As I’ve been playing with them for a while, I decided to go ahead and share my sources of inspiration (in a hope you’ll share yours in return).

1. Google Search

Good old Google search is quite understandably my first source of inspiration. Here’s one trick I’d like to share that always works: Google wildcard search. Just insert * anywhere in-between your topical search phrase and you’ll get plenty of suggested term variations right within SERPs:

• [amazing * swimming pools] for more ideas on swimming pool designs;
• ["what kind * are you"] for more viral quiz ideas;
• [weird *] just for something bizarre.

Quick tips:

• Use usual “viral list” cliches to get more ideas (amazing * word, awesome * word, weird * word, bizarre * word, etc). Note: in case Google decides to drop the word as being “descriptive and unimportant” be sure to place plus sign (+) before it to force Google to include it;
• StumbleUpon addon installed with search integration activated helps much to quickly make judgments as to how popular each article might be (see the stars indicator in the screenshot above)

2. Google Images

I use Google images more and more lately. Most importantly, it allows great visualization: you almost always can predict which type of content each listing represents: an ecommerce shop, “viral” blog post or any other. Thus, you only click through if it looks like something worth attention (=saves time a lot) Look:

Besides, Google images search seems much more straightforward than general search: those images that are linked to, contain search terms in alt text and file path are usually ranked higher. So first pages will contain plenty of images from viral pieces like you do (other types of content seldom put so much emphasis on images).

3. Digg Search

I hadn’t used it before it was improved so it is hard to tell how much better it became but now I just love it! Here’s a quick guide:

1. Go to Digg;
2. Provide your base search term and include +p to make it show only those stories that hit the front page.

That’s usually enough to get an idea of what type of topics end up going popular on Digg.

Here are a few more useful Digg search filters:

• Narrow search by media (stories / videos / images): search sidebar option;
• See only popular stories on your topic coming from one particular site (site:domain.com);
• Add +b to see buried stories (another very essential option for your topic analysis).

4. Flickr Groups

Flickr is an awesome source of inspiration. Last year I did a detailed post on Flickr search tools that make searching it much easier. Another useful tip that always turn effective for me is browsing through Flickr groups that unite photos on one particular topic.

While I didn’t have much luck finding really cool Flickr groups through its built-in Groups search option, I came up with an alternative way:

1. Search all images using your base term (and probably using one of the tools mentioned above);
2. Look which “pools” most popular / commented / favorited images belong to. Chances are, you will find many quality relevant Flickr groups this way:

5. Inspiration “Lucky” Buttons

Oftentimes. you just don’t even know the base words: you just need something awesome to write about. Or you’re just stuck and need something completely new and fresh. Or you have much free time (which is unlikely, I know).

In all those situations, just clicking through random links and scanning everything that comes up is the best thing you can do. Here are a few tools that will help:

StumbleUpon ToolBar “Stumble!” Button

• Just click it and you will be shown most popular stories that are likely to appeal to you (based on your preferences and SU browsing and thumbing history).
• You can also customize it to show (a) pages from one of the channels, (b) pages thumbed by your friends, (c) pages related to the term you specify:

FriendBar “Lucky” Button

FriendBar is a FireFox addon that aggregates your Facebook and Twitter accounts allowing you to track updates in both social media networks. One of its features is a “Lucky button” that shows you a random story currently popular on Twitter.

Yoono “Surprise” Button

Yoono is another FireFox addon that creates a handy “social” sidebar in your browser aggregating your Twitter, Facebook, Piczo, Flickr and Friendfeed accounts. By clicking a “Surprise” button at the bottom of the widget you will be taken to a random page.

• The button sows the most relevant page based on the content in your bookmark folder.
• You can also ask for a “surprise” based on one of your bookmark folders.
• You can check an option to have a surprise each time you launch your browser.

Digg Random Story

Digg FireFox Extension (among other cool features) shows “Random” Digg story to diversify your browsing experience. This way it give some SU feel to Digg which can also turn useful at times.

Any inspiration tips to share? Share them in the comments!

Post image by naama

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• He/She may want to see absolutely “fair” results (not influenced by his/her recorded browsing preferences, territory, etc);
• He/She may want to be served “non-targeted” Google ads;
• He/She may want the competitors to be unaware they are being watched (have you ever noticed any [site:yoursite.com] type of Google referrals? This is quite enough to suspect someone is after you).

So here are a few steps to take to ensure some preferred level of Google privacy:

[Btw, I do see the irony behind trying to make our sites visible to Google while getting invisible ourselves :)]

1. Use Google Privacy Greasemonkey Scripts:

GooglePrivacy is a cool Greasemonkey script that is claimed to work the following way:

• It replaces all tracking cookies with faked data.
• It disables the script sending Google your browsing records:

Normally each link on a google search page has an onmousedown script that sends a request to their servers telling them what you clicked on, it’s an invasion of privacy and it slows down your connection.

Remove Google re-directs: I’ve listed three Greasemonkey scripts turning Google tracking re-directs within SERPs into direct link for privacy and usability purposes.

2. Configure Your FireFox Browser:

Try accessing this page to see how your browser is passing your referrer string. You can configure FireFox to hide your referrer string (hat tip to Distilled) by following these easy steps:

• In the Firefox address bar, type about:config
• In the “Filter” box, type “referer“
• Double click the line named ‘network.http.sendRefererHeader‘
• In the dialog box, enter 0 and click “OK“
• Click referer checking page to check that Firefox isn’t passing your referer string (make sure that the first line is blank).

3. Disable Google Web History

Obviously you are well aware of the fact that unless you opt out, Google will be saving your search and browsing history to “improve the search quality” and show you personalized results.

Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services.

You are free to pause the feature as well as remove items already stored.

Obviously, you can turn off personalization of search results by simply signing out of Google account.

4. Configure or Uninstall Google Toolbar

That’s never been a secret that Google is using its official toolbar statistics:

Any time you use the Google Toolbar to contact Google, such as by sending a search query to Google, the Toolbar sends standard, limited information including your machine’s IP address and one or more cookies. This data is retained in Google’s server logs and protected according to our general Privacy Policy.

There’s almost no definitive way to tell how much this influences the search results returned to you personally but to be on the safe side, you may want to block this leak too.

You are given the option to disable the user stats via Google Toolbar settings:

1. Go the Toolbar’s settings ( icon).
2. (Firefox) click the Search tab.
3. Deselect the “Send usage statistics to Google” checkbox.
4. Click Save.

Alternatively, you can just uninstall the toolbar. Here are a few addons for you to perform its most useful features:

1. SearchStatus (which displays Google PageRank), though it has been slower than the official toolbar;
2. And this post of mine lists two alternative addons that offer quick access to Google services (like Gmail, image search, etc).

5. Anything Else?

Did I miss anything? Add your tips in the comments!

Post imageby striatic

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A lot of time passed since my post on calls-to-action but I am still getting comments and requests from people who are willing to get their site visitors to act. One of the recent comments was about optimizing your site for phone calls: how to place your company number to start getting calls.

I don’t know any extraordinary hacks (if you do, please share) but here’s what I know about why and how to make your telephone number visible:

Do you actually need a phone number on your site?

Usability:

1. A phone number is an effective way to get your visitors’ instant feedback (view the number of calls you get daily as an indicator of the website usability especially after the redesign or some tweaking);
2. A prominent phone number on a website builds the trust and confidence (the Internet is impersonal enough: adding some evidence that there are real people out there - like the physical address and the phone number) makes people feel more comfortable). The telephone number offers an additional, convenient way to order, but most importantly it implies that a live person is ready to assist.

Source: e-tailing.com

SEO:

• A telephone number might be one of the on-page trust identifiers. One of the facts supporting this theory for example is that one of the old Yahoo criteria for listing was a valid phone number on the site contact page. (Some editors would even try the number to make sure it is legit);
• Search engines are often believed to associate local area code as the local search rankings factor.

Stick to the easily recognized formats:

A U.S. phone number separates the area code, exchange, and number into three fields. Parentheses surround the area code field, and a dash separates the exchange and number fields. Thus the correct way to format a US phone number to make sure the US-based visitor instantly recognizes the format is:

(XXX) XXX - XXXX

To make it universally recognizable, the phone number should contain the country calling code:

+1 (XXX) XXX - XXXX

Mind the placement:

There are traditional (obvious) placements of your company phone number:

• Contact page;
• Help page;
• About-us page, and the like.

What should be noted here is that the best thing you can do to make sure your visitor is going to like you and your company from the very start is to make sure the phone number is easy to find. Often the owners seem to do their best to avoid the phone calls: look at this example (the phone number can only be found after the second click):

Contextual phone numbers

Some really essential steps in the buying process may require additional help or just re-inforce the feeling of confidence:

• Order page (Is there actually a person behind the site?);
• Checkout process (Is the site secure enough to entrust it with my billing details?);
• Service description (Are there any custom solution to fit my needs?); etc

Increased visibility:

It often makes sense to make the phone number visible sitewide (in the head banner for example).

Adding the phone number in the title tag (as well as meta description) might also make sense (both FireFox and IE will make the phone numbers clickable within the search results to make the listing stand out and thus more clicked ):

Additional reading:

• Providing contact details;
• Do you put a phone number on your site?

Post image by Daniel*1977

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Type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade…

["simple" is the key word here]

CAPTCHAs present a very controversial topic: you can’t do without them as a webmaster and you can’t stand them as a user.

Some CAPTCHAs are just impossible to figure - no matter who you are (a robot or a human), you won’t pass the test. Here’s my gallery of impossible CAPTCHAs:

Read fast:

Source: mgccl.com

Find cats:

Source: Depressed Programmer

Train your imagination:

Source: Digg.com

Learn other languages:

Source: Sveit.com

Look for the hidden code:

Source: hidden-3d.com

Just guess:

(The second character cannot be figured I guess)

Source: neogaf.com

(Do you see text at all?)

Source: flickr.com

Know your 1-2-3:

Source: backreaction.blogspot.com

Post image: Geek and Poke via Search Engine People

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• You may want to separate business life from your personal life (really having your husband/wife and your clients on same Facebook account may be tedious);
• You don’t want your partners and clients to know about your other projects (why would I want the SEO world to know that I own a creepy celebrity blog on blogspot and promote it on Myspace… and no, you don’t want to see that Myspace page!).

You know me as Ann Smarty, that’s my SEO pseudonym, and if you search this name on Google you will see only my professional profiles, professional comments and professional articles. But my SEO business is only part of my Internet life and I don’t want you to know (trust me, you don’t want to know that either:)) what stuff I stumble from my “private” StumbleUpon account and what comments I leave (or used to leave) on fellow Myspace profiles.

OK, I guess now you are intrigued to know that but that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to live several online lives, that’s totally OK and here are some tools for that (yes, there are tools for that either!)

Create several FireFox profiles:

Imagine you can run several FireFox profiles simultaneously and be logged in to various profiles there at a time (again, this is not (only) for spamming). For example: you have one for stumbling professional sites and one for other fun stuff you don’t want people to know you like it.

I did a detailed post on how to do create several FireFox profiles previously and here’s a quick recap:

1. Exit FireFox;
2. (Windows) Go: “Start” button => “Run” => Type “firefox.exe -ProfileManager” => “OK” button;
3. Click “Create” in a profile manager and choose the name for your new profile, then click “Start FireFox”;
4. Repeat steps 1-3 to create as many profiles as you want;
5. Done! Now each time you want to switch to another profile or change the default profile, repeat steps 1-2 and choose the one you want.

• Install this sweet FireFox extension to quickly switch between profiles.
• Now save different sets of social media profiles on different profiles.

Quick tip: I name my FireFox profile same as my social media moniker I want this profile for.

Use multiprotocol instant messaging application

If you have several IMs installed or even various accounts on each one for various groups of your friends, you can connect them all in one handy utility.

DigsBy is by far my favorite such application because it connects so many IMs and social networks that you can hardly think of any suggested feature for it. Find inside:

• IMs: GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook chat;
• Email notifications: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL mail;
• Social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.

My favorite features of the app are:

• For each social network add as many accounts as you want;
• Sort Gtalk (and other) contacts into groups (!);
• Set tracking for any GTalk buddy: e.g. get notified when some person signs in or changes the status message;
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows;
• Set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status right from Digsby.

Use some extra tools to make your parallel lives easier:

• This script makes it easy to switch between multiple Gmail accounts. It is pretty fast and can make my life much easier.
• Use temporal email address to sign up: most sites require an email address to sign up. If you do not care about their updates, just use any temporal address for quicker registration;
• I thought of adding a few tips on IP switching but then thought I’d look like a complete spammer in that case. So I’ll just stop here, hope I managed to do that before you thought I was a jerk and just left this site for good.

Post image by SideLong

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Still, there are some tactics behind crafting something that becomes viral. One such tactic is making fake mini websites that feature some sensation or weird concepts.

Those websites create their own imaginary world around them (for example, describe the life in a non-existent country) or share some spoofed scientific research or experiments or claim to describe an event that never happened, etc.

The best thing about those sites is that they don’t require much time or effort and are eagerly shared. Very often all you need is to contact a power blogger or even a journalist and share your hoax and it will work like a charm.

Let’s have a look at just a few examples to get an idea and inspiration:

Brand it:

Notice how the Onion, the weekly “satirical” stream of fake news, brand their video category: the logo, video watermarks, and the overall design are CNN-styled. This trick already makes their stream viral:

Make it easy to believe:

Male Pregnancy, the official site dedicated to the first male pregnancy, is a great example of how to design a hoax site. Everything here testifies for the reliability of this “scientific experiment”: video documentary, online EKG, magazine cover, etc.

Brainstorm a sticky concept

Some ideas don’t even require any design work or time to develop. Look at Internet First Page and Internet Last Page for example: all they needed was an idea and the domain name for that, and here we go a nice naturally-linked page to transfer link juice wherever you need:

Another cool example: turnofftheinternet.com

Grab a sensational domain

Sometimes a domain is what makes a website spread. A great example of that is PetsORFood.com for the site that claims to deliver exotic animals (like baby seals) meat to American dinner tables. The domain speaks for itself and provokes emotions by combining two “uncombineable” concepts that do not fit together: pets who we love dearly and food which we eat:

Post image by Capture Queen ™

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I recently shared on SEJ my latest favorite FireFox addon Search Cloudlet that generated a tag cloud of Google and Yahoo SERPs. I have also suggested its possible implication for keyword context research.

The interesting part of this whole thing is that the tool developers appeared to be based in my home country - Ukraine. Naturally, we got into contact and arranged to keep each other up-to-date of search news.

So today I received a message of them (it is hard to believe but we still communicate in English ) sharing the tool awesome feature: it now works for Twitter.

So, if you have it installed, you will see a tag cloud whenever you visit anyone’s profile or Twitter search.

For a profile page you will see a user’s favorite terms used, as well as who he recently addressed his tweets to:

For Twitter search see most popular term “neighbors” as well as recent related hashtags, most actively addressed Twitterers:

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It is funny I’ve started a new project but haven’t shared it with my best friends - SEOsmarty readers (no, actually it is sad)…

From now on, apart from seeing me regularly on Search Engine Journal, you’ll be able to read my posts at DailySEOtip.com - a new blog I’ve started together with my boss and good friend Loren Baker.

The site will be featuring one fresh SEO tip daily. You are welcome to come along and comment (we DOfollow all links in the comments by the way). Besides, you can submit your daily tip and either I or Loren will publish it and link back to your site.

We will also be twittering SEO tips at DailySEO Twitter profile.

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I’ve lately had to deal with a huge database-driven website. What troubled me most was the huge navigation menus - and I am wracking my brain over the ways to optimize it both for users and search engine bots.  It is always the hardest - to organize huge number of links into one easy-to-navigate and clear menus.

I am researching the topic now, drawing the site structure on a sheet of paper and still have to come up with the “perfect” solution.

Now, the best way to educate yourself is to learn from examples. Therefore I decided to look into one of the most successful (in terms of performance, not implementation) examples dealing with the huge database of products and sections: Amazon.com

Below, I am giving the history of Amazon.com navigation menus evolution without going into any extra ramblings. Your thoughts, resources and opinions are much appreciated! I promise to do a follow-up here or at SEJ linking to everyone whose comments I’ll be referring to!

I’ll start my analysis from 1999 when Amazon sidebar navigation looked overwhelming to say at least:

The key features:

• Website sections sorted into first- (bold links) and second-tier (”… And More” section - containing all things that can’t be combined - is a good sign of broken website information architecture) ;
• Inconsistent website navigation: why do “Top Sellers”, “Recommendation Center”, “New Releases” and “Soundtracks” come in one pack?

In 2000 Amazon took some steps to make the navigation menus much shorter (the image below) - second-tier levels were removed. It might be much more focused that way and less disturbing but does provide much less information for the first-time visitor.

During the whole next year it remained still top-tier-only but it continued to grow until it turned into something surprisingly huge and even more unfocused. Most elements seem to be completely in the wrong place: Video and DVD? In Theaters? Magazine???

It had remained to be that huge monster until 2006 when they changed the design twice again: first time it turned into something even larger and clumsier (with second level being back):

And then into something even huger but surprisingly much better organized (click to enlarge):

Positive steps in information organization:

• Main categories are listed in alphabetical order;
• Categories and subcategories are all logically related (e.g. there’s no more “Top Rated” and “Soundtracks” listed under one roof).

As of today (January 2009) Amazon sidebar navigation (hover) menus contains even more links (screenshot from Google cache to get an idea how it looks like with JavaScript disabled):

The first thing that comes to my mind is that they renamed the whole block from unclear “Browse” to “Shop All Departments” (which is already a good move).

Secondly, they have reconsidered the alphabetical order and probably list them by popularity now (I guess popularity was also the criteria behind re-arranging the subcategories).

So, what do you think on the whole topic of arranging links into the navigation menus? Any tips links observations to share?

Post image by flattop341

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Today in the morning I was pinged by one of my Facebook friends with some cute news: a start-up called Magpie (aff link) offers you to monetize your Twitter account and earn money for Tweeting the ads.

My instant reaction was “Nah…” The whole idea of earning money from friends sounds somewhat not good. But curiosity won, I went ahead and signed up. You can estimate how much you will be earning by clicking the “Start” tab.

So far I have no real data to share as I spread 0 Tweets and thus can’t see any statistics but here’s what the service looks like both from outside and inside:

What the service promises

• Magpie (aff link) promises to give you full control over your Tweets: you can set the ad frequency, stop it any time and even pre-approve each ad before it will be tweeted on your behalf.
• You can add a disclaimer before or after the advertisement text before the ad goes live to warn your friends that the Tweet is sponsored;
• Advertisements are served based on the person’s general networks (so the service appears to classify the whole Twitterati into groups by interests);
• You can spend the earned credits to advertise your own product or site (this one looks pretty cool by the way).
• You can also earn money for any new Advertiser who signs up through your personal referral link, you will earn a 30% commission of our transaction fees.
• Payment is made via PayPal as soon as you earn at least €50.00

Why I am in a doubt:

• Even with disclaimer and pre-approval, won’t this result in my following loss?
• CPM model: will those ads be ever clicked? Will they devalue Twitter: “in order to raise your revenue, all you need is to multiply your tweets or to increase your followers. And their site promotes these two facts for every low revenue account” (as my friend Rishi Lakhani points out);
• While the design is pretty sleek and clear, why would anyone trust the guys? Where are people I refer listed? How all my stats will look like?
• How is Twitter going to react? They have been expected to monetize themselves for a year now - will they bear with someone monetizing their network prior to them?

Anyway, I am curious to see how this will evolve. I definitely see the potential (for both parts: publishers and advertisers). I’ve never been paid for participating in social media communities and it might be a cool opportunity to combine business with pleasure.

So what do you think? Would you join? Would you pay for advertisements? Would you click the advertisements?

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