Typical Digg comment thread. Last week the new Digg version 4 has been released and I have tested it ever since. Back in the days I was a staunch opponent of Digg and an avid supporter of competing services like StumbleUpon and Mixx. That was years ago though. Both Mixx and SU have stagnated over time. So I decided to take a look at the new Digg. Maybe it has been fixed now? Most business people have been either expelled from the first wave of social sites like StumbleUpon,

A few months ago one of my clients has changed platforms. The new platform changed almost everything we've optimized on-site for years. It even messed up the obvious SEO basics like title tags and we're struggling with them to this day as the platform maker insisted that title tags "get assigned automatically" in their system. While title tag optimization is the daily bread of every SEO, for these people,

Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don't know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web. Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics. It's about usability conversions branding among others. Additionally, with the huge influence of social media, it's more important than ever to monitor social media buzz.

Grumpy Face by ellie . I'm blogging all day. Most of the time at work I spend blogging. I write for four flagship blogs. Plus I have a private Tumblr blog as well. Two of the flagship blogs are about SEO, this one here and my own blog. The other two are client blogs covering two different topics. So basically I have to be up to date about at least three subjects, industries or niches.

Chess by Alejandro Fernandez Everybody seems to agree with the "content is king" mantra. At the same time most articles, blog posts in and outside SEO industry seemed to ignore it. Not anymore: Content SEO and marketing resources are ubiquitous in 2010. SEO blogs used to deal with other aspects of Web strategy. Content has often been taken for granted and thus on page optimization, web design, usability and link building took center stage all the time. Good,

Time flies by. It's more than two years by now that I wrote the  highly popular "30+" list blog posts to get links and traffic for SEOptimise. I've often tried to abandon them, to write tutorials or other types of postings but list posts with around 30 items still rule. They get the most shares on social media links attention traffic for several reasons. This year all of the big guys in the SEO blogosphere started doing 30 something lists as well, SEOmoz does them,

Three of the most trusted SEO and social media experts, Rhea Drysdale, Tamar Weinberg and Lee Odden. Photo by toprankonlinemarketing . Interviews are often overlooked pieces of distilled wisdom. They aren't very popular on social media but they definitely should be! In interviews experts often provide the most valuable nuggets of their knowledge in a very concise form . You need to study dozens of other blog posts to learn as much.

So China just renewed Google's license to operate there. Google has tried to "abide by Chinese law" as they prefer to put it . Chinese law says: The communist party decides what's the truth and what not. What's not true shall neither be published nor searched for. Are multinational corporations like Google good law abiding citizens? Rarely. Is Google abiding by the laws elsewhere? Well, just look at the other news today.

In recent months I have been reading all kind of material on Facebook, search and SEO. I'm not here to predict the future or to hype Facebook as the new better search. Instead I'd like to analyze the clues we already have. Others have done great work on Facebook SEO by now. Moreover I'd like to combine these clues with the statistics suggesting that people trust their friends when it comes to products,

Dear Readers, at the end of last week I haven't published the "Twitter weekly" column. This time it was no poor time management issue. I did it on purpose. The week before I had written a highly popular "Twitter weekly" post but it was the last of its sort. Why? The Twitter hype is over! Twitter has peaked usage and traffic-wise in January , or maybe even earlier . That's not the main reason though. Also Google Trends still shows an increase.

Crossroads by Captain DJ . Getting targeted traffic for a website is just the first step in a thorough SEO process. What comes next? Landing page optimization or conversion )rate( optimization/CRO follows. After all you want the visitors you get to stay on your site and perform the desired action )like ordering or subscribing(. One of the foremost ways to optimize landing pages for more conversions is A/B split testing sometimes also referred to as simply AB testing .

Welcome back to the infamous "Twitter Weekly" attack where I dissect the hype around Twitter like a mad dog on crack. This week I will ridicule the baseless but nevertheless highly popular gossip about Google aiming to buy Twitter . First off I tell you one thing: Guess what? Google won't buy Twitter! I don't have to disturb Eric Schmidt's fiancé's privacy to know that. There are plenty of reasons not buy Twitter, especially if your name is Google.

Happy waiter by howard N2GOT Today someone was searching for a " client's guide to SEO " over at my SEO 2.0 blog. I think this topic is more fitting here on SEOptimise so I will explain the best approach to SEO companies and Internet marketing agencies for potential clients. In 2010 most people in business already know at least something about how Google works. Business people know about keywords and often pay for Google Ads already.

Recently a client of mine has been once again approached by someone who wanted to sell him an exact match keyword domain for one of the main keyphrases we optimize for. It was a German domain so I will use another similar phrase as example instead. In this SEO tutorial I want to show you the process of assessing a keyword domain for purchase and finding out whether buying it does make sense or not. Most common domains names that have keywords in them have been grabbed already.

Welcome back to the "Twitter Weekly" column. This week I want to talk about the phenomenal success of Twitter in Japan . Of course I refer to the AP article that was widely circulated this week. It seems that Twitter is huge in Japan, 16,3% of Japanese Internet users tweet, especially compared to Facebook which is only used by 3% of the Japanese Internet population. The AP story includes some ideas on why Twitter is so popular in Japan.

Oops, you're on our blacklist! Welcome back to Twitter Weekly , our Twitter column: Today I'll rant about the latest move by Twitter to monopolize the real estate of their own service. Twitter will in future reroute all links posted to Twitter via it's new t.co shortener. URLs in tweets won't display as shortened links anymore , regardless which service you use, you'll always see the domain you head to. Now isn't that good news? No hidden scam,

Image by spaceamoeba . Many people in the SEO industry write list posts about SEO myths . The authors always want to debunk myths but why repeat the myths over and over in the first place? Why not just speak out the brutal truth instead? Is it because people love myths? Is it because people love to believe in the myths they are taught? Several recent posts by Aaron Wall, David Harry and others have inspired me to write down the things that bug me.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. The biggest and saddest Twitter news this week was another blow to the Twitter app developer community: Twitter banned all third party stream ads to monopolize advertising for it's own "featured tweets" ad platform. While on the one hand, it's understandable, Google doesn't allow competing services to sell ads in search results either, on the other hand this a typical measure to stifle competition we all love to hate.

Ever since Google Webmaster Tools added the so called "search queries" data I've become a huge fan of them. I've listed the 10 Google SEO tools everybody should use in the past but to be honest I focus on three of them right now Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for SEO inspiration. The wealth of information GWB offers is like a goldmine. The tool-set has grown over the years steadily but I was neglecting it.

Image by pasukaru76 Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. This week I want to speak about a new development in the Twitter retweet wars . In the first episode we have seen a massive rebellion against the new retweet functionality introduced by Twitter itself . A huge wave of resistance has forced Twitter and most third party Twitter clients to ensure support for the old school retweet with the added "RT" or "RT:".