Download SEOLExA SEO Link Exchange Analyzer 1.0

SEOLExA Tool

Moreover I thought it would be even cooler if the tool could detect some nasty tricks that actually make the link worthless from a SEO point of view like: rel=”nofollow”, noindex meta tags, robots.txt blocks, javascript links, iframes etc… and then assigns a proper Link Status to each link.

Finally you will get an HTML or CSV report that will look more or less like this: SEOLExA HTML report example

That is what SEOLExA is supposed to do the only thing that you need to have is a list of your link exchanges that looks like this:

the site URL where link should be, the link URL to your page
http://site1.example.com, http://www.webproductblog.com
http://the-guy-I-exchanged-links-with-a-year-ago.com, http://mysite.com/
http://…., etc…

this file you just need to name seolexainput.txt and put it in the same folder like SEOLExA.jar and your automated link exchange check is set up

SEOLExA Screenshot

NOTE: this tool is free and there are no warranties whatsoever. Anyway, I tested it with bunch of sites and I seems to work fine. If you find some pages where SEOLExA categorized a link badly, please let me know!

The post SEOLExA SEO Link Exchange Analyzer 1.0 Beta Release first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Imagine the following example: You want to check the visits for a set of specific keywords. Let´s say call this group “christmas keywords” and it should match all this keywords: christmas, xmas, x-mas, santa claus, advent, chrimbo, yule, gift idea etc…
Just the right keyword group to measure the outcome of your Seo optimization for christmas!

You could get the idea and create an Advanced Segment with 8+ “Keyword contains” Rules. That works but it is a bit painful to do so many rules in one Segment (…and Google Analytics users are like all other users very lazy ). Moreover, you can´t put more than 20 rules like this. So what if you want to check bigger keyword groups? Let me show you which cool things you can do with bigger keyword groups with 3 simple examples:

1. The Basic SEO Keywords Group Regex

   The easier and more powerful solution is to use an Advanced Segment with “Keywords matches Regular Expression” rule:

   christmas|xmas|x-mas|santa claus|advent|chrimbo|yule|gift idea|and so on…

   This simple, but powerful regular expression uses the “|” Alternation operator. So “christmas|xmas” basically means “match ‘christmas’ OR ‘xmas’“. Easy isn´t it? In Google Analytics this will just anything that contains any of the mentioned words.

2. The Regex for Keywords Groups Excluding Combined Keywords

   You could might want to make your keyword group more specific and exclude combined words like “christmastree” or “christmaspresent” and you only want to match keywords that contain “christmas” without the combined words like “christmasparty“. You can use the regex:

   \b(christmas|xmas)\b

   The “\b” is the word boundary. It just marks the End/Start of a word. So this won´t match “christmastree” or “xmastree” anymore, since the second \b requires that after christmas needs to be the end of the word. It will match “christmas tree” though. Important: Note the use of the round brackets here! “\bchrismas|xmas\b” would match words that begin with “christmas” or end with “xmas“! It´s like in mathematics: 5 * 1 + 3 is not the same like 5 * (1 + 3)

3. The regex for exact match keywords

   Too make it even more specific: It might be useful for you too have a keyword group that matches only EXACTLY the keywords that you want, and nothing else. Check the following example: (let´s use some other example keywords, I have already enough of “xmas” )

   ^(keyword|keywordlist|keywordresearch|seokeywords|seo-consulting|seotips|search engine optimization)$

   The carret “^” marks the begin of the line, while the “$” marks the end.
   This really only matches the keywords “keyword”, “keywordlist“, “keywordresearch“,”seokeywords“, “seo-consulting“, “seotips“, “search engine optimization“. It won´t match for example: “keyword analysis” or “seo guides” – It wont even match “seo consulting” or “searchengine optimization“, it really just matches the exact keywords that you choose for your Segment and a “-” instead of ” ” is already too much of a difference. Note again the use of the round brackets!

Just a note: In Google Analytics you can use Regex also at the bottom of the reports:

you can use your regex also in the bottom of the analytics reports!

Another Note: There is a max. length of the regular expression that you can use in Google Analytics! After trying extremely long regex (Yes, I needed to try it out )Google Analytics refused to accept them and popped out errors.

And yet another Note: There are actually more interesting ideas to use Regular Expressions in analytics: Cool is to check for number of keywords in the query-keywords. This is nice to analyze how “longtailish” your SEO traffic is.

For the case that you want to learn more about Regex: A very good regular expressions tutorial you can find at www.regular-expressions.info – There all Regex are explained in detail and there you can find good how-to examples and examples of the most common pitfalls of regex.

The more visits your website has the more fun it is to do keyword grouping I hope that was a helpful tip for you. Any doubts? => Comment.

The post Clever SEO Keyword Grouping with Regex in Google Analytics first appeared on webproductblog.com.

“Feelings of euphoria and weightlessness are normal. Do not be alarmed!”
That was the alert message that appeared with the google instant launch.

But the Euphoria didn´t last too long for me and all this magic of not pressing “Enter” on my keyboard turned out to be useless for me (Although, it made me think “WOW!” first…).

Don´t get me wrong: There are many Google tools that I really like. For example I prefer Google Chrome to Firefox …it is just that Google Instant didn´t made it in my personal favorite Google features list.

Well, before starting the big discussion about Google Instant: Let´s watch the Official Google Instant Promotion Video to get an idea about what and for whom this feature was designed for!

• “Search is a hard problem and still far from being solved” – Oh yes in that point I agree with the Google Instant product manager!
• “Seing results instantly lets you refine your search as you type” – Does that phrase really make sense? Google Instant does NOT refine your search, it´s broadening your search! Why? Let´s say I am looking for the query “Guides for SEO”: After i typed the word “Guides” it will load instantly some results for the query “Guides” (First result was about city guides….) => “Guides” is a broader search than “Guides for SEO” => why should the broader search be interesting for me, before I have checked the deeper, more specified query?

Here go my reasons why Google Instant is not really useful for me:

1. Instant did NOT make search faster for me! According Google: “Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.” Ha! See what I got as an instant result for this “reasons why google instant sucks” example. The first Instantly appearing result was something about “reasons why I love you”:

   Did it help me that there “magically” appeared results that I was not looking for? => Nopes! Since they are usually irrelevant to what I was really looking for (people complaining about Google Instant) all this results for “I love you” and “lyrics” couldn´t really improve nor accelerate my search experience.

2. I usually search with the Google Toolbar in Firefox or with Google Chrome. This is the fastest way to search! why should I first open the Google homepage and then perform a search? The time that I spend writing Google.com & waiting for the page to load is time that I could spend for other things. Google Instant doesn´t work with browser toolbars so that is why I am usually searching without Google Instant.
3. I am a long-tail searcher. I guess that about 80% of all searches that I do consist of 5 or more search keywords. I usually have a very clear idea about what I am searching for and to get the more relevant results I have to use more keywords in my search phrase. Google Instant doesn´t help me with this, because it tries to interrupt me and wants me to check the results for fewer keywords phrases. This is against my preferred searching behavior, so I don´t really need it.
4. I became Google Instant blind! Damn, how many useless “instant” queries did I produce in the last weeks? I don´t remember, but it was a lot! Basically, I never clicked on them, because it just was not what I was looking for and in the end I was subconciously no longer looking at all at them! I was even no longer realizing that there appears all this instant results stuff… I ended up ignoring it the same way like advertisement banners.
   => That is the ultimate sign that it is not useful for me! If the user´s brain decides to no longer pay attention to some happenings on the page then it is not useful, FULLSTOP! It is fancy, but that´s about it! Switching Google Instant off means more relaxation for my brain and more efficient search experience for me and that is all I want (and probably other users as well!) and no fancy stuff that is useless in the end.
5. Instant is wasting server & bandwidth resources! Google even mentioned in their promotion video that their engineering team first thought that it is insane to do instant search. It is producing billions of additional queries, most of them a very likely not fulfilling the user´s needs. So why waste resources for something that is just fancy, but not really helpful? Sometimes when my internet connection had its bad moments the Google Instant annoyed me while I wanted to type a longer search query.

Reasons why I sometimes still use Google Instant:

1. It has a very high fun factor! Google Intstant combined with the Google suggestion can really produce some funny search experience You doubt that? Ha! Then check what happened during my search for “Reasons why Google Instant sucks” query:




2. For the case that you don´t really know what you search for or when you are just bored then Google Instant is quite cool. It is a bit like pushing the stumbleupon button! Yeah, check it out: Just type one or two random letters in the google search box and see what results “magically” appear! It can be fun

What´s your take on “Google Instant”? You don´t think it´s useful or do you think that I am just too Oldschool to really see the value of Google Instant? Here is your chance to be heard!

The post 5 Reasons Why I Don´t need Google Instant first appeared on webproductblog.com.

The good thing is: there are thousands of SEO guides for beginners available. After searching for some Google queries for sure you will find lots of results…

The bad thing is: there are thousands of SEO guides for beginners available…

or in other words: there exists a bunch of bad stuff as well. To avoid that you waste your time figuring out which ones are good. I have pre-selected some guides that I can recommend.

1. Google´s SEO starter guide

   Update:There is now a newer version of the Seo starter guide availabale!

   Let´s start with the “Google´s SEO starter guide” from the official google webmaster blog. Since Google is the god of search engines, it is a must to check their official statements from time to time. And the google engineers were nice enough to prepare this guide about search engine optimization for beginners. Especially for Onsite SEO factors this is a good introductory pdf guide.

2. The Beginners guide to search engine optimization

   The probably most comprehensive SEO guide that you can get online for free is the “beginners guide to search engine optimization” from SEOmoz. For sure you will not get bored reading this! Lots of info, tons of cool illustrations and the relaxed writing style make this Tutorial worth to read.

3. SEO help

   

Last not least the great book “SEO Help: 20 Search Engine Optimization steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page*” by David Amerland. For the case that you know nothing about SEO so far then this book will give you very quick an overview and you will know what search engine optimization is about. Every chapter contains examples that make it easy to follow this comprehensive 120 pages guide.

I hope you liked my seo guide suggestions! You have other favorites? Feel free to post them below.

The post 3 Quick Start SEO Guides for Beginners first appeared on webproductblog.com.

The participants of the IE6 survey had the option to choose between the following 4 Answers for the question:

“Do you think IE6 support is still necessary?”

And this is the outcome:

1. No IE6 support on my sites & No flowers for the IE6 funeral! (43.0%, 20 Votes)
2. No! IE6 is dead for me and I consider sending flowers to the IE6 funeral (28.0%, 13 Votes)
3. I can still see a pretty significant percentage of IE6 users on my page – IE6 compatibility is absolutely necessary for my business! (15.0%, 7 Votes)
4. I try to have an IE6 compatible website, but only if it is not too painful! (15.0%, 7 Votes)

Do I still care about IE 6? Not really… Well, it depends on how big the IE 6 user percentage of the website is. And this can be very different for each site! If I look into my Analytics, basically two factors seem to influence this:

1. “Geekyness” of the website – the less geeky your website topic the more IE 6 users you can expect
2. location of your target market – Emerging markets have a bigger IE 6 user percentage than industrialized countries

So I guess that all the voters for “I can still see a pretty significant percentage of IE6 users on my page” are webmasters of a non-geeky websites. I just can´t imagine an iphone-blog with 15% of IE6 users

Anyway: No more posts about IE6! Soon nobody will think about this browser-dinosaur anymore. Even Microsoft-guys want to “destroy” IE6 now!

The post The IE6 survey results first appeared on webproductblog.com.

soccer & web analytics

If your business model is not directly related with soccer and your target markets are in countries that participate in the World Championship you will very likely see traffic drops during the important soccer matches.

To quickly measure this you can do a hourly traffic analysis with your Google analytics.

With just 6 simple steps you are able to figure out how the FIFA World Cup affected your websites traffic:

1. Open the top right calendar view in Google Analytics and select the day of the soccer match:
2. Select the “compare to past” checkbox and then select the day a week before the match (you should use the day a week before to clear out weekly traffic cyles)
3. Open the Visits view in the “Visitors” folder of Google Analytics.
4. In the Visits view of Google Analytics you can go to an hourly view. Just select at the top right of the visits graph the left “hourly” icon of the “graph by” selection
5. Assuming your site has a stable (and not too little) traffic, you should see the blue and green line more or less at the same level for each hour. Now check the hours of the soccer game and you might see a nice traffic hole here.
6. You can also mouse-over the graph the get the exact traffic per hour and the percentages of increase/decrease

The Vuvuzela *erm* Soccer World Cup can have really big impact on the behavior of people especially in soccer crazy countries like Brazil. See the illustrations of dead streets in Brazil during the Brazil vs. North Corea match! Any doubts that the soccer world cup affects your traffic? Let me know and use the contact form below for your arguments.

The post Watch out for the World Cup Effect in your Google Anaytics! first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Advertisement Blocker Extensions:

• AdBlock – Version: 1.4.14
  

  AdBlock for Chrome! Blocks ads all over the web. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars by our users!

  I really like it when users click on the advertisements on my websites, but I don´t like to see advertisement myself. If you are banner-blind like me, you should have this extension

• FlashBlock – Version: 0.9.30
  

  FlashBlock for Chrome. Block them all, or be selective with the embedded whitelist manager

  Unfortunately most flash stuff in the web is more annoying than useful. To make it even worse, many times flash gets abused to create annoying self-launching video and music ads that in the worst case fly over the valuable website content… don´t waste your time with that and block flash. For the case you found a really cool flash website you can just switch flashblock off with one click.

Webdevelopment Chrome Extensions:

• BuiltWith Technology Profiler – Version: 1.4
  

  Find out what the website you are visiting is built with using this extension.

  This is a great tool for a quick technology check. You will get a list of all technologies used on that page and a short description what it is about.

• Pendule – Version: 0.0.10
  

  Web developer tools for Chrome.

  Similar to the famous Webdeveloper Firefox plugin. Allows you to manipulate many things like: Enable/Disable CSS and cookies etc.

SEO Chrome Extensions:

• Chrome SEO – Version: 0.7
  

  The Google Chrome SEO Extension. Make your SEO tasks easier with Chrome SEO Tools, includes ‘all’ the stats and data you need.

  Basic SEO stats about the webpage put together in a nice user interface

• SEO Site Tools – Version: 2.78
  

  On-Page / External metrics, Social Media info, Metrics / numbering on Yahoo, Bing, Google SERPs.Extends WMT, YSE and GA with metrics

  

Quite powerful SEO tool. Also shows SEO info inside Search result pages and Google Analytics if you want.

Social Media Chrome Extensions:

• Chromed Bird – Version: 1.8.0
  

  Chromed Bird is a Twitter extension that allows you to follow your timelines and interact with your Twitter account.

  Twitter App for Google Chrome. Cool: It allows separate columns for twitter lists.

• Chrome Reader – Version: 1.1
  

  simple Google RSS Reader subscripton extension

  Makes it very comfortable to subscribe to RSS feeds and organize the feeds with labels in Google Reader!

• Delicious Tools – Version: 1.0.4
  

  Quick access to saving Delicious bookmarks. Customizable keyboard shortcut. Selected text populates your notes field.

  A simple delicious bookmark button for chrome.

• Feedly – Version: 2.14.230
  

  Feedly organizes your favorite sources in a magazine-like start page.

  This is very cool! Organizes all your RSS feeds from Google reader.

• StumbleUpon – Version: 1.3.22.1
  

  Discover the best of the web!

  Well, this extension you just must have if you like stumbleupon

Webdesign Chrome Extensions:

• MeasureIt! – Version: 1.1.2
  

  Draw out a ruler that will help you get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

  This works like the Firefox plugin. Makes it very easy to measure the size of page elements.

• TinEye Reverse Image Search – Version: 0.1
  

  Find out where an image came from, how it’s being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or find higher resolution versions.

  This is awesome! Find out who publishes your images on the web! Must have for photographers.

• Webpage Screenshot – Version: 1.1.9.8
  

  Fast&Simple solution to save JPG screenshots of any webpage. The first extension that captures the whole page.

  Simple and easy screenshot-tool. Nice: offers also Full-webpage screenshot that captures the whole page even if its bigger than your screen

Miscellaneous Chrome Extensions:

• Clickable Links – Version: 1.1.2
  

  Turns unclickable urls & email addresses into clickable ones.

  This is very comfortable – no more non-clickable links and emails on websites! Never again!

• Google Mail Checker – Version: 3.1
  

  Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to open your inbox.

  A must have if you use Google Mail! You don´t have to have an Googlemail-tab open all the time anymore!

• Send using Gmail (no button) – Version: 1.11.3
  

  Makes the Gmail webmail your default email application (original Google extension repackaged without toolbar button, safer links)

  Whenever you click on an Email address it will open a Gmail window.

• Google Similar Pages beta (by Google) – Version: 0.5.4.5
  

  Discover webpages similar to the page you’re currently browsing.

  Displays similar pages to the current page as if you would use the Google Operator “related: “

Your favorite Google Chrome internet browser extension is not listed here? Let me know and write a comment below!

The post Top Google Chrome Internet Browser Extensions first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Things that I really like in Google Chrome:

• It is really fast: loading new pages or opening a chrome browser window is definitely fast.
• It is still fast even after adding dozens of Chrome Extensions!
• The Google Chrome User Interface is very simple and not polluted with unnecessary features that you don´t use regularly

Cool minimalistic Chrome User Interface: Everything that you need in a very small space: Tabs, back buttons, Refresh Button, URL field and Extension Icons on the right.

Things that I like in Firefox:

• Firefox still has the biggest variety of useful Firefox Plugins
• Since Firefox is together with Internet Explorer the most popular browser, all the webdesigners test their sites in Firefox – and you can be pretty much sure that every website works fine while browsing through the web
• It is an open-source browser

Reasons why I will no longer use Firefox as my primary browser:

• The more plugins you add to Firefox, the slower it tends to be – that doesn´t happen in Chrome. Since I want to have many plugins and there are now also quite a bit of cool Chrome Plugins, I better go with Google Chrome.
• The way how extensions are implemented in Google´s minimalistic UI is much cooler. No more toolbars-crap that polluted the Firefox user interface.

Reasons that prevent me from fully switching to the Google Chrome Browser:

• There are some Firefox plugins I can´t live without that are (not yet) available for Google Chrome like for example Selenium IDE for QA testing or Firebug (the Chrome version of Firebug Lite didn´t really convince me so far)
• Google Chrome is not yet on everybody´s “browsers-to-test” list => from time to time you can see smaller design bugs while browsing through the web

In the end I couldn´t fully switch to Chrome due to some plugins that I just need for work, but for the everyday use I now prefer Chrome, because of the good speed performance and the convincing user interface.

BTW: I skipped comparing Google Chrome with Internet Explorer, because I just assume that no web developers, webdesigners and web product managers seriously use Internet Explorer for the following reasons: (Ok, for browser testing purposes it makes sense to watch your sites through IE eyes from time to time)

• I don´t personally now people working in the internet industry that personally prefer Internet Explorer
• If I look into webproductblog.com Google Analytics, I can only see a very small percentage of around 15% IE users

If you don´t agree with that and know a good argument to use IE, please let me know and write a comment below!

The post Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Firefox – The Browser Duel first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Facebook has its opinion about IE6...

But the times have changed! The percentage of IE6 users decreases constantly and it is just a matter of time until it will disappear. In the end the cost of IE6 compatibility might be higher than the pity of serving IE6 users a sub-optimal page.

very funny: IE6 funeral

I would like to get your opinion about this! For sure you have something to say about Internet Explorer 6, since its non-conformity to web-standards made it a very “special” browser.

Please participate in this poll and share your opinion with the web product management world and invite everybody you know that works in the web business to participate!

Many thanks I will publish the results in a future post!

Thank you very much for participating! Your vote counts! If you want to make sure not to miss the results I recommend subscribing to the RSS or Email Updates! Feel free to add a comment related to IE6 compatibility.

The post Still Support IE6? Really?!? first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Firebug Screenshot - Web users are buzy and impatient and every millisecond counts. Well, unfortunately the big search engines don´t have unlimited time to spend while crawling your page, too.

Now in 2010, everybody has fast internet connections… So why bother too much about website speed!?!

You might have heard something similar already. Although it is of course correct that the average internet connection speed has increased a lot in the last years: Fast page load speed still matters! In my opinion it is even crucial for a good user experience …and there are a bunch of reasons why fast internet connections are not an excuse not to invest in page speed improvements:

1. Multi-tasking internet users – Unfortunately you will not have 100% of the visitors bandwidth in all cases. Imagine a web-user downloading a file, listening to online radio and visiting your page in parallel. Even worse if many users share the same WLAN etc…
2. Server-side performance problems – Some page loading speed problems have nothing to do with the users internet connection! Sometimes just the hosting server is too bad or there is bad code that leads to slowly generated dynamic pages or there are too many unnecessary database hits etc… the list of possible server-side performance issues is long.
3. Emerging markets web users – If you are thinking about launching a product for the emerging markets don´t be surprised if users connection speed stats look a bit like 1998.

And why is it important for SEO?

1. The search engines love fast websites, they can crawl more information in a shorter period => They don´t need to spend that much resources in crawling fast websites.
2. Website speed is a Google Ranking Factor which makes totally sense since fast websites make users and webcrawlers happy and both is pretty much of interest for Google, too. Check the second half of this video and listen to what Matt Cutts from Google has to say about website speed:

How to check the website speed?

There are some cool free page speed testing tools available:

1. Google Page Speed – Analyzes your page loading speed and gives suggestions for improvements. Works together with Firefox Firebug and Google Webmaster Tools.
   

   Google page speed screenshot

2. Google Webmaster Tools – Check the Crawl Stats Folder in GWT frequently to get an idea about how Google experienced your website speed while crawling your site.
3. Firebug for Firefox – Just activate the “net” tab in the firebug window and enjoy the magic!
4. webpagetest.org – Cool online test tool with lots of options like different browsers, bandwidth, location etc.
5. More Load and Performance Test Tools – There are lots of them, see the nice overview of Load and Performance Test Tools by Rick Hower.

How to improve the website speed?

1. Cached Pages – If you have a problem with slowly generated dynamic pages
2. Check removing Features – There is a feature on your site that only 1% of your visitors actually use and that increases page speed by 20%? => then better remove it.
3. Optimize Images – Minimize KB, Don´t downsize pics in HTML and only use pics if absolutely necessary.

About optimizing website speed there are a lot more things that can be done, for further reading I recommend the post tips for increasing website speed.

I hope this post about page loading time improvement was helpful for you. Feel free to tell your opinion or ask a questions in the comments section below.

The post Website Speed – Crucial for User Experience & SEO first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Email screenshot

Well, registering a domain is not that spectacular…  but this conversation that I had earlier this year with a domain registration service provider sales dude is just too weird!

In theory it all could have been so easy: I send an Email Here is my data – Wanna domain please and an answer alright, here you go: … …2 Emails and that´s all!

But it all had to come so different, it ended up with more than a dozen Emails and in the meantime I kinda had the feeling I had a conversation with an (defect) automated Email reply bot.

The scenario:

In this case it was all about a .pt domain and the special requirement for the .pt domain by the Portuguese registry is to have a Trademark for the domain name for my case. So I filled out the registration form at the domaining service and waited until they contacted me for the EU Trademark (not knowing that a 3 weeks Odyssey was expecting me…).

The Domain Registration Sales Force:

Hello,

Please provide a copy of your trademark that is valid in Portugal in order to proceed with the registration of your domain.

I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Kind Regards,

So far nothing special, so I send them the trademark copy in pdf:

The Web PM:

Hi,

see attached the copy of the European trademark. Please let me know if you need additional information.

regards,

…and they send me their reply:

The Domain Registration Sales Force

Hello,

This is not valid in Portugal. You can register.com.pt with no restrictions. Please advise how you wish to proceed.

Kind Regards,

Wow, that is the first moment I got a little bit shocked. Why should a European Trademark suddenly not be sufficient? That was definitely the first time I heard such a nonsense that a European Trademark is not valid in Portugal. Anyway, I checked again all the resources if suddenly something has changed. (Like a political revolution in Portugal or a spontaneous continental drift towards USA?!) And as expected:
Portugal´s registry (dns.pt) still says at its homepage that you need an EU Trademark.
Even the Domain Registration Service´s page said that you just need an EU Trademark (Sales team doesn´t know its own website?)
Anyway, I didn´t want to explain in detail why Portugal is in Europe (geographically and politically) and therefore the European Trademark is valid and just asked for an explanation:

The curious Web PM:

Hi ,

Could you please clarify why if we have an European Trademark this is not useful in Portugal?

Thanks.

The (inventive?!?) Domain Registration Sales Force:

Hello,

Portugal requires that your trademark be specifically registered in there country.

They do not accept a general EU trademark registration.

Regards,

Alright, so Portugal needs special treatment regarding trademarks… although they do not announce that on their official webpage. I still didn´t really believe that and decided to investigate that a bit more.

The Web PM:

Thanks.

I will check it and let you know something ASAP.

The Domain Registration Sales Force:

Thank you, I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Kind Regards,

Well, at least the Sales team responded politely all the time Anyway, after re-investigating the issue I figured out that the service dude was wrong again:

The Web PM again:

Hi

I think there is a mistake.

You can see in all following links that the European Trade mark is enough:

https://online.dns.pt/dns_2008/do?com=DS;7867331493;111;+PAGE%284000060%29+K-CAT-CODIGO%28C.125%29+RCNT%28100%29;#886

1. “Serão igualmente aceites como nomes de domínio

As marcas nominativas e os elementos nominativos de marcas mistas registadas a favor do requerente do domínio, tal como constem do respectivo título de registo nacional, comunitário ou internacional desde que, nestes últimos casos, as marcas sejam extensivas a Portugal. São ainda admitidos registos de nomes de domínio baseados em pedidos de registo de marca. No entanto, se um pedido vier a ser recusado o nome de domínio será removido nos termos da alínea d) do artigo 44º.”

2. [again the URL to domain registration service provider´s page that clearly says that a European Trademark is valid in Portugal]

Can you please let us know what is going on?

Thanks.

…days of silence…

The Web PM:

Please,

Could you please give us an answer?

We need to clarify this issue as soon as possible.

Thanks a lot!

The (somewhat inventive?!?!?!)Domain Registration Sales Force:

Hello,

In the past an EU trademark was enough to secure a .pt domain.

About a year ago they changed the requirement to having a trademark valid in Portugal.

You can register .com.pt with no restrictions.

Regards,

Ok, now my patience was already quite exhausted. What more evidence did the service provider need? How about a confirmation directly from an dns.pt official? (as if the terms of service on their page wouldn´t be enough…)
here goes the mail to the dns.pt registry:

The Web PM:

Dear Sirs,

We would like to register .pt domain and see on your website (Artigo 11º: Composição do Nome de Domínio – 2 – b.) that this requires that we hold a European trademark on that name – on the other hand we heard from an ISP where we wanted to register that domain before that a European trademark would not be sufficient…

Could you please advise us in this case? Attached I send you our European trademark registration.

With kind regards from Barcelona,

and the very quick reply of the .pt registry:

The dns.pt Official:

Dear Sirs,

We hereby inform that for the registration of domains .PT are accepted trademarks valid to Portugal, as a European trademark are valid for all countries of Europe, there for extension will be valid for Portugal.

Also inform that you should insert the domain online to be verify by the legally department.

At your service for any additional questions, we present our best regards,

Yey, of course I had to forward this…

The Web PM:

Hello,

I asked directly the FCCN – Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional (DNS.PT) and they have replied that an European Trademark is enough for registration of .pt domains, since this trademark is valid for Portugal, too.

Also you can read this at the official terms of dns.pt https://online.dns.pt/dns_2008/do?com=DS;7867331493;111;+PAGE(4000060)+K-CAT-CODIGO(C.125)+RCNT(100);#947

and at your domain registration service providers home page [Again the link to the service providers page…]

Please, continue the registration process – the trademark copy you need is attached.
If you have any questions, please let me know.

regards,

Since after this Email I didn´t get a response any more I decided to register the domain directly at the dns.pt registry, since I figured out that they offer an English domain registration form. Only drawback was that they don´t offer a Domain Name Server, but that is not a big deal for the tech team.
So I arranged the domain directly at the dns.pt and saved that way some money btw. So far so good… but why do I suddenly get an invoice from the domain sales dude?

The Web PM:

Why did I get this invoice?

From your organization you were constantly saying that you could not register the domain. Finally we did it ourselves and now you pretend to charge us?

Please, remove the invoice order.

Thanks.

The (very politely?!) Domain Registration Sales Force:

Hello,

You have been refunded, I apologize for the mischarge on our behalf.

Kind Regards,

And yes, I got the money back …must have been my lucky day.

What I have learned from this:

1. Before considering to buy an “exotic” domain via a service provider: Check first if it is possible to register directly at the countries registry. That is usually much cheaper “Cut the middle man”, but unfortunately not with all countries TLD possible
2. Be skeptic if the ISP is saying something that is against the information that you get from the official domain registry of the country.
3. Be even more skeptic if the ISP wants to offer you another top level domain with the argument that it is easier. It might just be the better deal for him.
4. Don´t be too patient. It can be hard to convince a Sales person and that is not worth the effort

So this was the weirdest web story of 2009 for me. Please let me know if you have made similar experiences with domain registrations.

The post A Weird Story About Exotic Countries Domain Registration… first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Lots of pages in the Google index!

BUT what if your site has (approximately) hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages in the Google index?
… Well, you will need a looot of patience or even better: You will have to use advanced Google Search Techniques – and that is what this post will be about, so hang on

Alright, before rushing into the for SEO interesting Google queries, I recommend to visit the Google Operators Reference sheet to get an overview about the Google operators. Lifehacker published an interesting article about “Google Search Tricks” that helps you to understand what you can do with the Google search box beyond just writing your search terms. The cool thing is that with combining these Google operators in an intelligent way you will be able to mine interesting data for analyzing your websites and your competitors as well.

Here go my favorite advanced Google search techniques for search engine optimization, competitor analysis and QA: (replace “example.com” with your domain)

1. Find pages that copied your content, but don´t link to your page

   Unfortunately this is something you need to check from time to time, because copied content without putting a dofollow link to the original site appears quite often in the web. This can happen especially with blog posts pages. To identify these pages that don´t put a (dofollow!) link to your page  it works best to search for a unique phrase of your content that is long enough to be unique. That could be the title of your post, if it is not too mainstream or a phrase taken from your blog posts text. Important: don´t forget the ” operator for phrase match search and the – operator here!

   “my blog post title or unique phrase from the blog text content” -link:myblogpostURL.com

   ---

   

   The nice example pic seems to be on 87 other sites!

   BTW:

   If you are a photographer or a designer and you are worried if somebody stole your images there is help for you available:

   You can use the Reverse Image search engine tineye to identify sites that stole your pics!

   The only thing you have to do is to upload your pic or submit the URL of a page that has the picture integrated.

   That´s it! The reverse image search engine will do the rest.

   ---

2. Find pages that mention your site but don´t link to your homepage:

   Good to know, if you or your team wants to do some Linkbuilding. It is interesting to identify pages that mention your website, but didn´t put a (dofollow) link to your site, because maybe it just got forgotten to put the link to your site! Just write: (don´t forget the – operator before the link: here!)

   example.com -link:www.example.com

   Just a note: Google shows with the link: operator only sites that put a dofollow link to your page (yahoo shows also nofollowed ones) so you will probably get lots of results from social media sites that put a nofollow link to you like for example twitter.
   Second note: with the link: query Google looks only at the mentioned page! so if you searched for link:yourhomepage.com it will only show the links that exactly linked to yourhomepage.com – links that go to sub-directories and pages like yourhomepage.com/blogpost-1 will not appear here.

3. Analyze keyword optimization of competitors

   Or analyze your own sites keyword optimization! A good way to identify keyword optimized pages is to use the intitle: operator. You can combine it with a site: search and you will get interesting results! For the case you want to search for a longer keyword phrase, don´t forget the ” operator.

   intitle:”the keyword phrase” site:example.com

4. Check for “Evil” subdomains:

   First of all it needs to get clarified what an evil subdomain is: Well, that are just pages that are in a wrong subdomain that is not wanted. This can become an issue, if:
   (a) you do URL Rewrites and it happens a bug that generates pages in an evil subdomain
   (b) your site has a looong history and in the past there have been used different subdomains
   (c) your hosting server got cracked and a spammer tries to hide his backlink pages in an evil subdomain
   Well, (a) and (b) can only happen to you if you actually use subdomains in your website, but (c) can happen to you even if you don´t use subdomains!
   Here goes the query: You will have to write -inurl:mysubdomian.example.com with “-” operator for each of your subdomains and “www”. Well, and site:example.com without “-” to tell Google that it should only search your domain. If you get 0 results after this query then everything should be fine. Example:

   -inurl:mysubdomian1.example.com -inurl:mysubdomian2.example.com -inurl:www.example.com site:example.com

5. analyze backlink anchortext

   Which pages on your site got backlinks that had your favorite keywod phrases in the anchor text? Very intersting question because the link anchor text became one of the most important SEO factors, according to SEOmoz! Important here again: use the ” phrase match operator!

   inanchor:”your favourite keyword phrase” site:example.com

Google SERP with active SEO Quake plugin

BTW:
A cool free Firefox Plugin to check important SEO stats is SEO Quake!

This very cool Firefox plugin allows you to display important SEO info like Google Pagerank, Yahoo Linkdomain, number of pages indexed and much more right in the Google search results page!

SEO Quake can do much more cool things, but a detailed description would really go beyond the scope of this blog post

That was actually just a small subset of possibilities to use advanced Google queries for SEO purposes. I have planned to continue to write about this topic in a future post. Ideas and suggestions are always welcome, so feel free to add a comment.

The post Efficient SEO Site Analysis With Advanced Google Search Techniques first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Opening new pages with old browsers like IE4 can be fun

Basically this Quality Assurance Phase should take place 2 times:

One time in a test-environment before the deployment to the production server and once again after the new web is live!

To maximize the efficiencies of your testing take care not to do the following mistakes that might lead to wrong observations, unnecessary time-waste or you will end up in overlooking faults:

1. Forgetting to do a QA test in multiple browsers

   

   Firefox rocks

   Sure, you don´t need to test with all browsers that exist, but you should check if your website still works ok with the most popular browsers that your visitors have used according to Google Analytics. Especially the old IE6 is well-known for design-troubles and is still quite popular. If you want to do a quick test with lots of multiple browsers check the cool free online service browsershots.org to get some quick screenshots. Fancy: they even offer screenshots for a Win2000 + Internet Explorer 4 machine (=almost 10 Years old software!!!) which is I think more for fun than really usefull, because no modern webdesign will work well in this kind of superold software!

2. Not deleting the browser cache

   Whenever you start a new test the first thing you should do is deleting the browser cache. If you do not you are in danger that you are accidentally viewing a webpage version that is still in the Cache from the last session.

3. Forgetting to update the hosts file

   For the case you have to do a test in a test environment that requires that you have a special version of a hosts file, make sure that the domain names and IP´s are updated and confirm this before the test with the development team.

4. Cookie issues

   Always check cookie-requiring functionality like logins etc. with and without activated cookies. Webdeveloper is a quite useful Firefox plugin that allows you to temporarily disable active cookies.

5. Forgetting to Test in multiple screen resolutions

   Especially floating designs are bug-prone with very small or big screen resolutions. Worth to take a look here in Google Analytics, which screen resolutions are the most common ones and make sure that at least these are looking good.

6. Not using Selenium tests

   Especially for very “click-intensive” or repeating parts of a test it is very helpful to have an automatic Selenium test. Just download the Selenium Firefox plugin and design the testscript once and hit the replay button… it is almost like cinema

7. Last not Least: Wasting time by testing stuff that tools could test for you

   

   ups that link seems to be broken...

   There are many cool free tools available that can help you a lot with QA testing. Actually some of them make it possible for you to test parts of your website that you cannot test manually. For example it is impossible to check all the thousands of links on your site manually. There are tons of Online Linkcheckers for this available, if you prefer to run a automatic linkchecker from your own machine I prefer Xenu Linkchecker or the Linkevaluator Firefox Plugin

I hope I could help to make your QA day easier with this tips! Feel free to add a comment if you want!

The post The Most Popular Quality Assurance Testing Mistakes first appeared on webproductblog.com.

image by suchitra prints

Before you run to the library or the bookstore to buy your next book I recommend to take a look at the opinions of experienced product managers.

See below my favorite resources for product management related literature. It contains only reviews and recommendations written by very experienced product managers:

---

• “10 Books To Make You A Better Product Manager” by Cindy Alvares
• PM book reviews by Tabita Green
• “Strategic Product Manger” reviewed books
• Book reviews by “On Product Management”
• Recommended books by “Write That Down”
• Recommended reading by “Pragmatic Marketing Blog”

---

Actually, I am also thinking about publishing book reviews in the future. If you want to make sure not to miss them I recommend subscribing to this blog´s RSS Feed. You probably know even more good resources to find reviews, please feel free to add them as a comment here, if you want.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

The post 6 Great Places To Find PM Book Reviews first appeared on webproductblog.com.

• “pop up” and user experience and annoyin

  YES! YES! YES! It is really annoying!

• “should have read” mistake

  

  Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber

  Lol, I don´t really know what this visitor was looking for, but I would say the book Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber is a “should have read” for web product managers.

  Reviews of this book you can find for example here:

  amazon.com

  goodreads.com

  digital-constructions blog

• xenu sleuth limit

  

  max. parallel threads limit

  Yes, with Xenu Link Sleuth you can set a limit for for the parallel threads.

  If you experience too many timeout errors in your Xenu report you should try it again with a slower crawling speed.

  If you want Xenu Link Sleuth to stop before it has crawled every page you can just push “R” and it will show a report for all the pages that have been crawled so far.

• can you create a report in google analyt

  

  Export report options in Google Analytics

  Sure, you can actually export a couple of different types of reports in PDF, XML, CSV, CSV for Excel and TSV. You can also let Google Analytics automatically send this reports weekly if you want (click on Email -> schedule)

• “ignoring emails is”

  …from time to time a good thing! Don´t become a slave of your inbox and enjoy your workday!

I hope you liked this post! Please let me know what you think.

The post Google Visitors Special: Interesting Queries And Answers first appeared on webproductblog.com.

• louisgray.com – Silicon Valley Blog for Geeks

  Danger: Geek alert! For some reason the first thing I think after I hear the name “Louis Gray” is “Early Adopter”. If there is some cool new tool out there in the Social Media Sphere it will get reviewed by him – that is as sure as death and taxes! A good way to stay updated about brandnew trends directly from the Silicon Valley is to follow his RSS. Latest geekiness:
  Real-time Google Reader Shares to Twitter – There’s An App for That.

• avc.com – Musings of a VC in NYC

  In almost every interesting web start-up there will be the earlier or later a Venture Capitalist involved, so it is a good idea to try to understand how the VC´s think and why they do so. Cool post : Why I think RSS is alive and Well

• rotorblog.com – Spin the Web!

  A fun-to-read allround-geekiness blog. Web 2.0 news, startup reviews, topics related to social networks and online games can be found here. Cool post here: Free Web-Based Widget Tools for Website Owners

• inspiredstartup.com – Next Level Startup Blog

  Especially in Start-ups you will need to have an entrepreneurial mind-set, even if you are “just” an employee. For example you can learn here how to motivate others and yourself.

• kikolani.com – The art of blogging

  Yes, there are also geek girls and kikolani is really worth following, especially if you are interested in blogging topics and social media. Tip: A very nice weekly Top-links series with selected blog posts by topic can be found here.

• joelonsoftware.com – Joel on Software

  An experienced software developer blogging mainly about tech topics. I am especially impressed by his very cool writing style! Interesting to learn about things that you should never do from a developer´s perspective.

• findermind.com – Guide to People Search

  You are thinking about hiring someone or want to get hired? Or you just want to know which information about you is available in the web? I bet you didn´t know how many ways there are to search these information in the web: 25 Free People Search Engines to find Anyone

• 1stwebdesigner.com – Graphic and Design Blog

  How could I write a blog post about top blogs for web business people without mentioning a good webdesign blog? So here goes my favourite Lots of great tutorials and designer resources like 65 Popular And Professional Free Fonts For Creative Typography can be found here.

• seomoz.com – Search Engine Optimization

  Too stay up to date on SEO this is the blog to follow, but that you probably knew already Nice post here: 17 ways search engines judge the value of a link

• goodexperience.com – user & customer experience

  In the end the product management needs to achieve products that customers love. User experience design is a key factor for this and you should learn more about design thinking.

• analytics.blogspot.com – The official Google Blog

  Yeap! Last not least it is worth to take a look from time to time what Google shouts out to the crowd, like for example: Update Regarding AdWords Cost Data Reporting

I hope you could find some interesting new blogs here! Please do not forget to subscribe to the RSS if you found it interesting and please let me know which blogs you prefer and leave a comment.

The post 11 Top Blogs To Stay Up-To-Date In The Web-Business first appeared on webproductblog.com.

1. Agile2009 Product Manager – Product Owner Dilemma

   

   The Art of Product Management

   The excellent presentation of Rich Mironov – the author of the interesting Product Management Book The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator* – brings light into the Product Manager´s Dilemma.

   The Slides have many illustrations that help to understand the complex responsibilities of the PM in the company´s organization.

   Just click below in the image to play the presentation or use the arrow buttons to move back/forward.

   Enjoy!

   Agile2009 Product Manager – Product Owner Dilemma

   View more presentations from Enthiosys Inc..

   The Agenda of: Agile2009 Product Manager – Product Owner Dilemma

   ---

   1. Context, scope, terminology
      – Development-only or inbound/outbound cross-functional?
      – Product strategy vs. vision vs. backlog
      – “business value” vs. quarterly revenue goal
   2. Why talk about product managers and product owners?
   3. What does a product manager do?
      – Or.. what do I mean when I say “product manager”?
   4. How does this map to product owners?
   5. Recommendations

2. Early Stage Web Product Management by Dan Olsen

   Dan Olsen highlights Web Product Management from a Start-up´s perspective. Especially I liked his points about Optimisation with Web Metrics:

   Early Stage Web Product Management by Dan Olsen

   View more documents from Dan Olsen.

   The Agenda of: Early Stage Web Product Management by Dan Olsen

   ---

   1. Understanding customer needs
   2. Prioritizing, scoping and maximizing ROI on engineering resources
      
   3. UI design
   4. Usability testing
   5. Using metrics for optimization
      

3. Strategic Role – Product Management

   Steve Johnson from the Pragmatic Marketing Blog explains the strategic part of Product Management and clarifies common misconceptions about Marketing, PR and Product Management:

   Strategic Role – Product Management

   View more documents from Afzal Khan.

   The Agenda of: Strategic Role – Product Management

   ---

   1. Who Needs Product Management?
   2. What is Marketing Anyway?
   3. Where Does Product Management Belong in the Organization?
   4. The Product Management Triad
   5. Roles and Titles
   6. Product Management in an Agile World
   7. Final Thoughts…
   8. Learn More About the Strategic Role of Product Management
      

   I hope these slides are that helpful for you, like they have been for me! Please let me know about your opinion and leave a comment.

The post 3 Awesome Presentations About Agile Product Management first appeared on webproductblog.com.

1. Bad contrast of text and background

   

   good contrast - bad contrast

   Unsolicited eyesight tests will not really amuse the users! Especially pay attention with text on backgrounds with image! If the image has to many different colours you will have to either soften the contrast of the background or use fonts with frame.

   BTW: Black text on white background is still up to date, if you want to be on the safe side – more at thomsonchemmanoor.com

2. Frames

   Framesets are just a funny thing to do…  – but an absolutely nightmare for Usability and SEO. Learn more at Sameer Chavan’s blog

3. Heavy video intros

   That is exactly what web users are looking for… slowly loading fancy intro videos, especially if there is no skip button… – Web users are always in a hurry and unexpected video-surprises might lead to loose the visitor. see more at chaosscenario.com

4. Hidden Sign in

   Your users need to sign in to perform actions in my site? If they really want to sign in they do not mind searching the sign in link… – Users will very likely not like to search for this buttons | see more about mistakes related to registration process at uie.com

5. Tiny clickable areas

   Don´t save space at the wrong place! – more at smashingmagazine.com

6. PDF for Online reading

   PDFs are great! Why should I only use them for downloads, if I can replace major content parts with it? – Please only use it for content that is supposed to be downloaded or printed by the user, because PDF breaks the flow of the web users. See the older study at useit.com that still is relevant.

7. Pop-ups for content

   Why load a new page or use AJAX, if I can just use a Pop-up? – Pop-ups are just annoying and most browsers anyway just block pop-ups by default…

8. Unstructured, unscannable texts

   Why use bullet points, bold text etc. to structure your text, if you can just put big fat and boring text blocks? – If users can´t scan your website quickly they won´t read it.

9. Over-loaded pages

   More is always better, so the more stuff I can put on a website the better it is… – Your website usability will suffer if your site contains lots of useless features and contents that distract the users.

10. Horizontal scroll bar

    Why should I care about width if I can have a horizontal scroll bar? – It is just unconfortable to scroll horizontal and makes it very hard to read your content. Usability fail!

11. Blinking text

    It is very important, so it has to blink! – Blinking text gets very quickly on user´s nerves, doesn´t it? (Sorry for the blinking text, that was just for demo purpose)

12. Forcing users to switch their browser

    I don´t want to take care about all Browsers and i why not use superfancy special tags that only my favorite browser understands? – Imagine a street with a sign “only cars by BMW allowed”.

13. Too many and too big pictures used

    I just love pics! – But too many pics reduce the speed of the site and can distract the users.

14. Unnecessary use of animated gifs, flash or Java Applets

    Yep, I know how to do and implement this in websites, so why not show it as much as i can? – Please only add this if there is no other way to do it, don´t add unnecessary komplexity to your site.

15. “Mysterious” link texts

    People like surprises… – Users should have an idea where the link goes and search engines take a look at the keywords used in the anchor text.

Please let me know what your most annoying usability mistakes are and leave a comment.

The post The 15 Worst User Experience Design Mistakes Ever first appeared on webproductblog.com.

“But I am the Product Manager! Why should I think about that now? The SEO guys will take care of this once it goes to development…”

If you thought something similar to this after reading the headline, I recommend the entertaining blog post Building SEO into the Development Process by SEOmoz and see why good SEO involves almost everybody in your company.

You can really save a lot of time and improve the performance of your website by doing this right from the start. Or do you prefer to get a SEO analysis with dozens of required technical changes, just because you thought it is ok to start thinking about SEO “after the launch”? I guess not, so this is why here you will get a summary of the most important SEO issues that will affect your product strategy. If you are new to search engine optimization there are a lot of good SEO blogs in the web. For getting a basic overview I recommend the original Google Guides: the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (download PDF Version) and the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

See below SEO Factors with high impact on product planning:

1. Landing page

   Most search engine traffic will land at sub-pages of your website and only a few users on your homepage. This means every page of your website might be the first page new visitors see, which you need to know while working on a design concept for your website. Get rid of the idea that most new users see first the homepage! Every page that is not easy to scan for the users and hard to understand on the first view is almost useless. Search engines might send lots of traffic to them, but after taking a look in your web analytics you might see very high bounce rates… Goodbye Conversion Rate!

2. URL structure

   Keywords in the URL matter for search engines, so you should give your subfolders and subdomains optimized names. Especially avoid duplicate content (the same content with different URLs) to get indexed by Google. This can actually relatively easy happen with dynamically generated pages.
   All URL related specs needs to be well-planned in the early stages of development, because the URLs have a high technical importance and URL-Rewrites might become tricky to implement. Changing them later might imply high extra resources to get the URLs in the right shape for SEO. Moreover a change to a new URL structure will need 301 Redirects, which need to get tested deeply, because screwed up redirects or masses of duplicate content are really bad for SEO.

3. SEO friendly web design

   This mostly means for the webdesigners to produce HTML code according to the Google Webmaster Guidelines. But SEO-friendly coding implies some design constraints you should be aware of. Especially the use of plain text for headlines etc. means that some fancy looking solutions might become impossible or at least harder to do. Another story:  Flash sites. Flash is cool for animations and other multimedia content, but problematic for SEO. Avoid building full-flash pages and better use flash only for the parts of your site that cannot be done without it. In any case avoid putting lots of text content in flash files.

4. Text content rich pages

   Text content matters! the more text content you have on your pages, the more interesting they are for search engines. The PM Challenge here is to think about where and how to implement interesting text contents to your page without distracting from the primary calls to action of your pages. Better think about this early while doing a design concept and try to achieve easy extendable wedesign solutions.

5. Internal link structure

   Search engines crawl your site by following the links on it. Well, that is obvious, but why can this affect your product concept so much? Because Google also looks at how many links point to a specific site, how prominently they are placed in the page, what importance (PageRank) has Google assigned to the linking page etc. Your challenge here is to achieve a for the users useful website + an intelegent internal linking that emphasizes your “best” webpages from SEO point of view by linking them more often. A pretty common feature that is nice for SEO and users are “related links”. That way you can get display your favourite pages links related to the link pages content.

6. Anchor text optimization

   You still insist on having fancy images for your links? Well, at least make sure that for your internal links also always exist alternative text links with good anchor text. Avoid Anchor texts like “here“, “click this” etc. or are you optimizing for the keyword “here”?

7. Schedule SEO tests

   

   xenu

   Very important! Deep SEO tests can become time consuming, because many things like bad redirects etc. are not that simple to test and can get easily overseen. Btw., for a quick and easy broken links check I recommend: Xenu Broken Link Checker

8. Fast website

   Very likely you were already thinking about this since users love fast pages like the search engines do. Whenever you add features, keep the speed performance in mind and think about caching dynamical generated pages if possible. A good way to track your server speed is via Google Webmaster Tools. For a quick check in a browser I recommend the network check function of the Firebug Firefox plugin.

Last not least after all this SEO input: Do not forget that there are users out there that might want to use your website! So please do not “over-optimize” your website for SEO and always keep an eye on user feedback and your Google Analytics to see how users accept your page. Please let me know what experiences you have made with SEO and Product Management and leave a comment!

The post How SEO Will Affect Your Product Planning Right From The Beginning first appeared on webproductblog.com.

Product Manager Senior

nuroa is looking for a talented senior product manager to coordinate the conceptual and technical development of new product initiatives specifically in the area of search. This position is full time and based in our main offices in Barcelona, Spain.

Responsibilities

• Write specifications, prioritize Search-related features, build consensus and coordinate product schedules within a team of world-class engineers
• Facilitate communication throughout the development process between a variety of internal teams
• Integrate usability studies, research, market analysis and SEO studies into product requirements to ensure that products satisfies business and customer needs
• Understand nuroa’s strategic and competitive position, and work to define and deliver the best products that maintain, shape, and improve that Position
• Develop the product roadmap with new, justifiable ideas to enhance existing functionality or introduce new features
• Maximize efficiency in execution to product milestones in a constantly changing and growing environment where the process is fluid and creative and unique solutions are desired

Requirements

• Minimum 3-5 years of internet industry experience in similar roles: managing a product between business needs an technical resources
• Degree in Computer Science or related technical field a plus
• Experience developing or studying Search-related Internet products and/or technologies is strongly desired
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills
• Exceptional organizational and analytical skills
• Exceptional technical abilities and/or ability to work with engineers
• Statistics background or strong skills in data analysis
• SEO knowledge, especially related to dynamic websites
• Demonstrated skills in gathering requirements, organizing resources and risk management
• Understanding of property search engines a substantial plus

nuroa is currently active in 7 countries:
Spain | Mexico | Chile | Germany | United Kingdom | Italy | Brazil

The post Challenge: Product Manager Senior first appeared on webproductblog.com.