1. Internet Trends

    5 months, 2 weeks ago

    The current economic climate brings new challenges for all businesses. The media of course have latched on to the credit crunch oiling the wheels of panic. We have seen some noticeable changes within SEO too. Some clients have reduced PPC budgets whilst others have only just started a  PPC campaign. As house sales supposedly take […]

    Dave Naylor

  2. Poor .info Domain Name Strategy, Afilias

    5 months, 2 weeks ago

    Afilias had submitted a proposal to ICANN for the .INFO gTLD that would allow them to shut down domain names at will if they consider them abusive. The proposal was approved.

    The problem they have is not going to be solved by this strategy. The value of high end .info domains was just diminished because now the registry can take them away from you for anything that they consider abusive, and in this day and age it is easy for someone else to spam for you in order to make you look shady. Given that, who wants to invest $20,000 in buying and building out a premium .info name? Probably only the people who are unaware to what Afilias just did.

    Meanwhile .info domain names are on sale at GoDaddy for $1.99 - $8 cheaper than any other extension. And it turns out spammers are less discriminating than most other business people. So spammers still buy .info and Google has to protect their search results. If Afilias wanted to fix the .info quality issue, simply increasing the price at the lower end would go a long way.

    Aaron Wall

  3. Robots.txt Overview, Generator, & Analyzer

    5 months, 2 weeks ago

    We recently compiled a 6 page robots.txt primer and added a robots.txt generator and robots.txt analyzer to our suite of free SEO tools.

    Aaron Wall

  4. $100 of FREE Text Links

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  5. Is the BlogHer Conference Guilty of Sex Discrimination

    5 months, 2 weeks ago

    Last week July 18th through the 20th was this years BlogHer Conference. According to the Blogher website their mission is:
    To create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment.
    To those organizers I challenge them to look in the mirror and realize that you’ve now become the same evil and sexist […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Is the BlogHer Conference Guilty of Sex Discrimination”, url: “http://www.wolf-howl.com/conference/blogher-conference/” });

    Michael Gray

  6. Unintended Consequences

    5 months, 2 weeks ago

    Edward Lewis runs SEOConsultants.com, one of the more well known and trusted directories in the SEO space. When I first started learning SEO about 5 years back Edward sent me an email letting me know that something I wrote was incorrect. He was right and I made sure I fixed the issue, but he was also quite abrasive.

    When Traffic Power was spreading their slime through the SEO industry, Edward Lewis was one of the main people helping to fight them off…so much so that Traffic Power even created a hate site about him. Edward cares a lot, but sometimes a bit too much. Recently he documented his experiences at Sphinn, where he was largely outraged by some inaccuracies he saw. In less than a week he was banned from the site for being too curt, abrasive, and disrespectful.

    The problem with trying to clean up everything on the web is that conversations are controlled by power laws…for every person in the know, there are 100 people new to the field. Plus many of the people who know what they are talking about eventually exit the conversation. Given that trend (and how companies like Google profit from spreading misinformation) the goal of killing misinformation is equally painful and self-defeating.

    Being correct is not enough to ensure success. You also have to package your message in a format that people find appealing. Which is part of the reason why blogs are so popular. Someone slicker than you is going to take your ideas and repackage them in a profitable format…may as well be you doing the repackaging rather than letting others take credit for your work.

    We all get invested in what we know, and to hear something from a different perspective challenges our identities. Easier for people to buy off on changing their opinions if they learn from a trusted messager, especially if they do not have to admit that they are wrong to do so. An easier way to create change is to share your side of the story on your home turf using good formatting, clear language, and logic. Some people will listen and follow, others will not.

    Allowing people to self-select is a much more efficient marketing strategy than trying to force change upon others. It allows network effects to work for you, rather than against you. You pretty-much need legal or military might (government) or a monopoly (Microsoft or Google) to get away with forcing change, and even then it usually ends up creating unexpected consequences (just look at Iraq).

    Aaron Wall

  7. MyBlogLog for Backlinks ?

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    Looks like I’m getting some link juice form mybloglog, sweet lets hope they don’t hijack me :) http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/DaveN
    DaveN

    Dave Naylor

  8. Chambers loses Olympic ban case

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    I honestly thought he would have won this case, I mean where in the world does Life mean Life, Under BOA rules, Chambers was banned from future Olympic Games after testing positive for the steroid THG in 2003
    full story on BBC : here 
    DaveN

    Dave Naylor

  9. trifecta - is a betting term isn’t

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    So what in a name, well if you didn’t know I take my company at least twice Horse Racing and a trifecta is a Bet, it’s not a easy bet either you must select the first, second and third horses in the correct order ( well that’s a straight trifecta ).. Anyway’s I was […]

    Dave Naylor

  10. Yahoo what are you doing ?

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    I was reading an article on Yahoo news titled : Big Brother Britain ‘going to far’
    Big Brother Britain is going a step too far, the UK’s Information Commissioner has warned.
    Richard Thomas has spoken out against apparent plans for a massive new Government database which could contain every phone call, text message, email and internet search […]

    Dave Naylor

  11. iPhone 2.0 Google Maps error in the UK

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    This is so Funny, I must admit all the Apple fan boys had almost convinced me that I needed an iPhone, btw I just ordering another Touch Diamond for ME after buying becky one :).. anyway all the old Iphones that upgraded to the new software can’t locate themselves on Google Maps and another cool […]

    Dave Naylor

  12. DaveN kicking Seomoz and Shoemoney’s Arses

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hell Yer Baby, I was pinged a url .. Alexa Basically this month saw Davidnaylor.co.uk spike past Seomoz.org and shoemoney.com.

    Just goes to show you how crap alexa is, Btw I’m not fucking with Alexa..
    DaveN

    Dave Naylor

  13. Big Brother Rex’s restaurant is Crap !

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    This is so funny, I have Quite a few clients and friends that live and work in the London area, and when I got IM’ed a few minutes ago, by a Client asking me if i watched BigBrother, I LOL’ed and said I was watching it now.. he then said do you remember the restaurant […]

    Dave Naylor

  14. I got my new phone - the HTC Touch Diamond

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    Back in June Dave posted about which phone I was going to be getting, as my upgrade was due on our Orange Business Contract. It was a good time of year to be ready for an upgrade with some great phones being released. Running Bronco, (and Dave!) requires me to be in touch with […]

    Dave Naylor

  15. The Value of Perception (and the Perception of Value)

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    Rich Schefren recently interviewed Dan Ariely. The recording is freely available online here. In the call Dan highlights how companies can increase perceived value and get their customers to spend more by creating a decoy offer, which is discussed in the first chapter of his Predictibly Irrational book.

    The decoy marketing offer introduces false choices to make another choice look more appealing. We have a hard time valuing offers, but are relatively good at valuing relative deals. The example Dan uses to discuss the decoy is the pricing of The Economist.

    Lets say the pricing is

    • web $60
    • print $120
    • both $120

    Given the above virtually nobody will order print, but adding the false choice of print only will make many people buy the both option, whereas if the print option were priced lower or the print option were not there more people would be inclined to opt for online only instead of the web +print combination.

    Non-commodity based value is largely a game of perception. You can build perceived value by

    • building exposure and trust in the marketplace by giving something of value away for free (people will think “if this is free imagine how good the stuff they are selling is”)
    • minimizing downside risk (through the use of payment plans, refund guarantees, etc.)
    • comparing yourself to higher priced offerings (the words SEO training are considered far more valuable than the words SEO Book - something I wish I would have considered in 2003!)
    • expanding your target market and resonating with niche brands (what is the difference between Prozac and Sarafem?)
    • breaking the language of a commodity product and reshaping it to associate it with higher value fields or fields with less competition (Starbucks language sounds more like fancy tea than a I need caffeine cup of coffee)
    • using scarcity (how much did Beanie Babies, Pet Rocks, and Tickle Me Elmo dolls sell for?)
    • requiring prompt action (when we ran a discount during the launch of our membership site people joined at a much faster rate before the price increased because the price increase was a real tangible cost of not acting quickly)
    • adding bonuses and benefits that are unique to your offering

    Everything around us is a collage of overlapping value systems competing for attention and resources. What backs the value of the U.S. Dollar? Why has it fallen 20% in the last couple years? Housing prices went up for a long time, and then they stopped. Last year Indymac bank was a top 10 mortgage lender and now they are bankrupt.

    Many investors shorted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In response to deteriorating business conditions the U.S. federal government offered to allow the companies to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve and increase their borrowing limits. That help stabilize their stock prices a bit.

    What really scared investors away from shorting the stocks further? A proposal from the White House to Congress would give the U.S. Treasury authority to buy the stocks to provide needed liquidity. Imagine betting on a company failing when your government says that they are interested in buying stock in the company if the company gets in a pinch. That is the sort of news that can send a stock price up 40% before the market opens.

    Why would the government care about the stock prices if they have little to do with the functionality of the businesses? It all comes down to perception. A healthy stock price gives the perception that all is well and helps keep the housing market as fluid as possible, whereas low stock prices erode confidence and evoke a sense of fear, which adds a lot of risk to an already unstable housing market. Perception becomes reality.

    Aaron Wall

  16. The Grass is Greener…

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    One of the easiest ways to scale a business model is to rely on user generated content. This effectively turns readers into writers (free content) and marketers (brand evangelists promoting their own work). But at the same time it makes it hard for readers to keep reading all the content produced from those sources.

    We subscribe to personalities and known shared biases. I read everything that John Andrews writes. I read everything Barry Ritholtz writes. The same can’t be said for many group blogs. The option to water down what you are doing for a short term revenue boost will always be there, but the ability to re-gain attention and trust that was thrown away in the process is not.

    The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be. - Robert Fulghum

    Aaron Wall

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  18. Does Your Website Make People Angry?

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    Just as it is good to invest in structural change it is good to invest in restructuring debates and reframing ideas.

    When we consume media one of the biases we often overlook is our own. When NPR created their Budget Hero commentors quicky stated things like “it’s too liberal” and “they used right wing think tank as a *credible* source.” Such statements reveal as much or more about the reader as they do about the media.

    When you know a field better than most people producing media in your space it is easy to denounce everyone who knows less than you as being full of crap. Dr. E. Garcia, a brilliant Information Retreival scientist, makes a habbit out of roasting me because I have a more practical and less academic experience in the space.

    While he feels my work is not up to his standards, the work he denounces helps people gain top rankings in Google and is getting free inbound links. Even better, I syndicated some free Creative Commons licensed content on latent semantic indexing called Patterns in Unstructured Data. Dr. Garcia thinks I know nothing about the topic, but when the original source went offline I started gaining citations as the source for that work too! Am I a leading expert on academic information retreival? No. I read some of Gerard Saltan’s work, but my experience are more well aligned with finding the criteria necissary to rank in Google.

    Web Designer Wall recently published an SEO guide for designers. In it they stated “Most people aim for a keyword density of 2%.” I am not sure where they got that stat from, but generally the document was fairly well done and I am glad they cited me as a resource. I could be envious of the exposure their article got and try to rip it to shreds, but where is the benefit? Dr. E. Garcia flaming me generally does nothing but flow PageRank my way. So be it…you know you are doing something right when people hate you. ;)

    Chris Anderson, famous for the Long Tail, recently had his long tail strategy ripped apart by the Harvard Business Review.

    Chris does not mind though…he is already on to debunking the scientific method!

    But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. …

    There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

    Mahalo offers virtually nothing original or of value, but it is worth more than most websites because Jason was good at making people angry. There is greater value in evoking emotions than being the person who’s chain is jerked by people writing with the express intent of making you angry.

    Aaron Wall

  19. Writing for Buyers vs Writing for Cynics

    5 months, 3 weeks ago

    6 fundamental laws for online publishing

    1. Most popular free online content contains factual errors, but it is still popular due to an affinity readers have for the author, and/or the ease of understanding what they are writing.
    2. The more you know the easier it is for you to denounce someone who knows less than you in your field, though doing so will rarely build brand loyalty, and often attracts the wrong kinds of customers. Call this phenomena the Threadwatch effect…good for attention, but bad for monetization. This is especially true since people new to the market are willing to spend money to build their businesses, but more established market players are more ad blind and more cynical to most commercial offers.
    3. If you are selling stuff online you are not your own target audience. Every field has far more novices than experts, and experts rarely buy because they feel they already know everything and have got burned so many times in the past.
    4. Most online content is recycled. Local substitution is a fact of life, and probably has been for thousands of years, only now it is faster and cheaper. Unless you add pretty pictures, write for novices, and aggressively market your best content at launch someone is going to recycle it (with errors) and get credit for your work. Competing publishers can polish up posts you wrote *years* ago and be called a visionary for doing so! If you are not making your work accessible to novices then you lose.
    5. The more mindshare you have in your space the easier it is to get weak references from people outside your space who occasionally graze upon your topic. When people who know little about your topic look at your field they care more about format than accuracy because they typically do not realize when they are reading factual errors.

    From a business perspective, one of my bigger errors with this site is that I tend to write more for the cynical person who loves SEO than for people newer to the field who are more likely to buy. That is not to say that we do not have people sign up every day, but that we are only targeting the fraction of the customers that we could.

    The hard part about changing is that I typically write about what interests me the most, using my own interests as a filter. Dumbing things down would be walking / swimming in uncharted territories, and I don’t think I would enjoy it all that much.

    Aaron Wall

  20. Link Laundry List

    5 months, 4 weeks ago

    A bunch of goodies recently. I still have about 5 pages worth of links saved up, but figured it was a good time to share some of the new and the old. Rather than pounding out 10 blog posts I figured it would be easier to write a nice list of attention worthy items.

    Aaron Wall


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