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This weekend I was perusing some of the more popular SEO sites looking for material to prepare some sort of lesson plan for my new SEO/SEM guy. I thought that since the new guy is a college student, then the best way to train him would be to stick with what he is used to, ie: having him read a lot of boring material and testing him on it. Since I myself am way to busy and important to make both a lesson plan and a quiz, I let Google do the work for me. Looks like the folks at seomoz.org have made an almost perfect seo quiz, and I don’t just say that because I scored a 97%. The questions are a nice mix of basic best practices and more advance stuff thrown in. Anyway, here is my SEO Dark Lord graphic/link bait:

SEO Dark Lord - 97%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Here are some truly tasteless items I came across at the Dollar Tree this weekend.

I think the packaging says it all:

emmm, chocolate faith

And, of course you need edible praying hands to go with your chocolate cross:

I Pray for More Chocolate

I looked all all over for a chocolate Jesus but apparently eating your actual savior would be too tacky.

A few weekends ago I came across this disturbing stock photo in a picture frame at Kirklands:

The resemblance to the real McVeigh is frightening. Hard to believe that this would be the photo that was chosen to be displayed in who knows how many picture frames across the country. Although I have to admit they make a cute couple.

Here is the real deal for comparison:

You should get a free pass if you ass end this guy:

Worst addon ever

Just when I thought that I had seen all of the cool Easter Eggs from Google Street View, those crazy Googlers give us some more blog bait. Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley teamed up with the Google Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side to put on an avant-garde performance for the street view cameras. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to drive through a marching band or a marathon, here you go:

View Larger Map

You can check out some behind the scenes video and pics from the full cast at http://www.streetwithaview.com.

If you are in search marketing or search engine optimization then you know what a wealth of data that Googles Insights for Search can provide. I probably use Insights at least a dozen times a day and this morning I came across the Google Insights Bookmarklet. This is a clever little bit of javascript that works like this; simply copy the bookmark onto your Firefox toolbar and after you have entered a search on Google or Yahoo you simply click the bookmark and it opens up the Insights page with your query already populated.

This keeps me from having to open a new tab and then go to the insights page and copy and paste my query, all of which takes about 4 seconds to complete. Mutliply that by, say, 10 x a day x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year and I have effectively saved myself 167 minutes a year that I can use to find other ways to save time.

Well it was bound to happen eventually. My coworker across the pond, Erik Rasmussen, has an awesome blog that people actually read and comment on and stuff. He had a post today that was especially interesting and though provoking, Agnosticism vs. Atheism. Well, apparently Mr. Rasmussen really pissed off god because later in the day he shut down that sacrilegious abomination.

No, not really. It actually was so engaging that the Digg community voted it up in a matter of hours and basically brought down the server on which his blog resides. Unfortunately that server has a lesser function that involves hosting ecommerce sites or some silly nonsense.

Luckily, we all gathered in a prayer circle and laid hands on the ailing server and revived it through sheer power of faith.

No, not really. Alan saved the day by redirecting the digg traffic to Google’s cache of the page. Thanks Alan!

I have to say, it is a great post demonstrating how agnostics are bunch of pussies that just need to step up and admit that there is no fucking god.

No, not really. He is just trying to explain the difference between believing that god does not exist and not believing that god exists. Yeah, I know it makes my head hurt too.

I think that I am going to start calling myself a pragmatic agnostic or pragnostic. Think on that one and get back to me.

I cannot express in words the frustration I have felt recently while trying to influence the results of Google Base. These feelings reached the boiling point last Friday when I placed a product search for a key term that one of my clients is adamant about ranking highly on. Here is a pic of the results:

As you can see, one site dominates the listings. This occurred sometime Thursday night and as of this Monday the results are still the same. Traditionally Google Base results are fairly spread out amongst competitors provided the proper key term is in the title and description. This is the first instance where I have seen this behavior on a highly competitive term.

Now, why could this be occurring? I can really only think of two reasons:

1) Google Base is temporarily insane and will eventually correct itself.

2) Google Base is undergoing some sort of change and this is simply a side effect.

3) This competitor’s feed has some sort of mojo that no other competitor has.

I think that it may be a combination of all three. Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the initial teaser results on the term do not reflect the same as the first page of product listings:

For many SEO’s and SEM’s the coveted .edu and .gov links are the holy grail of back links. For the most part these links are hard to obtain because these sites are considered authorities and are of course very picky about who they link out to. Just emailing and requesting a link to you blog is probably not going to get you anywhere. You can forget about buying them as well. Other than maybe getting a link on a student blog you are probably out of luck.

So what is an ambitious Search Marketer to do?

Do your research. Look at the edu’s that have linked to your competition and find out why. Depending on your industry, there could be a variety of reasons why a school, professor, or student may link to your competition and if they link to your competition then they likely will be open to linking to your site.

Job Postings. Most every school has a place for job postings somewhere on their site. My attitude is that every business that has employees is always hiring, or at least reviewing resume’s. So, get busy on Google and start searching using a query like inurl:.edu “job postings” and you will see thousands of school job posting pages ripe for the picking. And who knows, maybe you can get a hot intern out of it.

Open Your Wallet. If theres anything that both schools and students love and need, its money. If you or your client belong to a relatively large company, then you can probably afford to contribute something to some department or organization affiliated with a school. Start with a local school and find out what they need. Not only will you likely get a link from the .edu, but you will likely get some additional publicity out of it. If not, you can always crank out your own press releases praising your altruism.

Well, that’s 3 ideas that should be good for some .edu’s to any site that is actually worth linking to. Good hunting!

If you are marketing a retail or e-commerce site then e-coupon sites and forums can be a nice source of qualified traffic. Participation in e-coupon sites can bring customers that are in the late stages of the buying cycle to your site rather than that of your competitors.

To take advantage of the multitude of coupon sites out there, you will need to participate in some sort of affiliate program such as Commission Junction or Share-A-Sale. I won’t go into too much detail about choosing an affiliate program (that will make a later post) but basically you agree to pay affiliates for leads on a per lead basis or as a percentage of online sales. This is done through the insertion of tracking code on your site and the use of cookies in your visitors browsers. You will also pay a small percentage to the actual affiliate program. Keep in mind that affiliate links are not “clean” links so you will not get any PR juice from spreading them around.

Most coupon sites are just great big affiliate networks.Visitors search for coupons or coupon codes, wind up on a coupon site and end up clicking through to your site via the affiliate link. There are also some coupon forums that are SEO friendly and do not require affiliate code to post a link but they may be a little harder to find since they are generally not for profit as the affiliate sites are. I personally love these little forums since they give me a clean link and some incremental traffic to boot.

Depending on your market, coupon marketing may be a considerable amount of traffic. Try searching for your own primary key terms or brand and add the word coupon. You may be surprised how many of your competitors have already beat you to the punch.

Some pics if the insane crew that cut the trees down in my front yard.