… okay maybe not dirty, but you get the idea

Moderating email discussion lists - be they business-to-business, tech- or consumer-oriented - takes a great deal of skill, patience, and tact. Light touch is the goal with moderating, but it sometimes takes a heavy touch to steer the ship. Balancing that line is the art.

For a long time I’ve had the idea of a moderator’s touchstone, a small, quick reference guide I could refer to when a problem came up in one of the communities we manage. There’s no way to make a guide like this comprehensive. Moderating is an evolving, changing, all-various responsibility. It changes depending on the style of the community, the moderator, the list members and the …

A cornerstone of search engine optimization is the analysis of server log files. Analytical tools are essential, but we need direct access to the raw logs in order to study bot behaviour and spot errors, patterns and potential crawling issues GUI analytics can’t give us.

We use a number of tools to diagnose crawling and indexing patterns. Google’s webmaster console is excellent, but in my experience (especially with large sites) crawling errors are shown as indicators rather than comprehensive reports - good for a heads-up to delve into some deeper analysis. That’s where command line scripts come into the picture. They can parse huge log files for critical information, such as search engine spider behaviour, or error codes like 500s that …

This article will serve as a basic reference sheet for those doing email marketing campaigns. This is primarily aimed at newsletters, but can also be applied to sales messages, transactional emails, or even discussion lists.

There was a time when HTML email wasn’t widely accepted, with pushback for anything not delivered in plain text. That’s not true today. In fact, companies still using only plain text are missing opportunities in engagement and sales that richly formatted HTML email can provide.

I probably don’t need to mention this (but I will). Don’t spam. Spamming is stupid and annoying, and companies engaged in the practice don’t have a clue about doing business online. There’s a gray area of spam too (that I recently found …

This post will explore several arguments against using nofollow for internal PageRank™ sculpting. It is based on a presentation I did at SMX Advanced. You can view my presentation slides here, however the deck is very brief since I only had about 10 minutes to present my position. The bulk of the discussion is treated in this post.

Summary of My Position

Sculpting PageRank™ with nofollow is not going away. Limited use of nofollow is recommended. However, widespread use of the technique is usually a bad idea. I recommend slowing it down.

Nofollow sculpting is a tool to raise search rankings by distributing PageRank™ flow internally. However, PageRank™ is a patented, secret algorithm designed by Google that we can …

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Not a real doctor mind you, but an alternative doctor - I wanted to heal with botanicals and homeopathy, with nutrition and philosophy. I was all about naturopathic medicine (to the great bewilderment of my parents). Once I came to my senses, realizing that 12 years of education wasn’t going to make me any smarter (and would probably put my family in debt forever), I abandoned the idea. Internet marketing is in my blood; it was always going to be my destiny. It just took me awhile to accept that (plus, studying during the day and working for clients at night sucked!).

Fast forward to the present, and I …

Can a lifestyle brand create a total shopping experience within the confines of the web?

This post is written by guest author Alex Hughart. Find out more about Alex in the sidebar.

Tough times for lifestyle, on and off line. Isn’t that what got us in trouble? - the headlines scream - Too much style, too little life! From now on, we’re all going to be lean, mean, green machines… and, we need stuff to prove it!

The end of consumerism is nowhere near in sight. What we are facing is a shift in consumers’ behavior, not the most pleasant one but, still a shift. Different groups will start buying different products, at a different pace, in different quantities (who …

This article will explore the basic concepts of designing optimized site architectures for efficient spidering by search engines. Building an easily spidered site has ramifications in how pages, sections of a site, and entire domains are topically understood and categorized by bots, which influences indexing and rankings.

While search engine optimization concerns are the focus here, there are many different applications of information architecture (IA) that go beyond search engines. IA overlaps with several other disciplines, including navigability, user experience, and interface design. It’s very hard to speak categorically about this subject, because how IA is applied to a site is based largely on business goals, the site infrastructure, user testing, and the whims of the people involved (for real).

At its …

Words matter. Words are images, descriptions, and labels. Words convey meaning and nuance; words are symbols. Words are inextricably tied to culture and society. Words can even become an extension of our personal identities.

Words matter. So why do the words that describe internet marketing suck so bad?

This article explores the reputation problem the search engine optimization industry faces because of shortcomings in the language used to describe it. This is a difficult topic, and probably too theoretical for some. But since my last post on the Fundamentals of Link Building was so practical, I thought I should balance that out.

One footnote: you’ll notice throughout this article, I use a variety of terms interchangeably to describe internet marketing. Yes, I …

The following post was inspired by a presentation I did at Searchfest earlier this month. Since this blog is new, I’ll be posting articles on fundamental marketing concepts that we can use as reference points on the site. This is the first in a series of posts along the theme of Internet Marketing Fundamentals…

The Fundamentals of Building Links

There is a golden rule to link building: links reflect value on the web. Remember that rule, because we’ll come to it later.

Right now, let’s expand that rule with two important definitions:

1. Linking is a communication and citation signal inherent to the web. Links reflect contribution, value, relevance and influence. If you want a scalable solution for building high-quality links, then …

Is there an interchange between search engine optimization (more accurately, internet marketing) and usability? That’s the question veteran SEO Grant Crowell asked Jared Spool, a veteran usability engineer, in a twenty minute phone interview.

Grant Crowell of Grantastic Designs enaged Jared Spool on the topic in late November of 2007, and shared it with the LED Digest this week. The topic at hand was the interchange between search and usability. Grant highlights the major content of the talk in his post to the LED Digest, which is well worth a read.

After listening to the podcast (directly below these comments), here are my thoughts:

Spool doesn’t feel there’s any issue here, in terms of search versus usability. I tend to …

 

 Grant Crowell and Jared Spool on SEO and Usability [18:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download