I recently switched the navigation on the SEO Training subdomain to be on the left side rather than the right side. The reason for doing this was that it has folding tree navigation based on where you are in the training part of the site, and having the navigation change over on the right side of the page was probably a bit confusing for some users.

Using iGoogle or Google Apps you can easily create a page like this , which tracks brand mentions on blogs and other active parts of the web. If you know why people are talking about you then you can create more things they may talk about. If nobody is talking about you then you need to stir up conversation.

How long should I build links for? and when should I stop building them? Both frequent SEO questions, with the answer "it depends." Automation as a Non-strategy Many people are interested in automating as much as possible and doing it as easily and quickly as they can.

It is much easier to get people to impulse purchase a one time $79 product than it is to get people to join a higher value but higher price-point recurring program. When I changed my business model the sales rates changed significantly. Just before changing the model the sales rate for the ebook peaked at an all time high. And just after launch the sales rate for the membership site was even greater than my best sales rate for the ebook, but then sales slowed down a bit.

Some readers who came across The Blogger's Guide to SEO asked me if it was ok to translate it. It is Creative Commons licensed, so please feel free to. Please comment on this post referencing the language you are going to translate to. I will link to translations from the official guide, which has many thousands of inbound links and hundreds of daily pageviews, so it should send some traffic to your site.

I just came across an interview of NFFC from 3 years ago . It is just as good today as it was back then...maybe even better.

Sometimes people think I am a cynic when I mention things like "avoid Google Analytics," but you never really understand how Google perceives the web until they chose to try to wipe you out. Jay Weintraub recently posted about how he was permanently banned from AdWords because one of his employees accessed his company account AND their personal account from the same IP address. A person who has access to the company's AdWords accounts has their own AdWords account.

You can read a lot about what search engineers want by looking at how the search results change. You can learn a bit more by listening to how they try to guide / influence / manipulate the market while engaging in discourse. And you can learn a lot more by reading their guidelines for how they expect people to rate search quality. The reasons that the internal communication documents are so powerful are they do not discuss search from "in an ideal world" approach,

Reciprocal links really started getting punished after there were tools to automate link exchanges and link exchange hubs developed. Nofollow was a direct response to automated blog comment spam software. Directories really started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to. Article directories started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.

My buddies over at Prospect MX made a cool link building chart . Great article about the rapid rise and fall of Geosign . Rae on why you can't just rely on content quality to do your marketing for you . Search Engine Strategies running a series of advertorial only sessions . Eeek. Wired considered it spamming when Search Engine Land mentioned that people can submit articles to the Wired How-to Wiki. That same Wired now offers a guide on how to 'Google Bomb' an Enemy .

Google Analytics came out with a novel benchmarking feature which compares your site's performance to other websites in your field. You can see this benchmark data ONLY IF you are willing to aggregate your data into the pool of anonymized data. The best sites in your industry probably are not using Google Analytics, and those who do are probably not benchmarking against average,

As free and infinite competition erodes the value of weak connections, a key to sustainably selling art is to reach out to 1,000 true fans : The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support.

The line between being clever and giving out too much information, can be seen here .

Recent University of Iowa research concluded that blissfully ignorant shoppers are happier with their choices : "We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, there's a kind of wishful thinking that happens and they want to like what they've bought," said assistant professor of marketing Dhananjay Nayakankuppam. "The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking. But the more information you have,

Recently Google's Kevin Marks was interviewed by cNet , where he said: OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?

The Federal Reserve is somewhat like a market maker, or at the very least a market influence, on the value of currency. Google acts in a similar value, placing value on and evaluating the value of information and collections of information. Reading this blog post about Ben Bernanke and replace words like credit and inflation with paid links and search spam and you can see )and perhaps even respect( how Google manipulates the press ,

Here are some interesting articles I recently came across. Tapping into unconventional link attributes - tips to evaluate the value of a link, including the fresh boost and the actual lasting value of the link. Beet.tv NYT report - Google traffic to NYT has doubled since unlocking their archives Microsoft Tracking Search and Browsing Behavior to Find Authoritative Pages - even without PageRank you can easily discover authoritative pages largely through tracking usage data.

The Disadvantages of Low End Outsourcing My History of Outsourcing Last year I lost thousands of dollars multiple times outsourcing projects to people who could "do them no problem" until time for showing the results came in, and that capital was simply wasted. At the lower end, where people will take your money and do nothing for you or offer services not worth paying for, there will always be a market where people are glad to take your money.

Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform , and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo! still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank? Here are some examples of what I am talking about )with URLs expunged to protect the guilty(.

Naive Excitement When you are new to the field of SEO there is a certain excitement in starting a site from scratch and growing it out into a flourishing enterprise. You ask someone to link to you and when they do you get excited. When you get cited without asking for it you get excited. And when the rankings start to show up you get excited. At some point you may even develop an irrational emotional attachment to some of your websites. I know I have.