Danny Sullivan has a flawed piece today titled “Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think?” The sensational headline is no doubt good for traffic and his basic information and method is good, but the numbers are way off because he has a miniscule sample size. Google Analytics, and other [...]

Continue reading: Is Google Analytics Really Under-Reporting Twitter Traffic by 500%?.

Taxonomies in WordPress are categorized tags. They are useful if you find yourself adding a class of tags over and over, like ingredients on a recipe blog. WordPress 2.8 includes updates that make the hidden taxonomy features easier to use. I’ve set taxonomies up on my home-brewing blog, Life With Beer, where I have taxonomies [...]

Continue reading: Thesis Custom Taxonomy Pages that Visitors and Search Engines Will Love.

Title tags and meta-descriptions are your search results ad copy. Too many people focus entirely on their SEO value. But titles and meta-descriptions not only need to rank in the search results, but also need to sell the idea of a click. I’m going to use the AIDA sales model to better understand selling the [...]

Continue reading: Winning Clicks in Search Results Pages.

First, the release of Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that crawls the web to calculate the answers to questions. And now Yahoo!’s announcement that they’re going to can the links and just throw out the answers because that’s what searchers want. Bold? yes. Interesting? sure. Successful? not a chance. The problem with both Wolfram [...]

Continue reading: Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo!: Destined for Failure.

Google is starting to add the search ranking directly to the referring URL which means the convoluted search ranking filters I wrote about earlier will soon be obsolete. That’s good news because now we’re going to have much better information than before and it’s going to be easier to get. I quickly took the sample [...]

Continue reading: Google Analytics Search Ranking Filters for New URLs.

A dark vision of the future of Twitter? Satirical look at the perils and pointlessness of automated follower building? I started writing a post to go with this image, but realized the words were superfluous. Totally unrelated and unintended, but did you notice the optical illusion where the grey square between the corners of four [...]

Continue reading: Twitter Botnet.