Beginners guides and how to judge links – Monday September 14th Roundup

Is it Monday again already? I swear I was writing one of these just last week (astute readers, will note that I wasn’t. We didn’t have a roundup last week thanks to a holiday and absurdly busy schedule on my part). Time flies when you’re having fun. Or when you’re under the gun.

This week we have beginners guides for PPC and local web marketing, tracking zero results in GA, and how to judge the value of a link.

• We start the week with PPC for a change: SEMvironment’s PPC for Beginners. Anyone who knows anything about PPC will find this a little basic (I know nothing and I knew most of it), but if you’re just starting and having trouble, its a great primer to the kind of skills you’re going to need to develop (or hire).
• Do I really have to say anything about this? It’s SEOMoz (and Rand Fishkin specifically) talking about the 17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link.
• Lots of beginners guides today eh? Well, if you can call anything from Huomah beginner… A small business guide local web marketing. How beginner is this? Here is an excerpt:“Image geocoding has a lot of implications that can, and will, have a place in Local. Team that up with labeling systems and image content analysis, (OCR) and you have the potential for images to be more powerful than you can fathom.”

  Ok, it’s not “Philosophy of Mathematics” difficult to understand, but does assume you have some knowledge of SEO and the web.

• Want to have a sweet automated process to keep your Facebook page and your blog working together, just like ours? Then don’t read Smashings guide to integrate facebook with WordPress. Our blog is based on BlogCFC, so we use a different integration process, but this one looks more full featured.

• A guide on one of the subjects I’ve been wanting to learn more about: Using Google Analytics To Identify High-Performing Keywords. This is some really great and simple advice for anyone doing PPC or SEO. Even Google themselves took notice of this one, posting about it on their analytics blog.
• Next up, Epikone with Tracking Zero Result Searches in Google Analytics. Why would you want to see what people are looking up and not finding on your site? Do I really need to answer that? Go read the article.

• Another “size matters” joke, *sigh*, still it asks a good question: is a larger button is more likely to get noticed, or are designers merely compensating for their insufficient page design. Darnit Linda, now you have me doing it.
• For all you web optimizer obsessed UX guys (and I know there’s lots of you) Google has announced a new website optimizer feature: Experiment Notes.

• You’ve likely read this already (perhaps in your email) but Twitter has changed its terms of service, specifically stating that your tweets belong to you, though they retain the right to copy, post, and transmit the data (because that’s what Twitter does, duh!). Major major MAJOR kudos go to Twitter for their amazing TOS page, complete with laymanspeak explanations.All in all good PR in an age that’s becoming more and more concerned with user content rights and privacy.
• Sixrevisions has a great time line of search engine designs from 1998 to the present. Highly entertaining, especially when you notice that Google has had one redesign in 10 years (while they were leaving beta).