SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

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Top SEOmoz Posts, Comments & Users of 2010 Posted: 28 Dec 2010 02:44 PM PST Posted by jennita Earlier this month we gave you the top SEOmoz posts from 2010 based on the total number of thumbs up, traffic, backlinks and tweets. But that wasn't enough, and the community asked for more! You wanted to see the posts with the most comments and the comments with the most thumbs up (as I screwed that list up in the last post). So I decided to even take it one step further and see which community members commented the most in 2010 also. The numbers were gathered on December 21st, so beware that some of them could have changed since then. Now that we have that out of the way, come along with me for a walk down memory lane. Top Posts of 2010 By Total Number of Comments It's interesting to note that this list consists mostly of SEOmoz launch posts (beta web app, Open Site Explorer), controversial posts and YOUmoz promoted posts. One could definitely come to the conclusion that search marketers like to give their opinions when the topic is a bit controversial! I also love to see that 2 of the posts in this category started in YOUmoz. Wahoo! Let's take a look at the posts that got the most comments this year. 1. New SEOmoz Web App Now in Beta for PRO Members August 11th, 2010 - Posted by randfish 2. I'm Getting More Worried about the Effectiveness of Webspam August 17th, 2010 - Posted by randfish 3. Whiteboard Friday - We Bought Links and It Worked!! June 24th, 2010 - Posted by Scott Willoughby 4. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Google's Rankings are Remarkably Well Correlated September 6th, 2010 - Posted by randfish 5. One Giant Leap for Link Data: Announcing Open Site Explorer + Page/Domain Authority Metrics January 20th, 2010 - Posted by randfish 6. SEO Chrome Extension - Comprehensive View of Page and Domain Data February 23rd, 2010 - Posted by neopunisher 7. All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links May 27th, 2010 - Posted by randfish 8. Link Building 101 - The Almost Complete Link Guide September 14th, 2010 - Posted by scott.mclay 9. A Recommendation for Google's Webspam Team December 1st, 2010 - Posted by randfish 10. It's Only A Clique If You're Not In It January 26th, 2010 - Posted by Dr. Pete   Top Comments of 2010 by Thumbs Up Ok so in the last post, we looked at top posts based on the number of thumbs up it received, but what about those comments? Who writes comments so eloquent that people can't wait to thumb it up? Well since 5 out of the 10 comments are from Rand and Jane, I'd say they do. :) 1. randfish | March 3rd, 2010 Using Anchor Links to Make Google Ignore The First Link 2. Jane Copland | January 26th, 2010 It's Only A Clique If You're Not In It 3. audilo | September 10th, 2010 Discussing LDA and SEO - Whiteboard Friday 4. MOGmartin | June 25th, 2010 Whiteboard Friday - We Bought Links and It Worked!! 5. Mike Coughlin | June 25th, 2010 Whiteboard Friday - We Bought Links and It Worked!! 6. gfiorelli1 | September 10th, 2010 Who's Ready to Get Googley? 7. Jane Copland | June 25th, 2010 Whiteboard Friday - We Bought Links and It Worked!! 8. randfish | September 16th, 2010 LDA correlation 0.17 not 0.32 9. Jane Copland | January 12th, 2010 An Update to Our Testing on PageRank Sculpting with Nofollow 10. Ann Smarty | September 16th, 2010 4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark)   Top Users of 2010 By Total Comments Whew! This list of Top Users is based on the total number of comments they've made in 2010. I've removed employees and Associates from this list as we all comment quite a bit, and have added the member's mozPoint total and rank amongst all users. These members need a huge round of applause for the amazing number of comments they've made both on the main blog and in YOUmoz this year! Thank you all for your contributions. :) 1. goodnewscowboy mozPoints: 2057 | Rank: 6 2. gfiorelli1 mozPoints: 2154 | Rank: 5 3. lukejonesme mozPoints 857 | Rank: 22 4. Empowered mozPoints: 367 | Rank: 73 5. seo-himanshu mozPoints: 611 | Rank: 40 6. Tola mozPoints: 328 | Rank: 90 7. The Lost Agency mozPoints: 744 | Rank: 27 8. Mike Feuti mozPoints: 253 | Rank: 125 9. Stephen mozPoints: 499 | Rank: 53 10. chrishorner mozPoints: 155 | Rank: 203 Now we all know that goodnewscowboy and gfiorelli1 comment a lot, but wow over 1,000 comments each? I'd say they win some sort of prize... any ideas? So which were your favorite posts, comments or even members from this last year? Personally I'll never forget when Gillian wrote this excellent post about digging deeper into analytics but sadly when I added the post to Facebook, the title got cut off at a horrible (no, I mean HORRIBLE) spot. Thanks to our friend hoodwebmgmt who saved a screenshot from Facebook and posted it in the comments, you can see my ridiculous mistake. Oh and the screenshot only shows about 1/4 of the total comments on the Facebook thread. :) I do however still break down into tears laughing about this whenever I tell the story. :) Now... your turn! Do you like this post? Yes No

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Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

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Developing Websites, Posts and Niches From the News Posted: 28 Dec 2010 08:25 AM PST When you’re looking for new websites to develop or to expand existing websites into new and profitable niches, the news can be a valuable source for inspiration and research. In this post, I’ll take a look at what to be on the lookout for and how to see if it’s worth developing. Recently I came across an article that talked about the cities with the worst teeth in the United States. According to the article, one of the worst cities is St. Louis, Missouri. We’ll start off with a search for the keyword [dentist] for the state of Missouri using Google insights. Click to Enlarge According to Google Insights, “Memphis” has more volume than “St. Louis”  because Tennessee is so close to Missouri. After drilling down into St. Louis, we get more data, which shows there is indeed volume for dental kwd terms in the area. Click to Enlarge Next we want to check on how commercially viable the term is. To test, we set the location to St. Louis, Missouri and do some some keyword searches looking for adwords ads for [cosmetic dentist]. Click to Enlarge Next, we want to take a look at what the prices are for some of the keywords in adwords … click to enlarge It’s important to note that these prices are country-wide averages; with nationwide search volume, it’s likely that one city will be radically lower in price and volume. Additionally, you will only get a percentage of the bid price, which can vary dramatically based on the quality score of your adsense account. We want to make sure there are additional monetization opportunities besides Adsense, so start looking for Dental-related affiliate programs. There are multiple dental lead gen opportunities such as DentalPlans.com, so there is more than one monetization option (see Adding Revenue Streams Into Your Website or Blog). Now there’s more to deciding to build a new website. In addition to this research, you need to look at competition analysis and local factors, which in this case are huge, but those are topics for another post. The takeaway here is to learn to be on the lookout for these types of stories in the news and be able to see if they are areas worth exploring. Related posts: Google News is Getting the Date Wrong on Old News Stories Last week there was a bit of a brouhaha over... Blog News Reporter: Approaches and the News In part one of this series we talked about the... Use Scribe SEO to Optimize Your WordPress Posts As you know I’m a big fan of the WordPress... 6 Tools & Tips to Help You Improve Your Blog Posts I was having a a few conversations on twitter last... The Affiliate Marketing Newbie’s Guide To Finding Niches When I started out in internet marketing, I browsed around... Advertisers: Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed! Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295 KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price. This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. Developing Websites, Posts and Niches From the News

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Behind-the-Scenes with Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey

Your Daily Snapshot for Wednesday, Dec. 29,  2010   Behind-the-Scenes with Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey Every year around the holidays, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts selects and celebrates individuals who have, through their lifetime achievement in the arts, contributed to enriching and enhancing culture in America.   Watch this video which features behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with this year’s honorees at the White House - Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, Merle Haggard, Bill T. Jones, and Jerry Herman. Watch the video. In Case You Missed It Photos: The Obamas & the Bidens with the Troops on Christmas See photos of the President and First Lady at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kailua and the Vice President along with Dr. Biden at Walter Reed on Christmas. Get Updates Sign Up for the Daily Snapshot  Stay Connected     Facebook Twitter YouTube Flickr iTunes           This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com Manage Subscriptions for e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com Sign Up for Updates from the White House Unsubscribe e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com | Privacy Policy Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

Seth's Blog : Sadly stuck with the status quo

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Sadly stuck with the status quo

JetBlue is ordinarily smart with their web site, which is why their broken system is particularly useful to take a look at. I'm guessing that at some point, management said, "it's good enough," and moved on to more pressing issues. And then, of course, it stays good enough, frozen in time, ignored, and annoying.

The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they're way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it's not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.

Here's an illustrated guide to things to avoid, JetBlue style:

First interaction wasn't so great. If you even bother to build a "please wait" page, be sure it says something useful, or perhaps interesting, as opposed to confusing. Should I press continue?

Throughout the form, JetBlue frequently asks for dates (of birth, say, or issuance). Everywhere else on their site (and in the country they're based) the format for dates is July 10, 1960. But here, just this one time, the format is 10, July 1960. And you can't just type in the date, which is fast, you need to wrestle with pull down menus, menus too dumb to list all twelve months of the year at once, but instead requiring you to scroll if any date is after April...

Alert readers know that pull down menus with more than thirty total choices are a petty annoyance for me, and this one is particularly vexing. There a more than a hundred and fifty countries here, including a few I have never heard of. The United States, home to 90% of JetBlue's customers, is listed near the bottom, but not at it (hint: if you insist on this sort of error in form design, list the popular choices at the top, at the bottom and in alpha... no penalty for multiple listings). (A far better alternative is the auto-completion guessing trick Google now uses in search).

Worse, if you try to type the country (U...n...i) it takes you to... TUNISIA!

Four passengers; 8 times I had to scroll down all the way, then slowly scroll up and then click...

It gets more annoying. For each passenger, I had to choose, "Travel document type". But of course, there's only one travel document permitted, "Passport" which hardly requires a pull down choice I think. Rule of thumb: when in doubt about a question, don't bother asking.

They also wanted to know the nationality of traveler, which is fine, but then two items later, they wanted to know, "Issuing country." While I'm confident that there are a few travelers who have a nationality in one country and an issuing country in another, my guess is that it would be considered a nice gesture if the form remembered your answer from three seconds ago and automatically entered it for you, no?

After painstakingly filling out the form, I was presented with these two buttons at the bottom of the page... hmmmmm.

Doesn't really matter which one I pressed, though, because lady and the tiger style, I got this:

NOOOOOOOO!

And I had to start the entire form over again, from the beginning, with no fields remembered.

I know, I know, this is a rant. But it's a rant with a point:

Fill in your own forms. Make your executives do it. Watch customers do it. See what your competitors are using. Improve the form. Don't use pull down menus for more than 12 choices unless there really is no choice.

"Good enough" is a hard call, but I think we can agree that most online forms, aren't.

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