Industry News

Just like anyone, I get crappy SEO pitches. My advice to anyone who gets these out of the blue is to ignore them. A good firm isn’t clogging your inbox with supposedly awesome sounding offers. But as a guide to crap you can especially ignore, here’s the latest from my inbox. The Pitch

Gloria C. Williams got in touch with me on June 25th, to say: Hi, my name is Gloria C. Williams and I am an Online Strategist.

I’ve been tracking the success of www.calafia.com while doing some research on...

John Ciancutti explains how Netflix uses data to make product decisions in How We Determine Product Success:

It can be frustrating to be in a product development environment where force of personality or hierarchy determines product outcomes. At Netflix the focus on customer value makes a teachable moment of those times one guesses wrong. My product intuition is vastly better today for the benefit of my mistakes.

It’s a great read on the importance of listening like you’re wrong when...

Over the last 4 years I’ve conducted more than 250 A/B tests focusing on copywriting, and how copy impacts conversions. The main lesson I’ve learned from all this research is that your copy has direct and measurable impact on conversion.

For this article, I’ve picked out 8 very simple case studies for you where minor copy changes resulted in significant conversion lifts. Check them out and get inspiration for low-hanging fruits in your own conversion funnel. 1.) 6.64% increase in downloads...

Clayton Cubitt starts his fascinating article on how photography is changing with a definition of what French photographer (and the father of modern photojournalism) Henri Cartier-Bresson called “The Decisive Moment”:

Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from...

Here I am again, coming to you to tell you that I am seeing higher than normal chatter in the forums about a possible Google search algorithm update..

Google was granted an updated version of a patent this week that looks at how the search engine might use directories in URL structures to help it better understand the categories on a Web site, and to categorize new pages and directories that might be added to a site. The patent tells us that this [...]

The post How Google May Classify Pages Using Hierarchical Categories in URLs appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Ethan Zuckerman in Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World:

Because Reddit connects strangers, it has certain advantages over Facebook, which connects friends. Ideas may spread more widely from Reddit than from Facebook despite a smaller pool of users. An idea shared between Facebook friends may peter out quickly as social networks reach saturation: an idea spread through friends who went to the same college may lose momentum when all alumni have heard about it....