Roundup Thursday for the Week of 8/31/08
Three star links:
- Back to Blogging is a new project that will run from September 8th through October 10. Its goal is to provide blogging tips to help people learn how to design a better blog, create content, and promote and monetize their blog.
- Who knew that MC Hammer loves web analytics? First Tonya Harding gets fat and becomes a boxer, then Screech from Saved By the Bell turns into a royal turd and puts out amateur porn videos, and now MC Hammer's touting the benefits of web analytics. What's next, Vanilla Ice comes up with a practical renewable energy source plan?
- Going out of town and need a guest blogger? Try out GuestBloggerFinder.com, a new service that helps you either become a guest blogger or find one for your blog.
- Julie Magro came up with 14 cute suggestions on what to do with your old Yellow Pages. I'm a fan of the Yellow Pages car, though I don't think it would hold up well in soggy Seattle.
- Slightly Shady SEO teaches us how to hide the inner shadiness of our blackhat sites. He has some really interesting strategies, and even if you're a pure whitehat, his tips are a good learning experience.
- Rae Hoffman wonders why Twitter decided to nofollow links in the "bio" section of user profiles. She wonders if Google is subtly threatening high-profile companies like Twitter into complying with with their rules, else these companies get dropped from Google's indexed or heavily penalized.
- Speaking of Twitter, Phil Baumann shares some tips on how not to Twitter your professional license to death. It's pretty embarrassing if someone compromises his professional license or reputation by acting like a jackass on social media sites, but hey, we all know it happens from time to time. Ah, the "anonymous" allure of the Internet...
- Seth Godin dispels the myth of launch PR. It's a nice reminder that you don't necessarily have to launch your company or product with tons of media exposure and PR in order to be successful.
- Want to know what's likely to kill you? Well, here's a nifty chart! Hmm, no "crushed to death by vending machine"? Now that would be a hell of a way to go...
- Target shelled out $6 million to the National Federation of the Blind for having a search-unfriendly website for vision-impaired users. If this isn't a cautionary tale to ensure that your website is usable for users, both able-bodied and handicapped/impaired, then I don't know what is.
- Sweet, apparently a wandering mind can do important work. More daydreaming, everyone! We've got important work to do!
Four star links:
- ReadWriteWeb talks about tech blogging embargoes. It's an interesting subject that I didn't even know existed.
- Freakonomics uses economics to hypothesize whether UFOs really visited Earth as early as the 1940's. I love outside-the-box thinking like this.
- Digital Inspiration shares some cool Windows Live Search tricks that aren't terribly well-known. Well, technically search share indicates that Windows Live itself isn't terribly well-known, so Trick #1 should be "Did you know that Microsoft has a search engine?"
- Here's a great usability tip: use verbs as labels on buttons and pop ups. I'm curious to hear how much of an impact this could have on conversion rates.
Five star links:
- OnionMap is the "global people map," and it's pretty damn cool. It provides 3-D map imagery for a city and also details other facts such as the city's area code, population, form of currency, language, mayor, and more.
- SEO is a Business. Franz Enzenhofer highlights the business aspects of SEO as well as its typical goals, milestones, and metrics.
- Large Corporate SEO Survival Tips. TrainSEM shares some tips that might help other corporate SEOs and agencies that want to sell their SEO services.
- Another Look at Meta Geo. Maruschka talks about meta geo tags and encourages small business customers to register with both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps.
- Hidden Data in Google's Keyword Tool. Ex2x discovered that when he copies a keyword from Google's Keyword Tool results, the data appears to paste along with the CPC of that keyword.
- SEOmoz Expert Training: Global Search. DarioStereo shares some tips he picked up from Distilled's Global Search presentation at the SEOmoz Expert Seminar.
- Squeezing the Value Out of Your Google Adwords Keywords. Moleskin provides us with some handy tips on getting the most out of your keywords in Google Adwords.
Best of YOUmoz:
- Google Helps You Make the Most of Pages Not Found. Stephen T plays around with Google Webmaster Tools' "Enhance 404 Pages" feature and uses SEOmoz as a little case study. Great examples--way to experiment, Stephen!
New events added to the Events Calendar:
No new events added.
Upcoming events:
- Internet Marketing Conference September 11-12 at the Coast Plaza Hotel & Suites in Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Melbourne SEO Meetup September 13 at The Palms Food Court in Mt. Waverley/Syndal, Australia
- Webdagene September 18-19 in Norway
- Social Networking Conference at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington and Conference Center September 22-23 in London, UK
- PPC Summit September 25-26 in Los Angeles, CA
- SMX East October 6-8 in New York, NY. SEOmoz members get a 20% discount if they use discount code SEOmoz@SMX while registering. This discount can be applied to all access passes (full and one day) only. Early bird registration expires Monday, September 8, so if you're thinking of attending then you should sign up soon!
New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:
Featured job postings:
- Link builder for Distilled, SEOmoz's UK partner company, in London, UK
- 2 senior SEO consultants for 24/7 Real Media in Sydney, Australia
- 2 search managers for 24/7 Real Media in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia
- Online marketing manager for e3media in Moscow, Russia
- Online marketing expert for EmailAppenders in New York, NY
- Contracted SEO for TeachersWallet
- Paid search/SEM manager for Expedia in Bellevue, WA
- Contracted SEO/AdWords optimizer for a high-end notebook computer retailer
- Writer/social media master for Think Basis
Featured companies:
United States/North America:
- Wpromote in Los Angeles, CA
- Spork Marketing in Denver, CO
- DA Web Marketing in New York, NY, the UK, and India
- Cornerstone in Toronto, ON, Canada
Asia:
- Bangkok SEO in Bangkok, Thailand
- FOMAX in Bangalore, India
- Elix Software Solutions in Bangalore, India
- SEO India Solution in Bangalore, India
- Intellionics SEO Services in Hyderabad, India
- NetAdwise Solutions in India
Featured resumes:
Happily employed:
- Nicholas Gadacz in San Francisco, CA, is an SEM architect for CNET and dreams of becoming a director of SEM and building a search marketing department from the ground up.
- Aji Isaac is the head of the web marketing department for Digital Avenues.
www.seomoz.org
published @ September 5, 2008