Winter is certainly on it’s way and we have some great reading to keep you warm this week. So get a cup of coffee, grab your tablet, sit next to the fireplace and start reading about our SEO Insights. And by the way, speaking of tablets, we internally still have lots of discussions about which one to use. Marcus loves his new Surface, while i stay happily with my iPad. But that’s another story..
On with this week’s news and views…
- Larry Kim looked at what data you can get when you spend a billion Dollars in AdWords. He is in the end putting it into “5 Killer SEO Insights” (plus a bonus) and talked about lowering click prices, and raising amounts of clicks. Very interesting reading.
- Smaller numbers, but still very interesting, is the story of Uri Bar-Joseph at Search Engine Watch; “How a Preview Image Increased a Landing Page’s Conversion Rate by 359 %. What I liked most was: the structured approach with a strong thesis, test and measuring results. Just looking at these 3 steps, there’s a ton to learn from. And who doesn’t want to raise conversions by more than 300%..
- There’s also the video from Matt Cutts, explaining that the quality raters do not have direct influence on the penalty or the ranking of website. They are just testing the algorithm much like an AB test. And surprise, surprise: after the leaks in the last years, Matt Cutts now wants to make the quality guidelines public. They don’t want to be evil and they want to open themselves more. Apparently this is making them somehow less credible. I liked them more with all their secrets..
- Dejan SEO was doing some testing on SERP hijacking it seems. For many years Google has had a some serious issues as far as getting attribution right is concerned. They even had an algo update in January of 2011 towards this end. From the looks of this testing, they’re still having some issues. Certainly worth a read.
- Our own Terry Van Horne talks Universal. If there’s one area that doesn’t seem to get enough attention, it’s targeting the Google Universal elements in SEOs content programs. Terry wrote a post here on the blog this week that looks at just that, and how you can use Searchmetrics to make that happen.
- Another one of our peeps, David Harry, looked at tracking for bad times. It is often too late when SEOs realize what they should be tracking as far as potential algo and penalty problems. Of course much of the advice he gives, can be accomplished with the Searchmetrics Suite of tools. Read this one before it’s too late.
Next on the conference schedule for Searchmetrics:
- 6.11. NOAH Conference London (Marcus is already there)
- 8.11. Race Conference Moskau (Marcus and Matthias taking off to Moskau on thursday)
- 23.11. SEOKomm Salzburg (Marcus and Kathrin as speaker)
And now, some entertainment:
Interesting, that on november 13th Google music is finally also coming to Germany. We’re looking forward to checking it out and then see if this can replace my current iTunes Match subscription, which is now running out in a few weeks.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s SEO news, still looking forward to get some feedback from you and now getting ready to take off to Moskau tomorrow to speak at the Race Affliliate Conference there. I can’t wait to meet some Russian SEOs! I already met someone in New York at the SMX, she is running russias biggest SEO Blog, her name really is Lada Kalashnikova. Funny, isnt it?