Around the Web in 20 Links

Loren Baker is holding a 3 day spring break SEO get together in Deerfield Beach, Florida. There are only 200 tickets cheaply priced at $500 each (especially when you consider that there will only be 200 people attending and you have people like Loren Baker, Chris Winfield, Todd Malicoat, Brent Csutoras, Rae Hoffman, and more speaking).

David Harry has been publishing brilliant content, including finding Yahoo!'s patent for automating SEO and a wonderful post on SEO higher learning.

Todd Malicoat highlights some great social media marketing tips.

Conversion Rate Experts shared some tips on why to get obsessed with conversion rate optimization.

Fantomaster highlights how behavioral metrics would create many surfbot nets, and offers an insightful cynical comment about the dangers of trusting data mining outfits:

Conclusion #1: The more they know about you as an individual, the more likely they will be to try and track and, as required, exploit or manipulate you - be it as a consumer, as a citizen i.e. a polity member, as a (perceived) health hazard, as a (perceived) sociopath, as a (perceived) security risk, etc. etc.

Conclusion #2: The better they are able to categorize you (aka slap some generalized "profile" of theirs onto you), the easier it will be for the process to become self-perpetuating and auto-referential: anything you may do or avoid doing (as tracked and monitored by them) will actually only reinforce their hold on you - both as an individual and as a member of whichever societal group or subgroup you may belong to.

SugarRae highlights how you can rank well quickly, without focusing on SEO.

Dazzlin Donna is offering a mini-stimulus jump start plan.

Andrew Goodman and Aaron Goldman highlighted some shortfalls behind bid management software - namely that some of the rules are too concrete, give credit to the wrong spots, and don't provide a huge competitive advantage since there are sooo many services and in house technologies being built that commoditize most of the offerings. Time naturally commoditizes most software, especially in saturated fields. Just look at how Google Analytics ate the analytics market.

Michael VanDeMar shares some tips on how to find images.

And if you are into economics it sure looks ugly. The market casino is rough, debt to GDP is huge (and like bank credit is STILL GROWING). The ending isn't going to be pretty. I am trying to ignore the market and spend more time and effort investing in myself, but the carnage keeps attracting attention! I have lost faith in the US government and US dollar, but ponder where to invest.

What else of interest have I recently missed?

Published: January 15, 2009 by Aaron Wall in internet

Comments

Affanlaghari
January 15, 2009 - 2:44pm

Nice roundup.
The second Huomah link is broken (has line break inside).

And you missed Stuntdubl's wonderful social media marketing post:

http://www.stuntdubl.com/2009/01/12/social-marketing-failure/

January 15, 2009 - 3:20pm

added that link and fixed the broken one :)

CureDream
January 15, 2009 - 3:32pm

Behavioral inputs to ranking would just put the SERPs in the control of the black hats. It would take less network activity to create the desired behavioral inputs than black hats do right now to do what they do -- they need to simulate the amount of network activity on their site that they want to get.

Contrast that to the people who attempt to drop thousands of spam messages on my network of sites each day, who get about 99% of their messages blocked by my spam filter, and get the rest blocked by me.

My experience is that different kinds of sites have very different bounce rates. I've got some blogs, for instance, that do good in social media (with a little help from my 'friends') but get bounce rates around 90%. Heck, I subscribe to ~this~ blog in RSS and usually "bounce" away after reading today's article.

On the other hand, I've got another site which really captivates some people. Just about every day, somebody spends a few hours browsing it. I just wish I could find an advertisement or affiliate offer that they'd find 1/10 as interesting ;-)

The Gypsy
January 15, 2009 - 4:06pm

Hi Aaron, Dave here...

Just wanted to stop in an say thanks (tho one is never comfortable around words like 'brilliant' eek).

Isn't it funny how everyone loses their mind when Google became the defacto owners of an SEO division (which they sold) - but Microsoft has been offering SEO Services for more than a year and Yahoo looking at automation get's no feathers ruffled what so ever. I found that amusing.

Since you mentioned Ralph's post on BM... drop by the Trail as today's post hopes to put a few more nails in that particular coffin.

Well, back to the battle. I just wanted to drop in and say thanks for the interest and kind words(part of my regemin for 09 - more appreciation). You've done some some brilliant work around here yourself (the missus and guest posters as well).

Have a great week... I am sure to 'bounce' into you in my travels soon.

January 15, 2009 - 3:54pm

Hope to see you soon David :)

Add new comment

(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.