I never thought I’d be saying this, but I’m absolutely sure it’s true. I’ve slowly evolved into a horrible blogger. Even if that’s not true (because, perhaps I’ve always been awful?) - I don’t need to know.

I go from having like 5 posts a day to zero over two weeks. It’s really unacceptable. I’d like to say I’ll do better, but really, would that be honest? I’m no soothsayer, but my money is on me losing track again soon. :)

QUICK LINKS FROM THIS POST
Bruce Clay Blog
6 Questions With Analytics Guru Avinash Kaushik, by Lisa Barone

Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet™ Newsletter
Search Marketers Need Web Analytics, by Eric Lander

At SMX West, I had the opportunity to meet up with Lisa Barone, Susan Esparza and for a brief moment - Bruce Clay himself. If there’s one thing you need to know about Bruce Clay Inc., it’s that the organization is an absolute veteran in the space. When my first startup tried to compete head to head with Bruce Clay back in 2001, we failed miserably. Since then, Bruce Clay has opened up offices in Europe, Austrailia, Africa and Japan and continues to dominate the industry by providing market leading SEO services and internet marketing tools.

My point: there’s something to be said about experience, a strong team and proven leadership.

Anyways, today’s a pretty cool day for me because I actually had two references from Bruce Clay Inc. The first was a little bit of link love from Lisa Barone with her interview of Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik. The post, 6 Questions With Analytics Guru Avinash Kaushik, includes multiple questions that I offered up to Lisa when I found out she had the interview opportunity.

While Avinash isn’t a full blooded Googler (he’s technically a consultant), he fits the mold by not sharing any real juicy details on what’s up with Google Analytics. Rather than have me go on an on about that, just check out the interview already.

The other contribution I made to Bruce Clay Inc., came in the form of today’s featured newsletter. If you didn’t already know, Bruce Clay offers up an SEO newsletter that’s distributed on the 15th and last day of the month.

My contribution to the latest edition of the newsletter is the current featured piece, Search Marketers Need Web Analytics. The article speaks towards the beginner’s side of things by walking the reader through the overall purpose of web analytics. I go on to discuss various technologies involved in tracking data (page tagging, logs, etc.) and eventually end up discussing how to establish and track goals and baseline data for your site users.

The article wraps up by introducing some simple ideas to use common reports from most web analytic packages to help increase the effectiveness of your search marketing campaigns. Obviously, analytics is something I’ve really been spending a lot of time with recently - and I’d certainly be open to extending this featured article out to cover more comprehensive integration of analytics with search marketing.

A few moments ago, Brent Csutoras posted on his blog, that Google is showing indented results from a different domain. I hadn’t seen this behavior before, so I wanted to cover the topic here with a little insight.

Before we jump in though, please take a look at Brent’s screen shot and then read the full post and the information he presents.

The most notable element here is that he was able to refresh many times and still get the same formatting of results. When I ran the same search though, I could not replicate the behavior in FF, IE or Opera - both logged in and logged out.

If you have come across this yourself I’d certainly like to hear your thoughts and see additional examples. Initially, I expected to see some sort of reference from the indented site over to Brent’s in his example. It’s become clear to me that Google needs to understand the origin of content, especially given the scrapers out there with RSS feeds running wild. So, my first thought was that one of Brent’s posts was referenced and replicated — and that’s why the indent occured.

Not so.

Again, it’s the first time I’ve seen this, so I’m going to try to look into it further. At the end of the night though, it could’ve just been a random tweak that was let loose as a mistake.

Hunter Satterwhite, to me, is the Andrew Gerhart of 2008. A bold claim based on how much I’ve learned and appreciated Andrew’s guidance in my career.

So here’s the deal. Hunter has already obtained his BS in Graphic Design & New Media from Johnson and Wales University — the same school Gerhart was at when we brought him into the mix at TSL.

Of course, formal education is nothing in this industry. It’s all about drive, ambition and determination. A few weeks ago Satterwhite transitioned from an intern here at the office over to a full time designer.

Having made the same transition after college, I’m hoping to steer Hunter in the right direction to get him up to speed on advanced SEO tactics. Right now he’s focusing a lot of his time on PHP, MySQL while still managing to maintain his role as a designer.

If you want to get a feel for what he’s all about, be sure to check out Two Plus One Design, a company that Hunter co-owns with Chris Gioranino (fellow designer here) and Sam Pannice.

I’m also pushing Hunter to get a blog going, so stay tuned for that as well. My simple goal is to corrupt him and get him into SEO as much as possible.

A little test with Ian to see how long it takes for this page to rank for “Blublua”. I don’t sell Blublua. I don’t own any Blublua. But, I’ll probably rank for Blublua in about 3 minutes.

Hooray for Blublua!