Cloak and Dagger: The Many Motives for Cloaking… and their Consequences
Cloaking is a touchy subject in SEO circles. Typically falling into the category of “gray hat,” it can be fairly safe or incredibly risky to your site’s search engine rankings, depending on how and why it is done. Unfortunately, the growing literature around cloaking does little to dispel the confusion over acceptable use. Often times, [...]
A Surefire Way to Spot Fluff Posts
Consider the topic of this post. What if it was just a collection of links to other sites about fluff posts? What if it was something you’d already heard about fluff posts? Would you be as interested? Would you even be reading this sentence? Probably not. The fact is, a post that doesn’t offer enough [...]
Debugging Syntax Errors in PHP
PHP is unforgiving of syntax errors. Misplaced a semicolon? White screen of death. Mismatched your single and double quotes? White screen of death. Considering a career in Ruby on Rails? White screen of death. Okay, maybe not the last one, but you get the point. Unless you beg and plead with it to output errors, [...]
Don’t Attack Your Critics; Empower Your Advocates
“If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.” – Malcolm X It’s a fact of life. The more successful your website, the more likely it is to receive criticism. As Malcolm X points out, this can almost be regarded as a good thing. After all, nobody would feel the need to criticize unless [...]
The Purple Cow Level: An MMORPG Lesson in Remarkable Marketing
Case: LF1M healer for norm BM Unless you’re a seasoned World of Warcraft player, the string of acronyms listed above probably doesn’t mean much to you. To translate, it stands for, “We are looking for one more party member to fill the role of healer for a normal-difficulty run of the Black Morass dungeon.” Yes, [...]
Why NYTimes.com Gets a Majuscule “A” for Usability
Case: “Majuscule” Whenever I’m presented with something I don’t know, I have an almost instinctive habit of looking it up. It’s not necessarily a bad habit; in fact, several of my coworkers seem to rely upon it. And I could argue that it’s foolish not to do so with the wealth of the world’s knowledge [...]
7 Questions to Ask Your Marketing Analyst
“You don’t know what works until you test it, so test everything.” Adam Schultz Over the years, my marketing mentors have instilled in me the understanding that marketing is 10% creativity and 90% testing. Examined through this paradigm, marketing takes on an almost scientific nature, where every piece of data is scrutinized until the truth [...]
My Social Media Frankenstein Monster
Since the dawn of search, SEO professionals have dreamed of controlling brand-related search results. Through the power of social media, I intend to do just that. I will wrest my name from the whims of the algorithms and take control of my own destiny. The Hypothesis By linking them together, social media profiles can be [...]