Netpaths Guide to SEO & Web Design

Every Consultant Can Relate To This

CVOS — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:02:47 +0000

The Vendor Client relationship video shows consulting satire in real world situations. Hilarious video that all consultants can relate to.

Consulting in the web design world can lead to interesting price discussions.

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Will Smith: I Know Who I Am, What I Believe, & That’s All I Need to Know

CVOS — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:17:15 +0000

Will Smith on life, work and making meaning: “I want to do good. I want the world to be better because I was here.”

We grew up with the sense that where we were almost didn’t matter.

He has come a long way from DJ Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince, and his teenage television sitcom the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

It takes a desperate obsessive focus to perform at the highest level.

I have a great time with my life, and I want to share it.

I love living, I think that’s infections and it’s something that you can’t fake.

The separation between talent and skill is the greatest misunderstood concept. Talent is natural, skill is only developed by hours of beating on your craft.

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Off Line Marketing Using I Like You

Mad Libs Form Style Increases Conversions Up To 40%

CVOS — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:31:13 +0000

How to you encourage more people to fill out your landing page forms?

Vast.com tested a form using a narrative format and presented input fields to people as blanks within sentences, Mad Libs style.

I haven’t done MadLibs since elementary school, but it worked: they realized an increase in conversions of 25% to 40%.

This is the most innovate conversion rate optimization I have seen in a long time, and you should use it before it becomes widespread, commonplace and ignored. Back in the 1990’s banner click rates were high before the novelty of flashing graphics on a webpage wore off.

Squeeze page image via Luke Wroblewski and QuadsZilla.

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SMCLA Google Analytics Event – Tracking Social Media Campaigns

CVOS — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:11:39 +0000

SMCLA had an educational event showcasing Google Analytics and ways to measure website success. This is one of the easiest ways to measure online social media efforts and gauge the effectiveness of optimization efforts.

Moderator, @EricaForrette did a great job keeping things active and getting attendees questions answered.

Panelists included:

John Shiple, CTO, Ultralive
www.linkedin.com/in/johnshiple
Alex Becker, Co-Founder and President, Highly Relevant
www.linkedin.com/in/alexybecker
Andrew Hahn, Luxury Link and Familygetaway.com
www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhahn

Below are some notes from this informative session.

This is a great explanation of how to set up Google Analytics for your fan page on Facebook. Use an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. Create a new GA account and name it facebook. Create a custom img tag for each page you would like to track: contact form, services, products etc. Add the entire custom image html tag to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you would like to track. Read more

Classify your links by tagging the Source as “feedburner”, the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as “feed” or “email”. read more about adsense for feeds.

The Google Conversion University provides free training materials and case studies to help setup analytics. They also explain conversion funnels and how to measure visitors as they travel through your website.

There is a great writeup of the Goo Goo over Google Analytics at the SMC LA blog.

Organized by Garick who did a great job managing the 150 people show showed up.

@techzulu provided for livestreaming this event. We had over 10,000 online viewers.

location host company Mahalo.com 902 Colorado Ave Santa Monica, CA 90401

@freshbrothers sponsored pizza – it is excellent

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E-Commerce Transactions: What People Really Buy Online

CVOS — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:43:48 +0000

What are people really buying online? Which websites get the most transactions? More business happens on the web than you may realize. The categories are separated into clothing, electronics, furniture, office supplies and books and magazine sell more often online, overall the majority of U.S. purchases still take place in brick-and-mortar stores, but the gap is closing quickly.

The categories with the highest online buying percentage. These retail segments had higher online purchased in aggregate dollars than from brick and mortar stores. Percentages show e-commerce sales as a percent of total sales.

Majority of Purchases Online

electronics 74.1%
music & videos 74%
office supplies 67.8%
clothing 65.9%
furniture 65.8%
non merchandise recipts 65.5%
toys & games 61.4%
books and magazine 61%
sporting goods 58.2%
food, beer & wine 57.9%

The categories with the lowest online buying percentage, it is odd that more people prefer to buy computers in store and go to pharmacies in person. These segments were online pioneers with Dell and Drugstore.com the early leaders

Majority of Purchases Offline

Computer hardware / software 48.1%
Health & drug aids 8.8%

Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau /
Chart Source: Infographics

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Google Superbowl Ad Predicted by Tiger Woods

CVOS — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:48:36 +0000

This ad was created in December 2009 in response to the Tiger Woods allegations. It eerily mimics the superbowl ad for the Google search engine.

Here is a spoof of the Google ad for the study abroad to Paris titled “Parisian Oops”

A spoof on the Google ad by Shoemoney about his system on how to make money online. This was one of the first and best remixes I have seen of the famous Super Bowl commercial, and may do more to inspire entrepreneurs to learn more about SEO.

The original Google superbowl ad titled “Parisian Love” about an American finding love in France and living happily ever after.

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Dilbert on Search Engine Optimization

CVOS — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:19:04 +0000

Asok Lost his soul trying to improve his Google search engine ranking. He found that keyword research & placement along with inbound links are the foundation of search engine placement. The missing ingredient:

Ritual sacrifice, presumably of an intern.

Suggestions to Scott Adams to improve Dilbert search engine optimization: create a text version of your cartoon, rename the image with a more relevant filename, add a keyword rich alt tag, and consider linking the strip to a larger popup version.

Source: United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

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PRweb Promo Code Save 25% Off Your Next News Release

CVOS — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:44:56 +0000

SAVE 25% on your online news release with PR Web, and use it wisely.

PRWeb sets the standard for building online visibility by distributing your news through the largest online news distribution network. From the smallest business to the Fortune 500, PRWeb has helped more than 40,000 organizations maximize their online visibility. Our online visibility packages will help you attract new customers, increase sales, drive visitors to your website, and get publicity for your business.

Use this promotional code: em0210drmRemail

This must be the largest company in Ferndale, a rural town near where I went to university. The town is small enough to have less than 10 traffic lights, and depending on the wind you can smell the nearby dairy farms. It is also the headquarters of the largest semi automated press release organization in the world.

PRWeb helped customers achieve more than 77 million impressions of their news across the web in January 2010. Hopefully you will be responsible with this service and only send out relevant, informative and helpful information. Please don’t use this powerful service to spam the news indexers with unimportant info.

Link to the PRweb coupon code, it only works with this link http://www.prweb.com/go/em0210drmRemail

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Yahoo No Longer Second Most Visited US Website

CVOS — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook has become the second most popular website in the United States, passing Yahoo with 134 million unique visitors. Yahoo has been on an aggressive cost cutting plan, reducing services and features while Facebook continues to innovate, develop and improve their site.

What is most remarkable about Facebook’s dominance is the short time span this has happened in and it’s level of user engagement. The social networking site has nearly 3x the site visitor time as the other major internet properties.

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Facebook is only behind Google and they have a real chance at beating them – Facebook is growing faster.

Back in the late 1990’s Amazon foresaw the growth of social networks and made a large investment in the purchase of PlanetAll.com in 1998. Amazon was correct in realizing “the only address book you’ll ever need” would be a website, however they were about 8 years too early.

Read more about Facebook becoming the #2 most visited website on the internet at Network World and Compete.

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5 Common Search Engine Optimization Scams and How to Avoid Them

CVOS — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:20:31 +0000

Normally I don’t like to be negative or call out any services for bad practices, and try to give other search engine marketing firms the benefit of the doubt. When companies present misinformation and but I will list some warning signs of unsavory businesses.

Performing Search Engine Submissions
Submitting your website to search engines stopped being necessary 10 years ago. Any firm that promises to submit your site to 10,000 search engines is not only being untruthful – they will also be adding you to hundreds of mailing lists which will spam the life out of your inbox.

Guarantees top 10 placement
It is not possible to guarantee a specific listing, these guarantees are for long tail keywords with low traffic that will not generate sales volume.

Automated Process
Search engine optimization is a time consuming manual process. You must perform constant keyword research to identify new traffic trends and continuously update your website. There is no 100% automated system that will effortlessly bring in targeted visitors.

Multiple Search Engines
The only search engines you should expend energy on are listed in descending order: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask

Anonymous Unsolicited Contact
If you receive an email with no contact information promising the world for pennies, just ignore it.

When a company like www.websiteregistrationservices.com sends deceptive unsolicited letters through postal mail that rely on misinformation and fear to sell their services, someone must explain what they are doing and offer consumer protections.

Some ways to know if an offer is legitimate or not:

does not send unsolicited mail
provides real address, phone number and contact information
does not mention ’search engine submission’
does not claim to have a special relationship with any search engine
does not use fear to sell services
does not pit you against your competitors: “our client is Company X and we know you have are in a price war with them. If you signup with us for extra money we will drop Company X as a client.”

websiteregistrationservices.com has 1 backlink from an untrusted source.

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