Image by Victoria Jones
Follow the money and you’ll find that hot trends in design and search engine optimization are tied to our shrinking technology. What’s in your pocket?
For more, check out my latest article on the Geekly Group blog. It’s all about mobile, responsive design, SEO and the long tail
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Research is the smart first step when starting a new SEO campaign or growing an existing SEO effort. I talk with clients to brainstorm a few keyword ideas and then feed those seed keywords into tools to find related keywords. Then, ideally, I look at traffic and competition metrics to identify low hanging fruit of the long tail and other gems in the rough. (Per previous whiny posts,) Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) lost my business a while ago, but SEOmoz (seomoz.org) is just as frustrating.
Every single bit of keyword research I’ve done on SEOmoz returns “unavailable” for these metrics:
…Leaving only one SEOmoz metric, “Keyword Difficulty” which also often returns the dreaded “unavailable” result.
SEOmoz – Close to Useless.
What’s worse, this “Keyword Difficulty” metric is dumbed down so as to hide any real value. While I’m sure the two-digit SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty score (or the nearly identical two-digit “Competition” score from Wordtracker) in some fashion represents IAAT and other competition metrics, I am more than hesitant to base important keyword decisions on these vague scores. While I’m sure their scoring algorithms consider many factors, I’m accustomed to crafting my own meta-metrics. But pretend for a second that we do trust their “scores” – exactly how are we supposed to make intelligent decisions without good traffic data?
More frustrating still is the fact that SEOmoz limits us to five keywords at a time and always takes several minutes to return results. There’s nothing less satisfying that twiddling your thumbs waiting for a screen full of “unavailable”. Oh wait, there is – try paying $99 per month for the privilege. Yeah, it burns.
I posed these conundrums to SEOmoz and received a few responses.
Load times in the Keyword Difficulty tool can vary depending on the keyword(s) and time of day but generally, this shouldn’t be more that a minute or so. Cutting down on load times is also why we limit individual searches to 5 terms.
Sounds like a crappy Band-Aid to me. I ran into slow load times regardless of time of day and keywords.
Search volumes were pulled from the tool several months ago due to problems we were having with accuracy. So instead of taking the entire tool offline, we removed search volumes while we work on new metrics that we hope provide more valuable data. In the interim, I’d recommend checking out Google’s Keyword tool if you’re looking for search volumes.
What are the chances that somebody using SEOmoz doesn’t already know about the Google Keyword tool? And why did it take a trouble ticket for me to find out that this is a known issue? Ugh.
Although we don’t have a solid ETA at the moment for a release on the new metrics, we’ll definitely let everyone know via the community and blog.
I’ll ask them if they can just send me a note when they get it in gear. I don’t want to have to follow them on Twitter for five months to figure out that their ducks are all finally in a row. I asked if I could have a second free trial whenever they fix their tools, you know, so I don’t have to pay a hundred bucks to play with broken toys:
Unfortunately I can’t promise that since we don’t have an actual ETA on when the new metrics will be updated but I’d be happy to add a credit to the account for half off your next month if you’d like.
Paying $50 to test their patches wouldn’t be as bad, but it’s hardly ideal customer service.
And just to be clear, I’m asking you. Sure, I can get all the data I need directly from Google, but it’s a time-consuming boondoggle. That’s why SEO professionals like me used to pay thousands of dollars every year to the likes of Wordtracker and SEOmoz. Alas, no more.
If I’m going to spend a couple grand a year for competition and traffic metrics, I expect better. What SEO tools do you recommend? If you know a coder looking to make a buck on a new creation, I’ll help him/her design a killer app for keyword research. All I ask in return? Please let me use it.
When not whining on this blog Dan Dreifort consults on Search Engine Optimization and Usability from his home. An avid musician, Dreifort is currently performing with four different bands and trying to form a fifth. Dan Dreifort is for scuba.
Nice, but needs some cropping.
(In which our amateur blogger plays the role of self-aggrandizing art critic.)
Always bad web-form to refer to something that might soon change, but see that banner up there? It’s a Droste effect applied to a picture I took in NYC on September 21, 2001, just ten days after 911. My digital camera (a Fuji Finepix) served me well at the time, but its 640 x 480 output pales and pixelates next to even the cheapest digital cameras available today. Still, I really like that picture.
No flash?!
I didn’t use a flash for the first snap of this picture. In it the chain link fence looks cold and constraining, confining and defining the entire composition. How ironic then, that illuminating the foreground barrier really delivered a sense of openness? This is the first and last time I’ll display it. You’re welcome.
Much better. (2001)
Shortly after my trip to post-911 New York, I started doctoring the w/flash-version of the picture. First I cropped it. That looked nice enough, got rid some extraneous color palette (who needs trees anyhow?) and provided subjective focus. It’s in this phase that I came to call the picture “Jung Gym” for what may be obvious pun-inspired reasons. But cropping wasn’t enough.
Next on the image doctoring docket, a pass through what looks like a Photoshop cutout filter with some selective digital hand painting wherein the artist introduces fresh, bold color to the ensemble. So enamored by this piece, I tacked on my dotcom brand and slapped the would-be commercial art on a coffee mug. It has not sold well. A dozen years later, it’s still available. Buy your uncool mug today.
Is that recursion?
Still haunted by this lo-fi image of a fence partly obscuring a jungle gym in front of a building, I immediately modded it again. This iteration, while not a true Droste, includes elements of recursion, no doubt planting the seed for future self-similar expression experimentation. What does that mean? When I look at this throwaway sketch, I see the seeds of my journey into Droste effects.
Yes, it’s a Droste. (2010)
So, back to the banner on top of every page of DanDreifort.com; it’s a Drosted version of this “Jung Gym” picture wherein we replicate the original introducing near-infinite recursion. It’s not really infinite, silly. That’s impossible. We can only hint at it. Hell, instead of referring to that banner (that might go away someday,) I’ll just post the full version of that and erase the bit where I asked future reader noticing the absence of said banner to tell me to post that image over to the right. See it there? That’s why I make the big bucks.
Fast-forward to September 2009: My Sony Elph digital camera is a little better and there exists a plugin for The GIMP called MathMap. Pair the two with moderate investment in time and elbow grease and voilà! Pixel pushers the world ’round are able to create myriad mergings of art and math. For me, that meant the ability to create Droste effect images. I’ll offer only one more thumbnail image here. Clicking it, just like the following hyper-linked text, will take you to a selection of Dan Dreifort Droste effect efforts, displayed in chronological order. Enjoy!
Do you want a personalized Droste effect image? Tell me. Maybe we can work something out.
A Fox 40 whistle from the late 1980s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In early November I received my umpteenth call from Rachel at cardholder services. A few years ago I wasted time filing FTC reports on these jokers in a wholly ineffective effort to thwart their incessant nagging. Of late I’ve instead taken to passive aggressively nagging them back.
This time, as is now my custom, I pressed whatever number would get me to a consultant to discuss the urgent scam relating to my credit cards. I then pressed mute and walked away. A few minutes later, per my routine, I picked up the phone to hang it up, but this time there’s a guy whispering all sorts of awesome stuff still on the line. So I listened for a while. He’d just started at his call center job two weeks earlier and had yet to get any training. He was bitching about the people near him and how backwards and horrible everybody and everything about his job was. Very entertaining. (He was using more colorful language than I’m willing to recount here.)
I wanted to un-mute and talk to him but decided not to. What would I have said? “Become a whistle-blower!” These $#%^ing phone spammers are breaking the law and I’d love to see some convictions. Unfortunately I (and likely most call center drones) are unaware of incentive to blow the whistle on such illegal activity, if any even exists.
The FTC is planning to spend serious dough on “new and innovative ways to block these illegal calls,” and is soliciting fresh ideas via the U.S.A.’s official challenge website. They’re also offering $50,000 in prizes for challenge winners. But I recognize problems with most of the submissions. They’re either ineffective, costly, unproven, violate basic privacy or show other weaknesses. Solving this problem is as simple as the American dream itself and it’s a bargain too.
From aforementioned breathy undertones of the underbelly of the robocall world, I was able to infer that call center workers are overworked, underpaid, shown little respect and mistreated. What if we offered cash rewards for proof of illegal telemarketing activity? How much would it take? I’m guessing not much.
What person working at a thankless illegal job is going to turn down a four figure reward for ten minutes of work? IT WILL WORK. But how will we fund it? While there’s likely already a budget for this sort of thing, I understand that taxing and spending isn’t sexy these days and that we’re to rely on the private sector for things like… money. (?!)
I’ll start. If I win the challenge, I’ll donate 10% of my take to an FTC telemarketing whistle blower fund.
Won’t you join me? (Boring details for my FTC challenge submission follow. Thanks for reading!)
Q: What is required to stop robocalls and encourage whistleblowers?
A: Funding. A website to field scam reports. Small staff to review reports. Initial marketing push.
Q: What about robocalls that don’t provide an option to speak to a human?
A: There are still underpaid minions in these shady organizations. We can turn them from the dark side.
Q: What about robocalls from other countries?
A: People in other countries like cash too. We can turn them and stop the flow of robocalls.
Q: Harumph! I hate government spending! What else would we need to crowdsource the funding?
A: If the gov doesn’t have the ability to do it already, hire somebody to use free, off the shelf, open source scripts to accept donations. Initial marketing push.
When he’s not traveling or making music, Dan Dreifort likes to consult on search and usability. Dan also likes his wife even though she has neglected him for almost four years while she’s been at veterinary school. She comes back in three weeks. Dan is very happy about this.
This is what you’ll see after enabling your new favorite add-on
Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks is a great little add-on for both Firefox and Thunderbird. It makes Mozilla’s rapid release cycle totally tolerable.
If the keeper of your favorite plugin can’t keep up with Mozilla’s zany release schedule, worry no more. Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks does exactly what it sounds like it’ll do. Install it (no restart needed) and head to your Add-ons Manager where you’ll be able to enable previously dead-to-you add-ons. I’ve periodically posted links to several repacked add-ons in the past, but this plugin means I’ll never again have to edit an install.rdf file.
Occasionally a plugin really and truly can’t be resurrected by this method. Case in point, today’s update to Thunderbird 17.0 killed the Quicktext add-on for good. Sad times. I loved that plugin too! RIP little buddy.
Big kudos to Kris Maglione for making one add-on to rule them all. Thanks!
That SEO and usability don’t flourish in a vacuum has been on my mind lately. Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum. If there’s nobody to hear your pearls of SEO wisdom do they make a sound? The sound of silence sends no sales. Four cases of constructive complaining follow.
I helped grow a startup e-retailer from nothing to three million in annual sales. The company sold to new owners who kept me on for SEO services but took away my keys to the site because they wanted to do all web work in-house. No problem- I work this way (via intermediary) sometimes. Though I’d informed them of redesign best practices, they chose to ignore it all; the hasty series of redesigns and half-rebrands erased years of SEO and usability progress. I spent a few months frantically trying to implement remedial measures but they heeded nothing I said or sent. We parted ways less than a year after the company switched hands. In a few short months they went from hero to zero in Google. Why would you spend good money on a company and then tank it? Conversely, the people who sold the company hired me to do SEO and usability work for a new endeavor. Its sales are growing. SEO and usability are processes, not events; they don’t exist in a vacuum.
SERP trends: often cyclical over longer periods
The chart to the right shows long-term cycles of a different SEO effort, underfunded and unfortunately not paired with a good usability effort. The company rakes in millions every year and would hugely benefit from doubling, tripling or quadrupling their SEO spend. I tell them this every year and sometimes spend time cobbling together metrics to back it up. …Which led to a smart realignment of the campaign scope a few years ago. The effort went from about 10% funding to 25% funding, but we’re still overreaching the budget. Part of the problem is the size of the company; they’re huge. Big boats don’t turn on a dime. A properly funded campaign would smooth out those valleys, and the peaks would be, literally, off the charts.
Because of a third-party payment solution, this client is also unable to give me ideal, actionable analytics data tying actual sales to each keyword. I’m left measuring the ranking of SERP listings, a comparatively bush-league measure of success. I’m also sometimes unable to appropriately geo-target longer tail search phrases (usually a good tactic in underfunded efforts) because most of the campaign consists of more competitive generic keywords. (They have their reasons, but it’s still frustrating. Good thing I like a challenge, and complaining!) I have neither budget nor latitude to increase the usability of landing pages so some of the most trafficked pages on the site lack a cohesive design with calls to action and good user direction. Though I know it’s not true, sometimes this client’s actions tell me they’re happier with countless second and third SERP rankings instead of focusing on the first SERP. My voice is necessarily muddled by the relative vacuum, but it’s getting better all the time and I’m still able to do some good work. I am optimistic.
Eating crow in Bing and Yahoo is fine if you’re doing well in Google
This other graph for the same client, though only tenuously related, needed a place to live in the blogosphere. Many of the campaign’s most broad metrics have been sluggish, flat or even slowly tanking over the past year because they cover all three major search engines as a whole. The chart at right (click it for a larger version) shows that SERP listings have been tanking in Bing and Yahoo, while Google’s doing alright. My SEO work will often please Google more than Bing and Yahoo, and this account exhibits the extreme of that trend. Because Google is responsible for the vast majority of searches performed in the US, I’ve never wasted much effort focusing on the other search engines. So while I likely won’t get more budget to play with, I have a Q1 2013 plan to address some of the issues. Ping me in six months if you want an update.
There’s a reason SEO practitioners display results in charts with various metrics in one axis and time in the other; SEO is a process, not an event. This next tale bit of complaining deals with the one-night stand of SEO gigs. It’s my first one and I feel dirty – too ashamed to post a picture because a filthy picture is worth a thousand guilty words. Because of stipulations tied to the funding of this project I was informed that I had to complete all SEO work and training in one month. I interjected, “But….” Nope. One month. I could not get keys to the server so I sent over a long list of Drupal modules essential for SEO like nodewords, xml sitemap, seo-friendly urls, etc. After a month I was still left with a CMS that wouldn’t even allow me to insert title tags or descriptions. It’s been over three months and I’m just now getting close to the finish line. It would have been a huge payday for one month’s work, but I knew better. It’s still a decent payout for a third of a year, so I’m happy. I’ve educated and empowered the client enough to ensure continued SEO success in the future.
A/B/X Testing and Google Experiments = More Bang For Your Buck
Most of my clients do listen, especially those I hand pick (vs. clients from agencies.) Case in point, to compliment SEO efforts I’ve really been leaning on A/B/X testing and Google Experiments. I try to convey that people should not be making decisions about design, SEO, brand, etc. when we can actually measure our audience and do what works best for them. After all isn’t that what any organization wants? The results (and data) speak for themselves.
If you have a very usable site with poor SEO, people won’t find your site. If I use SEO to build your audience, but your website sucks, you’re not going to get as much bang for your SEO buck. Usability is the science of making things not suck. SEO makes search robots happy. Usability makes people happy. The marriage of the two equals high ROI. This last image (above) shows how one little four week experiment caused visitors to be twice as likely to convert into customers. It cost very little to run that experiment and it paid for itself in one day. The rest is gravy. That it’s difficult to convince companies to invest in SEO and usability never ceases to amaze me, but I won’t stop trying (or complaining.) Thanks for reading.
Dan Dreifort makes money for companies and reads. If people paid him to read more he might stop helping companies make so much money. He’s currently proofreading (and loving) a book called When the Biomass Hits The Wind Turbine. It’s available in self-published form from Amazon for a few more months before its re-released and becomes all famous and stuff on the Daily Show and whatever awful show Oprah’s doing these days.
Firefox. Love it. Hate it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Remember back when Firefox 3.5.17 came out? I’ll give you a clue; it was 2011.
It’s just a year later and the latest version of Firefox (15.0) ships with new features under the hood, including better memory handling for plugins and new “Silent, background updates,” but it’s not enough. When Mozilla switched Firefox to a faster release cycle in 2011, users relying on extensions and plugins suffered. Many jumped ship for Chrome and Safari. Those of us who have stayed either suffer or update extensions on our own. I’m in the latter camp.
Head here to download a zip containing the following usability extensions updated for the current Firefox release:
I’ve posted links to other updated Firefox plugins in the past but I don’t make a habit of it. If you’d like updated versions for any of those, drop me a note in the comments.
I enjoy a good acronym or three.
WOUB.org is putting the finishing touches on an article about my latest musical endeavor which is only relevant here because I strung three acronyms together this morning while politely refusing to stream one of my old songs along with the article.
“Naturally, if you just want it for personal use, I’d be happy to hook you with an OSJB OMG MP3″
To be fair, WOUB reporter Elliot Nicolson started the acronym abuse!
“Polishing up the Leave Corp article now. I was wondering, would it be possible that you send me an mp3 of Oh My God by OSJB?”
I wrote that song (OMG,) when I was 17, almost 22 years ago, just one short year after I finished my longest acronym.
You won’t find it at AcronymFinder.com, but when I was a kid my friend and I would try to memorize really long acronyms of nonsensical pop culture phrases. I think I won when I could recite this doozy -
OMPYPPAEBFDWFDYMAHHCJBCHTPMPILISBCDCSDTDJL
OMDYACKKKJDTBCJBLOODYXTBGCOGODIDTDODAFNDO
TKOBRTBYGD
…Not saying I could do it in one breath, but I did it! I’m not going to bother counting that now, but according to 16-year-old me, that was a 94 character acronym.
I don’t know what all of it stands for, but here’s what I remember, (with the lost-to-us parts in parens.)
Osculate my posterior you pre-pubescent anal excretion. Big f*ckin’ deal. Whoopy f*ckin’ doo. Your mother and her howling commandos. (WBCHTP) My pistol is loaded. I shot Betty Crocker. Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones’ locker. Ohio Meadville District Youth-Adult Committee. (KKKJDTBCJBLOODYX) The black glove cult of gynecologists of death. (IDTDODAFNFO) The kingdom of big Rankin tape. (BYGD)
Nothing.
Some of it is self-explanatory, like that first bit, which is long-winded douche-speak for, “Kiss my *ss you little sh*t.”
YMAHHC, (acronym pronounced Y-M-A-double-H-C) was my first band, named after a similarly named comic book. The main character, Sgt. Nick Fury, is also the head of, S.H.I.E.L.D. Acronym coincidence? I think not.
Any hipster worth their salt will recognize a line from the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill, and I was an active member of the OMD-YAC, a Unitarian Universalist conference planning group.
The Black Glove Cult of GOD was my fencing team. We each wore a single black glove and quickly got in trouble for our inappropriate name after posting flyers after-hours all over the high school. The mini-posters depicted a black glove surrounded by text, “The Black Glove Cult of G.O.D. – Join our ranks.”
School administration was certain beloved Shaker Heights High School had been infiltrated by a cult. They called an emergency early morning teacher meeting the next day for triage damage control wherein our honors English teacher exclaimed, “Some kids in my class wear black gloves!” We had to take down all of our flyers. 
TKOBRT is more convoluted. Mr. Rankin was an honors chemistry teacher. The tape was a roll of duct tape, duct-taped to the side of a bus in West Germany. The Kingdom consisted of band nerds on said bus. All kingdom dwellers got their own fancy title. I did NOT earn “Minister of Chill” but co-opted that title for my first business cards a decade later. TKOBRT even had a battle hymn/fight song. (With apologies to Alice Cooper.)
I wanna hit you with a really big stick. (BIG STICK!)
I wanna poke your eyes out with my favorite pocket knife. (POCKET KNIFE!)
Cuz you’re poison running through my veins.
I can’t stand the site of your brains.
You’re poison. And you smell bad too. I hate you.
I wrote none of that awesome garbage but I’m guilty of remembering it.
Dan Dreifort will be a bachelor for only another month or so, ladies. You missed your chance. For you, he would have recited an even longer acronym. Dan Dreifort makes little changes to companies’ websites to make those companies more money. He will be first against the wall come the revolution.
No juggalo, I like playing with magnets.
A friend gave me a Ball of Whacks a few years ago. I played with them so much, my special lady friend threatened to leave me the next time I said, “Hey babe, look at this weird shape I made!”
Buckyballs are great fun for creative fingers. I made this tetrahedron shape in 2011 and looked around to see if anybody else had done it. Nope. Almost a year has passed since I recorded the video above. Time to share it with the world. Has anybody else recorded proof of the buckyballs “3 sided pyramid” shape in the past year? I hope not. It’s getting more and more difficult to appear as if I have fresh ideas.
I’ll take the tiny creativity victories.
Book reviews with a healthy dollop of snark
Digital strategy | Social business | People-centric biznology
xCommenter Bad for SEO – Bad for your site
25 JulSpun content will inevitably tumble and fall.
Got an email from one of my contract coders today about a supposed SEO plugin for WordPress called xCommenter:
Hey Dan –
Ever heard of xCommenter wp-plugin?
Just wondering what your opinion is on these sort of tools.
What is xCommenter? Will it help my site’s SEO?
xCommenter parses your post’s tags, title and content and then searches Yahoo Answers to find related questions. In an effort to improve your SEO, these questions are then periodically posted as comments to your blog post. Though it integrates with a popular article spinning service, my guess is this plugin will do more harm than good once Google catches up, if they haven’t already.
Here’s my reply:
Yikes! It’s fed by Yahoo Answers?! Have you SEEN Yahoo Answers? Garbage. Here’s a dramatization of my favorite Yahoo Answers content.
I suppose xCommenter *could* help SEO in the short term, but you should google “duplicate content penalty” to see how Google says this sort of thing can wreck you.
“There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our [Google] Webmaster Guidelines:” (source)
I suppose that when you pay the $77/yr fee and check the box next to “Spin comments with your TheBestSpinner.com account” in the xCommenter settings, in effect rewriting some content phrases, it might not be as big a deal, but something tells me Google is on the lookout for this sort of thing and will soon penalize the funk out of sites using xCommenter.
xCommenter is not the future of SEO
I will not be using xCommenter. Not only is it frowned upon by Google, (and will inevitably be penalized when Google figures out how to spot it, if they haven’t already,) xCommenter also cheapens your site. Use it if you’re a tripe peddler. I will scorn thee.
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When he’s not making music, riding a bike, or dreaming about great food, Dan Dreifort consults on SEO and usability.
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Tags: article spinning, Duplicate content, google, search engine optimization, Search Engines, seo, spun content, wordpress plugins, xcommenter, Yahoo Answers