Over the past 6 months I’ve been on the hiring end of some of the worst interviews I care to remember, and a select few that both captivated my attention and made me awestruck. Although I can’t go into the details of the bad interviews I’ve sat in on, I wanted to ensure that job seekers that are either in our industry or want to break into it come prepared to impress.

Here are seven tips on how to land a job in the online space.

1. Dress to Impress

The online space is notorious for dressing down, but hiring managers and prospective employers take interviews seriously. You’ll rarely be criticized for over-dressing (although it has happened to me), so make sure to make a good first impression. You can dress down on a follow-up interview, if you make it that far.

2. Be Social

The crowd in the online space is naturally social, so put yourself out there on Twitter, LinkedIn or start your own blog. For best results, try to keep personal content and drunken disorderly pictures on Facebook behind strict access permissions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve extended invitations to people that I’ve met socially at tradeshows or mixers or industry nights that have been vetted through peers in the industry long before reaching out for a first interview.

3. Show an Interest in the Industry and Organization You Want to Join

Working in an online channel is one of the most interesting places to be right now, so bring that shared enthusiasm to your interview. You’ll likely be asked the question, “what sparked your interest in this role?” and if you have no spark, it is painstakingly obvious. Some of the best candidates I’ve met were able to go off on tangents discussing new gadgets, social networking, recent blog posts from industry leaders, and books they’ve been reading.

4. Take Advantage of Soft Skills That Fit Online Roles

Don’t be embarrassed to admit you don’t have all of the technical skills listed on a job description. Some of the best interviewees I have met admit up-front the things they can and can’t do, and it goes a long way to increasing your credibility. Individuals that tend to rank higher in emotional intelligence are very sought-after because soft skills are often shared amongst strong leaders and lost on extremely technical people.

5. Market to Your Strengths and Prepare to Discuss Concrete Examples of Your Past Success

Let’s face it; people tend to blow a lot of smoke, especially in online circles. Anyone can claim to have done all kinds of things in a previous life, but few have the numbers, reports, diagrams, and process flows to back it up. Don’t be afraid to blank out the names of the innocent (your previous employer) and bring that evidence to your next interview. If you can show that your past experience directly impacts your interviewer’s prospective role, you are as good as gold. In addition, marketing your past success may help you to avoid a follow-up homework assignment that pit candidates against each other.

6. Ask Exploratory Questions

You have to ask at least three exploratory questions of the interviewer, because they are likely holding back some useful tidbits of advice, information, or insight into your prospective role. In addition, it lets your interviewer know that you aren’t just going through the motions; that you actually want to determine your own fate, especially if you’re looking to abandon your current position with another company. It’s risky to change jobs, so make sure the grass is truly greener on the other side.

7. Be Early, Be Patient, and Stay Professional

Really three tips in one, but all equally important to make a good first, second, third and nth impression.

Arrive early to your interview, but not so early that your interviewer doesn’t get a chance to grab their morning coffee or finish their lunch. Be patient in the process, especially with larger organizations that require prospective interviewees to meet several stakeholders in the process.

Expect to interview between 4-10 times with just as many unique interviewees. Each time, you will be expected to exhibit a good fit with the culture, as well as a familiarity with your interviewees function and how it relates to the prospective role (sales, marketing, operations, I.T., communications, human resources, product development, etc).

In technology giants such as Google, interview questions are often off-the-wall, highly technical, or ludicrously complicated. Don’t get discouraged by tough questions; think on your feet and break down the problem, verbalizing your rationale, and make fair assumptions. Interviewers often want to learn how you learn and problem solve.

Whatever you do, don’t ask your prospective hiring manager how long it would take to have their job. Sadly, it has happened.

Care to share any other tips you may have when interviewing, or have any weird interview experiences in the past? Let us know in the comments below.

Almost as quickly as November came to a close, news broke from StatCounter indicating Google’s Chrome browser overtook Mozilla Firefox as the second most popular browser worldwide for the first time. Internet Explorer, the incumbent for years still remains king of the pile, but even Microsoft has to be looking at their dropping share as an impending challenge to keep up with Google.

Unlike other browsers in the segment, Chrome appears to be the fastest growing browser of all time globally, rising to an unprecedented 25.69 percent share of usage in just over three years. Delving deeper into the numbers, Chrome still falls short of Firefox for usage in North America and Europe, but tops the charts in South American countries, well ahead of Internet Explorer and nearly doubling Firefox usage.

The masses seem to be abandoning Internet Explorer in favor of alternatives. The sinking ship used to be sole property of Microsoft until recently, when it appears a change in strategy sprung a few leaks in Mozilla’s boat as well. Mozilla introduced an accelerated release schedule earlier this year, which saw Firefox go from version 3 to version 8 in less than a year.

As most folks in the industry know, changing anything that quickly is a recipe for disaster, and here’s why:

• Add-on support sucked: Third-party and often enthusiastic developers made up a group of Mozilla’s hardcore advocates and community members. These are the folks that develop add-ons, extensions and themes for the browser that now have to work overtime to incorporate changes into each new version.
• IT Administrators couldn’t keep up: Browser share is likely to drop (obviously) if admins don’t have the time to deploy new versions of Firefox to users in their organization. It would be a relatively painless process if deployment was all they did, unfortunately they usually exercise some measure of compatibility testing, bringing me to my next point…
• Incompatibility with websites and web applications: The bigger tragedy was felt shortly after the first few monthly releases of major version increments, as more and more websites suddenly stopped supporting Firefox. Versioning that used to increment from 3.6.1 to 3.6.2 in one month’s time were now uncharacteristically moving from 4.1 to 5.0. Programs written to support minor increments of a browser and ensure compatibility were blown away by Mozilla’s rapid-fire release schedule.
• It really ticked people off: One of the major reasons I hadn’t switched to Chrome until recently was because Mozilla Firefox, despite all the blemishes (memory leaks, a big one), was a solid browser that didn’t follow the crowd. Community support was excellent, the rendering of websites was reliable, web applications ran as intended, add-ons were phenomenal, and most importantly, I could trust the product after years of unwavering reliability.

It’s still unclear why Mozilla adopted this strategy. Perhaps they decided they needed to increase the pace and align version numbers with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

To make matters worse for Mozilla, Microsoft has actually made significant improvements to Internet Explorer 9. Unfortunately, the browser version is not bundled with Windows 7, so they are likely challenged with trying to migrate users of their newest operating system.

Only time will tell whether the expected release of Windows 8 in the New Year will put a dent in Chrome’s meteoric rise to fame.

March was an extremely busy time for me personally, so I passed up the opportunity to write about an awe-inspiring keynote delivered by Michael Eisner of Disney fame at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. In his address, he eloquently explained how technology enables a never-ending and consistently innovative evolution of content delivery mechanisms: from Gutenberg’s printing press back in 1440 all the way to present day with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.

With much of the hype now turning to Google+, I was inspired to recall an important recurring theme from his presentation: new technology may emerge, but old technology never really dies.

Although the printing press represented a foundational change in content delivery at the time of Gutenberg, it threatened the existing content delivery mechanism of the day: scribes (mostly monks) who copied books (mostly Bibles) by hand.

Fast forward nearly 500 years to the early 1920s when the first news program was broadcast through the airwaves by a Detroit, Michigan radio station, which undoubtedly threatened the existing content delivery mechanism of <i>that</i> period: the newspaper. In relative terms, the first television broadcast was demonstrated not long after radio in 1929 and was thought to be the killer to radio and newspaper.

Isn’t it amazing how history repeats itself? How quickly we forget the past? How quickly we sensationalize the innovation and introduction of new technology in murderous terms?

One would argue that this sensationalism results from capitalism, but I’m not going to mix business with politics. My point is that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself, whether through continuous education, retooled business objectives, heck, even with conversion rate optimization. The true death of an organization, ideal, or technology is when it ceases to innovate and evolve, but that decline is never an instant death.

The recurring theme that each new technology that comes about is a killer of this or that is a direct result of sensationalism surrounding – unfortunately – less and less progressive innovation above and beyond existing technology. Case in point: Google+.

What functionality does Google+ introduce that would cause it to be a “Facebook killer”?  Not much, because at this point in time, Google+ lacks innovation worthy of recognition as a “killer,” although they certainly did themselves a huge favor in emulating a formula that worked for Zuckerberg.

I bet it sounds like I’m raining on Google’s parade – quite the contrary. I greatly admire Google for not giving up on social media, despite several failed attempts in the past with Wave and Buzz. Google Wave’s postmortem was likely some time ago, and Buzz is likely to soon be absorbed into Google+, not because some other people didn’t love those products, but because the company made a judgment call.

And those old-school content delivery technologies like books, newspaper, radio, television, and MySpace? They’re still around, they didn’t die, and as long as someone keeps creating and consuming that content, they’re likely to stick around for a while yet.

In continuation to a relatively popular article I wrote last month on top web analytics myths, I thought I would expand upon the theme of dispelling myths again this month. This time, I turned to some fellow Search Engine Watch contributors to help crowd-sourced a list of favorite SEO myths we’ve heard over the years. In no particular order, these are our top 10 SEO myths… dispelled.

1. [Insert Fortune 500 Company] does it that way, so it must be right.

If you’re looking to the Fortune 500 for SEO tips or reverse engineering their “SEO campaigns”, stop now; F500 doesn’t “get” SEO. Unfortunately, this fact was made famous in several Conductor Research studies over the years, but hit infamy when news hit about bad linking practices at JCPenney earlier this year.

2. Onsite SEO doesn’t matter.

Internal links, title tags, semantic mark-up, and clean code are just some of the onsite SEO factors that will contribute to significant improvements in rankings, usability, and indexing.

3. Paid links are bad or buying links can get you banned in Google.

Paying for links is not always bad. Consider products and services that cost money to use but generate links to your website. These may include directory listings, advertorial content, sponsorships, press releases, etc.

In addition, the relatively recent argument that using paid links will spell doom and gloom for your site should be taken with a grain of salt. Are there ways you can sink your rankings using paid links? Absolutely. Are you going to get banned on Google for strategic placements of paid links? Probably not.

Obviously there is a white hat/black hat/gray hat blur on this point, so please feel free to discuss and comment below.

4. Keyword density doesn’t matter.

This myth is a no-brainer: search engines use algorithms to calculate relevance of content on a page. How would anyone expect search engines not to use keyword density on that page to determine subject matter?

5. Look what I did in [insert non-current year here].

Old SEO tactics are about as useful as worn car tires. Will they work? Maybe, but you’re better off spending time and money to improve your content, fix technical issues, and build links rather than spinning your tires on lame tactics.

6. Matt Cutts [or insert Expert Name or Blog here] said it [insert year here] so it must still be true.

It has never been more obvious that Google’s search algorithm changes significantly several times per year. In addition, hundreds of other signals can influence rankings with varying degrees of weight and decay unevenly over time.

Anything written by Matt Cutts or SEOmoz several years ago should likely be stricken from the record as the game has indeed changed. Google has also changed their tune in terms of public relations with respect to SEO, with Cutts appearing and speaking in greater frequency on expert panels and in videos posted to the official Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel.

7. Content is king.

This mantra has been echoing through the vast conference halls of online marketing for far too long. While content, site architecture, social media and even technical intricacies can contribute to search ranking nirvana, they pale in significance compared to the SEO power of links. Although this argument may be a little “chicken and egg”, it should be noted that we didn’t rule out the possibility for a balance between content and links in the organic search monarchy.

8. Stop paying for keywords that you rank for organically.

There has been a long-standing debate on which is more important – SEO or PPC – but the truth is success in either is mutually beneficial. Rather than turning off paid search completely as organic rankings improve, try to leverage high organic rankings for higher quality score (and therefore lower cost per click).

9. Meta tags have a huge impact.

One might argue that meta descriptions have some impact on search rankings, if Google chooses to utilize them in the search results, but meta keywords died several years ago. Please let them rest in peace.

10. You can’t hurt a site with bad links

In general, bad links scattered across your inbound link profile aren’t generally going to hurt your rankings. However, if you’re the unwitting recipient of a significant amount of bad links overwhelming the good and you don’t do something about it, you could be in for some trouble.

The best protection against spam links or bad links is to be proactive. Measure inbound links on a routine basis, keep an eye on unusual inbound linking, and enact a good link building regimen.

Thanks to SEW contributors Michael Bonfils, Rob Chant, Thom Craver, Simon Heseltine, Kristine Schachinger, and Frank Watson for sharing their SEO myths.

As usual, we’re anxious to hear from our community of readers. Heard a doozy of a myth lately? Disagree with one of the above? Let us know!

Having worked in online marketing and web analytics for nearly a decade, I’ve heard it all when it comes to myths passed around small and large companies alike. Here is a top 10 list of my favorite web analytics myths and practical advice on how to dispel them.

1. Free Analytics Software is Just as Good as Enterprise Analytics

There are several reasons why free software is never the best solution. Some of my favorite retorts to “why do we use Omniture rather than Google Analytics” often involve witty comebacks like “because I have to pay the bills” or “because my boss said so.” If that doesn’t work (and it never does), the primary reasons to go with enterprise analytics are:

• Service Level Agreements: What happens if your software fails? If you pay for analytics, you have a neck to choke; if not, you have to wait it out and pray nothing is lost.
• Data ownership: Free doesn’t mean consequence-free. Someone is paying the bill. Free software is often offered “at no cost to you.” Enterprise solutions enable you to take your data with you, should you so desire.
• Privacy: Enterprise solutions offer security and privacy through non-disclosure agreements protecting both sides of the contract.
• Customization: Hacking free solutions like Google Analytics is possible, but only to a certain degree. Enterprise solutions are built for customization with business objectives in mind.

2. Bounce Rate (or “Insert Metric Here”) is the Best Metric

Avinash Kaushik calls it the sexiest metric, but it’s not the best because there is no “best” metric. I know of several companies that employ teams of analysts whose sole responsibility it is to monitor a “God metric,” but rarely do these stand the test of time. It’s best to focus on a handful of metrics that actually drive profitable insights.

3. Everything Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, or Eric Peterson Says is Gold

Don’t get me wrong, Avinash is brilliant, but none of the experts in analytics know your business well enough to provide a plug-and-play measurement strategy. On a high level, their best practices are indeed gold, but nothing beats digging into your data and creating an analytics playbook of your own.

4. Dashboards or Reports Should Have 4 Quadrants and Only a Handful of Data

Although it’s a lofty goal to aim for when producing any content (resumes, menus, etc.), it’s extremely difficult to integrate the data, insights and visuals on a single page that caters to everyone on a distribution list. A good strategy is to start bigger than necessary to showcase your capabilities, get the attention of several stakeholders in your organization, consult with unique business units, and fine tune custom reports for each audience.

5. Insights are More Important Than Data

Sometimes key data is all your executives need to make a decision. Should your company officially support IE6 for our next redesign? If only 2 percent of visits to your site for the last six months came from IE6 and incorporating development and testing for an application would cost several million dollars, the answer is easy!

6. Unique Visitors are Real People

Unique visitors is perhaps the single most abused metric in history. If you really think about it, the metric known as unique visitors is no more than: count of persistent cookies dropped in a browser. Unique visitors do not equal browsers, individual people, or computers.

7. Analytics Code Degrades Site Performance

All code degrades site performance. If you had a single webpage with nothing on it, adding any code to it would increase load and execution time. That being said, there are customizations that add considerable bloat to your JavaScript files supporting web analytics data collection. As with any code added to a page, try to measure the benefit of adding additional code versus the cost of not having it on a page.

8. Web Analytics is the Responsibility of Marketing/Research/Communications/Operations/IT/etc.

Web analytics is the responsibility of a data-driven organization. If your website influences your business in any way, it’s everyone’s responsibility within your organization to take a portion of the responsibility for coming up with actionable business insights that increases revenue, decreases cost, takes advantage of opportunity, or mitigates risk.

9. Metrics From Different Web Analytics Vendors, Web Logs, and Databases Should Match

Web analytics is inherently inaccurate and practitioners are rarely adequately versed in statistical theory, so to argue that any one data collection source should match another is futile. There are several factors that contribute to inaccuracies in web analytics data including:

• Browser compatibility with JavaScript code employed by any given vendor.
• Cookie acceptance.
• Data corruption: receiving, executing, and transmitting.
• Server-side caching, scripting or configuration issues.
• Filters and processing rules: reverse DNS inaccuracies, data sampling, data encoding.

Look past the numbers and analyze trends, ensure your findings are statistically significant before coming to a conclusion, and always be transparent about web analytics limitations.

10. Insights From Web Analytics is Free

Nothing is free. Adding JavaScript code to a site requires time and effort, analyzing reports and deep-diving may entail hard costs and additional access to tools, and the practice of web analytics itself comes at an opportunity cost to the organization that must be considered just like any other capability.

There are plenty of other gems out there, do you have a favorite myth that I missed?

Disclosure: I originally wrote this article for SearchEngineWatch.com.

Everyone should know by now that landing page optimization is a critical tactic in your overall online marketing strategy. Optimizing your conversion rate can effectively boost your return on investment in digital marketing, as well as reduce churn and overall spend.

What most marketers won’t tell you, however, is that landing page optimization can be a double-edged sword; immediate improvements in micro conversions high up the funnel may result in lower overall prospect quality.

Consider the pitfalls of some of the most popular conversion-optimizing tips.

1. Keep Your Copy Short, Sharp, Concise

It’s hard to argue that reducing the overall content on a landing page would be anything but successful for most campaigns, as it does in fact reduce the probability that a landing page will overwhelm a prospect. However, answering fewer questions about your products or services may cause havoc to your overall conversion rate over time. When dramatically reducing your landing page content, keep a close eye on offline channels such as phone and email.

2. Remove or Deemphasize Primary & Secondary Navigation From the Template of Your Landing Page

Less escape routes mean more probability of prospects continuing along your chosen path. But without consistency across the rest of your site, overall new visitor trust may result in higher abandonment.

3. Add Trust Marks to Your Landing Pages

While I certainly can attest to the conversion lift trust marks can provide for widespread (but tasteful) use on an ecommerce site, landing pages are somewhat different. In most cases, broader phrases that ensure security that link to your trust marks or certificates can be more powerful to win prospects over and convert.

4. Testimonials & Client Logos Can Boost Your Brand

In B2B campaigns, association between large-scale brands that you do business with can definitely touch a nerve with prospects, especially for smaller start-ups. Make sure you’ve done due diligence in establishing good relationships with your partners and seek written approval for logo usage. The worst thing a marketer can do is include a logo on a landing page meant to generate interest that ends up causing turbulence with a long-term lucrative client.

5. Incentivize Your Prospects With Freebies, Calls for Urgency, etc.

While these tactics can elicit a strong reaction to first time visitors, it can also have very undesirable effects on lead quality. Many visitors are conditioned to fill out forms and commit to agreements without reading anything else on a landing page. Sometimes it’s worth it to lose a few people on your landing pages than to sacrifice your overall profitability.

The key to any good experiment is strong analysis. Ensure you closely monitor the net effect landing page tests have on the rest of your website’s performance.

Yes, we plus1'd the black-hat Pope

Search Engine Strategies 2011 was – by far – the biggest internet marketing show of the year.  By partnering with OMS, the Email Experience Council, IAB and various other organizations the show was able to crank out up to 8 sessions per time slot over 5 days of education, inspiration and conversation.  This year I was fortunate enough to speak on two panels and felt I really got my finger on the pulse of the industry.  Here’s what I noticed at this year’s SESSF…

Emphasis on SEO post-Panda

Surprisingly enough, the folks sitting in on the Search Engine Watch Lab for advanced search marketing tools and tactics on Day 3 did not seem to be hit that hard by Google Panda; if they were, they weren’t admitting it.  The recurring theme at SES for recovery after Panda seemed to be loud, clear and consistent:

• Fix duplicate content issues immediately.
• Address poor user experience by checking for high bounce rate first, time on site and page-depth second.
• Make your pages more “sticky” by including rich media such as images and video.
• Build and maintain quality links from relevant sources.  Good links promote page rank, but poor links depreciate page rank.

SEO never has been a tactic you can just set and forget, it takes work, but as Bruce Clay put it, “you don’t have to be a gold medal sprinter to outrun a bear, just faster than the other guy.”

Emphasis on Building Community

Put the “connected” in “connected marketing” by joining your users, prospects and clients online and actually participating in online conversation.  Not every social network was built alike; not every social network was built for your business.  Remember the following social media engagement tips:

• Twitter is 24/7, hyper-local, and extremely interactive.  Don’t sit on Twitter and vegetate; don’t Tweet haphazardly.  Be in it to win it.
• LinkedIn is a premier B2B community.  Make use of existing groups or start your own.  It’s a little less intense than Twitter, so it may be easier to phone it in.
• Don’t obsess on the big three: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  There are literally thousands of social media sites.

Companies that are doing it right in social media can avoid fundamental swings in traffic volumes caused by rapid Google algorithm updates.

Opportunity in Conversion

It’s obvious that this year marks a significant turning point in attendee philosophy.  From my perspective, fewer attendees are ranting and raving over SEO and paid search in favor of finding new opportunities in converting the traffic they receive.  What most don’t realize is that helping conversion can also help SEO. Win-win!

Did you attend this year’s show?  Let me know what you thought!

Disclosure: I originally wrote this article for Search Engine Watch.

One of the easiest ways to gain credibility with any business partner is to establish quick wins using conversion rate optimization. In terms of business impact, conversion optimization is a grand slam because you effectively reduce cost per action, increase revenue per action, and satisfy more visitors to your website.

As is often the problem, web analysts and marketers tend to inherit a lot of excess baggage, so choosing to focus on only one or two sore spots on a website is hard to do.

Consider these top five places to start:

1. Paid Search Landing Pages

Looking for big impact right away? Optimize those paid search landing pages and start counting the money you save on search marketing immediately. Vary your value proposition, urgency, pricing, product mix, and form length.

2. Internal Search Results Pages

Search inquiries made on your website often yield the best (and cheapest) way to determine indicators to voice of customer information. These are committed visitors that probably aren’t finding what they want intuitively.

Inspect your server logs if you have to, but find out where your on-site navigation fails to satisfy. Look at pages with no results, top queries that should be satisfied through navigation, and perhaps synonyms you didn’t consider when writing creative. Increases in conversion optimization from visits to internal search pages are usually quick wins.

3. Help Sections

Areas on a website dedicated to helping people are most often frequented by loyal customers that want to solve problems on their own, rather than cost you money by calling support numbers, or emailing support staff. Help them help you (and other customers) by doing a better job of help documents, support downloads, and public service messages.

4. Product and/or Service Recommendations

The art of the upsell is best exhibited by ecommerce giants such as Apple, Amazon, GoDaddy, and Dell. If you are able to measure cart abandonment on your site, you’re ready to start testing product and service recommendations to increase your average revenue per order (I love ARPO).

5. Top Entry Pages

Entry pages to your site (excluding home pages and landing pages) are a bit harder to optimize, because referred traffic through search or other websites isn’t always continuous or predictable, but this is traffic to your site that is (usually) free. Measure common pathways from entry pages to determine how content can be changed to reduce bounce rate and you may just improve your search rankings at the same time.

Summary

Not making the list is “talk to your sales people,” because they often have invaluable insights into top questions prospects ask that may not be answered on your site that could warrant testing.

Disappointed that your top starting point didn’t make the list? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Matt Cutts, Ben Gomes, and Amit Singhal discuss the Google search philosophy, their dedication to increase the quality of search results, and hint at possibilities for the future of the search giant.

Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch, interviews Thom Craver, Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT), Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk SEO, Garry Przyklenk, Founder, Eclipseo Online Marketing (and PPC-Advice.com), and Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo, at SES Toronto 2011 on the subject of the most recent change to Google’s algorithm called Panda.