How To

As the end of 2007 approaches it seems like a perfect time to recap our most popular and commented blog posts:
7. More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Linking

How much are certain links worth? Are directories valid? Should you pay for links? How do you measure your linking success?

6. Microsoft Jumps in the Ad Company Buyer’s Club

Now Microsoft jumps to prove they’re not out of the online advertising game with a whopping $6 billion purchase of aQuantive in a move to expand their breadth of paid opportunities on web sites, Internet television, video on demand, and other places online.

5. The Human Element of Search

Take a look at your homepage. What does it say? Does it give you a clear sense of personality… say, clean-cut professional, serious business or funky casual?

4. What Happened to my Google Page Rank - SEO Audio

Were you one of the thousands of web site owners crying foul this week? Or maybe you hardly know what a PageRank is, but want to know the kind of thing that gets bloggers from coast-to-coast, time zone to time zone gossiping and ganging up on Google

3. Blogging your way to The Top of the Search Engines in Minutes

Although Google’s search ranking methods are usually shrouded in mystery, we can assume from these two examples, that Google may be using its Blog Search feature in collaboration with its general search to retrieve the most up-to-date information on any given topic.

2. Is Your Website Ready for Cyber-Monday?

With online holiday sales expected to hit 39 Billion dollars, it is essential to make sure your e-commerce site is in tip top shape.

1. Thinking about Buying or Selling Paid Links? Think Again…

Webmasters have been aggravated for weeks because of Google’s more aggressive policy, with most of the drops in PageRank a few weeks ago blamed on a penalty to sites perceived as buying or selling paid links.

Happy Thanksgiving Week!

This Friday will mark the official beginning of the 2007 Christmas shopping season, commonly known as Black Friday. Mobs of shoppers will be out the day after Thanksgiving grabbing $399 Dell Laptops, $199 Panasonic DVD Camcorders & this seasons hottest toy, Squawker McCaw by the cartload..or at least until quantities run out.

Luckily for online shoppers, like myself, we have Cyber Monday!

Cyber Monday, dubbed as the biggest online shopping day of the year, occurs the Monday after Thanksgiving. With online holiday sales expected to hit 39 Billion dollars, it is essential to make sure your e-commerce site is in tip top shape.

5 ways to increase online holiday sales:

1. Offer a time sensitive special. People love a deal! A Free Shipping special or 10% Coupon can literally turn a passing visitor into a customer. Encourage them to buy now by instilling a sense of urgency with a deadline on the special. For example: Free Shipping Until 12/15/07. Be sure to place the offer prominently on your homepage with an appropriate landing page to encourage users to buy now!

2. Ensure all your pages are working. The last thing you want is to find out that your customers,with credit card in hand and virtual shopping cart stocked, are getting an error message on one of your site’s checkout pages. Do a test run on your site to ensure that all pages and commands are working properly.

3. Dress up your homepage. Just like decorating your home for the holidays, decorate your homepage. Add some Christmas colored text, a snow man or feature holiday themed products. Add holiday keywords to your products (P.S. Last year the term Christmas was searched over 3 million times a month.)

4. Use Pay Per Click. If you are not using PPC. Start. If you are. Up your budget. This is the time of year when you will see the biggest return for your marketing dollars.

5. Clearly display your delivery schedule. Buyers will want to know when to expect their shipment. Getting items delivered before Christmas is critical to online shoppers. By prominently displaying your shipping methods and delivery schedule, buyers will feel more comfortable buying from you.

Ready, Set , Go! You’ve got 1 week until Cyber Monday and 35 days until Christmas!

There are a lot of reasons why we love to use Wordpress blogging software — it’s a straightforward install, highly customizable, extremely SEO-friendly, and with its latest release, it’s jam packed with more features than any other blogging platform out there. And did I mention that it’s free? And open source? It’s just a no-brainer.

It gets better, though. Wordpress makes starting a podcast as easy as posting a complete URL link to an MP3 in your post. That’s it. Wordpress handles the XML enclosure, and you can even assign your podcasts all a unique category to make a podcast-only feed. As someone who manually wrote XML enclosures for months in the early days of podcasting, the no brainer approach made possible by Wordpress is hugely appreciated.

Yet, it still gets better. Feedburner and Wordpress are a very attractive pair, and with Feedburner you can further customize the output of the XML feed, for optimal reading in podcasting clients from iTunes to Juice. While you can do same with some of the very good Wordpress podcasting plugins out there, Feedburner integrates all the bonus podcasting information with its other great features, such as exceptional feed usage statistics, XML optimization, social media integration, blog search pinging, etc…

All the tools are widely available, and while it requires a fair amount of tech savvy to get started, it’s not nearly as serious a project as it was in the early days. The real challenge comes with coming up with the content to make using these tools worthwhile!

Anyways, if you’re wondering why we’ve taking a radical turn off from the beaten SEO path, it’s because we’re just about to unwrap a new addition to this blog that we’ve been working on for some weeks here at Hall — an SEO Q&A podcast called SEO Audio. Stayed tuned for the first episode this afternoon!