There are lots of predictions for 2012, some more fantastic than others. Sure, there’s going to be change, but it needn’t be disastrous. Change, when you’re prepared for it, becomes opportunity.

So what kinds of changes in Online Marketing should you be preparing for?

Do a quick search for “online marketing trends in 2012″ and you’ll find plenty to read. Every marketer has their opinion, and they’re all offering prognostications in their particular areas of expertise: SEO, PPC, conversion, social media, or web analytics.

Those individual online marketing disciplines work best together: SEO and PPC put your message in front of searchers and motivated shoppers, conversion optimization turns those visitors into buyers, social media builds and maintains real relationships with those customers, and web analytics crunches the numbers and finds opportunities for data-driven improvement.

Where can you go for a qualified, single source presenting online marketing trends for 2012 from respected industry experts across all disciplines?

Right here.

We brought our faculty together here at Market Motive for a brainstorming session to talk about the trends online marketers should watch for in 2012. We brewed a pot of coffee, gathered around the conference table, freed up the white board, and each instructor offered up the top three trends they think you should know about during the coming year.

Todd Malicoat – SEO Faculty Chair

Over the last decade, Todd has consulted and created training documentation for the Public Broadcast System (PBS.org), Meredith Corporation, Thomas Industrial, Rasmussen College, Real Networks, and other large brands. Todd was named among the top 50 Most Influential Marketers Invesp.com, and Top 40 Most Influential in Search Marketing by GSInc.co.uk.

Increased use of social signals as quality validation
We’ve known this was coming for a while, and with the launch of Google+, it’s evident that Google is taking social media signals very seriously. We’ll see these become increasingly important, although they will still just play a role in overall search rankings. It’s important to note that social signals are used heavily for very fresh documents, and for validating things like backlink data as validation of the overall quality of the site.

More Competition and More Demand for Personnel, Services, and Tools
You thought it was competitive before? The result sets are shrinking, the brands are creeping in, and Google is pushing vertical results of their own. Everyone has a link development team, social media team, and paid search team working in harmony for higher rankings and revenue. The competition will continue to heat up, and the barrier to entry will continue to rise. The good news is that this creates a demand for quality people, services, and tools within our industry.

The Longtail Will Stay Dead
Google has made it essential for websites to score well on engagement metrics in the long tail of search results. You will no longer get a lot of search traffic for obscure terms that you don’t have good strong results for. The Panda update has increased the quality of relevance in the longtail, and don’t expect Google to just give this traffic back to the sites they don’t think deserved it in the first place. Make sure to learn from your bounce rate, and improve those engagement related metrics.

Brad Geddes – PPC Faculty Chair

Brad is the author of the well-respected book Advanced Google Adwords, and founder of CertifiedKnowledge.org, an online source where the Paid Search community comes together for PPC training, tools, and advice. Brad frequently writes columns for Search Engine Land, co-moderates the AdWords forum on Webmaster World, and has spoken at more than 35 conferences.

The thing to watch the most is mobile
Mobile commerce is heating up. The latest comScore numbers said 38% of people had bought something on their phone; which I find quite amazing. Right now, most sites are based on the desktop versions. As some users primarily use tablets and phones, how will that affect site design, conversions, and payments? I find Africa fascinating as many people there have only seen the web on their phones and not on a desktop. Will Africa find a better way to display info on phones than the rest of the world? Kenya has one of the best mobile payment systems in the world, the US lags far behind in mobile payment. Can Google Wallet or ISIS revolutionize credit card usage and mobile payments?

I’d like to see Todd write the Advanced SEO book
There are many books out there on SEO; but I think Todd could do one that goes beyond the basic and intermediate concepts that most books have covered. [Editor's note: Todd says the rough outline is in place... it's just a matter of time.]

Google+ will have to evolve
Google has a lot of correlative data; but not a lot of hard data given to them by their users. How will Google+ affect personalized search, paid search, and will it incorporate a new ad format for G+? And of course, the big question: Can Google+ have enough adoption, users, time on site, etc to be a player in the social game? It can force itself to matter via +1 in rankings, but that will only matter to marketers. Will it be adopted by the mass market?

Bryan Eisenberg – Conversion Faculty Chair

Bryan is a highly sought-after consultant and speaker, and the co-author of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, USA Today and New York Times bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? and Always Be Testing. He has been the keynote speaker for Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, E-consultancy, Webcom, SEM Konferansen Norway and the Canadian Marketing Association.

The next generation of tools will focus on Return on Time Spent
Marketing operations are more complex than ever before and the demands on our resources are constantly increasing. We need to identify solutions that help us get the most bang for the buck; because we aren’t about to get 25 hour days any time soon. Tools like BoostCTR, Runa, and InboundWriter will help us do just that. Read more about Return on Time Spent.

CEO’s will be taking responsibility for conversion and customer experience (like Apple)
Nobody has been involved in e-business for two decades. There are too many not-quite experts, over-promising tool vendors, and self-proclaimed pundits demanding attention. It’s the responsibility of executive management to create an expansive environment where learning in ongoing silos is less important than customers, and optimization isn’t a project but rather a habit of great execution. Read more about building marketing teams.

More leadership will be put in place
The marketing optimization team leader should be comfortable working with a variety of methods of identifying insights and optimization techniques … These leaders are going to have to be trained and mentored … You can’t outsource this core competency or downplay it.  It’s a serious commitment but one that has a high payout over the long term. Read more about building a marketing optimization team.

Jennifer Evans-Cario – Social Media Faculty Chair

Jennifer spent six years as Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide, and is editor of Small Business Answers. She was also founder of the popular Small Business Marketing Unleashed conferences, and the author of two books, including the Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing and Zero Dollars, and A Little Talent and 30 Days. She is now President of SugarSpun Marketing.

Scheduling Posts for Highest Impact
I see this as one of the single most important things companies can do in 2012. Granted, everyone has been scheduling posts for convenience for a year or two now, but they’re not generally considering how to really time it for the best impact. There are quite a few tools out there that will help give you some really good information on how and when your audience is online and when they are most apt to interact with you. Companies are branching out and attempting to use more and more Social Media outlets. This makes judicious use of time more important than ever. This is especially true for small businesses.

EdgeRank Checker shared some Facebook engagement data by day just last month.

Mashable had a wonderful post on how to use Facebook Insight to time your posts for ongoing exposure to your followers in October.

Tools like When to Tweet and Tweriod are helping companies learn when their most active followers are on Twitter and a whole slew of others provide some valuable timing information.

Content is King, but Graphics are the King’s Cloak
We’ve been preaching about good content for years and years and in terms of SEO and engagement, it’s still incredibly important, probably the MOST important thing. However… as social media usage grows, the competition for attention keeps increasing. I’m seeing a dramatic uptick in the focus on images and graphics on Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest, a new site that’s basically visual shared bookmarking, is growing in leaps and bounds. Hobby bloggers are studying the art of photography to make sure the pictures they share are top notch… Infographics are amazing link bait. With all this content to digest, people are looking for an even faster way to scan for value. Delivering a compelling image is a great new way to pull them in. Invest in a better camera, hire a graphic designer, explore these new spaces… do what you have to do to be able to play on this level.

Tying Social Media Directly to Business Goals
Yes, you’re here, you have fans, you have followers… we get it. That’s nice. Now let’s all quit patting ourselves on the back and face reality. Social media has grown up and “we need to engage with our audience” is no longer enough to justify a social media budget. More and more companies (the smart ones) are going to start looking at their top level business goals and exploring how social media can help meet them. Need to reduce call volume to your call centers? Invest in a social listening and reputation management strategy to handle customer service issues online. Need to increase average order size? Explore targeted social media sharing for coupons. 2012 WILL bring about a new and increased focus on clearly defined metrics that social media marketers will be expected to deliver on.

Avinash Kaushik – Web Analytics Faculty Chair

Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist at Google, and the author of Web Analytics 2.0 and the best-selling book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. Avinash works with some of the largest companies in the world to help them evolve their online marketing strategies to become data-driven and customer-centric organizations.

SoMoLo will continue to rise in importance
Social. Mobile. Local. SoMoLo will drive a ton of disruption when it comes to finding the most relevant customers and offering them something of value.

Marketing as providing utility
Marketing models that provide constant value to the customer — regardless of whether they intend to buy anything or not — will accelerate when compared to Shouting (yelling at people hoping you catch them at the moment of purchase).

The downfall of dashboards
People in the Analytics world whose primary contribution is to puke data will find themselves with fewer and fewer contracts/jobs. People who provide a list of actions to take, rather than a puke of data in “dashboards,” will find they are richer than they anticipated.

Greg Jarboe – Online PR Faculty Chair

Greg is president of SEO-PR and author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day.  He writes for Search Engine Watch and ReelSEO; speaks frequently at SES Events and PRSA International Conferences; contributed to Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions; and was interviewed in Michael Miller’s Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus.

Changing media landscape will reshape online PR strategy
According to Compete PRO, unique visitors to news.yahoo.com increased more than 35% during the past year to more than 54.7 million, while unique visitors to news.google.com decreased almost 2% to less than 9.2 million.  At the same time, unique visitors to huffingtonpost.com increased over 113% to close to 26.2 million, while unique visitors to nytimes.com increased just 5% to fewer than 17.4 million.  In the coming year, other changes to the media landscape should prompt marketers to update their online PR strategies.

Online PR measurement will shift from outputs to outcomes
When Market Motive was launched in August 2007, our first Online PR 101 course explained the difference between measuring PR outputs (e.g. press release ranking, press mentions, and blog mentions), and tracking business outcomes (e.g. driving traffic to your website, generating leads, and selling products, services, or content directly online).  In 2012, online PR measurement will shift away from outputs and focus increasingly on outcomes.  And more and more marketers will demand that PR professionals know how to measure the return on marketing investment.

Online video marketing will become simply YouTube marketing
According to Experian Hitwise, YouTube.com ranks #1 in the United States with 86.9% share of visits to a custom category of 78 video sites.  Hulu.com ranks #2 with 2.9%.  In Canada, YouTube.com ranks #1 with 93.3% share of visits to a custom category of 70 video sites.  Dailymotion.com ranks #2 with 1.8%.  In 2012, even more talented creators and original entertainment will join YouTube’s existing channel lineup, including channels created by well-known personalities and content producers from the TV, film, music, news, and sports fields, as well as some of the most innovative up-and-coming media companies in the world and some of YouTube’s own existing partners.  These channels will have something for everyone, whether you’re a mom, a comedy fan, a sports nut, a music lover, or a pop-culture maven.  And marketers will stop talking about “online video marketing” and will start focusing on “YouTube marketing”.

Matt Bailey – Fundamentals Faculty Chair

Matt is the founder and president of SiteLogic, the author of Internet Marketing An Hour A Day (Sybex), and serves on the Advisory Board for Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies Conferences. A highly respected speaker, he presents at conferences around the world. With over a decade in the web marketing industry, Matt creates comprehensive strategies that improve internet presence and conversions.

Marketing will become marketing
Social, video, search, content, etc. They will all be drawn into the marketing mix rather than separate parts measured separately. It will all be considered as a full marketing campaign, rather than disparate parts that are run independently.

Reduce acquisition, increase loyalty
In order to survive, search marketing will have to move from acquisition metrics to loyalty-based metrics. As search referral data becomes more difficult to gather (Google), different metrics will need to be developed to determine the best value keywords.

Don’t socialize, personalize
Digital marketing will become more personalized, not socialized. As data mining and information becomes more granular, marketing will enable a closer relationship with the customer. Companies that develop personal marketing tools and relationships will win the customer over the long term. Companies that invest in Personalization will grow in profitability.

So what do you think? Is your online marketing plan ready for 2012? Be ready for change, embrace it when it comes, and build a cohesive plan that integrates multiple online marketing disciplines. That’s what will give you the advantage you need to see the growth you want in the coming year.

If you’d like to get an extra advantage, study with the experts cited here with Market Motive’s self-paced online marketing training plan, or our 12-week coached online marketing course.

Online Marketing Trends for 2012

Gathering keyword data from organic Google searches just got a little more complicated. Here’s what you can do about it.

What’s Changed

On October 18, Google switched search for their logged in users to SSL (HTTPS). At first, this may not sound like much of an issue, but because of the way URLs are constructed when searching with SSL, analytics tools can’t track the keywords used. This means that if someone who is logged in to their Google account searches for “Market Motive”, one piece of information will be missing. Yes, we’ll still know that the person came from Google; but we won’t know the keyword they used. (Remember, this is only for users who are logged in to their Google account when they do their search.)

What You Can Do About It

Now that you know what happened, here’s how to measure its impact on your analytics. If you’re using Google Analytics you’ll want to go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic and look for the keyword “(not provided)”.

The number you see next to “(not provided)” is the total number of organic search keywords coming from logged in Google users that weren’t able to be recorded.

Don’t Let Google’s Search Change Destroy Your Keyword Tracking – With Video From Avinash Kaushik

Should you let them build their campaign on Vimeo? Recommend they  focus on YouTube? Or is a two-pronged approach in your client’s best interest?

That’s this week’s hot topic in the Market Motive discussion forum. And although I’ve already weighed in with the members on the forums, I thought I’d share my opinion here as well.

Vimeo vs YouTube: The Search Algorithm

Both sites have robust search engines, and they’ve got their differences. Vimeo search has several elements to its internal search algorithm that YouTube doesn’t have … which may or may not be an advantage.

YouTube’s algorithm looks at:

1. relevance
2. upload date
3. view count
4. rating

The default is “relevance”, but you can sort other ways.

Vimeo lets users search by:

1. most relevant
2. newest
3. oldest
4. most played
5. most commented
6. most liked
7. alphabetical

In Vimeo, the default sort is also “most relevant”, so to that extent the algorithms are similar — but YouTube ignores comments, while Vimeo factors those in. Why is that?

YouTube has good reasons to ignore comments: because most are pretty juvenile. The Vimeo community seems to be populated by more creative types (including my daughter, who attends the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Go MassArt! ).

Vimeo vs YouTube: Google Universal Results

It’s true, if you’re trying to optimize videos for Google universal search, Google will show videos from Vimeo as well as videos from YouTube in its results. Of course, there are significantly more videos uploaded to YouTube, which is why Google tends to display significantly more YouTube videos in universal search results.

In fact, according to the latest data that I saw from Hitwise, the ratio was 86 to 1 (YouTube to Vimeo). So, your client won’t be handicapped by solely using Vimeo. The Vimeo video will show up.

But your client will probably be outnumbered by competitors who understand the value of YouTube.

Vimeo vs YouTube: Why being Vimeo focused can hurt

That’s where your client will actually be hurt — by not having any content at all in the world’s second largest search engine, which happens to be YouTube.

The last time I checked, there were more than 3.6 billion searches a month conducted on YouTube in just the U.S. So, Vimeo or not, if you don’t upload your content to YouTube, then your content likely won’t get found when YouTube searches are conducted.

That’s why even Hulu has a channel on YouTube.

The Conclusion

Yep, even YouTube’s direct competitor understands that it needs to have a presence on the largest worldwide video-sharing community.

So a two-pronged approach is your only real responsible plan.

And now that you know, so does your client.

Their Vimeo preference notwithstanding.

If you’re not a Market Motive member, you’re missing out. With a constantly updated library of online marketing training videos, and 24×7 forum access to fellow online marketing students, graduates, and our world-class faculty, membership in Market Motive is an indispensable resource for the professional marketer.

Vimeo vs YouTube – Which should you be using?

Lately I’ve been studying some of the new models for promoting local businesses online … daily deal websites in particular. I signed up for Groupon and Juice In The City deals and have been researching the types of businesses that promote through them.

One offer on Juice In The City caught my eye. It’s from a company called GoPhoto and they provide a photo scanning service.

It struck me because I had recently been attempting to scan several boxes of photos and negatives at home – I even bought a cheap negative scanner. The results were horrible and it was incredibly time consuming, but I had been reluctant to try a scanning service, fearing that I’d pay for scanning everything and only want to keep 20% of the images, or worse, they’d lose my precious photos.

In fact, anyone considering a photo scanning service is going to have some pretty deep rooted concerns, including:

• Will my stuff get lost or damaged? It’s irreplaceable.
• Will the quality be really good?
• How will I find the time to sort through my boxes of random prints and negatives, and decide what’s worth scanning?
• What if my old pictures just don’t look good? I’d prefer to not pay for them to be scanned, just to find out they couldn’t be salvaged.

I knew I was never going to be happy with the results from my little cheap negative scanner. So it was with a slightly skeptical air that I decided to research GoPhoto. What I learned convinced me to try the service, and even more interestingly the company serves as a model for how to do business online.

First Impressions

The GoPhoto site looks great, with a nice features/benefits list next to some sample photos. They state the price and mention the ability to share photos directly (I don’t use photo sharing stuff like this, however). More interestingly, the site does a really good job addressing the above concerns, right on the front page:

(click to enlarge)

Every customer’s main concern, of course, will be knowing how many photos they have, and therefore how much it’s going to cost. GoPhoto solves this in two very clever ways:

• You don’t need to sort or count anything. Just pile it into a box and they will count the scans as they create them.
• Amazingly, you don’t pay anything until after the scanning is complete. That’s right – just ship the box and pay later. Even though GoPhoto scans everything you send to them, you don’t need to pay for anything you don’t like or want. Delete the item and you won’t get charged (even though GoPhoto clearly took the time to scan it so you could make this decision).

User Experience

Once into the signup process I discovered how carefully these guys are thinking about the user experience.

They didn’t just take a crappy business model and bolt an AJAX UI onto it. They took the whole business first, and baked the user experience all the way through, which of course makes it very powerful. Everyone is going to recommend GoPhoto because the customer has been placed at the center of what they do. They are showing very high confidence that you’re going to love the scans – so much so that you don’t pay a dime until they’re done.

The signup process concludes with generating a UPS mailing label right from the website, which gives you a high level of confidence that the package will be safe. Even better, the moment you hand it over the counter at a UPS store, you’ll get an email from GoPhoto confirming each step of the delivery process. The level of detail is better than you’ll get from UPS themselves. It’s very comforting and you feel well taken care of.

A Smooth Delivery

Obviously your photos go into a queue and are worked on in turn (For me, the scanning process took a little more than a week). Once scanning is complete, you’ll get a notification and it’s time to visit the site and see those old memories.

The photos are organized into albums and there’s an easy way to review them. More importantly you can delete any images you don’t like – either because the original image was bad (out of focus, poor exposure, etc.) or just because you simply don’t want to keep it. You won’t get charged for that scan. You can also share the images direct from the GoPhoto interface via Twitter, Facebook and email.

The quality of the scans is excellent – far better than I was getting from my cheapo film scanner. The colors are not as rich as I get from my digital camera, but they’re a lot better than having the prints stuffed in a box where I never look at them.

Once you’re happy with everything just plug in the credit card number and your originals are returned with a DVD containing all the high resolution scans.

The Verdict

As an online marketing maven I was just delighted to see GoPhoto put so much care into the product. I wish more companies would embrace this type of thinking. It’s a bold move to ask the customer for payment only AFTER they like everything, but I’ll bet it dramatically pushes up conversion for this type of product.

And as a consumer I am thrilled with the scans … my wife loves to have those old memories resurrected from our boxes (and boxes) of ancient photos.

A case study in customer-centric thinking

I posed this question to a few of our own subscribers and the answers were both surprising and expected.

The reasons they stay on had little to do with the subject line or the time of day we send our newsletters — we know these have more to do with the open rate. What keeps people subscribed boils down to one thing: The expectation of something valuable in the email.

In my email marketing course, I teach that there is a direct and inverse relation between the urge to unsubscribe and the expectation that staying on will yield something useful.

But having great people on your list, and gaining their confidence that your emails will deliver value, is only step one. It’s more important to deliver on that expectation. Not just some of the time, not just most of the time.

A more interesting question to ask your recipients is, “How many of my emails will you delete before you decide to unsubscribe?”

1, 2, 3, Unsubscribe!

My own rule? After deleting three mass emails in a row, I decide that future emails will only distract or clog my inbox. I unsubscribe. Others seem to be more forgiving, and will wait for a fourth email.

Every email blast is an invitation for your subscribers to click that unsubscribe button. And every email blast is a chance to reinforce the perception that future messages will contain something of value.

In the context of an email, “value” can be:

1. A pointer to news or relevant and useful information
2. An authoritative how-to article
3. Discounts or coupons
4. Free access
5. Free samples
6. …
7. … many many more

What’s Your Gift?

A simple sign is tacked to the wall in one of the Market Motive conference rooms. It reads, “What is Today’s Free Gift?”

The sign is a reminder that outbound messaging should not be self serving. It must give. It must be generous while we attempt to persuade our audience to act. And it must do this out of the gate, and consistently throughout your campaigns.

A Practical Example

LinkedIn is a great way to stay in touch with prospects and customers. Sending an email message to your LinkedIn connections is an appropriate way to engage your prospects and customers. Send something of value and you’ll enhance your connection. Send an unvarnished pitch or impersonal note, and you’ll find your messages aren’t welcome.

My own LinkedIn connections tend to be managers or directors of marketing groups. I decided to send a small ‘gift’ to help these managers ‘gift’ someone on their own team.

My first message to my LinkedIn connections contained an offer for a free month of access to a Market Motive course for an employee. No catch. No pitch. The first test went to just under 1000 managers and directors.

So far (four business days after sending) the response has been overwhelming. More than 10% have gifted an employee or colleague with a free month of access to a Market Motive course.

The qualitative response has been great as well. Nearly everyone is genuinely excited and grateful for the access. I’m getting a lot of thoughtful responses and ‘thank you’ notes. One recipient, Bill Ross, who is building a managed online marketing service, blogged about his experience:

“Leave it to experts in internet marketing to practice what they preach….I’m connected on LinkedIn to Michael Stebbins,… Last week he offered his LinkedIn followers a free month of the service, a $299 value. I decided to take him up on the offer and am brushing up my social media marketing skills.”

Aw. Thanks Bill. He goes on to say some very nice things about what he found inside, suggests he’ll be looking to hire Market Motive graduates, and then spreads the word about US Government financial assistance for Market Motive courses.

That’s 100 managers who now expect value from the next message from Market Motive. 100 and more marketing managers are very likely to fall in love with what we do for their employees. And even more may continue with paid training through our courses.

I can’t wait to send my next message

Your Turn

Your take-away: To build the expectation of value, each message must be generous while still persuading your audience to act. Do this early and consistently throughout your campaigns and your subscribers will look forward to your future messages.

Struggling to decide what “gift” to send in your next message? Have a good idea? Comment here and we’ll help each other plan.

How to Change Unsubscribe Rates Through Generosity

Ask an internet marketer “how many domains do you personally own?” Now ask, “How many have you developed?” Chances are the domains are simply parked, collecting dust. Successful domainers are like commodity traders — 98% fail.

Why do domainers usually fail?

Because it takes work. The idea that a great one-word domain like Cameras.com guarantees direct type-in traffic (and truckloads of money) is a myth. So is domain parking. And revshare. It takes a tremendous amount of real effort, research, and development to bring a site up in value. In the end, the successful domains are those that are properly developed with a keen understanding of the human audience, SEO, Web Analytics, Conversion and even Social Media.

Oh, and a real business plan.

But what if you just want to leverage your awesome one- or two-word domain to supplement your primary site?

The answer there is almost always “Stay focused on your main site.”

And that’s because whether you’re domaining for profit, or juggling multiple domains around a single business, a focus on traditional business development is your friend. Boring and hard? Sometimes. Profitable? Only if you make it through the hard work. Or win the lottery. For that matter, why not trade commodities?

11 myths and 7 rules

It’s not easy digging through the mythology, hype and wishful thinking to understand just what it’ll really take to reap value from your domains. Market Motive’s SEO Faculty Chair Todd Malicoat has an excellent post detailing the 11 myths about value in domains, and seven rules to follow for success. I strongly recommend it.

Are you a domainer? Here’s why it doesn’t work.

It’s pretty hard to get ‘accidentally’ banned by Google these days. Either someone reports your site for a borderline technique or you are knowingly pushing the boundaries and trigger a flag with the engines. In both cases, there is intent.

We’ve been through the process of advising our friends and clients for the recovery of hundreds of banned sites. It’s not always pretty, but I’ll share what we’ve learned in the process.

In this presentation, I’ll show the most “mortal” sins, and those that generally fall in the “forgivable” category. I’ll share what tools to use to assess your situation and give you one of my own analysis scripts. We’ll end with a sample of an effective re-inclusion letter (modified from Todd Malicoat’s example posted on Search Engine Watch).

It’s sure to be a noteworthy panel with Aaron Shear, Roger Montti and Michael Gray weighing in. See you next week.

Speaking on Banned Sites at WebmasterWorld Pubcon Vegas

http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/09/free-tools-to-improve-your-website/

Here are a few of my other favorite tool lists:

SEO Guru Todd Malicoat’s summary of “Tool Time With Todd” twitter sessions: http://www.stuntdubl.com/tooltime/

An older, but still functional list of SEO tools: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

Of course, the seoMOZ tool sets: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox

And then some excellent research tools from AdCenter Labs: http://adlab.msn.com/alltools.aspx My favorite is the Commercial Intent Tool.

Bookmark ‘em.

Lists of Tool Lists

I used to Love your webmaster tools. You have lots of great features, like site map configuration, crawler diagnostics and top search queries and positions. But why must you tease us by pretending to report on incoming links?

Sure, you call it a “sampling” and carefully word your descriptions with phrases like “links we have available to show you.”

If “Links to your site” is a sampling, and the basis isn’t known or consistent, then what is the intended use of the report?

Case in point: Throughout 2009, Webmaster tools reports that one stable and quiet site (read not many new links) consistently remained at ~350 links give or take a few. Then Webmaster tools reports only 90 incoming links throughout the month of May. This is less than the 119 reported with your very own link: operator.

Then, last week, you report 600 links. All of which have been there for quite some time. From 350 to 90 to 600?

How is this useful? It isn’t. If your sampling varies widely with no consistent basis, then it is not useful for trending.

So I hate it.

While a tool link LinkScape or Yahoo! Site Explorer may not see all the links that Google sees, at least they have a consistent basis for detection and reporting. And that is the necessary foundation for relying on a report for decision making.

So Google, thank you for webmaster tools. Some parts are useful. Stop pretending to report on incoming links and use a consistent sampling method for reporting.

Your captive user,

-Michael

What I hate about Google Webmaster Tools

Alan’s experience and knowledge made him a great partner for us at Market Motive. His character and kindness made it easy to be his friend.

Early Days at Market Motive: Alan, Michael, John, and Tyler in 2007

Our times working and visiting with Alan were truly a joy and we will miss him.

Alan Rimm Kaufman