Archives – April, 2010
In my ongoing attempt to use and review as many SEO tools as possible, I have come across another, Optify. Optify.net is a lead gen tool, scalable and easy to use!
I began working with Optify back in January of this year. I immediately liked the user interface. As far as I’m concerned if it doesn’t have an easy to use, and easy to navigate UI – I’m done (if your a regular reader you might know this from my previous experience with a tool I did not especially find as appealing).
There are lead gen reports I can pull for both paid and natural search. Not only does this tell me how many leads (in my case a lead is generally a request for either a sales rep to call or request a demo), but it tells us who these contacts are, what their business is and what form they filled out!
You do get all the other SEO-like bells and whistles like where does my keyword rank and what page is it mapped to, but in addition to this, you get real competitive analysis as well. You can include up to 5 competitors, some tools only allow for 1-2 and charge more to add more.
They will be at SMX Advanced in Seattle in June! No I do not get paid in any way to comment on Optify, it works and makes my job a lot easier. It does what it says and actually is able to show true ROI for SEO – which, as SEOs is what we all are looking for.
April 24, 2010
I read SEOroundtable on a daily basis and came across this post that asked if links that deploy a target=” _blank or similar code – opening up a new window pass PR or not and if so, does this diminish Page Rank.
At first I thought it was a joke, but people will think of literally anything when it comes to SEO- which is good. The obvious answer is no, it doesn’t have or should not have any negative impact at all. It’s pretty simple your opening up a new window, not sending the visitor to a dead link. A link is a link is a link – makes no matter.
I think most dev teams should force a new window to open up if the link takes the visitor off the site, that way your visitor still has your site in view. This was an interesting question, but as I always say, SEO is pretty logical and consistent – if it doesn’t make sense, it probably isn’t right.
By the way – I really wish we could all forget about PR and in particular sculpting, which Matt Cutts actually said, is such a waste (granted the guy works for Google, but still I think this advice is sound).
April 22, 2010
You may have already heard the latest from Google, but with the new Caffeine update page load speed is now coming to reality.
Here are some great proven ways to reduce your page load time (Most I got from attending the SMX West Conference in Santa Clara!)
1. Go to Google’s code articles area for some real helpful insight.
2. Speed increases conversions! Time on site and page views do reduce bounce rat! Actually Google presented this case study, but if you think of your own behavior, do you hang on a site that takes 10 seconds to load? I know I don’t).
3. Server Side Caching is good!
4. GZip compression – seems an obvious choice.
5. Image compression
6. Externalize as much JS and CSS as makes sense.
7. Using CSS Sprites (Amazon does this) csssprites.org/
8. Use of Squid, very inexpensive, and my favorite because it makes the site IP appear as though it’s “in country” and not in middle-of-nowhere-usa.
Should be a regular part of your developer’s build process!
April 13, 2010