comments and bug reports please
DaveN

Want to check your rankings on Google.com, international Google search results, Yahoo, and Microsoft? Try Rank Checker, our free Firefox extension which tracks your rankings, and allows you to automatically check ranking changes over time.

If you have any questions please watch this video.

The tool has issues with special international characters, but we are trying to get that fixed ASAP. Have any other feedback? Please leave it in the comments below.

If you like it/find it useful, please show some love via a blog mention and on del.icio.us if you can.

While I signed up nearly a year ago, I just recently started using Twitter. As a marketer I find it both interesting and fascinating…as it is more transparent than most social networks are. People often write back and forth using @username when they want to send another person a message, which sometimes draws you into other conversations. And since everyone you follow is someone you know or related to someone else you know it is really easy to get pulled in. And the social pressure of being associated with everything you do (no anonymous domain registration here folks) prevents Twitter from becoming a spam filled mess. Maybe there is some way such a system could be applied to search?

People can subscribe to get short blurbs from you (and whoever else they like), and the system is almost instantly self-correcting. It is the complete opposite of email spam hype marketing - if you want off the list you get off the list. If I were to spew nothing but hollow hyped up marketing messages nobody would subscribe (and many would unsubscribe). Conversely, if I help give people a laugh (and share the goodness of pearl drink worldwide) people subscribe. Next to peace and SEO, pearl drink is the best thing you can spread.

Ok…back on topic, so where was I…. I recently started using Twitter. From a social network and marketing standpoint Twitter is worth checking out and understanding. If you would like to check it out you can sign up here, and if you want to follow me, I am awall19.

Here are some of my favorite Twitter feeds: webgirl, Graywolf, Rae, Copyblogger, Mike McDonald, Chris Winfield, ChrisG tamar, Stuntdubl, Lee Odden, Barry, Debra Mastaler, Todd Mintz, Vanessa Fox and Danny Sullivan.

Henry Rollins is using Twitter too!

And by far, Neil Patel is out in front on the “people subscribed to” list, with over 8,000! I think (once he finds time to) he will finish up writing that final blog post about stopping everything else in favor of reading Twitter 23.9 hours a day.

Finding a good SEO consultant who has enough time to take on more work is a tough job. The large SEO companies rarely have a competent employee working on your account, and the best smaller SEO firms end up spending most of their time building their own website and/or are limited in the number of clients they can take on.

My friend Jonah Stein just shot me an email letting me know he quit working for his firm and is going it alone, which means you might be able to hire him since he has not built up a large list of clients yet, and his old clients are still with his former employer. If you are looking for a good SEO, here is Jonah’s site.

I was amused and a bit irked by this irrelevant and disturbing spam post from a fluff website promoting Wealthy Affiliate. I enjoy reading material plagued with disconnects and false information like this post. You can really learn a lot from both your mistakes and others’.

They attempted to compare The Rich Jerk, SEO Book and Wealthy Affiliate. Of course, since they are an affiliate of Wealthy Affiliate, guess who the BEST company was? The point here is that they did a poor job persuading me that the three subjects are relevant and from the same category.

Here are the disconnects:

1a. Rich Jerk Up-sells
1b. Seobook.com changed its business model and market one product. This was a good move because it eliminated folks who weren’t serious about learning and keeping up with the ever changing world of SEO.
1c. Wealthy Affiliate??? I honestly don’t see how this company is different from hundreds of sites like it.

2a. Rich Jerk offends people as a gimmick.
2b. Seobook.com is praised by Fortune 500 clients, best selling marketing authors, an Ivy League business professor, and countless webmasters. It’s not our job to make everyone in the world happy but we try and work our ass to give supreme value to our members.
2c. I can’t find the USP of Wealthy Affiliate

3a. Rich Jerk is a marketing gimmick that worked.
3b. Seobook.com is a very active member of the SEO/Webmaster community and writes for other Technorati Top 100 Blogs, including this one.
3c. The pop-up that attacked my screen disabled me to click further on Wealthy Affiliate

4a. The attack on the Rich Jerk was 3 long paragraphs.
4b. The dismissal on Seobook was a short paragraph including a positive statement about the quality of the product.
4c. Wealthy Affiliate is God’s gift to mankind.

I don’t know where they got the information that Seobook was free. They need to stop visiting sites that steal copyrighted content. ALSO - they admitted that they heard Seobook was good stuff.

Persuading the Reader to Take Action

When you hard-sell a reader, especially how terrible other products are, never mention anything positive about the subject you are lambasting and destroying. IN FACT…. When you want to persuade a person to TAKE ACTION, you need to speak in their own terms. How will this post convince a buyer? Will or can they be trusted? How will it help their buyer’s needs? What are the benefits and potential gains?

As a newbie Internet marketer, they failed in so many levels:

• made absolutely false statements
• comparison of three different products further dimmed their sub-standard ability to determine relevancy, which is really what selling online is about.

you know that Google is hunting and killing sites…
do this search : Google
so you can see 2,800,000 blogs wp-content folder ( this is a standard googledork )
how hard would it be for Google to write a script where basically do this…
open folder : http://www.blogherald.com/wp-content/plugins/
fuzzy logic search for TLA_ which would return http://www.blogherald.com/wp-content/plugins/tla_44565.php
yep thats the […]

In the Pwn2Own competition the the first attack breached the defenses of Mac OS X using a bug in the Safari browser and won £5000 as well as the MacBook Air that he compromised. hehehe
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/711
DaveN

These are my 3 my Favourite messing with Digg tricks.. remember most diggers are stupid
1) The 301 redirect to another page.
Basically you 301 the page that’s been dugg to another page, with a Digg button, because most people Digg after they have left Digg and landed on your page
2) The wrong Digg button
basically you just […]

• Great interview of Ken McGaffin about keywords and market research.
• Free open source link analysis tool from Patrick at Blogstorm, which shows how many links point at each page of your site. Using it does require setting up a MySQL database, but it is quite easy to set up and use.
• Brian Clark wrote another great post about the trend toward membership sites. He mentioned our humble site, and tomorrow he is going a case study call with me…I hope that goes well.
• John Andrews has a great comment on Sphinn about marketing strategy, and what you can learn from industrial strength black hat spam wrapped in a public relations cloth.
• SEOMoz Survey - they surveyed a couple thousand of their members and readers and shared the results. Part of what is so interesting is not just all the data, but how good a job they do at presenting it visually.
• YouTube launched their insights video analytics product, which allows you to see how many times a day people view your videos. Many of my videos get a hundred or a couple hundred views a day. Putting that in the context of how expensive it is to buy traffic makes me want to create about 100 more videos. $20 worth of trafic * 100 videos = $2,000 worth of daily traffic. Being on YouTube you don’t have an optimal conversion process set up, but they could be branded with intro and outro ads…and should be able to create at least a conversion or two every day.

ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.

“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales. Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent.

The two logical options from there are

1. set a floor price on house content and show fewer ads to offer a better user experience
2. look at currently hot stories, key markets in the weeks and months ahead, and market positions where you are close to leading but do not yet dominate and advertise your own products and services
3. Advertise branded widgets that go on third party networks which help get your brand exposure on those as well. ESPN should have made an official NCAA bracket gadget rather than letting that traffic and branding and traffic go to Google
4. add interactive features to your own site which increase brand loyalty and reduce content creation costs…which end up making the ad networks a more viable offering for back-fill content
5. If the ad networks are too cheap buy out inventory on competing sites to further distance yourself from them as the market leader.

All of those strategies allow you to buy market-share in your vertical on the cheap. The more of your market you own the better you will be able to sell ads for. If ESPN was 60% of the sports market Nike would be required to buy ads with them, largely based on ESPN’s terms. Part of being remarkable is about creating featured content, but an equally important piece is making sure you are branded as the leading source. There is no better place to market your content and ideas than your own site.

Introducing Answer Sniper

I just came across AnswerSniper, a $147 software product created to help you find open questions to answer on Yahoo! Answers by keeping you up to date with the latest open questions for keywords you select. Can you imagine paying for software for the privilege of finding questions that need answered, and then trying to be the first person to answer each of them?

If you are committed at that level, why not just create something like AskDaveTaylor.com or your own forum so you at least build content, brand equity, and a traffic stream you own in the process?

Worse yet, on Yahoo! Answers you are not answering questions in a small community where you can build a strong personal brand, but on a huge network where it would take a serious time investment to build a personal brand. Just doable perhaps, but probably beyond the opportunity cost for most folks.

What is even more absurd about buying such software is that Yahoo! Answers offers RSS feeds of new open questions (open SEO questions), so all you need to do is subscribe to the feed to get notifications of new questions. Want to track multiple keywords? Use Yahoo! Pipes and/or subscribe to multiple feeds.

Maybe there are more features I do not see or some things I am not fully appreciating. Do you think AnswerSniper is an unneeded product or a testament to how saturated the web is becoming? Or both?

The Yahoo! Answers Pollution Problem

About a year ago I answered a few questions just to get to a second level rating and learn what the site was like, but many of the top selected answers are people working inside the same companies who asked the exact same questions. And that pollution is only going to grow, especially as more internet marketers create internet marketing products focused on Yahoo! Answers. Plus the link equity keeps getting spread thinner as more questions are asked AND the average quality of the service drops due to pollution by marketers - those trends do not bode well for the long-term viability of Yahoo! Answers as a traffic source.

The issue in not just an issue of being someone else’s user generated content versus becoming a destination, but also an issue of supply and demand. There is a lot of supply of low quality content. And there is a lot of demand for the much more select high quality content. And for Google to keep their market position they need to keep getting better at understanding which is which.

Right now a lot of weight has been put on domain trust, but as more sites add user generated garbage to their sites, site authority driven algorithms will require a lot of algorithmic refinement or manual intervention by the search engines.

As the web gets more competitive the answer to sustainability is not more content, but deeper content. In the time it takes to answer 100 Yahoo! Answer questions you could write 10 blog posts. In the time it takes to write 10 blog posts you could write 1 feature. And 5 years from now, content like the Blogger’s Guide to SEO is going to be worth far more than 100 of my average blog posts. In a month you will not remember reading this post.*

It is hard to build a lasting brand that changes with the market if you are a username on a large heavily polluted site.

* If you do, leave a comment one month from today and prove me wrong.

As Google clearly states (with their actions), bartering for links is fine as long as money is not part of the exchange (or if there is editorial discrimination and relevancy when it is). What is the guiding principal for bartering links? Massa said:

When do other people WANT to accept your link request, publish your article, run your press release or accept your submission?

When it does something for them.

Either it makes them money, saves them time, provides added value to their visitors or they believe it makes them look good or smart or benevolent to their visitors, their peers, their friends, their relatives, to the search engines, award sites or just about anyone that can make them a buck or stroke their ego.

So, the absolute best chance you have of getting that link is to cover as many of those bases as possible at the same time. When you can satisfy some need, want or desire of the webmaster, the visitor to the hosting site and it makes the search engine look smart, BINGO. You just hit the SERP buster hat trick!

If you are going to sell links, you can cloak them as being AdSense ads to lower your risk profile, because if it’s Google its got to be Good! Or you can require the link purchase be wrapped in a guest article or some other format that does not look like a link purchase.

Everyone who is popular gains detractors along the way. And detractors tend to flock together and vote for other people who share their opinions. That trend virtually guarantees any valuable brand will have dirt ranking somewhere in the search results. The more valuable the brand gets the more people who will gun to unearth the dirt.

With so much competition for attention, many publishers believe they need to offer bold predictions quickly in order to be remarkable. And when those predictions go wrong people are creating documentaries about how wrong you are. Jim Cramer recently mentioned that Bear Stearns was fine right and talked about how unsophisticated the naysayers were (and how they never did their homework)

Days after Jim said Bear Stearns was fine, they were bought out for pennies on the dollar. Not only does Comedy Central offer their take, but other mini-documentaries and flames have appeared

Don Harrold
over 100,000 views!

The Daily Show

Fox Business Ad

If you are a publisher and your business model requires you to find new customers every day then you need to keep competing for attention. In many markets that will put you in a Jim Cramer-like position where you end up making some bad calls that cost you a lot of money in the long run.

a nice little pagerank 3 website : I thought I had found a new adsense block …

You see the “From” and “Get a Quote” well guess what they are Not Ads buy google they a sold links !!
DaveN

a nice little pagerank 3 website : I thought I had found a new adsense block …

You see the “From” and “Get a Quote” well guess what they are Not Ads buy google they a sold links !!
DaveN

as if you didn’t know ! lol
ok I want to try and show you the importance of back link .. My little German Buddy linked to me in German !.. Ya das ist gut
this was the text here used Dell beim spammen erwischt ( it means something like “Dell gets spammed” ), but check out […]

as if you didn’t know ! lol
ok I want to try and show you the importance of back link .. My little German Buddy linked to me in German !.. Ya das ist gut
this was the text here used Dell beim spammen erwischt ( it means something like “Dell gets spammed” ), but check […]

if you are like me and recently noticed that your Firefox was crashing all the time maybe you should read this ..
http://secunia.com/advisories/29526/
DaveN

if you are like me and recently noticed that your Firefox was crashing all the time maybe you should read this ..
http://secunia.com/advisories/29526/
DaveN

hypothetical I repeat this post is hypotheatrical !

lets say that 12 months ago a group of Googlers and anonymous friends sat down to discuss how they could kill link selling and buying, without causing death and destruction to normal sites, Obviously if Google started killing sites for buying links, then the bad people would just […]