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Blind Five Year Old

SEO, SEM, Marketing and Technology sprinkled with Sports, Parenting and Rants

Facebook Questions Forces The QuestionAugust 3

Facebook recently launched their new Q&A product, aptly named Facebook Questions.

The Q&A space is white hot right now, in large part because of the SEO potential of the content. Q&A, if done correctly, creates highly focused long tail content that gets gobbled up by search engines. Look no further than Demand Media’s eHow as an example.

But is that what Facebook has in mind for Questions?

Facebook Questions Not Crawlable

Search Engine Land reported that Facebook Questions could not be crawled by search engines, and that Facebook has no plans to change that policy. The news was surprising, resurfacing the notion of the walled garden and sending mixed signals on Facebook’s strategy.

Facebook Search Powers Questions

In the first few days after launch Facebook search would force users into Questions whenever a search started with the five Ws or one H

SEO Pivot TablesJuly 23

In my last post I covered SEO Excel functions. In this post I’m going to cover something even more valuable to SEO – pivot tables. Excel defines a PivotTable as follows:

A PivotTable report is an interactive table that combines and compares large amounts of data. You can rotate its rows and columns to see different summaries of the source data, and you can display the details for areas of interest.

Use a PivotTable report when you want to analyze related totals, especially when you have a long list of figures to sum and you want to compare several facts about each figure. Because a PivotTable report is interactive, you can change the view of the data to see more details or calculate different summaries, such as counts or averages.

What does a pivot table really do? A pivot table lets you slice and dice a big set of data.

Top Queries Pivot Table

Instead of using dummy data I’m going to show how to generate a pivot table report using the new Google Webmaster Top Queries report. I’ll be using Excel 2008 for Mac which is different (probably more difficult) than the PC version.

Obviously we need to the Search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools.

SEO Excel FunctionsJuly 6

SEO and Excel are like chocolate and peanut butter – great together. Here are 18 Excel functions (and two formulas) that can make SEO just a little bit easier.

SEO Excel Functions

LEN

The LEN function returns the number of characters in a cell. It’s particularly handy in creating the right title and meta descriptions. Remember to keep your titles to ~60 characters and meta descriptions to ~150 characters.

TRIM

Phantom spaces at the beginning or end of a cell can be maddening. So before you go Office Space on your keyboard use the TRIM function which gets rid of any spaces before or after text. It’ll also get rid of any extra spaces between words. Think of TRIM as a vacuum cleaner for spaces.

SUBSTITUTE

This is just what it sounds like. Using the SUBSTITUTE function you can find specific text and substitute it for different text. It doesn’t sound all that interesting but it turns out to be vital in creating useful formulas.

Word Count Formula

There’s no out of the box word count function. But with a little creativity you can create a useful word count formula using the three functions

Facebook 2010 = Google 2003July 3

This isn’t a post about predicting the future of Facebook or taking sides in the Google v. Facebook debate. Instead, this is a warning.

Google 2003

AdWords was launched in October of 2000. In February of 2002 Google switched AdWords to a cost-per-click model. Later that same year the first Google Dance was held. By 2003, smart marketers were figuring out how to get the most out of AdWords.

Search volume continued to climb and the Google algorithm became more complex. Search engine optimization became more important and the landscape was changing … fast.

Facebook 2010

Facebook Ads launched in November of 2007. Today (figuratively, not literally) the platform seems to have hit critical mass. Thus far, most marketers have focused on engagement at the urging of the many socia

Google AJAX Search ResultsJune 28

A few months ago I wrote about how you could track keyword rank in Google Analytics. I said I’d blog about how to create ranking reports based on the new data but as I did due diligence on those reports I found something much more interesting.

AJAX Search Results Performance

There is a profound difference in the performance of Google AJAX search results versus normal search results.

Standard search results drive 13% more traffic per keyword, 38% more keywords per landing page and 56% more traffic per landing page than their AJAX counterparts.

Creating The Search Result Comparison

The Google Analytics rank hack captures a specific rank parameter present on AJAX search results. If that parameter doesn’t exist no rank is reported for that keyword. Upon implementing the GA rank hack you find that Google is serving AJAX results approximately 20% to 25% of the time. This is simply a product of looking at traffic that is reported with a rank compared to the total traffic reported in the profile.

You can also create advanced segments that include or exclude the AJAX sear