Updates to blog scheduling this week. Tuesday will remain Email/Copywriting/Etc., Wednesday is now home to our new SEO Mistakes section, Thursday Remains Usability (and some times Copywriting when Michael wants to), and Friday is now Brian Katz Advanced Analytics.
Great stuff this week, a great one from Avinash on Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, Content restrictions in Canada, alternates to nofollow now that nofollow doesnt work, and more.
Internet Marketing and SEO
- As always we start with internet marketing—SEO this week: Huo Mah’s four alternatives to page sculpting. I don’t know how needed these actually are (we haven’t gotten a whole lot out of page sculpting in the last while) but its nice to see the community finding ways to hack at Google changes.
- More on the search engines: SEOMoz on how news of Michael Jackson’s death traveled across the web. What SEOMoz illustrates is how Google’s indexed search falls behind the “real-time web” when it comes to real time events: falling over 3h behind the breaking of a story, and its rampant run on Twitter. Thing is, I am not sure that I think this is a problem. Twitter is a gossip engine, it’s about passing short snippets of information (too little to express any actual knowledge) to other users. Google is an indexing engine, it’s about indexing lots of content. Complaining about slow indexing of what amounts to the gossip (sorry Jacko) is just silly, that’s not Google’s role, no matter how fast Google brags its indexing is.
- Finally, Adage has realized that your best marketing tool is the humble product review. Amazing, no one else has ever said this before. Especially not us.
Technology
- AnalyticsMarket.com has a pretty neat looking tool to Automatically Tag Outbound Links
. You place it just below your GA code, and it saves you from having to manually tag every link on the page.
Web Analytics
- Lotsa Avinash this week, starting with one of the best stories I’ve read this week—nay, one of the best stories I’ve ever read: Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian & Telling Stories With Data. In this post, Avinash Kaushik takes us through the steps to “telling a story” with numbers, and thus creating memorable data. To do this he tells a story about looking up Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton using Google Ad Planner. He gets audience statistics and some very surprising results.
- Next up two from click equations, again by Avinash but this time with a PPC bent (hence click equations)Avinash Kaushik on Advanced PPC Reporting & ClickEquations Analyst
and Avinash Revisited – Part I (Keywords by Engine)
Web Usability
- UXmatters has a cool piece on reusing the user experience, or rather reusing tried and true components of your designs. Seems an obvious one, but they make some interesting analysis and cases.
- In our comments last week Klaus Rusch left us this article disagreeing with Jakob Nielsen. He argues for what I like to call the Apple model, having password boxes that users can choose to unmask. I agree with this idea wholeheartedly.
Miscellaneous links of the week:
- Lastly, Slashdot has just noticed that Pandora doesn’t work outside the US. It stopped working in Canada years ago. If ever there has been an argument for why copyright in its current form is flawed online, this is it. There is no reason that Pandora and its ilk can not work in Canada, other than that the stakeholders from contracts may get tetchy, and thus just to cover their ass they are cutting out Canada
