Shoemoney Sports Our T-Shirt

After a few beers and bouncing funny t-shirt ideas of each other we came up with what we thought was a pretty funny one and sent it off to Shoe hoping he would feature Newport SEO on his free shirt Friday post. Well the time has finally come for us to be featured. Hop on over to Shoe's blog and check out our shirt. Let me know what you guys think of it.

R.I.P. UFC Champ Evan Tanner

Ok this one hits too close to home. UFC Champ Evan Tanner lives two houses down from me here in Oceanside. I hear on Sat 9/6 that Evan called my neighbor and said he was out of water in the desert and was walking back to his camp and was about 5 miles away... If he didn't call again by tomorrow to call the police... The police searched and found his bike and camp on Sat but no Evan. A couple of days pass and we figure the worst happened which was finally confirmed.

R.I.P EVAN TANNER


Normal Evan from Fish TAXI

Rap Song Explains The LHC

What better way to explain the LHC than to have some scientists bust a rap...

Black Holes on Sept 10th

For those that read my last post about the scientists that are making a blackhole on earth and our internet crazy fast... The countdown is on... September 10, 2008.

I pinged Stephanie Majewski a 27 year old scientist from the US who is moving to CERN this week. I asked her to launch a Twitter account to keep the world updated on the launch. I will keep you posted if she responds. If she does it would definitely make me break down and open up my own Twitter account ;-)





Photo cred: Stephanie Majewski

Update: Stpehanie said today she would try and set up a Twitter account this weekend prior to the LHC launching to keep everyone updated.

It's Offical: Yahoo! To Use Google's Ad Technology

Google anounced today they signed a non-exclusive agreement with Yahoo!

What this means...

• Consumers will see more relevant ads when they are looking for information and browsing the web. And with interoperability between IM services, users will have easier access to even more of their contacts.
• 
  Publishers currently in the Yahoo! Publisher Network will benefit from Google's advertising technology, potentially increasing the revenue they earn from their sites.
• 
  Advertisers will have new ways to reach their target customers online more efficiently.

Why I'm Glad I Skipped SMX Advanced 2008

• I enjoyed reading the multiple live blogging sessions from SMX Advanced 208. My iGoogle reader kept tabs on what was going while I still took care of business and made money.

• I heard about the presenters not being being able to give their full presentations because of time restraints. Lucky for us and a big THANK YOU to those that posted their presentations online.

• I don't agree with what this guy has to say but he posted his SMX presentation prior to his appearance.

• I attended a free webinar (it was excellent) that was exactly the same as a presentation that was given at SMX.

• I am tired of hearing about what color hat SMX was wearing. I feel like I have waisted the last few days of my life reading about SMX hat color.
  

• I think everyone would have been happy if there was more focus on the tangible results that make us and our client's money. You know... improving conversions, copy, site sculpting, analytics, landing page optimization, etc.

• I am in no way advising against attending a SMX event. I'm just glad I didn't attend this year because I feel I was at an advantage since I could still conduct business and learn. I learned from the information that was posted and many people had good wrap ups.
  

• I didn't have to leave sunny southern California for the dreary Seattle to learn the best advanced seo techniques.

Worst SEO Report Ever

A company I do some work for has paid $6,000 in SEO fees to receive this report 3 months into a six month contract. This has to be the worst SEO progress report I have ever seen. According to the SEO firm they have not been able to install tracking on their site yet.

Here's the original proposal/contract of work to be performed over the 6 months.

Here are some highlights from the report...

• Presence in forums : lot of (Is that lotof.com or what?)
• From this month, we are adding blog inputting alongwith inputs from customer, specific high traffic oriented subjects are being targeted for additional blogs. (What the fuck does that mean?)
• We focus on three genres of blog dissemination. The accent is not on quantity, but on relevance and quality. The key factors that we saw was :
  a) Page Strength of the anchor text go to page
  b) Relevance of the sites.
  c) Traffic of the sites. For example digg.com and now Sphinn are considered bellwethers in terms of inbound link juice.
  d) Most importantly, how quick SERPs recognize the inbound links.

(Does A thru D = 3?)

• Other Inbound Links
  Off page presence in high profile listings like Craigslist and Local listings are being done regularly (with images) to boost inbound strengths. Google is favoring certain local library classificatory sites since last algorithm change. (really... CL for links?)
  

If you paid with a credit card would you try and get your $6,000 back for breach of contract or just call it a lesson learned?

Faster Internet W/ Black Holes Included - LHC

I was reading an article today on how "The Grid" is going make the internet obsolete. The article was fluff but it got me digging deeper into "The Grid".

Being able to use "The Grid" for access to the internet was just an added benefit from the initial project. They built a machine over 16 miles long called a LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It is a particle accelerator designed to calculate an equation to prove the existence of a particle known as the Higgs Boson. The Higgs boson is a hypothesised particle which, if it exists, would give the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.

What the journalist from FOX forgot to mention is that in creating the LHC they may also be creating a black hole which could devoure the earth.

Listen to the BBC audio report here

Scientists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang created the universe by colliding two beams of protons traveling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light. Now that doesn't sound very safe to me...


There have some delays in launching the LHC due to some accidents, safety concerns, and legal battles but it appears that it will be switched on in a couple of months.

This summer, on the 'Red Button Day', scientists will turn on the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), and also open "The Grid", which can send data online 10,000 times faster than current standards. Movies can be downloaded in 5 seconds, for example. "The Grid", according to experts, will transmit holographic data, revolutionize business, and lead to 'Cloud Computing'- where users store all data online. I think this is just one step below "The Matrix".


Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope our scientists have created something that will actually help humanity instead of destroying it.

Cool Gmail Trick to Fight Spam

Are you afraid of getting spammed when you provide your email address?

Gmail supports "plus-addressing" - just add a plus sign "+" and a word before the "@" sign to create as many new email addresses as you want.

For example, if your email address is "user@gmail.com", mail sent to "user+newsletter@gmail.com" will also reach you.

Later you use Gmail's filters to kill emails to that address if it falls into the wrong hands.

ASK.com Uses Google For PPC Arbitrage

So I am doing some research today for a client's site and I come across an Adwords ad from ASK.com on the first page of Google spot # 8 just below the fold. I wondered why Ask.com would want to show me skin cancer photos when I searched for skin cancer. Maybe it was to get me to use their search engine like it says. I don't use ask.com so I figured I would click and see what they wanted to show me.




To my astonishment they displayed 10 sponsored results from Google with 3 small pictures!

I had to scroll a few times to hit the bottom of the sponsored section.



Is that really what you want me to see when your ad says "Get health questions answered now on ASK.com. Try it!"?

You answer my health questions with sponsored ads from Google, really? I just left that site for you to give me my answers like your ad said. Then you show me the top ads I just saw on the last page, that sounds like PPC arbitrage to me!

I thought maybe this is how all of their images searches are so I go to their home page and run an image search for skin cancer. I do not see any sponsored results until I look through a bunch of pictures. So it is only when you arrive there via Google adwords that you see 10 sponsored Adsense results and only 3 small pics.

Thanks for the great first experience. Now I understand why they are changing their model of trying to be a search engine back to answering questions again. They can just game Google with PPC arbitrage and rake in the loot.

Who is a Failure? Google Says Bush

The official website for President Bush is now #1 on Google for the search who is a failure. Once again our fearless leader seems to be under attack by interweb folks.

Starting around 2005 or so President Bush was ranked #1 one for the term miserable failure. It took until 2007 for Google to fix the problem. The common term used for this is a Google bomb. I am not sure yet if this is a Google bomb or not but Danny has some in depth analysis on his post.

Who's Looking For You? 5 Free Tools To Find Out

5 free seo keyword research tools to find out who, what, when, where, why, and even how your prospects are searching for you. Finding out everything about your ideal prospect is the key for a successful marketing campaign. Everything from writing your copy, designing your marketing piece, offer, and strategy should be based off knowing the 5 W’s about your ideal prospect. For this demo we will use turtles as the search term.

1. Who wants a turtle?

Using this free tool from MSN we find out that 66% of the people looking for turtles are female. The ages of the majority of people looking for turtles are between the ages of 18 - 49. I would have thought pre-pubescent boys would have been looking for that perfect reptile that their mom wouldn't be afraid of but I was wrong.

2. What do they want it for?

Using this free tool from Google we find that people are searching for sea turtles, pet turtles, ninja turtles, turtles for sale, and baby turtles. This should be used to determine what your content should be about.

3. When do they want it?

You can use Google trends to determine when the most people are looking for turtles and that happens to be on Sunday’s. Utilizing this information you can increase your marketing efforts on Sunday, offer a Sunday special maybe buy one get one free or a free month of food, etc.

4. Where are they searching?

Using Google trends once again we find that most people looking for turtles live in Australia, US, and Canada. One idea might be to include a free heat rock for turtles going to Canada.

5. Why/How are they searching?

MSN provides a good tool to determine why someone would be searching for a particular term. They also provide a tool to find out how a searcher arrives at a certain keyword (before & after).

You can use these tools for any industry keyword research and find out who, what, when, where, why, and how your customers are looking for you.

Do you know of any other cool free SEO keyword research tools?

MSN Wants You To Love Them

MSN filters their SERPS like propaganda fliers during a war.

If you run a search on Google for I love msn and I hate msn the big G yields approximately 100% more results for love.

Run the same search on MSN for I love msn and I hate msn it returns 300% more results for love. Hmmm...

Here's the catch on the "live" search...You get recommended to love MSN and to hate school, Christmas, Walmart, people, life and men.
























In my research for this post I found that MSN fan boys like cows. There are fans that hate Google but want MSN to copy them to gain market share. Then of course there is at least one person that bats both ways.

As long as there are people like search master Steve to guide the way, people like SEOHack will have their job of hating MSN made easy.

This post was inspired by the news that MSN is passing around a virus like that girl from down the street that no one wants to touch.

Alter The 2008 Presidential Election with PPC

Every Presidential Candidate should be trying to rank #1 for "who should I vote for?" Not one of them does right now... I know if I was running for president I would be determined to be #1 for that search term and a few others.

Both Yahoo and Google are reporting a huge increase in searches for who should I vote for in the 2008 election (1200+% increase) and presidential candidate quiz (1700+% increase) over the past week.

This is how the folks at the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or Ron Paul camp could sway the 2008 presidential election if they would just spend a few bucks out of their multi-million dollar campaign budget on an optimized Pay Per Click campaign.

Right now it cost less than a pack of chewing gum to rank #1 for "who should I vote for?". Here's a screen shot of a few other phrases that every presidential candidate is missing the boat on.

Yahoo also reported a huge increase in searches for "presidential candidate quiz". I figure these people are trying to figure out who to vote for or which candidate is the right match for them. Why don't the online campaign managers make a candidate quiz to help these people out? Once again less than a dime to be number #1 for "presidential candidate quiz".















Not one presidential candidate is using this technique right now. If they did, IMO they could alter the outcome of the 2008 elections. I think all of the candidates need to revisit their PPC campaigns, that is if they are even running one. If the campaign team can't do a good job on their own they should hire a good SEM or SEO company to help them win the presidential election. What do you think?

JDog's Top Blogs of 2007

I have been reading everyone's Top Blog Lists for 2007 and I feel there are a few blogs that have not received their due rewards. So it's time for JDog's Top Blogs. This list was not judged by other "top bloggers" nor did I take nominations or any crap like that. I have seen how those lists turned out and I do not agree. This is MY list by My categories so if you don't agree I could care less but feel free to express your thoughts in my comments.

Most Read Blog
After running reports in my feedreader SEOHack takes this award hands down. I find myself revisiting his blog time and time again when I need a good laugh. Even though my friends give weird looks when I start rolling with laughter.

#1 Male Chauvinistic Blog
Brian over at Learn2BeaMan is the winner of this award. His insightful responses to letters that readers submit are great. He has alot of letters on there now so hop on over and check them out. I just wish Brian would post more often but I know he is working on his ebook right now so I'll let it slide.

Most Shared Blog
Aaron Wall at SEOBook takes the cake here. His posts are always packed full of useful unique information related to SEO and I usually feel compelled to share what he has to say because he doesn't just regurgitate what I have just read on 50 other seo blogs. Thank you Aaron for sharing your knowledge.

Top SEO Blog
The whole crew over at SEOmoz does a great job everyday. I sometimes feel lost if 3 hours go by and I don't see a new post from them. They are the lifeblood in the seo community as far as I'm concerned. Their premium seo tools are worth every penny.

Top Advanced SEO Blog
This guy knows his stuff and just launched his blog this year Hamlet Batista He wins the award for the best blog that covers advanced SEO. His blog came out of nowhere and was an instant hit in the seo community. I find myself NOT sharing his info with my friends because it is too valuable. Thank you for devulging the wealth of knowledge you have just begun to share with us.

The Best Online Money Making Blog
ShoeMoney.... enough said. (ok maybe I agree with the masses on one thing)

This is the first glimplse into my world. My new year's resolution was to start writing and contributing since I have been a lurker for a year now on over 100 blogs. I finally held true to a new year's resolution, let's see if I can keep on top of it. If I get comments on this post I will be inclined to write more. *hint hint

I leave everyone with a video of who I think should be the next Amercian Idol - Gerry Phillips with his rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.