Industry News

Here are the tools I use regularly to help with my SEO consulting services.

UX deliverables had a rocky year so far. I feel particularly bad for the humble wireframe, which took some serious knocks over the past few months. There’s also a growing skepticism about the value of Personas. The Persona thing made me particularly uneasy because I’ve always been a huge fan, and we still start most of our projects with a workshop to define Personas and User Journeys.

That unease led me to introspection, which is a good thing, because it made me step back and revisit why we...

Despite effectively renewing its search deal with Microsoft recently, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo wants a way to break that deal. Why didn’t Yahoo take the opportunity it just had? I suspect that technically and financially, it couldn’t. Yahoo’s “Get Out Of Microsoft Free” Card

The WSJ story says that Yahoo has been “quietly” trying to find a way out of its deal with Microsoft. There are some very specific reasons why Yahoo could break that ten year deal early. One of...

Nicholas Carr compares two recent Facebook ad campaigns in Home away from Home, and comes to the following conclusion:

What’s really remarkable about “Dinner,” though, is that, in tone and meaning, it’s set in a universe not parallel to that depicted in “The Things That Connect Us” but altogether opposite to it — fiercely opposed to it, in fact. The new ad comes off, disconcertingly, as a sarcastic and dismissive rejoinder to the earlier one: Facebook calling bullshit on itself....

Yahoo is giving Microsoft a further chance to prove that its search ads really can make Yahoo as much money as promised — at a price. Microsoft has agreed to extend “search revenue guarantees” that it has continually paid since the two companies signed a deal in 2009. Yahoo Declares An Extension

Reuters spotted the extension as part of Yahoo’s latest quarterly financial filing: On April 30, 2013, Microsoft extended the RPS Guarantee in the U.S. for an additional 12 months commencing...

There are some very early signs of a possible Google update brewing as of early this morning. A WebmasterWorld thread has some renewed chatter around an update...

When it comes to SEO, I often meet two types of webmasters. The ones that know nothing about how search engines work and the ones that obsess over the smallest SEO concerns. There is often never a balance...

I recently tested four different privacy policies on a sign-up form on the home page of a betting community. The results were quite surprising as the variations had drastically different impact on sign-ups – from an 18.70% drop in sign-ups to an increase of 19.47%.

In this article I’ll show all four variations, run you through the test data, and give you concrete takeaways. Privacy policy experiment 1:

Here’s a screen dump of the BettingExpert.com home page. As you can see, the control...

Now if you search for a local intent query in Google, Google will still likely show results from Google Places/Maps but it will no longer give you the ability to quickly click and see additional results...