NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

(usual excuses) I’ve been busy hence my dead looking blog, but I?  have been bookmarking and here is about a months worth of links to things I really value.

Free word of mouth marketing PDF eBook Written by Dave Balter
(Recommended by Seth Godin) I’m a great fan of ‘word of mouth marketing’ – because I believe this is the real driver behind consumers making most of their important buying decisions. Of course ‘WOM’ isnt just asking your friend for advice, its also asking a search engine or looking at a website for information to help make a good decision. Its a good read.

Follwing on from above: The Ontology of Social Media
1st, whats ontology? It is a description of a Subject, Object and the Relationship that exists between the Subject and the Object…. Uh? There is an idea “markets are conversations”, where users confer to make discriminating decisions about something related to commercial intent (buying something). The Ontology of social media, is a way of making some sense of this set of ‘conversations’. Heavy article, but well worth a thorough read.

Facebook to be No1 UK site
My line about facebook is “I think it’s cool, I just don’t know how to make money directly fom it”. But you know, its not he direct monetization, its your engagement with this community and others like it, so when they are ready and trust you, they know where to go.

Google quality score algo (landing pages) added to
Page download time is now a factor on the Google adwords quality score…incidentally I was at SMX advanced recently and the subject of quality score came up. During the ‘give it up’ session, some very interesting stuff came to light about how erroneous the scoring mechanism is. Whilst I’m under a promise not to give the whole story away, I can say that there is some amazing mis-represetaiton going on here by the big G. I’ll add to this in a later post. G’s comments on the landing page score - the big clue ? You can’t really define quality algorithmically…

Google trends for websites
Old news now, but still very important. Why? Well its a means of finding ‘super relevant’ links. Site trends shows you relative traffic volumes over time, where users have been in your site neighbourhood (which is cool) andit shows you sites also visited by that user base. Click on a relevant visited site and it shows you more relevant visited sites and so on. If G. is looking for a relevance indicator, this is going to be a great one! – so happy link hunting!

Google trust rank wierdness (webmaster world)
If you have heard of the idea of profiling, then this is what G is doing with your site. If it sees something out of the ordinary i.e. a super high page rank link or whatever, then it can react and penalise you as your site is behaving outsite of its ‘normal range’ of behaviour. I guess the moral here is not to go out and buy a 7 or 8 page rank link, if you have a crappy site that would never normally receive such links!

Bloging from your iPhone (movable type)
Yes, I do live my iPhone, despite the lack of copy, paste & file saving and the need to crack it to get it to behave a bit more normally. Anyway, I do a lot of wok with movabletype and it seems they have come out with a new app (iPhone 3g) that allow you to picture blog and blog straight from our little friend. Cool. ….WordPress app anyone ?

100 SEO videos
There is bound to be some good stuff. ive linked to this because it is an epic piece of research….

Google adwords and freeing up competition on trademarks
The intersting part about this is not so much the allowing of competitors to advertise on competing brand phrases, its the slow march of Google on the monetization trail. here is another thing about their interest in the travel sector. Please comfort yourself in knowing it THEIR SITE AND THEY CAN DO AS THEY LIKE. If you you are making a profit from Google natural search, then at some point they want some of it….If its PPC, then bad luck as well!

200,000 – yes 200,000 servers to run the google data infrastructure.
if you like your teccie stuff then this will interest you. A long Cnet article about Google’s data infrastructure. I am always amazed by their cleverness.

Google Factory Tour
2 hour video of Google and its various operations. It won’t give you SEO insight per-se, but it gives you a sense of the scale of events there.

Need free images? Article about it
There is a new well organsied search engine, listing free images with no copyright hassles…hooray!

Multiple Gmail account access
This is a hassle for me, since I have loads of accounts i need to drop into to get info. But there are some nice workarounds, however none are 100% solid.

Advanced Yahoo search query strings
A really helpful guide to doing some cleaver link hunting query strings on Yahoo

Deep stuff on how spammers are tracked
Edel Garcia of IR thoughts has put together a useful summary of papers related to spam clean up on search indexes. Hardcore as ever and worth reading through.

Landing Pages: all you ever wanted to know about building them!
Copyblogger has amassed a really usful list of sites and articles to help you refine your landing pages. Bear in mind if it costs $100 dollars per conversion and you for instance go from a conversion rate of 1% to 1.2%, then thats $16 dollars saved per conversion and an extra 20% in the acquisition numbers.