Here's why you can't burn witches in Denmark! (Thanks to Trygfonden.dk for the image :-)

Labels: Fireproof Witches

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Stephanie told me about this collection of 11 case studies that cover how companies in different industries tracked the ROI or results in their social media campaigns. Examples include consumer retail, enterprise, rock concerts, automobile, and so on. They measured their campaigns in social media and public relations (PR). The document includes names of tools and how they did this. See Social Media ROI Success Stories at MarketingProfs.com (I am not affiliated with them. We subscribe to their service.) 0 comments

Our book Search Engine Marketing has been published in China by Tsing Hua University Press in Beijing. Tsing Hua, the leading technology university in China, is known as the MIT of China. Many thanks to Maggie Guan (co-author), Stephanie Cota (co-author), Emily Huang (proof reader), Roslyn Layton (co-author of the KPI chapter), Lili Knobloch (coordinator), and Bob Platkin, plus many more. We also thank the team at Tsing Hua University Press and McGraw-Hill China.

Last Friday, we also reached agreement with a publisher in Taiwan.

The China book has been completely updated and revised. We teach SEO, PPC, and analytics in a 3-day in-person course for Search Marketing Professionals. 0 comments

Dear Web Guy, What do you think of WebSiteGrader.com? It tells me my SEO score. Does that really work? -- Perplexed in Peoria.

Dear Peoria,

In the beginning, SEO was a technical process: put keywords in the meta-tags, sprinkle keywords around the page, get lots of links: bingo, you showed up in Google. Basically, it fooled Google's algorithm. But search engines finally realized users don't want to see the page with the best SEO; users want to see the page with best answer to their query.

This means it's no longer sufficient to get a high rank by using links, meta-tags, keywords, etc. It's entirely possible for a page with zero keywords (no keywords in the meta-tags, the HTML, or the URL) and zero backlinks to rank #1 over pages with lots of keywords and high pagerank scores. (Yes, we know examples of this for highly-contested, highly-visible topics, and yes, we'll tell you how if you sign up for our SEO/PPC course or hire us :-)

As we wrote in our book, Google uses 10,000 humans to evaluate web pages. They look at the user's intent in the query. The Quality Raters choose what goes to the top of the search results page. They down-rank sites that are not relevant.

This means WebsiteGrader.com and similar tools give webmasters a false sense of success ("hey, I have 98 points!") that has nothing to do with how search engines actually rank pages. Ignore WebsiteGrader.com. Write better pages. 0 comments

Here's a Word Cloud of my blog. Use Wordle.net to create word clouds of a blog, yours or someone else. 0 comments

I found out about Yahoo Alerts. It sends weather, breaking news, and alerts on any mention of a keyword to your phone via SMS. It's free (in comparison, Google Alerts can't use SMS and it doesn't include news or weather.) Go to beta.alerts.yahoo.com 0 comments