Well I owe ol’ Jaimie Sirovich an apology. He sent me a copy of his book Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP and I told him I would give him a brutally honest review. That was about 4 months ago maybe more. I finally just got around to actually reading the book, and I’m a man of my word, so here is my review 4 months late.

I was actually quite surprised by SEO with PHP by Jaime Sirovich and Christian Darie because I was expecting another boring SEO manual. “Make sure you put keywords in your title, yada, yada, yada,” with a touch of php - ?php include(header.php)?. Note to self: never doubt Jaimie again. This book is a php toolbox for not only SEO, but for good practice web development in general. I particularly enjoyed the section about URL rewriting for search engines. Apache’s mod_rewrite module can be a beast to deal with. SEO + PHP dissects mod_rewrite with precision leaving the reader with the code needed to set up URL rewriting the proper way with ease. A method that has really helped the development of x ray technician schools site

The other section I enjoyed was the Blackhat SEO section. I’ve had a hard time finding any good how-to Blackhat SEO information on the internet. The authors effectively break down some heavy-duty cloaking scripts for anybody who may be interested in trying to trick the GoogleBot for good or evil.

This book is not entirely dry and excruciating to work your way through like most of the O’Reilly books I’ve read. Sirovich and Darie made it about as easy to comprehend and interesting as computer books get. I realize thats not saying a lot though.

This book really closes the gap for readers like myself who are already SEOs and know a little PHP. If you are a PHP n00b you may want to learn some basics first so you can follow the supplied scripts a little easier. The same goes for SEO. Although there is an SEO primer in the book, you may want to digest some basics first. For the moderate to advanced user this book should make a fine addition to your web development library.

Time to reveal the secret weapon in my arsenal - ebizzsol. I finally found these guys after working with at least 20 different web designers / programmers on Elance. They are hands down the best bang for the buck when it comes to developing websites. I’ve used them on about 10 projects now including the design of ConvertUp.

Bapin Zaman, the owner, makes the whole operation run smoothly. He is always available by email and always willing to help. If for some reason Bapin isn’t available Tanjim, and Nazmul usually are to handle any issues that come up. His customer first approach is the reason I keep coming back. Not to mention he sends all his designers to web design colleges. Sometimes the design work takes a lot of back and forth between Bapin and myself, but I’m always very impressed with the finished product.

Bapin is always sharing ideas on design and functionality and I have come to trust his opinion as much as my own. Although I almost hate pointing new clients their way because I don’t want to lose him, you really should try them out for yourself.

As long as I’ve been pay-per-clicking I’ve never been able to turn a profit advertising on Google Adwords content network. My search ads have a great ROI, and the content ads produce triple the revenue of the search ads but the expense is more than the revenue. I’m pretty sure this is the result of “push advertising” concept that is the Google content network. The network brings in tire kickers rather than buyers.

So I called in the big guns to help me figure out the problem. George (Werty) Kepnick, the pay per click prodigy, gave me this advice:

Well Google now allows you to have both a content and search prices. I
would suggest tracking the content vs search network and measure the
ROI on either. just start low on the content side and work your way
up.

Throw this in your add url:

{ifsearch:googlesearch-}{ifcontent:googlecontent-}{keyword} (more info)

It will tag your url as googlecontent-key_word which should then allow
you to track things based on that.

Hopefully, I can get this Contextual PPC going because I know I’m leaving a fortune on the table. Anybody else have any good tips?

Update: Werty also informed me, “It would make more sense to run [the campaign] at a loss probably and work your way down to the ’sweet spot’. If you go the other way you may never reach the ’sweet spot’ due to lack of exposure.”

Here I am at 24 years old laboring over what I want to be when I grow up , and two months away from moving to Houston to do I’m not exactly sure. I know I love internet marketing and web development on the whole, but what is it, exactly, that I want to achieve? (Do I want to run a blog or leave it to collect dust?) I’ve been trying to come up with some “life goals” for a while now, goals meaningful to me. I think sometimes we’re led into making others goals our goals, like being rich and/ or famous. Many people say their goal is to be a millionaire because they think being a millionaire is synonymous with success. Generally thats what we’re raised to believe I think. But is being a millionaire really your idea of success?

I stumbled upon this article last night in Men’s Health magazine and I had a revelation of sorts. I’m having trouble deciding what I want to do with my life because in my mind I haven’t defined what it means to be successful. Before any goal setting can occur I need to decide what success actually is. From there I can set goals to reach that success. Success can be a simple as eating steak every night to having a loving wife and family to being a millionaire.

So lying awake in bed for a few hours I came up with my definition of success. If you’re having trouble figuring out what you want do with your life, ask yourself what success is, then commit the answer to writing.

Success is:

• Good Health. Physically, mentally, spiritually.
• Being the best I can be at whatever I do in life. (Insider’s tip: Compare yourself to yourself only. Comparing to other people is a recipe for disaster. E.g. “To be a better at whatever I do than anybody else.”)
• Contributing something of value. Accomplishing something every day.
• Helping people. If you can’t help others what good are you?
• Success is owning as much real estate as I possibly can.
• Not ever having to worry about money. One of the most stressful things in life is worring about money. I don’t want to do it. If I do the previously listed things, I shouldn’t have to worry about money. — I also think having a private jet would be pretty cool, to me that means you’ve really made the big time
Bookmark This Post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Here is a video Pankaj sent me of Andy dancing at the SEO Meet in Delhi, India. It’s a little choppy but you get the idea.

UPDATE: Also make sure you notice Rich McIver dancing as well. His dancing skills may, in fact, be more hilarious than Andy’s.

UPDATE 2: Apparently, this is the original source.

Well now that people on the social media sites are starting to catch on / have caught on to link baiting, I’ve noticed it’s much harder to make the likes of the digg or reddit front pages. One to two months ago this was a much easier task. I’m not exactly sure if there has been one incident or algorithm change that caused the increased difficulty of making digg’s front page, but I do know that the window on link baiting is quickly closing.

I think part of the reason of the increased link bait promotion difficulty is people have caught on to the sensational titles that were the critical component of a successful link bait. Its becoming more and more rare to see an “ultimate guide”, or “12 tips you never knew”, on the much sought after front pages of the big time social sites. I think as a general rule these are great copy writing techniques that really spark the readers’ interest, but with the communities link bait radars now on high alert these are now a sure-fire way to get your story buried.

The next logical question becomes “So how do I make my story stand out without a sensational title?” Quite honestly, I’m not exactly sure. I think comes down to several things:

• High quality domain name. People are now giving an extra look at the domain the story appears on. If you happen to own freedebtconsolidation.info I think you maybe in real trouble.
• High quality site design. Kill anything that can be construed as ’spammy’: ads or misaligned text and images, or just a crappy all around design.
• High quality content. Its more important now than ever to create actual valuable content. Take your time, and make your writing as perfect as possible.

The long and short of it is: make a quality website … I know, I know, we all hate doing it. I have always defined link bait as creating quality content that adds value and then promoting that content. With the promotion vehicles wising up, the quality content part becomes all the more important, or, maybe you just have to just get used to a lower successful link bait average. If that ends up being the case, I wouldn’t worry, some other link building method will come along shortly.

One of the things I like about usability is that it touches upon literally every aspect of a web business–it’s as much a
school of thought as it is a discipline. There are many little offshoots of that fact–tiny parts of your business which are partly
governed by usability (which you may often not even realize right away). And before your eyes glaze over, let me remind you that
usability always affects profits.

For instance–is your domain name usable? Things that could make a domain name unusable include:

• Having a domain which is not easy to spell. If your site should ever get featured on radio or TV, you want viewers to be able to easily type it into a browser after hearing it. Otherwise you’re going to lose a percentage of them.
• Having a non-dotcom domain. People have a tough time remembering non-dotcom TLD extensions, period. Again, you’re going to lose a percentage of potential visitors by having a
  non-dotcom.

Remember, these visitors you’re losing aren’t just visitors, they’re potential linkerati.
Anyway I just thought this was important to bring up since so many SEOs and marketers seem to be getting into domaining. Don’t forget about usability!

Why is it so difficult for me to get coverage of the college basketball tournament while I’m at work?

After navigating the mess at cbs.sportsline.com to try to watch the games over the live internet feed, (they make it almost impossible to find the link for to watch the games live.) I’ve come to find out that the video for whatever reason doesn’t even work on my Linux box, not to mention crashed my browser several times. I’ve also heard a friend say he can’t get the video working on Firefox either for Windows. He had to use Internet Explorer. HELLO? I wasn’t even aware people still used Internet Explorer.

So failing this course of action I figured maybe I could get a live scoreboard from somewhere. I figured ESPN would have some kind of live updated scoreboard for the tournament. It took me about 3 years to find the link. Then every time I closed out and tried to find it again, I could never remember how I accessed it the first time. I’ve hated ESPN’s website for years, but this really annoys me.

I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the two links in question with a red outline in the screen shots. You still may not be able to see them. I realize there is a lot of news to display along with video and audio on these two sites, but come on guys can’t we do any better than this? How we me make a special section just for March Madness?

With just a shade under 50 submissions for the first round of the Usability Makeover Series, I had a hard time with the selection process. I ended up selecting Twiddy Outer Banks Rentals because I could tell they had already put a lot of effort into establishing user trust and usability. I think with a few tweaks the site could go from medium usable to extremely usable.

What I Like

First let me point out a few things that I really like about the site (circled in green).

1. Phone number front and center for easy access.
2. Along with the phone number, the BBB logo, testimonials, and the tagline “Family owned and operated since 1978″ add greatly to user trust. It seems like there are real people behind this site, who I could count on to take care of any problems.
3. Multiple navigation paths. The user can find a house by searching by arrival date, or browse by certain criteria.

Problems

Home Page

The biggest problem I see is a site design issue. I think the homepage is too cluttered. There seems to be several areas that distract my eye instead of my eye focusing on one or two main goals. I really dislike 3 column designs for e-comm purposes, because usually you need the extra room to display pictures. I think we can eliminate some visual distractions by blowing away the right hand column and incorporating all the navigation into the left column.

There is also too much text here for a home page. I think one introductory paragraph is good. Then if the users desire more information, they can click on a link to get there. Generally not many people read all the text on the homepage. They tend to just use it as a navigation starting point.

I had my design expert friend mock-up the page really quickly so we could see what it would like without the right-hand column. (As you can see from the previous two pictures I’m not too good with Photoshop.) This isn’t exactly how I would lay it out, but this gives an idea of what it would like with a two column design and less text on the homepage.

In my opinion this design is much more clean and usable. It takes away a lot of the “distraction” from the page.

The next main thing I would do is figure out how to incorporate the “Quick Search” and “Browse Homes” sidebar navigation items into one. I have a feeling the “Search” function is probably a proprietary software piece, but I think we could still integrate those two things somehow… maybe just by pasting the “Quick Search” box to the bottom of the “Browse” box.

Another minor issue I see is the “Quick Find”. As a visitor, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this. I guess it seems confusing because we have “Quick Search” and “Quick Find”. Maybe they could move it or get rid of it all together depending on how many visitors use it. If they decide to keep it they should expand the search area wider. It seems to be only a few characters long right now, not very inviting for typing anything in there.

Another thing that sticks out at me is the text on the first two tabs at the top of the page, “Vacation Rental Search” and “Browse Homes”. You should always try to shoot for consistency across the entire site. I think here we should say “Search Vacation Homes” and “Browse Vacation Homes” to help make that language more consistent.

Product Page

The one thing I dislike about the individual pages for each house is the fact that there is no price “above the fold”. I realize the rates vary by week, but we should find some way to put a price in there. Either the average price or a price chart for the next 3 weeks, or whatever. My concern is that someone who comes in from Google directly to this page sees only this with out scrolling down:

The first thing I look for when considering purchasing / renting anything is price. I do understand, however, that a vacation rental house isn’t really an impulse buy, but if I’m power surfing for weekly rental houses, before I even look at the picture the first thing I want to know is whether or not its within my budget.

I see two links in there, “Rates” and “Amenities”, that take you farther down the page. According to Jakob Nielson these can have an inverse usability effect. Twiddy may want to consider rethinking that or taking that out all together and just letting the user scroll down.

Another thing I would like to see here is maybe 5 line chart just below the main picture of “vital statistics”. Price, square footage, number of beds, number of bedrooms, and distance from the beach, or something of that nature would be great. Remember people don’t like to read. Give them something that they can scan to see if the house is right for them, then they can read the details and the full amenities chart.

Conclusion

I could go on for at least 10 to 20 pages, but I don’t want to bore anybody. As you can see, there isn’t really anything revolutionary here. Most of usability is picking apart the smallest details that when aggregated account for a lot of loss in conversion rate. Will fixing the things I’ve mentioned in this article make their sales go through the roof? Probably not, in fact I may have totally missed the mark, but the bigger idea here is that usability isn’t a destination it’s a journey. If you’re not consistently moving ahead on your site testing new layouts, new placements, new buttons, different price charts, adding new features, and figuring out how to try to stay ahead of the competition then you’re basically moving backwards.

If anyone else has any constructive criticism for Twiddy I’d love to hear it in the comments!

I did a `site:www.convertup.com` in Google only to find that 2 copies of all my pages were being indexed. One without a trailing slash which was going into Google’s supplemental index, and one URL with a trailing slash.

You can see the one in the supplemental index hasn’t been crawled in a while because it still has my old title structure.

Luckily someone makes this handy-dandy Wordpress Plugin called Permalink Redirector . It redirects all calls to pages without a slash on the end to the page with the slash. I could have just edited my .htaccess file to do this, but I’ve found out the hard way not to try to “hack” anything if somebody has already done the work for you.

The next time Google goes to crawl the page without the trailing slash, it will be redirected to the one with the trailing slash, and I should see these pages drop from the index since technically they no longer exist.

I’m not sure if this is a new Wordpress 2.1 problem or if previous versions suffered from this problem as well, but you Wordpress users may want to check your sites. Both pages in the index may cause duplicate content issues and lower your ranking, or your PageRank could leak across to the false duplicate pages. Maybe not though, but better just to fix it anyways.