Jake was a quick-witted entrepreneur oozing with creativity.

He made decent money working for others at the agency that employed him. Somewhere along the way, Jake decided that he should come up with his own product.

So he did. Jake spent all his free time for the better part of a summer in quiet isolation. While he kept up his day job, as soon as the clock struck 5:00 everyday, the fire in Jake’s seat at his desk burned him right out the door to his hatchback…

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…

Back in November we launched Ad Sitelinks to help you get even better results from your top performing ads. Since then, we’ve seen advertisers experience huge gains with Ad Sitelinks, boosting their clickthrough rates on average by more than 30%. Today, we’re introducing a new one-line format that allows you to get the benefits of Ad Sitelinks for even more of your campaigns, including your more generic, unbranded campaigns…

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington, and his wife, an architect and photographer, at Johwey!

As the solo in-house SEO for Fatwallet, it is important that I keep up with the constant changes of the industry. My two staple conferences have been SESNY and Pubcon Vegas. Last spring I was toying with the idea of attending Pubcon South instead of SES when Danny Sullivan told me to skip both and go to SMX Advanced…

Marcus just posted the trailer to SEOktoberfest 2010, and it’s going to be another awesome edition of this epic conference / party / network event. I wasn’t there last year (my daughter was about to be born, seems a valid excuse) but I’ll definitely be there this year! Check out the trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ve seen it scroll by if you checked out the video, but here’s the speaker line up, and do realize when you look at it that more speakers will be announced later on:

1. Marcus Tandler
2. SEO Blackhat
3. Bob Rains
4. Johannes “Sistrix” Beus
5. Dave Naylor
6. Greg & Barbara Boser
7. rSnake
8. Frank Watson
9. Brent Csutoras
10. Avi Wilensky
11. me, myself and I

There will be 16 experts total, and only 18 attendees…

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…

Anyone who has been an SEO consultant knows that SEO is often bolted-on as an after-thought.

Which is, of course, the worst way of doing SEO.

Part of the problem is that SEO is often thought of, by clients, as a fix. It is a fix applied to solve the unforeseen problem of not showing up in search engine result pages.

Whilst some businesses get it, we know most never will…

It’s bad enough having to compete with Google’s engineers.

But to win the search game, you need to out-compete your competition, too!

Back in the dark, distant past – around the turn of the century – there was an “us” vs “them” mentality in search. “Us” being webmasters, and “them” being search engines.

Back then, in those simple times, in-the-know webmasters gathered in dark forums to discuss and share cunning strategies to crack the algorithms…

In 2008, Eric Schmidt let slip that Google would use brands as a signal to clean up the “internet cesspool.

SEOs ears twitched.

Quoted by CNET at the time:

Web crawlers aren’t particularly good at making judgments about the truthiness of digital matter, and the wisdom of the crowd can’t keep up with the river of data streaming online. Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future…

This past week during the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, I presented some correlation data alongside Janet Driscoll-Miller, Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing & Matt Cutts of Google. Matt in particular was quite vocal in expressing a desire to see additional data points from our research, primarily around the prominence/visibility of particular elements in the results. This post is intended to help make that available…

On the "So You Want to Test SEO?" panel at this year’s SMX Advanced Seattle, Branko Rihtman from SEO Scientist presented some spiffy looking ranking charts, measuring positioning by keyword, over time. A few people asked me how exactly you make a chart like that. Being something of an Excel fan, I was instantly inspired to share the approach with my fellow SEOmozzers. Here’s a step by step on how to create a rankings chart using Excel…

Ever wondered how to price your SEO services? Your products? Have you set your prices at a point where you can get the best possible returns?

Pricing seems simple, but there’s a bit of an art to getting it right.

In this article we’ll take a look at different ways to price, a few strategies to use, and why you might want to avoid charging everyone the same price.

Why Pricing Strategy Matters

Obviously, if we get our pricing wrong, we’ll miss out on business…

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…

One of our favorite things about SMX Advanced is that it brings all kinds of cool people to town, and you know what that means: special guest stars on Whiteboard Friday!  This week we’ve got one of our pals from across the pond, Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget, joins Rand to talk about how to get your content indexed faster.

When you’re covering poppin’-fresh, trending, news-worthy content, there’s no time to sit around whittling miniature canoes and waiting for Google to come crawl your site and index your new content…

When we discover something great, our first impulse is to share it. How else do you explain the 66 million times people have watched a baby panda sneeze? Sharing the insights you find in your AdWords reports should be as easy as forwarding a YouTube link, so we’ve recently released new options for segmenting, scheduling, and emailing the data on your Campaigns tab.
By clicking the Download button in the toolbar above your data tables, you’ll open a menu that shows you a number of options for sharing reports with others…

On day one of SMX Advanced Seattle, the contract kimono was officially opened. Yeah, baby! ThirdDoor Media Partner & President, Chris Ewell moderated the first session of the Business Issues Track, which featured speakers Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear, Will Scott, President, Search Influence and Lisa Williams, President, MEDIA forte marketing. The trio of seasoned panelists tackled everything from scope fundamentals to legal and liabilities…

As an AdWords advertiser, you know you’re not alone in the auction — any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as you. You can monitor your performance and use optimization tools to improve your ROI, but you still might not know how you’re performing as compared to similar advertisers. We’re aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab…

I spoke to Loren from Search Engine Journal today and he mentioned a conference he is helping put together in Los Angeles.

The conference is BlueGlass LA.

It’s on July 19/20 in LA. The speaker line up is pretty awesome and takes a business / start up approach on top of the killer search & social media tactics he will be reviewing. Tickets are only $495, and he has put together a 15% discount for SEObook readers/members…

Fiction: Google doesn’t support Electronic Funds Transfer in my country because they don’t like me!Fact: There are many factors we have to consider when launching EFT in new countries. In the meantime, please know that we’re always working towards expanding our payment options for publishers in all regions. Where we can provide in-country EFT depends on a number of factors. Whenever we launch Electronic Funds Transfer, our fastest payment method, in a new country, we hear a number of requests to launch it in even more countries…

Earlier this year, Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media asked me if SEOmoz could put together some data comparing ranking elements of Google against those of Bing to help illustrate the potential biases SEOs might face when optimizing for the two engines. Today at SMX Advanced in Seattle, I presented the following data, compiled by our own Ben Hendrickson with help from the entire SEOmoz engineering team (particularly Phil & Chas on the Linkscape side)…

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…

BlueGlass LA, on July 19th & 20th, will be kicking off the new premier BlueGlass conference series by the teams of Search Engine Journal, Search & Social and 10e20.

Moderated by Chris Winflield, Dave Snyder, Jordan Kasteler, Brent Csutoras & myself … the speaker line up will be amazing, as well as the amazing location in West LA!

• Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger
• Vanessa Fox from NinebyBlue
• Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz
• Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and QuickSprout
• Tony Adam from MySpace
• Marshall Simmonds from The New York Times
• Greg Boser of 3Dog Media
• Dave McClure from FF Angel
• …

As part of our ongoing effort to improve our advertising program, we’re testing an updated AdWords billing interface that’s designed to make the payment process easier and more flexible.We’ve just started the testing process with a small group of U.S. advertisers, and we’re inviting eligible advertisers to participate so we can incorporate your feedback into the changes we’re working on. Although your billing method and form of payment won’t change, you’ll have access to some snazzy new features…

Fiction: Targetable placements are difficult to set up and don’t do anything for my siteFact: It only takes seconds to convert your custom channels into targetable placements. This simple change can help increase your visibility to advertisers, and boost your revenue.Advertisers already take advantage of contextual targeting to have their ads appear next to your content. They also have the option to selectively target sites they know are relevant to their ads — when you’ve created targetable placements, advertisers can dig even deeper and find the most relevant sections of your site to place their ads…

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…

Yesterday someone emailed me this quote

“People that pay for things never complain. It’s the guy you give something to that you can’t please.” ~Will Rogers

and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage.

But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value…

Last week, we opened sign-ups for Google Wave to everyone as part of Google Labs and made it available for all Google Apps domains. Here is the quick (seven minute) update on the state of the product from this year’s Google IO conference:Today, it’s been a full year since the Wave team first got on stage at the Moscone Center and demoed a new vision for communication and collaboration to a crowd of developers…

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory…

Today, we’re introducing several new features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other Google advertising solutions. These features help streamline the process of planning and building online ad campaigns and give you useful data for making more informed media planning decisions.
Ad Planner Top 1,000 Most Visited SitesOne of these new key releases is the Ad Planner 1000 list, a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner…

Over the past year, we’ve focused on building new solutions on the Google Content Network for campaigns focused on branding. Last year we introduced frequency capping to help you manage how often your Content Network campaigns reach the right people. We then launched an “above the fold” filter to allow you to show ads only in places that appear on potential customers’ screens when the page loads…