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Supporting U.S. student veterans with a new scholarship

feedproxy.google.com-A-Googler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:03:00 +0000

The newest addition to the Google scholarships family is the Google Student Veterans of America (SVA) Scholarship. We’re partnering with the nonprofit Student Veterans of America (SVA) to support their mission of providing veterans with the resources, support and advocacy they need to succeed in higher education and throughout their careers. The Google SVA Scholarship is available to student veterans who are pursuing degrees in computer science and related fields in the U…

SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 6, 2012

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:01:22 +0000

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Managing PPC Through The Fog Of Long Tail Keywords
PPC managers over the years have always struggled with the right number of keywords to have in their accounts. Should you build out a big inventory of long tail keywords, or keep your campaigns neat and tidy, with fewer terms that account for most of the volume? Honestly, I’d say that most accounts I’ve seen, and indeed, many […

Writing ads that attract customers

Katie Wasilenko — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:11:00 +0000

With the theme of Valentine’s Day on our mind, we’re sharing tips on how to spice up your AdWords text ads, courtesy of the AdWords Help Center.Start by taking a moment to consider what you want to do with your ad. Then use the six guidelines below to create an ad that’s accurate, to-the-point, and engaging.

Highlight what makes your business, product, or offer unique
Include prices, promotions, and exclusives
Tell your customers what they can do
Include at least one of your keywords in your ad text
Match your ad to your landing page
Experiment

Here are some examples:Couples Cooking Classwww…

To Everyone’s Surprise Google Says "Sure, Go Ahead" To Swapping +1 Clicks For Content

Ruud Hein — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:49:45 +0000

Yesterday Joe Hall became annoyed. Otherwise soft spoken outspoken Joe had some choice words for an SEO company which had come up with what can be described as a creative way to get +1's:

The site's pages contained an inline popup layover thingie. You know, the page gets dimmed, the inline popup appears and then you have to click somewhere?

No biggie – popups work, after all – but this popup was different…

Watch our video to learn how to integrate AdSense ads with your quality content

feedproxy.google.com-Inside-AdSense-Team — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:10:00 +0000

Placing additional ad units on your site can have a big impact on your earnings. However, sometimes publishers find it difficult to decide whether an additional ad unit makes sense for their site. We’ve created a short video below to help you make sure you’re following best practices, as outlined on Google’s webmaster guidelines, when placing new ad units on your site.

Ultimately, great content is what will help your site stand out and engage your users…

Super Bowl XLVI Winner: Google Freshness & "Who Won The Super Bowl" Searches

Ruud Hein — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:28:24 +0000

Like many of us I watched the 46st Super Bowl yesterday. And backing the right team, if I may say so.

By the way, I backed the New York Giants on the wholly unscientific and almost unreasonable basis that they are from New York " and I like New York (disclaimer: I've never actually been to New York Go figure). A previous choice which team to back was based on the color of their uniforms Hey, I like yellow, OK?

So Who Is The Super Bowl Winner?

And is it super bowl or superbowl? According to US Americans, it's super bowl; the rest of us are either somewhat divided or we lean towards superbowl…

Spammed, Slammed and Shut, Desperate SMB Closes Down his Places Listing

Mike — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:25:57 +0000

For the most part Places spam, in all of its forms, gets dispersed throughout the marketplace. The net affect is deleterious but the brunt rarely falls on the same real bricks and mortar shops time after time. Imagine that you lived in a town and worked in a field that has a single (and apparently compulsive) competitor that is willing to go to any lengths to gain a leg up in Google Places. You don’t just suffer a reported closing, or the rare piece of competitor review spam or the odd spam listing but you and all of your honest competitors suffer repeated abuses at scale…

411 Locals Back in the News

Mike — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:47:22 +0000

411 Locals has been implicated in widespread Places listing sabotage and accused of threatening an SMB. Well they are back in the forums with this recent report of their widespread spam. You can’t keep a good black hat down.

Poster HoskinsRick noted a range of examples of spamming that shared a number of features; keyword laden business names, either superpages or keyword focused domains, Place Page updates that referenced the address or domain name, plenty of fake reviews, royalty free photos and spot-on centroid locations:

Placentia Accident Attorney
Accident Attorney Raleigh
Accident Attorney Hartford
Accident Attorney Irvine
Accident Attorney Oklahoma City
Accident Attorney Oklahoma City
Accident Attorney Indianapolis
Accident Attorney Philadelphia

I can not say with 100% assurance that all of these are from 411 Locals but I called the first 4 or 5 on the list…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 9 – From Ten Blue Links to Blended and Universal Search

Bill Slawski — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:42:52 +0000

In the early days of Google, when you performed a search, the results you received were just links to pages found on the Web, showing page titles, snippets, and URLs. Google started adding other types of searches to its Web search, such as:

July, 2001 – Image Search September, 2002 – News search December, [...]…

Super Bowl XLVI: Mobile, Manning and Madonna

feedproxy.google.com-A-Googler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:35:00 +0000

Now that the final Super Bowl touchdown has been scored, the dip bowl wiped clean and the last of the chicken wings devoured, we’re taking a look at some game-day search trends to see what football fans were searching for this year.

As the Giants and Patriots battled it out on the field yesterday, U.S. viewers multi-tasked, watching the game on television and also going online more than ever before, turning to their smartphones and tablets to look up players, halftime show performers and their favorite Super Bowl commercials…

Products that help you survive office life

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:26:52 +0000

At one of my first jobs, my lunch constantly disappeared from the community refrigerator. There were no clues and, being New York, “nobody saw nuttin!”

I tried marking my lunch. I tried notes pleading with people to not take my lunch. I tried hiding my lunch behind cans, etc. Nothing worked. One day, after my lunch disappeared, I shut the refrigerator door and laughed maniacally. Someone asked me what was so funny…

Use Gravity Forms to submit custom post types

Joost de Valk — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:17:10 +0000

In my previous post I explained how I used the Types plugin to create a new custom post type. That custom post type will be used to display a table of supported themes for my WordPress SEO plugin, and is therefor called wpseo-theme. Now the trick here is that I want users to be able to submit themes through a form.

Gravity Forms + Custom Post Type addon

By default, Gravity Forms allows you to create posts through a form…

6 CAPTCHA Alternatives to Improve Conversion

Linda Bustos — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:03:15 +0000

CAPTCHA is more than a catchy name, it’s an acronym — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But in practical terms, CAPTCHAs are often Consistently Annoying, and Prevent The Conversion from Happening A-Lot.

One study by Stanford University (link opens as PDF) found 3 human users agreed on the “translation” of the CAPTCHA only 71% of the time…

Find Your Site’s Biggest Technical Flaws in 60 Minutes

Dave Sottimano — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:14:53 +0000

I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly.

I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes…

Our favorite tweets of the week Jan 30-Feb 5, 2012

Cameron — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:46:03 +0000

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Focus on The Business Model

seobook.com-Aaron-Wall — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:43:23 +0000

Google’s Take on Search Plus Your World

A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.

While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows…

Comics of the week #115

Walter — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:38:24 +0000

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons…

How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

Dan Peskin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:04:41 +0000

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review…

SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 3, 2012

Matt McGee — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:04:13 +0000

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

5 Common Tracking Problems: How To Troubleshoot & Fix Them
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the tag!” I thought it would be handy for the beginners […

Unicode over 60 percent of the web

feedproxy.google.com-A-Googler — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品…