make money from their music online. The workhorse for the music industry has long been live shows, with concerts bringing performance earnings as well as providing marketplaces for sponsorships and promotional items like tshirts, CDs and posters. As Kiss' recent live UStream concert showed, there are a lot of people poised to make money from bands online.  As AdAge puts it: "It turns out giving a concert away online is a pretty good way to sell beer and video games."Popular bands have increasingly been lending their songs — and visages to popular video games. In addition to partnership with big games like Guitar Hero, bands are reaching out to make their own games. The Beatles music was released in its own version of Rockband this year to much fanfare, while other bands have gone a similar route. For example, the band REO Speedwagon recently teamed up with digital agency Curious Sense to create an online video game called Find Your Own Way Home. The move irks some. Many people were upset to see a digitized version of Kurt Cobain performing other people's songs in a new version of Guitar Hero this summer.  But even a lawsuit from Courtney Love claiming she did not sign off on using Cobain's image in GuiterHero cannot hide the impressive residuals that come in from partnering with a popular video game. Kiss' live concert came in partnership with the "KISS Track Pack," which is available for download via Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network, and Wii Shop Channel, and includes three songs from the band. In addition, the event was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch. The company was only represented with a logo for the newly launched Bud Light Golden Wheat brand in the corner of the screen during the live concert, but the beer distributor was well pleased with the results. According to AdAge: "We're looking for ways we can connect outside the 30-second spot," said Keith Levy, VP-marketing at Anheuser-Busch. "Ustream was a unique way to do that." Mr. Levy said A-B found its way to Kiss through its extensive sponsorship of ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live," which has featured a number of high-profile musical acts, including Kiss. That deal, reportedly valued at $5 million, gives A-B sponsorship of some 187 of the show's concert events, as well as a spotlight on Bud Light in a series of live commercials. Livestreaming presents all the opportunities of selling band merchandise at live shows, on a much larger scale. Kiss' November broadcast brought in over 2 million views via Facebook and Ustream and became a trending topic on Twitter during the performance. But beyond that, the show brought in money for KISS' sponsors. And the band. Activision sold many units of the Kiss "Track Pack" for Guitar Hero 5. The pack was plugged during the live show with a scrolling text message on the bottom of the video. And while the company does not release sales numbers, Will Kassoy, Senior VP-Marketing at Activision, says that the Kiss pack has had the best sales of any of the "Guitar Hero 5" downloadable track packs available since the game launched in September. Tom Consolo, a manager at Front Line Management in Los Angeles who has represented REO Speedwagon for more than 20 years, tells The New York Times of online games: “You have your ups and downs (as a band, so) “you’re always looking to reach a broader audience. And with the advent of the Internet, you can reach around the globe.” The problem of course, is monitizing that reach. REO Speedwagon is working hard to tap into its popularity online. Consumers who buy the band's game also receive coupon codes for 25% off their holiday album. There is also a sweepstakes for players who find the “golden ticket” hidden in the game and 20 prize packages offer real tickets to meet the band during an in-person REO Speedwagon concert in 2010. With brand partnerships and promotional items online, there are plenty of dollars for musicians to earn online. That is, if they're comfortable seeing themselves digitized in games and online. 

German based price search engine smart.apnoti.com has just launched a new barcode scanning iPhone app, iBarcode. The app (iTunes link) can deal with a range of barcodes (UPC8, UPC12, EAN and ISBN), which are commonly found on the packaging of consumer electricals, books, and DVDs. I've been seeing if it works... The app compares prices for the US, UK, Germany and France though you need to change your preferred market in the settings section, otherwise it defaults to Germany. You can either search by keyword, or use the iPhone camera (this works on all iPhones) to scan the barcode and return matching product results: You then need to hover the phone over the barcode, until it is lined up with the arrows on screen, which can be a fiddly job: Once this has been done, matching results from a range of retailers so you can compare prices for the item: The problem with the search results for me is that prices were shown in Euros, despite my having set the UK as the preferred country, and the names or logos of retailers are not shown next to results, which makes it harder to decide which result to click on. Clicking on the link takes you to the retailers' product page, and most I tried were desktop pages, which makes it less likely that a customer will make a purchase straight from the phone. This happens even for retailer like Amazon that have mobile-optimised sites: The app displays a beta logo, and this may explain some of the errors I came across when using the app. All the keyword searches I tried, including 'iPod' which should return loads of results, produced this screen: Conclusion I'm not sure that an app should be in beta when it is released, especially when you are charging users to download it. If people get the app and try it, and find it doesn't work so well, then this means that many will not use it again, and may leave negative reviews, deterring others from using it. I think that shopping comparison services are potentially very useful for mobiles, and anything that avoids the need for users to spend time typing in product details is an improvement. Barcode scanners are one thing that makes it easier to quickly find price comparisons, though I found the camera functions on both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble apps, which allow you to find matching products by taking a picture if a DVD cover or book, easier to use, though this may be easier on an iPhone 3GS. The price is another issue here. OK, 59p for the app isn't going to break the bank, but if you are looking to earn commissions through price comparison, it makes sense to get as many users as possible. Charging a fee, however small, will mean fewer users. It is a potentially useful app, but the various bugs / faults need to be ironed out first, while I think the company needs to think about making it free in order to attract more users. UPDATE: Wolfram from Apnoti tells me that a couple of the issues I mentioned in the review are, the prices displaying in Euros, and keyword search not working, were the result of a UK server issue. I tried the app again, and these two problems have been fixed now. I also asked why there is a 59p price tag on the app: With iBARCODE we don't just query the API from Google Shopping or any other provider but we query product prices on demand from all relevant merchants directly and in the moment when the user starts the price search. By doing it this way, we ensure that prices are most accurate and up-to-date and consumers can make the right purchase decision. Due to the fact that we have immense server costs to enable price requests in real-time we made the decision to make it a paid app.

I’ve set myself a social media challenge: to look at three brands every month within a specific industry to find out how well they’re doing in the social media space, or not. I’ll rate them in terms of their performance alongside others in the same sector. I’ll share what I find here and really welcome your comments on my findings.I’m going to give each brand a ‘Social Media Reputation’ score. This is a system we’ve developed here at Yomego Towers that allows us to look at the noise around a brand and the sentiment behind what’s being said. The outcome will be a total score out of 100, which makes it easy to compare results. I’ll use data from manual and automated processes to track sources that are relevant e.g. the major networks (e.g. Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube) and other social spaces that contain blogs, comments, ratings, reviews, and user-generated content. I can apply a geographical bias for brands targeting particular territories.Once I've gathered the information and given a score (that’ll decide whether a brand is good, bad or ugly) I’ll do my best to make suggestions as to what each brand should be doing to improve and where the brand should be doing it. So, brands under my microscope have a TV theme. Are these brands really getting involved in social media or can’t they take their eyes off the box?Contenders:•    SKY One•    ITV4 •    ESPN UK    Sky One     Sky One has a very respectable score, and they appear to be the only contender with a coordinated strategy when it comes to social media. We’d normally expect scores of between 55 and 65 as an average of this industry so Sky is just ahead of the curve. The majority of their score is made up of sentiment, particularly high around a small number of flagship programmes.Whilst the noise level could be higher it is respectable. Verdict = Good  ITV4Lack of a dedicated strategy generated an average score. It doesn’t appear ITV in general is keen to grab the social media nettle. ITV4 might lack the flagship programming of Sky One, and would no doubt covet the latter’s above-the-line budgets. But ITV4 has set out its stall around emotive genres such as sports and classic dramas. Social media can be invaluable for promoting advocacy among shared interest groups and if its content was packaged and marketed more effectively, ITV4’s score could quickly outstrip Sky One. Verdict = Bad  ESPN UK ESPN UK’s crown jewels are the live football matches from the English and Scottish Premier Leagues. It picked up the rights from the Setanta UK fire sale and its ATL blitz seemed to gain some traction with fans. However, a social media strategy seems to have not made it up the agenda yet.On paper, live football coverage should present a wealth of opportunity but rights issues around content will require ESPN to be creative in maximising its impact across social media channels. Generating awareness and engagement around football is also quite tricky as some of the bigger players like BBC and Sky Sports will have some of the bases covered already. The ATL message from ESPN was all about being ‘glad to be here’. If they can bring this premise to live on social media, there will be an appetite for interactivity*. They have access to the golden goose, the challenge is now is to make it fly.  *Those who do not wish to see a feather-themed metaphor should look away now. Verdict = Bad  ConclusionsSky One scrapes a decent score, but there’s work to be done at ITV and ESPN. The sentiment scores,more difficult to influence in the short term, are holding up so the first objective must be to use social media spaces to generate more widespread engagement. In the early stages, they should hang their hat on a particular strand or programme and tailor the content to the social space. There should be a consistency in the tone of the messaging and it needs to be punchy to cut through. Once an audience starts to build, and some affinity and trust is established, there will be scope to cross-promote other properties in the portfolio. Let me know what you think of my measurement tactics, and how you think brands in the TV space are doing in terms of their social media presence...

Officer's Club was, along with Woolworths and Zavvi, one of the casualties of the credit crunch, going into administration this time last year, though the company was purchased and has recently relaunched online. I've been trying out the new Officer's Club website, which was designed by Lost Ferret... Homepage As seems to be the trend with some fashion sites, Next, ASOS etc, the new Officer's Club website has a black background. The homepage layout is clear, and information such as the free delivery offer has been prominently displayed, as has a phone number and all the key navigation. Just below the fold, a scrolling display showcases new items and bestsellers, a useful way of presenting a large amount of products without crowding the page: Navigation The navigational options are clear and easy to use, the product filtering options make it easy to find relevant results from searching and browsing and narrow down the options. One interesting feature I haven't noticed on e-commerce sites before is the addition of price filters to the drop-down menus, possibly a means of catering to a price-conscious customer base: The site also has a 'quick look' option which allows shoppers to click on products within search results and see product details, choose a size and add items to the basket without having to go to the product page: This same feature was introduced to the new Adams website, as the old version of the site had relatively low transition rates from product list pages to product detail pages. This kind of preview option is designed to overcome this problem by offering customers an easier and smoother route to view product details, availability etc and make a purchase. It also makes it easier to look at a number of different products quickly without having to load up each product page in turn. Elsewhere on the site, I like the '£50 outfit' offer, a version of Marks & Spencer's 'dine in for two for £10' for fashion. The offer is clearly communicated to customers and the basket adjusts the total price accordingly as the items are added: Product pages The product pages are well designed, with clear price and product information, and useful cross-sell options on the right of the page: The product images are provided from four different views, the photos are good quality and can be zoomed into, making it easier for customers to get the best idea of how the product will look when they get it home: There is a clear link provided to see delivery prices, though shoppers do have to scroll down to find the prices, and unless people use the back button, no obvious route has been provided back to the product page. A clearly labelled link back, or displaying the delivery charges and info in a pop-up may be a better way to do it. Basket/Checkout The basket page is clear, and contains all the information that customers are likely to need, which means they do not have to leave the page to find anything out. Site security logos and reassurances about safe shopping are clearly displayed, as are the different payment methods available. The option to pay by PayPal has been provided, which makes a lot of sense given the target market and the fact that people do like to have alternatives to card payments. The possible barrier of making customers register before purchase is dealt with by removing the need to register altogether, though there is the option to enter a password at the end of the checkout. There is a one page checkout process on the site, which does potentially speed the process up, especially as data entry is restricted to just the essentials, and the form works well, though the process hasn't been enclosed, with the main navigation remaining visible throughout: Possible customer errors in postcode entry have been anticipated, so if you enter the letter O instead of a zero, it will still find the correct address. It also provides the option for shopper to add more detailed delivery instructions:   Conclusion The site is well designed throughout and has been made easy to use for customers, and it does the basics of e-commerce usability very well. It seems to be working so far, as I'm told that sales so far are ten times higher than for the same period last year, and that there has been a rise on conversion rates.

Shutl promises to revolutionise e-commerce by solving issues around delivery and providing customers and retailers with same day and named hour delivery options. The company's official launch will be announced at LeWeb today by founder and CEO Tom Allason, who also founded eCourier in 2003. I spoke to Tom last week about how Shutl works, and why Tom thinks it will be a game changer for e-commerce... What is Shutl? Something I know from my work at eCourier is that the same-day delivery market has been in decline for the last ten years, as people are sending fewer documents by courier. This prompted me to start looking for other markets, and so I looked at e-commerce, and had the idea of combining online shopping with same-day delivery services. Having talked to retailers like Amazon, one major issue I came across was that pure-plays tend to have warehouses that are in the middle of nowhere, which makes the cost of same-day delivery prohibitively expensive, except in those instances when either the value of the item or the customer need for it justifies the cost.  However, same-day couriers can be more cost-effective for certain types of deliveries, when the items are within five or ten miles of the customer, and can be delivered directly by one courier, which saves the time and expense of sending multiple vans and staff to collect and deliver items. I decided to try to find a way to leverage this efficiency over short distances for the e-commerce market, by finding multichannel retailers with stores within ten miles of the customer, from which couriers can pick up and deliver goods efficiently. How does it work? What Shutl does is to aggregate same day capacity across couriers offering that are offering these services. We also have a web service that plugs into multichannel retailers and enables them to offer either a same-day delivery option or a one hour time slot, both of which are far more convenient for customers than traditional methods.  Couriers tell us about the types of vehicles they have, the products they can deliver, their hours of operation and prices, as well as the postcode areas they can deliver to, so when a customer adds an item to their basket on an e-commerce site, then we can provide a list of relevant couriers, the postcodes they deliver to, and the prices offered. We then weigh this against how well the courier has performed and pick the best match of price and quality. The retailer can then decide whether to pass the price onto the consumer directly, or add their cut, or discount for the shopper. If the customer selects this delivery option, then the order is sent via our API to the courier. Once the delivery is completed, another API takes this information out of the courier's management system. This is then compared against the SLAs, and the courier's quality rating will go up or down depending on the level of service. So, a higher rating will mean that courier will receive more business in future and will be able to command a higher price. The big benefit of Shutl to retailers with a local presence is that it enables them to leverage the one thing that Amazon and other pure plays don't have, local stock. They can't compete with these big online retailers on price and product diversity, but we allow them to leverage their high street presence to provide the customer with a compelling proposition; a cost-effective, immediate delivery option. We think this is a significant game changer for e-commerce, as it shifts power back to multichannel retailers by providing a service that they cannot offer.  E-commerce has come a long way since the 1994 when the first online purchase was made, a Sting CD which took two days to be delivered. E-commerce websites have improved in many ways since then, but most customers still have to wait days for delivery, and at a time which suits the courier's schedule, not the customer's. Tell me about the funding, will you be looking to raise more? Simon Murdoch is in as non-executive chairman. I funded it initially for the first year, and the team all put a little bit into it, then we had an investment round with Simon, Paul Birch, Big Bang Ventures and others. We now have a strong team of investors and managers on board, which reflects the quality of the concept and their confidence in it. We'll also be looking at a more venture funding around the middle of next year to speed up out growth and enable us to expand into other markets. How have couriers responded to your business model? The courier companies love it, as it gives them access to a market that they cannot serve themselves alone, as they are not big enough individually to deal with the peaks and troughs of consumer demand. The same day delivery market has 50m transcation a year in the UK and is in decline, but the market for e-commerce deliveries has 820m transactions, and is growing at 20% a year. What are the benefits for retailers? I read some stats recently that said that 50% of customers abandon baskets and checkouts as a result of delivery issues. The options either aren't convenient enough, or are too expensive. Also, same-day options are normally expensive, but our model brings these costs down. If shoppers can get their goods the same-day, or at a specified time, then this removes some of the barriers to purchase and should help retailers improve their conversion rates. Have any other companies tried this delivery model? A company in the US tried something similar but failed. The mistake they made was to try and aggregate the retailer's inventory and be the destination site. It's too difficult to do this. Shutl is a pure web service, which consist of creating and managing the market; its a similar business model to Confused.com or Moneysupermarket. Are you launching nationwide? We're launching in London initially with five retailers on board, but the model will work anywhere where there are retailers and customers within ten miles of each other, which means we can cover 80% of the UK. Do you have many clients so far? We have one well known high street retailer on board, who we will launch with in Q1, though we can't talk about that yet. We'll be launching the service around London with five small-ish retailers and will look to cover the rest of the country as quickly as possible. What are your targets for the next 12 months? It would surprise me if we didn't reach £5m turnover in the space of twelve months,and this isn't taking into account the high street retailer I mentoned. We expect that copycats will come along, but we have a year's start on everyone else and we plan to get as big as we can as quickly as we can before we have any derious competition. 

By now, you're probably familiar with Tigergate. Who isn't? The news and gossip is plastered everywhere online. The paparazzi and celeb gossip press couldn't have asked for a better Christmas present than the one they've received with the scandal that has erupted around the world's first billionaire athlete.For those in the marketing world, everyone is waiting to see what will happen to Tiger, his brand and the brands of the companies that sponsor him. Will the public forgive him? Will his sponsors?Clearly, nobody reasonable is going to believe that sponsors like Nike or Gillette, for instance, endorse the behavior Tiger is alleged to have engaged in. But this isn't traditional advertising. In the case of traditional advertising, I've already argued that the vast majority of consumers aren't so naive as to believe that a television commercial or banner ad is an 'endorsement'. In the case of Glenn Beck, for instance, you're going to have a hard time finding a reasonable person who truly believes that a commercial that appears on FOX News during his time slot represents an endorsement of his views.Yet when an athlete lands in trouble, the math gets complicated for sponsors. Already, we've seen people poke fun at a recent Accenture print ad featuring Tiger. And GM, owner of Tiger's former sponsor, Buick, has found its brand caught in the drama as the now-infamous Cadillac Escalade Tiger crashed was on loan to Tiger from GM.For now, Tiger's sponsors are sticking by him. Nike and Gatorade have already issued statements of support. Yet these statements were made before the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan. Behind the scenes, one has to imagine that marketing execs at Tiger's sponsors are now cringing on a daily basis as the stories coming out, true or not, become more sordid. Actions, of course, speak louder than words and it's pretty clear that all is not well in Tigerville: Nielsen reports that prime-time television and cable ads featuring Tiger have been MIA since news of his alleged 'transgressions' broke. So no matter what Tiger's sponsors say or don't say publicly, it's clear they're trying to lay low.Obviously, the current situation notwithstanding, athlete endorsement deals make a lot of sense for many companies. Brands by their very nature come to represent something more than just the products they sell. They come to represent particular values, characteristics, lifestyles. Which is precisely what the most visible professional athletes come to represent. Given this, it's only natural that brands seek to align themselves with recognizable faces whose values, characteristics and lifestyles are similar to their own.In the case of Tiger Woods, brands weren't only aligning themselves with arguably the greatest golfer ever. They were aligning themselves with a man whose high performance on the green was matched by his compelling profile off the green -- a man with discipline, grace and professionalism. A private, family man. Somebody you'd welcome as a neighbor, invite to a BBQ or trust to watch your kids. It was this total package that made Tiger a billion-dollar brand. Yet as that brand comes under fire, the companies that aligned themselves with him will have to grapple with the possibility that the public will now associate Tiger with values, characteristics and lifestyle choices that are anything but desirable, and entirely antithetical to those Tiger had represented.Given the nature of the claims being made right now, it seems highly likely that Tiger's reputation will be forever blemished, if not completely tarnished. For brands, it remains to be seen whether Tiger's ability to continue performing spectacularly on the green will be enough to overshadow his problems as a private individual. That's a difficult question to answer given the amount of money involved. When Tiger was the world's greatest athlete and the embodiment of the perfect man, it was easy to argue that he really was worth $100m per year to his sponsors. But without the 'perfect man' part, I suspect that many of Tiger's sponsors may come to the conclusion that 'world's greatest athlete' isn't worth what they thought it once was. What they do about that remains to be seen; I suspect Tiger will have far less leverage at the negotiating table with future deals.But Tigergate is really a lot bigger than Tiger Woods. While scandal is nothing new to this business, we're not talking about just another disposable athlete that brands can break ties with and forget about. In many ways, Tiger Woods is the business of athlete endorsements. A product of brand marketers, 'Tiger Woods' has been hand-crafted for public consumption even before he teed off professionally for the first time. From that perspective, what Tigergate has done is shattered the notion that brand marketers can take a human being, create the ultimate public persona for commercial purposes and control that human being so flawlessly that the difference between the man and the legend never becomes visible to the public.The bottom line is that when you put your company's good name in the hands of any human being, there's a certain level of inherent risk present. While brands strive to add a human touch for important reasons, there can be too much of a good thing. When an athlete, for instance, becomes so closely aligned with the brand that he essentially becomes the brand, this risk is absolutely huge. In my opinion, the fact that the most prolific endorser in history has fallen from grace so quickly should give many brand marketers pause going forward when it comes to endorsement deals and the role they should play in overall corporate strategy. While the business of athlete endorsements will survive, I think there will be subtle and important long-term changes. Frankly, that might not be such a bad thing for athletes, brands and consumers alike. Photo credit: Ethan Bloch via Flickr.

The American market may be quick to catch onto some things, but the adoption of QR codes has not been one of them. The two-dimensional bar codes, that point to a destination online when captured with a smartphone, have taken off in some markets (they're huge in Japan!) but have not been met with widespread adoption stateside. This week, Google announced a broad plan to introduce QR code stickers in the windows of over 100,000 local businesses nationwide. Could this be the tipping point that imbeds the QR code in the American conscience? Well, that will depend on a few things. For starters, Google will have to get consumers to actually interact with the things on a widespread basis. The search giant is already trying to incite retailer interest by caling its program Favorite Places. The curated tone will likely encourage retailers to sign up for a spot on the list. Now if consumers start taking the bait, it could work. And Google might just end up cornering another digital marketplace. These two-dimensional bar codes have been trialed in all sorts of advertising campaigns, from print to stickers on all sorts of surfaces. Many brands — from Louis Vuitton's use of Murakami to Esquire's recent Sherlock Holmes tie in — have helped close the loop between the offline and online worlds. But as of yet, QR codes have not become a common occurence for American consumers. Google is hoping to change that with Favorite Places. A few weeks ago the search giant added a mobile couponing option to its Google Local Business Center listing, meaning that mobile search results now often include mobile coupons redeemable at local retailers. This week Google launched "Favorite Places on Google," which includes venues in over 9,000 towns and cities across the country that will have a Google created (and QR enabled) sticker in their windows. Restaurants and other retailers have long been in the habit of putting quality stickers in their windows (reviews, Zagat ratings, positive newspaper and magazine features), but this effort would result in more real time information. It could also lead to more informed — and happier consumers. Google isn't the first to do this, they just might be the ones to get it off the ground. According to AdAge: Citysearch pilot-tested a similar program in San Francisco back in March of 2008. In that trial, 500 businesses reviewed by Citysearch placed printed Scanbuy's brand of bar codes in their windows. Scanning the photo with Scanbuy's software would send you to the business' corresponding Citysearch page where you can read reviews and other information. Around the same time, QVC and Case Western University did some trials in which students could scan QR codes on outdoor print signage. These codes let users get campus bus arrival times, order magazines, enter sweepstakes and get text alerts from USA Today, among other applications. Beyond being a bigger player than Citysearch or QVC, Google has enabled their coupons to be read by any QR code reader, which is a big step toward wider adoption. (A brand specific reader is one of the things that has hobbled Microsoft's entry into the arena, Tag.) But Google making a play in the space is no guarantee that it will take off. The search giant has made previous efforts with these square codes. Placing QRs in newspaper ads drove 6.5 times more revenue than the ads without embedded codes, but they still failed to deliver expected results, and Google killed the campaign this January. While QR code adoption has been slow to take off in the U.S., some of the obstacles have been eliminated recently. Last year, when Case Western's trial seemed to implode, search advisor Andrew Miller said QR codes weren't just around the corner for U.S. markets because “adoption rates will be slowed by the expense and low penetration of broadband-enabled phones with data plans.” Now that consumers are quickly gobbling up smartphone models, it's easier to find phones that can translate the codes. But the method of delivery is still unproven. Zagat's established itself as a player in the restaurant business over a long period of time. Google does not have the same clout when it comes to restaurant reviews. And while smartphone users may be excited to scan a QR code on a window of an establishment that they've walked up to, that smartphone is the same reason that they can just as easily find out the information they want before they get there. Image: Google

Shravran Goli named president at Dictionary.com; VideoEgg and ComScore team up on data.

Hires "Auto-Tune the News" parodists to revitalize familiar commercials.

Google has ended a two-month test of simplified local listings designed to help small businesses target ads to geographic searches. The program, called Local Listing Ads, was offered free during the trial period. The sign-up period is now closed and ads will stop running by the middle of the month. According to a Google statement, the company is using data from the trial period to improve its small business offerings in general and expects to release an enhanced version soon. Unlike AdWords ads, Google's experimental local ads did not have a headline or creative copy, showing only company name, contact details, and a link. The ads are meant to be sold for a flat monthly fee rather than per-click. Here's what they look like: And here's the full text of Google's statement: "We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Local Listing Ads in the Local Business Center, and in mid-December, existing Local Listing Ads will stop running. This limited free trial was one of many beta tests that we develop experimentally as part of our ongoing commitment to help businesses advertise online. We're currently using data and feedback from the trial period to make further improvements to our online marketing offerings for small businesses, and plan to release an enhanced version more widely in the near future. In the meantime, locally-minded businesses can simply and easily promote their products and services to their local markets by using existing features within our AdWords program, such as geographic targeting and location extensions."

When reporting Google's acquisition of dynamic ad firm Teracent yesterday, one of my primary questions was, will Yahoo continue to work with Teracent? In May, Yahoo announced partnerships with Teracent and another dynamic ad firm -- Tumri -- to expand the capabilities of the Yahoo Smart Ads dynamic ad platform. Yahoo later extended its deal with Teracent to the mobile platform, giving advertisers similar dynamic ad capabilities on wireless devices. According to a Yahoo spokesperson who got back to me today, "We anticipate continuing to work with Teracent."

Effective advertising requires moving a consumer from learning about a product to becoming a customer. Here's where retargeting fits in.

Testing may seem pointless at times. But it's a long-term investment in your e-mail marketing program.

A look at an approach that's designed to remove inefficiencies from the traditional display ad media buying model.

A look back at this year's most important best practices to increase ROI.

On Cyber Monday, overall U.S. visits to the top 500 online retailers fell 9 percent compared with 2008 levels, according to data from Hitwise.

YouTube had three times the reach of Facebook in October, but the social network boasted more unique video users than Hulu.

Advertising Placements by Industry and Top Sponsored Links, October 2009

How search marketing can help build overseas trade for new exports. ...

Non-branded search traffic, visitor engagement, and conversions are three critical metrics you should use to measure your success in search engine optimization efforts. ...

Make your marketing priority wish list for SEO Santa, and check it twice. These three "gifts" could make all search marketers happy this holiday season. ...

More tips on Web usability, SEO, behavioral design, and how Web accessibility factors in. ...

Yahoo! has a new update that serves up some personalization into search results. Let's say you're searching for pizza. You'll now get results for pizza places in your area, despite not including a location in your query: As you can see, there are also links so that you can refine your search to an even narrower neighborhood or town within a greater metro area. Additionally, Yahoo! will serve up the local biz shortcut when it recognizes you're searching an establishment in your town: This is a great implementation of personalized search. And it shouldn't be too threatening to SEOs, who should be focused on local search as part of their overall search strategy.

The Google Analytics API was launched last April and then updated with a few more features in September. Now, developers are getting access to additional advanced features. Here's what's included in the API update: Support for Advanced Segments - Originally unveiled over a year ago, developers are getting two ways to use advanced segements via the API: Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query. Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API. Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data - Analytics recently increased the number of goals allowed from 5 to 20. Developers can now access 48 metrics regarding goal performance. Custom Variables - 10 new dimensions are now available to access custom variable data.

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeThis this handed to me, Newsknife has just published a ranking of the Top News Sites of 2009. The big story is that Newsknife's combined figures for sites owned by Rupert Murdoch put them in second place at a time when Murdoch has declared his unhappiness with Google News. (Methinks the media mogul doth protest too much.) The Top News Sites of 2009 is compiled by Newsknife from its analysis of more than 311,000 listings by over 7,400 news sites at Google News during the year. Here are the news sources you are most likely to find in Google News: 1 Associated Press 2 Rupert Murdoch related sites - Times Online, UK / Wall Street Journal / FOX News 3 New York Times 4 Reuters 5 CNN 6 Washington Post 7 Los Angeles Times 8 BBC News, UK 9 Voice of America 10 Bloomberg This is the eighth year of Newsknife's "Top News Sites" ratings. Newsknife's ratings are based on monitoring the main US-oriented Google News site. Associated Press headed its Top Sites for the first time. I covered this topic last week in my post, "Living Stories is Google's Way of Telling Murdoch to 'Buzz Off.'" But it seems like a great time to play the interview with Jeff Jarvis again. Hey, he made these comments after his keynote at SES Chicago 2009 -- but before the Newsknife number were available. And he was dead on target. What would Google do, Jeff Jarvis, slams Rupert Murdoch over Google's role at SES ChicagoRelated articles by ZemantaIf The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic (techcrunch.com)Murdoch barters Google links for Microsoft cash (blogs.ft.com)Can News Corp. afford calling Google's bluff? (news.cnet.com)Google to Murdoch: Whatever, Dude [Google] (gizmodo.com)A Glimpse of Google without News Corp.: No Big Loss (gawker.com)

Image by Bruce Clay, Inc via FlickrThere were seven solo presentations at SES Chicago 2009, which reflects a change in format for some of the topics covered at the conference and the consistently high rantings that some speakers have received over the years. One of those solo presentations, which was given by Christine Churchill, president of KeyRelevance.com, was on keyword research. So, how many keywords do you need in your paid search account? What keywords are your customers searching for? How do customers find products after they reach your site? Watch the video below to learn how to target the right terms in your paid and organic search marketing, and where these keywords should be used. How to do keyword research with Christine Churchill at SES Chicago 2009 Related articles by ZemantaThe missing step in keyword research (mikemoran.com)Google AdWords New Beta Keyword Tool (seroundtable.com)Sunday Morning SEO: Long Tail Keyword Research With Google Analytics (blogherald.com)

About a year ago, LinkedIn launched a new search platform, which has turned out to be wildly successful. Search activity has doubled since the update. Of course, their membership has almost doubled as well. No word on whether the chicken or the egg came first on that one. Either way, LinkedIn is improving their search platform with the addition of filters. The filter options are automatically generated and are placed down the left side of the results. Let's say I want to find someone to network with because I'm interested in a job there. I could click on "San Francisco" because that's where their HQ is (well, near). Then, on 2nd connection (because at least that would be someone in my network who knows somebody). Last, I could check the filter for Autdesk under "currently working." I'm left with 7 people to try and contact. That's much better than sifting through the original 25,000 results! This is a great update to an already robust search platform. It reduces the need to come up with search refinements on your own, making LinkedIn's search more efficient - and networking a LOT easier.

Google's had StreetView for awhile and Bing recently introduced Streetside imaging to their maps. Now, MapQuest is entering the ring with their street-level imaging, which they've dubbed "360 View." 360 View isn't available everywhere, so MapQuest is providing coverage maps, similar to what a wireless communications company might provide to show you where you can get a signal. MapQuest also took great care in pointing out that you don't have to download a non-standard media player (cough, cough Silverlight).

Coincidence or not, in the wake of Firefox recommending their users switch to Bing, Google launched a nationwide campaign advertising Chrome in the UK today. This follows a recent TV and print campaign in Italy appealing to trendy 'stilisti' (fashionistas) suggesting users gift wrap Chrome for Christmas. So, is this why Google has been talking up page speed as a ranking factor recently? Techcrunch has a writeup of how many people Chrome may reach via a cover wrap of the Metro and Journalism.co.uk has a picture which is worth a snigger - Chrome advertised right outside Ruper Murdoch's offices in Wapping. Meanwhile at Incisive towers, we are tittering to ourselves (ok just me and Darren, our ad trafficker) that Chrome still does not support Doubleclick's Dart for Publishers... we guess Murdoch really won't be switching anytime soon.

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues. Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features. We only show the performance charts and tables when there's enough data, so not all of them may be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.This is a Labs product that is still in development. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know your feedback through the Webmaster Tools Forum.Update on 12/04/2009: Our team just reconvened to provide you more information on this feature. Check out JohnMu's latest post on Site Performance!Posted by Sreeram Ramachandran, Software Engineer & Arvind Jain, Director, Faster Web program

Webmaster Level: IntermediateToday we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News. Here are a few examples for publishers:Include pages in both Google web search and News:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow:This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow:User-agent: Googlebot-NewsDisallow: /This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /User-agent: Googlebot-NewsDisallow:When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /latest_newsUser-agent: Googlebot-NewsDisallow: /archivesThe pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: AllCountry-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.This feature is easiest to explain through an example. Let's say you've heard about a boxing club in Canada called "Capital City Boxing." You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it's hard to tell which result is the one you're looking for. Here's a screen shot:None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you're looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there's apparently another "Capital City Boxing" club in Alabama.Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here's a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name "Canada" after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don't show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won't show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we'd end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag. We hope you'll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.Written by Piyush Prahladka, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllJust a few weeks ago, we made Google Friend Connect a lot easier to use by dramatically simplifying the setup process. Today, we're excited to announce several new features that make it possible for website owners to get to know their users, encourage users to get to know each other, and match their site content (including Google ads) to visitors' interests.To learn more about these new features, check out the Google Social Web Blog.Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Webmaster Level: AllAre the holidays an important season for your website or online business? We think so! And to help make sure you're in good shape, we wanted to invite you to our Holiday Webmaster Webinar.This Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush!Topic: Holiday Webmaster WebinarDate: Friday, November 13, 2009Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)Meeting Number: 574 659 815Meeting Password: webmasterPlease click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.-------------------------------------------------------To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)-------------------------------------------------------1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e56462. Enter your name and email address.3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster4. Click "Join Now".-------------------------------------------------------To join the teleconference only-------------------------------------------------------Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf-------------------------------------------------------For assistance-------------------------------------------------------1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mc2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support". Written by Lauren Dolmyer, Evan Tang, and Derrick Djang

Webmaster Level: AllYou may have seen our recent announcement of changes to the verification system in Webmaster Tools. One side effect of this change is that blogs hosted on Blogger (that haven't yet been verified) will have to use the meta tag verification method rather than the "one-click" integration from the Blogger dashboard. The "Webmaster Tools" auto-verification link from the Blogger dashboard is no longer working and will soon be removed. We're working to reinstate an automated verification approach for Blogger hosted blogs in the future, but for the time being we wanted you to be aware of the steps required to verify your Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.Step-By-Step Instructions:In Webmaster Tools1. Click the "Add a site" button on the Webmaster Tools Home page2. Enter your blog's URL (for example, googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) and click the "Continue" button to go to the Manage verification page3. Select the "Meta tag" verification method and copy the meta tag providedIn Blogger4. Go to your blog and sign in5. From the Blogger dashboard click the "Layout" link for the blog you're verifying6. Click the "Edit HTML" link under the "Layout" tab which will allow you to edit the HTML for your blog's template7. Paste the meta tag (copied in step 3) immediately after the element within the template HTML and click the "SAVE TEMPLATE" buttonIn Webmaster Tools8. On the Manage Verification page, confirm that "Meta tag" is selected as the verification method and click the "Verify" buttonYour blog should now be verified. You're ready to start using Webmaster Tools!Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Earlier this year, we launched our very own Webmaster Central channel on YouTube. Just today, we saw our total video views exceed one million! On the road to this milestone, we uploaded 154 videos, for a total of nearly 11 hours of webmaster-focused media. These videos have brought you conference presentations, updates on tools for webmasters, general tips, and of course answers to your "Grab bag" questions for Matt Cutts.To celebrate our one million views, we're sharing a fun video with you in which Matt Cutts shows us what happened when he lost a bet with his team:We're also pleased to announce that we've added captions to all of our videos and plan to do so for our future videos as well. Thank you to everyone who has watched, shared, and commented on our videos. We look forward to the next million views!Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Webmaster level: Intermediate/AdvancedWebmasters who check their incoming links in Webmaster Tools often ask us what they can do when they see low-quality links. Understandably, many site owners are trying to build a good reputation for their sites, and some believe that having poor-quality incoming links can be perceived as "being part of a bad neighbourhood," which over time might harm their site's ranking.If your site receives links that look similarly dodgy, don't be alarmed... read on!While it's true that linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithms, it's just one of many. I know we say it a lot, but having something that people want to look at or use—unique, engaging content, or useful tools and services—is also a huge factor. Other factors can include how a site is structured, whether the words of a user's query appear in the title, how close the words are on the page, and so on. The point is, if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it's important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site. If you have a well-structured and regularly maintained site with original, high-quality content, those are the sorts of things that users will see and appreciate.That having said, in an ideal world you could have your cake and eat it too (or rather, you could have a high-quality site and high-quality backlinks). You may also be concerned about users' perception of your site if they come across it via a batch of spammy links. If the number of poor-quality links is manageable, and/or if it looks easy to opt-out or get those links removed from the site that's linking to you, it may be worth it to try to contact the site(s) and ask them to remove their links. Remember that this isn't something that Google can do for you; we index content that we find online, but we don't control that content or who's linking to you.If you run into some uncooperative site owners, however, don't fret for too long. Instead, focus on things that are under your control. Generally, you as a webmaster don't have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking. Organize your content; do a mini-usability study with family or friends. Ask for a site review in your favorite webmaster forums. Use a website testing tool to figure out what gets you the most readers, or the biggest sales. Take inspiration from your favorite sites, or your competitors—what do they do well? What makes you want to keep coming back to their sites, or share them with your friends? What can you learn from them? Time spent on any of these activities is likely to have a larger impact on your site's overall performance than time spent trying to hunt down and remove every last questionable backlink.Finally, keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms. If you want to make sure Google knows about these links and is valuing them appropriately, feel free to bring them to our attention using either our spam report or our paid links report.Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin & Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Kirkland

(Cross-posted on the Google Code Blog)This week, we've been celebrating all things mobile across Google. Of course, this wouldn't be complete without a component for mobile web developers! Two months ago we asked you to make the web faster. Now, we've asked the Google Mobile team for some best practices, tips, and resources for mobile web development, and we've come up with a few things we wanted to share. "Go Mobile!" with our Make the mobile web faster article.Posted by Jeremy Weinstein, Google Webmaster

It’s that time again! Tomorrow afternoon I’ll record some new videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions plus a few interesting questions. Please ask questions that lots [...]

Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that [...]

This year for Halloween I tried to do a see-through hole in your body costume: It worked okay, but not great. The biggest problem was that I didn’t have a gadget lying around the house that could output live composite video. Both my normal video camera and my digital camera had exhausted batteries that wouldn’t recharge, [...]

One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data. In the past, Google Docs would let you export a single doc at [...]

This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners. We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to [...]

Hey everybody, I just wanted to wish you a Happy Diwali! I hope that everyone has a wonderful festival of lights. It’s a good time today for introspection and reflection on the past year, and for hope for the year to come. Whether you celebrate with firecrackers, sweets, or appreciation for what you [...]

For six weeks during the Fall of 2009 executives from iProspect — in partnership with executives from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft — traveled to 10 cities around the U.S. hosting events for 15-25 search engine marketers in each city.

In this webcast, we will give the audience a chance to ask the experts about paid search advertising. Senior management from iProspect, the Original Search Engine Marketing Firm, will open the floor to questions from attendees on what it takes to compete with the biggest and the best when it comes to paid search.

In this webcast, Chris Sherman explores how to blend offline marketing with online search marketing for maximum effectiveness. He'll discuss strategies and techniques, such as ways to coordinate online and offline campaigns; he'll also explore how to overcome the obstacles that can come up when trying to integrate the online and offline channels in a large organization.

Google has famously stated that all you need to get started with paid search is five minutes and a credit card. While that’s essentially true, to avoid wasting money and to achieve optimal results from your paid search campaign, you need to test, experiment, and test again. Testing and optimization offers multiple benefits: in addition to improving your bottom line, you’ll gain a leg up on the competition, as fully 60% of all search marketers aren’t doing any testing at all, and those that are testing often use simple, ineffective methods, according to JupiterResearch.

In this first-of-its-kind event, senior management from iProspect, the Original Search Engine Marketing Firm, open the floor to questions from attendees on what it takes to compete with the biggest and the best when it comes to search engine optimization. The entire webcast will be devoted to answering questions that registrants submit in advance, and that are submitted live throughout the event. With a focus on extremely large, extremely complex SEO campaigns, senior iProspectors will undoubtedly address topics that include: Simplifying Dynamic Website Optimization, Unique Challenges Posed by Huge Websites, Tracking the ROI of SEO, Integration of SEO and Paid Search, Integration of SEO and Offline Channels.

Discover the extent to which Internet users perform searches after exposure to online display advertising. Learn how to leverage search engine marketing to capture the demand created by display advertising and learn about the existing relationship between the two channels that affords marketers the opportunity to boost the efficacy of both.

Learn the extent to which search marketing efforts are integrated with a variety of offline marketing channels and the specific search marketing and integration techniques in use, as well as how to identify obstacles to the integration process.

By Ben Johnson, Search Marketing Analyst, iProspect

Building on the great feedback we received after the launch of the Yahoo! Video Search music refiners last month, we are launching even more entertainment refiners today. These two new refiners will help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies. You can see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming [...]

Earlier this year Yahoo! welcomed Yoelle Maarek as our new senior director of Yahoo! Research. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she opened in July 2006. For more than 20 years, Yoelle has been helping dig into search problems. She talks with the Yahoo! Search Blog about [...]

It’s the time of the year to look back on the past 12  months and reflect on events of the year. Here at Yahoo!, we’ve been analyzing billions of queries to find ways to look at the events of this year through the lens of search. Today, the Yahoo! Year in Review returns with a brand [...]

We know that many of you come to Yahoo! Video search to find entertainment-related information. Our video search traffic also shows us that many of those queries have an exploratory intent, including digging for great work from your favorite music artists. Starting today, you can easily dive into albums and songs by your favorite music artist [...]

Music is an integral part of everyday life. Since launching a partnership with Rhapsody in September 2008 and launching the FoxyPlayer last year, music has been an integral part of the Yahoo! Search experience as well. We have found that nearly 6 percent of all Yahoo! searches are music-related. Given the massive number of things people [...]

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team has created some great new features for site owners that provide you with even more information about your site. Experienced Site Explorer users will notice that we now have much more detailed page-level and site-level dashboard information for verified site owners. At the page level, you can now see your SearchMonkey [...]