The easiest way to find content ideas that are highly linkable is to study questions people frequently ask on forums, question sites such as Yahoo Answers , and social media. When questions continue to come up, it indicates a certain level of demand, that the answers to these questions might not be easily answered with a simple search, or that the top-ranking information is outdated. Of course, you’re going to have to promote that content to get it noticed, unless your site is already ranking very well and is trusted by search engines. As a solid reputation and awareness are built, others will also start to point people to your content. The goal is to get people to link to your content from the content of their site. People tend to link more to sites that rank in the top 10.

Having seen the outcome of the flip event, I would declare that the probability of coming up heads is either 0 percent or 100 percent (depending on what I′ve seen). From the law of large numbers we know that when sampling a very large number of visitors, the measured conversion rate will approach the true probability of conversion. By seeing the amount of overlap between the two bell curves representing the normal distributions of the conversion rate, you can determine the likelihood of one version of the page being better than the other. One of the most common questions in inferential statistics is to see if two samples are really different, or if they could have been drawn from the same underlying population as a result of random chance alone.

Craigslist started 14 years ago and — while the classified ads for apartments, dating, and items for sale are as popular as ever — it seems the adult listings are fast becoming a major legal battleground. But some of the most ignorant Web users have to be the people who criticized the tax trial of a Las Vegas resident who thought he could pay in gold coins but for tax purposes report the money as the face value of the coins. Rick Boucher (D-Virginia), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, are pushing for greater regulation and the implementation of more aggressive opt-in policies. The antitrust discussions about Google’s monopolistic hold on the search industry are another way we could see the government enter our industry in a very direct and pervasive way. He was one of the first 100 AdWords Professionals, a Yahoo and Overture Ambassador, and a member or mod of many of the industry forums.

After all, isn’t that the payoff of the Internet and search — you see how I traverse around the Web so you know enough about me to make some educated suggestions. Universal search, Bing, RAIS, Wolfram|Alpha, local integration, Ask redesign (for the four people who use it), and other recent updates to the search engines show that the industry is changing, but not in the way you think. For now, Bing isn’t a Google killer, but it looks like it will speak better to the needs of marketers (who let’s face it, pay the bills) and to a user base that’s looking to search less and decide more. He helps clients to understand how search fits into the overall marketing plan and constantly researches the rapidly changing industry to help clients anticipate, and respond to, changes in the search landscape.

When dealing with a brand new domain, it will likely be difficult to gain the necessary “trust″ for rankings for broad competitive terms for at least three months, but often closer to six to nine months. This isn’t always as clear cut — if you have and continue to put out useful content, and if you’re fortunate to benefit immediately from authoritative and consistent links (or are willing to cheat), you could see results sooner. The catch to this process is that, at the same time, the search engines are ridding themselves of any no-longer used URLs, through new robots. If the site relies on a lot of home page rankings for top keywords, then a redesign usually won’t hurt, even if the new home page URL now resolves to the root instead of a prior directory-appended version, based on a number of sites. Next, establish that your optimization is in place and start working to develop trust in the new pages and understand how the search engine sees them.

Once upon a time, back in the early days of the Web, marketers would spend lots of time gathering links that would encourage visitors to click on them and drive traffic. The site is still built to be crawlable by search engines, but instead of optimizing title tags and on-page copy for certain keywords, McDerment made sure the titles and pages would entice users to click on Freshbooks′ listing in the search results, and feel comfortable about the company once they got there. When search traffic got cheap and abundant, it was often easier to just get more people to come to your crappy website and still get enough to buy something, than it would be to target relevant traffic, and build a site that converted well. With a combination of real-world marketing experience and years of business journalism, Kevin brings to Search Engine Watch a unique ability to deliver news and training materials that help search marketers do their jobs better.

I, too, have felt that frustration, so this week I′m writing an open letter to the Google Analytics folks on behalf of my small business friends around the Web. Honestly, quite a few people would very willingly pay someone to listen to their issue and fix it for them — or at the very least, walk them step by step through fixing it. The scripts need to be manually adjusted to accommodate your variables and the pages on your site need to be adjusted to tell Google Analytics which numbers are which (e. I hear this from others, and you can see the frustration when you run a simple query for “how to set up revenue tracking in Google Analytics. The second step is to ensure that the tracking code is included in the receipt page in the standard fashion. It’s very frustrating when trying to do all of this setup and tweaking yourself and you have no idea for a week at a time if what you did worked, or didn’t work, because you’re not sure when that traffic is actually going to be seen.

As you upload your video, you’ll have the option to add your keyword phrases into the title, description and tags for each site. Tracking and analytics are always of the highest importance because they provide the statistics that tell you what works and what doesn′t. Ron is actively involved in the SEM community and speaks at conferences and seminars, as well as hosting regional SEM events where he provides participants SEM training and education best practices. Ron also serves on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is also one of the authors for the SEMPO Institute Fundamentals and Advanced courses.

Normally, this wouldn′t be a problem, but Google’s Web crawling has been increasingly aggressive, as they′re crawling JavaScript links on Web sites (most parked domains use JavaScript links and other scripts to take the Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing ads from Google/Yahoo and display them). This is significant because these “keywords” are not a “match” on the Bluegreen’s Web site, but they′re used — and a specific match — within the ads on the other Web sites, yet Bluegreen ranks first. After having witnessed the bubble burst and its lingering effects on stability on the job front (learning that working for a "large company" does not guarantee you a position, no matter your job performance), Mark established an interactive marketing agency and has cultivated it into one of the most respected search engine optimization firms in the United States. Mark is a board member of the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) and a member of the Dallas/Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association (DFWIMA) and is a regular speaker at the Search Engine Strategies and Pubcon conferences.

If education of visitors is your primary goal, the key metrics are the time spent on your educational pages and the number of page views . Regardless of the length or complexity of the form, the form-fill rate is used to measure the efficiency of this process. Many companies measure sales efficiency by looking at their sales conversion rate (the percentage of unique visitors who complete a purchase), or their shopping cart abandonment rate (the percentage of people who start the checkout process but never finish it). Instead of assigning the full revenue value to the sale conversion action, you use only the profit margin on the sale.