WebmasterRadio’s SEO 101 Program

April 3, 2009 by Eric Lander · 4 Comments

Update: After just three short weeks of co-hosting the program alongside Ross Dunn, I’ve resigned as a host and wish the program the best of luck. My decision not to be part of the program came after what I felt was a very questionable production of SEO 101 which aired immediately following David Szetela’s interview of Guy Kawasaki on Monday April 20. After listening to the show after it aired, I realized that the show was not the best fit for me.

My plans for 2009 continue to become more exciting. I just got word back from Ross Dunn, and the folks at WebmasterRadio.FM have made it official… I’ll be Ross’ new co-host on the SEO 101 program that airs each Monday at 5:00PM ET.

What is SEO 101?
SEO 101 is weekly program that speaks to Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO” from the very beginning. The goal of the SEO 101 program will be to interact and teach listeners about the many aspects of SEO by sharing helpful information without overwhelming them with technical details.

Joining Up with Ross Dunn and WebmasterRadio.FM
I met Ross back in February of 2007 at SMX West and he’s a great guy, great SEO and a wonderful father. If you aren’t already keeping tabs on what Ross is doing – please connect with him on Twitter and check out his company, StepForth Web Marketing Inc..

Here’s a photo of [L to R] Darrell Long, myself, Ross and David Wallace at Bennigan’s last February in Santa Clara. [Photo Credit to David Wallace]

Ross and I have obviously been pretty excited about this, and here’s his take on the development:

SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.fm has been a big success since Jennifer Evans Laycock and I took it on and revived it but when Jennifer left due to time constraints I needed someone to fill some big shoes. Thankfully I have been around long enough to know just how good a guy and SEO Eric Lander is. So when he agreed to be my co-host on the show it felt great to know the show was once again whole. Now it is time for us to plan out some great shows!!

To compound on that, I also want to thank Jennifer for her contributions to the show (and our industry) and wish her the best with all that she has going on. We’ll certainly try to steal her back and get her back on the air for our listeners, too. :)

About Webmaster Radio
Founded in November, 2004 – WebmasterRadio.FM is a free, 24/7, interactive Internet Radio Network focused on the B2B digital marketing world. We have burst on to the Internet Media scene as a community destination with 100% original programming, live broadcasts, archives, and podcast shows. We are proud to boast that our shows are hosted by the most respected names in the business world!

WebmasterRadio.FM Links of Interest:

Filed Under: Links & Resources, Search Industry Conferences ·

Google SEMMY Award Nomination

January 19, 2009 by Eric Lander · 2 Comments

Last year Matt McGee and others involved in the SEMMY Awards nominated one of my writings for award consideration. I just got an email that for the second straight year, I’ve produced something that the SEMMY judges feel is valuable.

Right now, my article and project on Google Sitelinks is available under the heading of Google – All 2009 Nominees. Keep an eye on the SEMMY Awards as judges will now begin to limit the fields of nominees down before beginning to acquire the public / popular voting.

Filed Under: Links & Resources, Search Industry Conferences ·

Project Jump Start Participation

January 6, 2009 by Eric Lander · Leave a Comment

I haven’t been blogging much, but did want to quickly cover Project Jump Start and why I’m choosing to be involved.

Our industry can suck sometimes. There’s a lot of finger pointing, calling out, name calling and veiled disrespect thrown around daily. I’ve both contributed to and been the focus of that nonsense. As I learn more each day, actions speak louder than words.

Rather than sit back and watch the community attack itself, I’ve chosen to be involved with DazzlinDonna‘s Project Jump Start. It’s an initiative that gets those who have been successful in search and social media to give back to those looking to do the same.

Small efforts can surely add. Project Jump Start will absolutely be an example of this for 12 motivated individuals. Please take some time now to read more about the project and the purpose.

I want to thank David Harry (@theGypsy) for mentioning this on Twitter and catching my attention with it.

We’ve all got the ability to help improve things if we decide to take action and not just talk a good game. I’d encourage anyone to get involved in this, and applaud good friend Jeff Quipp and Samir Balwani for their participation, too. And you too, should you join us.

Filed Under: Links & Resources, Search Optimization & Marketing ·

Free Analytics and User Demographics from Quantcast

November 19, 2008 by Eric Lander · 2 Comments

If you’re looking for a free way to learn more about your visitors’ demographics, I’ve got a pretty simple (and free) solution for you. Quantcast. And while this isn’t a new tool at all, it was new to me a couple months back when I began testing it out.

Around 2 months or so and I was checking out the Advertising Page on BBGeeks. Shortly thereafter, I saw that Sugarrae had the Quantcast code on her blog, too.

I thought it was really cool how BBGeeks presented their demographics as well as a link for a complete website profile. There were slick graphs, solid targeting information for potential advertisers and an overview of traffic growth over time.

I wrongly assumed the data came from a purchased analytics package of sorts. But, it’s all free and you can sign up for the same data if you’d like to capture it for your site.

That’s what I’ve been doing since having signed up. If you’re willing to tag your site, here’s some of the information you can acquire and provide…

Demographics

You can have Quantcast record user data for all of the visitors on your site. You can choose any combination of the following (selected via checkbox) when you’re managing your site profiles:

Age
Children
Gender
Education
Income
Ethnicity

Showing Traffic Information

When visitors access your site profile they can also view traffic information should you want them to. My blog is lucky if it is read by more than a dozen people a day, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose.

Here’s what my graph looks like:

And… Here’s what a kick ass graph looks like (from bbgeeks):

These graphs are obviously available to anyone should you opt to allow them to display.

You can get a deeper breakdown of traffic data too. Here’s an example of what I’m referring to with the stats for my site:

Check out those weekly numbers! See, blogging nonsense like I have been for the past week seriously pays off.

Lifestyle & Audience Data

Since my site’s traffic is that of a small Amish Pennsylvania town, there’s no good lifestyle data available for me. Other sites that do receive some sort of traffic will show three cool reports… What the site’s Audience Also Likes in terms of categories (like “technology”, “auto industry”, “politics” etc.), what the Audience Also Visits in terms of other domains, and finally, what keywords the Audience Also Searches For.

All pretty cool stuff. Nothing Earth shattering, but cool.

Demographics & Visitor Classification

The actual demographics that you can pull are much more interesting to me. Since my site has a limited audience, I’m sure these graphics are skewed a bit, but check out the breakdown available:

The Quantcast Media Planner

Finally, once you’re a verified account holder and have the code on your site you can opt to include your site in the Quantcast Media Planner which showcases sites and allows readers and advertisers to drill down using demographics to locate potential advertising partners.

In other words, if you’re open to selling some ad space… This can be a great money making opportunity too.

As always, play around with this and see what you can get out of it. So far I’ve been more than impressed considering it took seconds to setup and hasn’t cost me a dime yet. :)

Filed Under: Analytics, Links & Resources ·

Tynt: Stealing Site Owner’s Content & Refuses to be Blocked? (See Also Tynted.net)

September 10, 2008 by Eric Lander · 25 Comments

If you’ve seen Tynt, you may think it’s cool. That is of course if you’re a 10th grader and your parents are hip enough to let you on something other than MySpace or Facebook.

The trouble is, Tynt is a straight up invasion of site owner content. They’re re-purposing all of your hard work and letting anyone – yes, ANYONE – go in there and mark things up as they’d like.

Like many others concerned about Tynt, I’m testing out various ways to block them in their quest to steal your content, photos and media.

Block Tynt on an Apache Server

With many thanks to incrediBILL, Scott Polk and Edward Lewis, there is an IP range that you can block to help protect your site from being Tynt’d. You’ll need to add the following to your .htaccess file, as David Burke provides:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^204\.244\.109\.(2(4[0-7]))$ [OR] RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^204\.244\.120\.(1(7[6-9]|8[0-3]))$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [F]

The above effectively kills any access Tynt’s IP range has to your site. Pretty nifty, and certainly more comprehensive than some of the original blocks I was performing. The blocks I had were all based on referral string and/or specific IP addresses. The gentlemen listed above researched things further to arrive at a complete range to block.

SEO Consultants Gets Creative in Blocking Tynt

If you want to see how far you can take things, Edward Lewis has opted to protect www.seoconsultants.com. Just take a look at the 404 page he’s serving up to anyone trying to index www.seoconsultants.com.tynted.net

Tynt is on Twitter

If you’re interested in trying out tynt, I’d suggest you check out nothing further than tynt’s profile on Twitter. In a rich case of layering on some BS, here’s tynt’s justification / claim to fame:

Tynt lets you put contextual relevance and dialog on web pages for sharing and interaction.

“Contextual relevance” ? I may be on a series of rants here with my blog, but you have to be kidding me. Look what I can do to the tynt homepage if I’d like!

Tynt’s Questionable Example of Tynt in Action

Thanks to Jon Kelly for posting this and making me realize just how poorly represented the value of Tynt is. If you check out the page on Tynt.com called “What is It?” you’ll see the following screenshot (click to enlarge).

Screenshot of the What is Tynt? Page on Tynt.com. Click for larger version.

Tynted.net URLs Being Indexed

If you’re working for Apple Insider, I’m sorry – because you’re getting royally screwed right now with all the content tynted.net is stealing. Take a look at this search results for site: tynted.net on Google.

For reference, there are now 146 results for “appleinsider.com.tynted.net” too.

Tynt and Tynted.net Refuse to Be Blocked

What can I tell you now? You can’t use an .htaccess to block your site from being served up through tynted.net. They’re using a dynamic range of IPs, so any IP blocks you use is temporary at best. Likewise, you cannot block the referral source as that too has been bypassed.

And, since Tynt and Tynted.net are not spiders, they’re not actively listening to anything you place in your robots.txt file as well.

Sorry Tynt, I’m not Going Out of My Way

On Twitter, Jeremy Luebke [@JeremyLuebke] provided a possible fix as a Twitter reply to me:

@EricLander Also do a search for proxy hijack solution. THere is one where you cloak a noindex tag to everyone but SEs

(Thanks for permission to republish, as well as for the reply!)

While that could be one possible solution, I believe that most site owners are not going to be prepared or skilled enough to implement such a fix. There needs to be a clear opt-out of this service for *any* webmaster not wishing to have their sites tynt’d.

Are You With Tynt?

If so, please read everything here and correct me if I’m wrong. I hate what you’re doing and you deserve to be up front with webmasters regarding their content and protection. Please contact me if I’m wrong with the above. I’d like to give you an open opportunity to say your piece on this, too.

For reference, here are the folks listed on the Tynt About Us Page:

Derek Ball (CEO)
Dayton Foster (COO)
Kerri Knull (VP Business Development)
Allan Mackenzie (Executive Chairman, Board of Directors)
Brian Craig (Director, Board of Directors)
Guy Kawasaki
Dr. Steven Woods
Chris Brahm
Mark Silva
Paul Perez
Kelly Graves
Serge Klimoff

Hopefully someone from the above list is tracking their Google Alerts and can respond back to us…

Additional thanks to Edward Lewis and Scott Polk for their time in researching this matter further.

Filed Under: Links & Resources, Odds and Ends, Ranting & Raving, Search Optimization & Marketing ·

Internet Marketer’s Charity Party at SES San Jose

August 18, 2008 by Eric Lander · Leave a Comment

While I’m not out in San Jose I did want to send my best wishes along to Todd Malicoat and the organizers of tonight’s Internet Marketer’s Charity Party at SES San Jose. The event is an absolute must attend for anyone at SES, as it combines a great networking opportunity with a great crowd of people — all interested in benefiting a wonderful cause.

A $40 donation is required for attendance into the party tonight – but if you’re not in San Jose, you can still make a difference. Todd has set up a secure donation page online for the event where you can make donations in any denomination.

Please consider helping the IM Charity Party organizers in their efforts to raise money for The Children’s Hospital of Aurora Colorado and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

I’ve made a donation and I’m challenging all three readers of my blog to do the same! If you have donated and I failed to grab your name of URL below, please post a comment and I will add you to the list.

If you are attending tonight, I love you for participating and hope you have a wonderful time!

Special thanks also to the IM Charity Party Sponsors: