* { outline: 2px dotted red }
* * { outline: 2px dotted green }
* * * { outline: 2px dotted orange }
* * * * { outline: 2px dotted blue }
* * * * * { outline: 1px solid red }
* * * * * * { outline: 1px solid green }
* * * * * * * { outline: 1px solid orange }
* * * * * * * * { outline: 1px solid blue }

Saw this posted by Chris Page over at Snipplr this morning. I love stuff like this. There’s always Firebug+Yslow, Firefox Web Developer and other heavy duty tools to pick apart a site from the outside, but using the language to do the work for you from within the system is pretty much the coolest thing ever.

We’re now officially out of beta! All tools are live. Every one of them is free in one form or another, you just have to create an account to use them:

• Voltmeter – A comprehensive test of any site’s marketing power. This tool crawls a site and reports back on 30+ on and off site factors indicating online marketing prowess.
• A/B Darwin – A data fitness calculator that tells you definitively if your A/B split testing data is complete enough to declare a winner and a loser.
• RANDAL – Rank detection and logging that’s automatic. This tool will check your search rank for specific keywords daily and log your results over time. Hooray! No more manually checking search results.
• User Historian – A unique site analytics tool that can peek into your users browsing history and tell you where else your market is gathering online.
• Keyword Distiller – This tool scans a web page and looks at 13 different factors to determine what keywords that page is targeting. See what terms any page online is targeting, and shore up your weaknesses or learn from your competition.

These tools are all offered for free, but if the tools are useful and you need more power and customization options, we do PRO accounts, too. Being officially out of beta means that our 50% off price lock-in promotion is over for PRO users; but it’s still a great deal at $19.99/month or an even better deal at $149/year. Click either of those links above to look at our upgrade page and see exactly what the difference is between the free and PRO accounts.

We also host this resource, as well (no account required for viewing):

• Web Developer’s Field Guide – A huge resource list for web developers to bookmark and come back to when in need of a tutorial, instruction, general information or inspiration.

Being out of beta means everything works, but it does not mean everything is perfect (what is?) so we’ll continue to make improvements to all of our tools and resources. If you have something to say about any of it: we’d love to hear from you.

Our Darwin A/B split testing tool is temporarily offline while we try and find a hosting solution that allows us to run the astronomical calculations we have to perform in order to deliver accurate results.

Update: Darwin is back online!

Click any of the screen shots to see them full size.

I’m excited to say that Darwin, our A/B Split testing data calculator, is live! Go check it out – you’ll need to log in or create an account real fast (free, no email required) if you don’t have one.

Is Your A/B Split Testing In The Dark Ages?

It seems like every week I read another blog post about what rule of thumb is best for measuring your split test results. Sometimes 200 impressions is “enough”, sometimes it’s 600, but it’s always arbitrary. The truth is that there is no rule of thumb that will apply to all split tests. They have to be mathematically analyzed for random data variance on a case-by-case basis. It’s a complicated process that most online marketers skip.

Skipping the science on the data analysis means that A/B split testing for the majority of online marketers is guess work and intuition; both of which have been proven hideously unreliable since, oh… The Dark Ages. Unreliable analysis for your split testing data means that you’ll spend longer getting lasting results, if you get them at all, because you’ll kill a variant of a split test before you truly know it’s better. This means lost time and it also means lost money if you’re paying for those impressions.

Darwin puts a stop to all that.

Darwin is Easy To Use

To use Darwin, you enter your A/B split test data (two sets of related impressions and clicks/conversions) in the four fields and hit “Calculate Fitness”. It will then tell you in the plainest language possible (Yes or No) if your two sets of data show a mathematically significant variance from one another.

If the answer is NO, you need to collect more data because there’s a good chance you’re just seeing random variations in your user base.

If the answer is YES, then you can eliminate the worse performing variant and start over. No more guesswork! (Chance doesn’t stand a chance against science.)

A/B Split testing, or multivariate testing, is arguably the most powerful tool in an online marketers bag of, er, tools. It is essentially putting one pitch up against another and seeing which one does the best. By doing lots of A/B Split tests over time and always keeping the better performer, you can evolve a pitch that is tailored to your market and likely better than a pitch created based on a hunch or intuition. (Careful here; hunches and intuition are not to be discounted. You must start from somewhere, you can’t split test a blank Adwords ad or a from with no fields. And it’s obviously better to start from a good place than not, which is something only a good copy writer can do.)

One of the easiest places to do this is with Google Adwords. They make it very easy to run one ad against another. You can see in the example above, ads for the keyword “right-side back pains”. You would run two different ads (ad A & B, natch) to appear when users searched for that keyword, and see which ad performed better. Then you would eliminate the poorer performer of the two and start testing again. All A/B split testing is some variation of this process.

A/B split testing is also applied to whole web pages or individual elements on a web page like a headline or form. You can see a good example of on-page element split testing here: Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise sign-up page. They did a multivariate test with lots (more than two) of variables. This is a more advanced form of split testing. (It is much easier to keep track of variables and to vet your data with an A/B split test, which is why it is so much more common.)

In Summary

Split or multivariate testing is comparing things against one another to determine a superior so that the inferior may be disregarded. By running concurrent split tests of marketing pitch’s, ads or design we can allow our market to determine a pitch that is targeted and effective. (It should also be noted that split testing is a whole discipline, in and of itself, and this is bascially a light primer or vocabulary lesson.)

A Search Engine Results Page or SERP is what you see immediately following a search submission. When an end user types a keyword into a search box and hits “enter” or “submit” or “search” the SERP is almost always what they see next. Here’s a SERP for the keyword “SERPs”.

The most helpful way I’ve found to think of SERPs is as what is, literally, the search engine’s product. Most of the real work goes on behind the scenes with algorithm tweaking, web crawling, indexing, and so on, but the rubber hits the road at the SERP. It’s what the user or customer actually sees, so it’s an incredibly important element in the world of search marketing and online marketing in general.

Keywords, keyphrases, search terms; these are all the same thing (Capitalization does not matter when it comes to keywords.) They all get typed into search boxes by users who then click “submit” and are shown a Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

After listening to customer emails, we’ve upgraded the amount of daily Voltmeter reports a free account can run to 2. We’ve also dropped the price on PRO accounts to $9.95/month and $99.95/year. (50% off the original price, this is still discounted pricing while we’re in beta, so go get one before prices go up!)

The maximum score possible on the Voltmeter is 100, but this is not grade school and 50 out of 100 points is not an F. In fact, the vast majority of sites online would score 20 or below. That is because the Voltmeter scores on a logarithmic scale. You can find in-depth details on logrithmic scales from wikipedia, but it basically breaks down like this: on the Voltmeter scoring a 20 is not twice as hard as scoring a 10, it’s 100 times harder. And scoring a 30 is 1000 times harder than that. Why?

Think Of It Like This

1. Your Mom (!?) has a blog.
2. The New York Times has a web page.
3. Your Mom’s blog scores a 9 on the Voltmeter.
4. NYTimes.com scores a 92.

All good so far, right? But wait, it’s not as if NYTimes.com is only 11x more popular than your mom’s blog. (Unless she’s Arianna Huffington or Xeni Jardin.)

She’s getting 200 readers per month, The Times is getting 20 million. It’s exponentially more popular. That’s why the Voltmeter returns a logarithmic score; it’s measuring something incredibly vast.

When a search engine spider crawls your page it’s looking at the content. By looking at your content, it can tell what the page is about and knows where to file it away in the search engine’s index. So, keyword targeting is very important. The Voltmeter returns 5 keywords. (Keywords and key phrases are the same thing- A “keyword” can contain several words.) It is basically looking at your site’s content and returning keywords that a search engine will likely think the site is targeting.

Optimizing page content with keywords is similar to walking a tight rope. You don’t want to go overboard and churn out unreadable junk because it’s poor usability, your site will just bounce users away and you’ll never get any links. But you do want to include various phrases in your text that poeple interested in your topic would search for. The golden rule here is to write for people first.

“Arbitrary” is a bit harsh, but it’s definitely close. There are a lot of services that attempt to rank web pages online. We’ve included a few of them in this section for comparative purposes, which is mostly the only thing they’re good for.

PageRank

Pagerank used to be the only thing anyone in search marketing cared about. Now it’s not that big of a deal. Pagerank is one of over 100 factors Google takes into account when placing links onto a search engine result page (SERP). Pagerank is a good indicator of overall SEO/SEM clout, but don’t get too hung up on it. You should also note that it’s a logarithmic scale. Just like the Voltmeter overall score, it’s not twice as hard to score a two as it is to score a one, it’s 10 times harder; and scoring a three is 100 times harder and so on…

Alexa

Alexa has been around, in some form or another, since the beginning of the web. They’re a “web information company” that gathers said info about said web from people with the Alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. Then they try and extrapolate the rank of every website online and list them on their site, among other things. It’s a lofty goal and they often fall short, but overall it’s one of the most reliable services of its kind.

Compete.com

Compete.com does pretty much the exact same thing as Alexa. They try and gather all the information they can about the net and then package it for their users/customers. Also just like Alexa, these numbers don’t mean much on their own and are mostly good for making comparisons between two sites that are both ranked by the service, since they’re both ranked using the same data set.

Google pioneered the model of judging a pages worth by primarily letting other people do it for them. (All the big search engines have long since followed.) Search engines, at their most basic level, rank pages by looking at how many incoming links they have. Yes, the web is a popularity contest.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Search engines also assign all those incoming links or votes for your content a quality score by looking at how many incoming links the pages doing the linking have, they also look at link structures, link content, reciprocal links and on… and on… and then on some more. Links are the most important aspect of search engine marketing. With enough quality incoming links, nothing else matters. In fact, the Incoming Links portion of the Voltmeter makes up more than half of the total score.

This all makes sense of course. The easiest way to automate a process that’s impossible to automate (like objectively determining the quality of human-generated information output) is getting a real person to do it for you. Preferably someone else; or in Google’s case, everyone else.

Why does Voltmeter check the link sources it does? Not all links are created equal. Like I said earlier, the engines check your links’ links, they check domain histories, hypertext composition and so much more…

Total Incoming Links

We have to apologize up front because this number will never be consistent or correct. No searche engine has ever indexed the entire web, so no one actually cn tell us the total number of incoming links. We can provide you with the closest approximation available and that’s from Yahoo! Site Explorer. Their index is massive and their resources are many, so this is the best place to check for an overall idea of how many total incoming links a site has.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia links are a good measure of if you’re providing any sort of authoritative information on your website. Is what you have to say some combination of unique and valuable? If so you probably have a lasting Wikipedia link or two. Wikipedia links are fairly controversial in search marketing circles because I can go ad some Wikipedia links to any site I want right now. But even if I do, they won’t be there for long unless they actually add something to the what’s arguably the largest, most current knowledge pool online. So we check them when running the Voltmeter test.

DMOZ

Remember how we said the best way to automate something was to have someone else do it? Well some search engines don’t give two licks about automation. DMOZ is one of them, if not the one of them. DMOZ hand-selects every single website that it admits to its search index. If you want your site in the DMOZ directory, first you or someone else has to go and suggest your URL be included in the DMOZ index. Then it goes into a long queue until a real life human looks it over and decides whether it’s up to snuff or not. This can take weeks or it can take months, but we highly recommend it and we have Voltmeter check for DMOZ links, because they are likely the most trusted links available.

Google News

Google News tracks all kinds of news sources from TV stations to newspapers to online wire services. Checking for links to your site here is sort of a shotgun approach to checking for mention of your URL in traditional media. These links are usually pretty high quality just because we know for a fact that no link farms or other shady links sources are tracked by Google News.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search is just like Google News, but for blogs only. So if you can get the fickle, echo-chamber, rumor-mongering blogosphere talking, you’ll get some link-love from this area of the net. These links are usually pretty easy to come by with a minimal investment in some good link-bait. (Despite the negative connotations of the word baiit, we’re big into link bait around here. This is something we define as content compelling enough to spread on its own. Link-bait and viral content are pretty much the same thing. The Voltmeter itself is link bait. It’s useful, easy to use and looks good.)

Google Domain Mentions

This is sort of the catchall for anything we may have missed. This searches Google for your domain. So if we were looking for domain mentions of this site, we’d go to Google and search the term, “360voltage.com” (quotes and all) and see how many hits we got. This important because even if someone isn’t directly linking to you, this is the second best thing, it’s more than text, but not quite a hyperlink.

In Summary

Links are the thing. They are the currency of the net. You want as many links as you ca get from as many different reputable sources as you can get. (No link buying or link-farms.) If you only invest in one area of search marketing, make it link-beggingbuilding. I’ll say it again: with enough high quality links, nothing else matters.

The Voltmeter returns server condition codes to see if the target URL is being served to end users correctly. Server codes are standardized responses to how a server responds when a URL is requested by a user. The most ubiquitous of these is the 404 Error. Which mreans, “Page not found.” There are a ton of different server codes, and if you’re interested in seeing all the different responses, this is a good place to look.

200

This is the server code for, “All’s well.” Ideally, this is what you want to be returned for all page requests on your server, except for some fringe use-cases. Such as redirects, which brings us to…

300

The 300 series of server codes are for redirected pages. A 301 redirect means moved permanently, 302 means moved temporarily and on and on. (Preventing link rot with redirects is a big part of search engine optimization that is beyond the scope of this article, but we’ll touch on it in the near future.)

400

400 server response codes are bad. These are errors and will hurt your user experience (UX) and SEO. These should be hunted down and corrected.

In Summary

Effectively serving your content is the lynch pin of the world wide web. It’s arguably even more basic than the functionality of the hyperlink. Regularly running a report like Voltmeter to make sure that your server is in good health should be a regular exercise.

Every page online has two things that both web browsers and search engines will look at in order to help determine a page’s topic and they will also pass this information directly on to the user in most cases. These are the title tag and the description meta tag. They all appear in the head of an online document and this is what they look like:

The Title Tag

Don’t create things and leave them nameless! When a search engine displays a search engine results page (SERP) to the user, it will usually use the title tag as the link to the page itself. A lot of search engines will also bold searched-for keywords in this title tag. For example: if you’re page’s title tag is this…

…and someone searches for “Kansas City Cup Cakes.” When you pop up, the actual text in your link will look like this:

Bitty Cakes – Fresh Baked Cup Cakes in Kansas City.

This helps alert users to the topicality of your page and draws their eye.

The title tag is also where web browsers get the text to show in the bar at the top of the window or tab. All of these factors make title tags a great place to invest some copy writing time and refine your site’s outgoing message.

Meta Description

The meta description works in a very similar manner to the title tag. The meta description is also displayed on SERPs to represent your page and gets the searched-for keywords bolded, once again alerting users to the topicality of your page and drawing their eye.

In Summary

Many websites are missing these factors completely or worse, they implement a single page title and description site-wide. Why is this worse? If these elements are missing, a search engine will pull information directly from your page and display that in the SERP, so at least you get a title and description that have something to do with the unique information that page contains. So either fill out the info for individual pages or leave it blank and hope the engines pull something topical to display to potential users.

Leaving these either of these tools unused is like turning down free advertising money. This is what users will see anywhere you rank, so be sure to invest some time here when you’re building out your site.

If a Voltmeter Report crawls zero pages, it usually means that there is something fishy going on with the target URL. It could be a redirect, stuff could be hidden behind a mandatory log in form or maybe the site uses Flash navigation. We’ll start with the most common problem:

Domain Redirects

To see what’s going on, click the “Report Target” link on the second line of your Voltmeter report. Now look at the URL in your web browser. It’s probably not the same URL you just clicked on. The URL your report ran on is probably being directed to this new URL you see in your browser. So go back and run a Voltmeter report on that URL. For example, if you run a Voltmeter report on ESPN.com it crawls no pages because ESPN.com redirects to ESPN.go.com. So, you should go back and run your report on ESPN.go.com.

You will notice that a lot of the other metrics in the report will still show up, even if crawls zero or 1 page. That is because a lot of the factors the report measures occur off site. If we keep with our ESPN.com/ESPN.go.com example above, we’ll still get Domain Age, Incoming Links, Search Engine Inclusion and some web rankings. A lot of people link/linked to ESPN.com either because they did it before the current redirect was in place, or because, just like we did when we ran the report the assume that ESPN.com is ESPN’s home page. The same thing goes for Index Inclusion as well as Web Rankings. The pages on that site were included in the index and/or ranked before the redirect was in place.

Log In Forms

A lot of sites online, such as Facebook.com, are “walled neighborhoods”, meaning that they don’t let their information out. So if you run a Voltmeter Report on a site like this, it may not crawl anything or it may only be able crawl the homepage before getting stopped by a log in.

Flash

Flash is hard for all but the most advanced web crawlers to handle. Google announced recently that they are crawling Flash files for links and even text, but that it’s experimental. Flash should be used sparingly to enhance user experience, but should not be used for things like navigation or entire websites as it can hinder Search Index Inclusion.

Robots.txt

If your site’s Robots.txt file tells us to not crawl parts of a URL, the 360v Spider will respect its wishes. Same goes for no-follow links. Our spider obeys the same rules as the spiders (Google, Bing, etc…) you’re trying to impress.

Note that, as in our ESPN.com example above, the report will always measure off site factors even when blocked from a full site crawl by factors such as Log in forms and Flash.

Welcome! 360 Voltage is a collection of online tools that Voltage Creative, LLC, a Kansas City Integrated Marketing firm, makes available to the public on both a free and paid basis. The tools on 360voltage.com and the material published on this (very official) blog, are meant to educate and enlighten our clients, business owners and web developers about online marketing.

Explosion + Acceleration

The information age has exploded and is still accelerating. Marketing is no longer about coming up with a clever phrase and pushing it to a massive audience. Right now, so much is pushed from so many different directions that a lot of the old playbook doesn’t work anymore.

Stop Pushing & Start Pulling

It would take a week to absorb the marketing blitz a person is exposed to in 30 minutes of life in the developed world. We have to stop throwing away our dollars! We must go to our audience on their terms. This means offering mutual benefit marketing and communicating with speed and integrity. There’s no better tool for this than the internet. This is due in no small part to search. Search is becoming more important every 3 seconds. (That’s how often  new web page is born.) This site’s focus is on helping information and messages get found online through search.

Bad Reputation

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) have received a bad rap and that’s a shame. For a long time these terms were synonymous with hacks and tricks for gaming a system and yielding short term results. That’s thankfully going away now as the snake oil salesmen are exposed by search engines with an increasingly sophisticated and refined product. The whole search industry is maturing fast as bigger brands and (more impressively) scrappy upstarts see massive strides toward their goals with search marketing & optimization.

The Moment of Need

We’re very excited about this, because as anyone who’s seen a professional search engine marketing campaign or who’s watched a properly optimized site hit its target can tell you: search is the most powerful type of marketing there is when it comes to return on investment. It allows you to place your message in front of your audience at their precise moment of need. It’s pull marketing at its best; a lighthouse in a blinding storm of information. It’s also a good long-term investment: as information output accelerates, search will only become more important.

Secret Sauce

We can’t take on all the clients that come to our door, but we can share out knowledge about how to get a message to an audience and provide a nice toolkit to help you on your way. If you’re looking for access to a cutting edge marketing professional’s secret sauce, you’ve finally found it.

Swinging For The Fence

This site is a labor of love, so contact us if you can think of a way to make it better. We’re always going to be interested in that.

The web is made of code. There are all kinds of code, but the most basic kind, and therefore the code that’s sure to be present on all websites, is HTML. So, the search engines primarily use HTML to try and determine what a website is about. This is the other half of the search engines’ battle. (Firstly they must get the information into their search index.) Once they have the info, they have to parse it (look at it) and figure out what the site’s focus or purpose. Then they’ll know when to serve it to their searchers.

HTML Tags

HTML tags are many, but the important ones we want to focus on for SEO purposes are header, bold, title and alt tags. You can see them here:

This is a level 1 header
This is a level 2 header
This is a level 3 header

This text is bold
Visible Link text

These are the things a search spider looks for on each page to assign it topicality. Many web pages online are not using these tags properly or they may not be using them at all. Not using them at all is like trying to drive nails by hand when you’ve got a hammer sitting next to you. All you have to do is pick it up and it changes your impact by an order of magnitude.

The use of HTML tags is easy to detect. The proper use of them is a bit harder and it’s going to be specific to your marketing niche. For instance, when our Voltmeter tool shows that you’re using all your HTML tags , that’s a good thing, it means you’re using all the correct tools. But it should also be looked at subjectively to determine whether you’re using them correctly for your website’s purpose.

Code to Content Ratio

The search engines prefer pages that are content-rich. One way to automate the detection of a content-rich page is to examine code-to-content ratios. If your web page has 100 characters on it, and 35 of them are user-facing text while 65 of them are HTML code; you have a 53% code-to-content ratio, which is pretty good.  I’d consider anything above 30% good. Anything over 50% is great. Pages with a low code-to-content ratio make the user-facing message stand out to search engines. Think of it as boosting your signal-to-noise ratio.

Why do search engines care about this? When a user hits a page they’ll never know the code-to-content ratio, and it’s not like they can tell what a site’s topic is by looking at a single number, so why bother? Generally speaking, low code-to-content websites are going to be easier to crawl. But the main deal is that looking at this number also allows search engines to infer something about the quality of the site. Sites with a low code-to-content ratio load faster and contain a lot of information for the package they’re in. Generally speaking, fast loading sites with lots of informaton are going to be considered of higher quality and will be in a better position to rank well for the terms they are targeting.

Index inclusion is such a basic tenant of Search Engine Optimization that, in a very broad sense, SEO is almost the same thing as search engine inclusion. Almost all search engines are made of three main parts. A spider that crawls the web for content, an index, or database, that the spider sends information back to, and an algorithm that uses the information in the index to generate search engine results pages or SERPs. The only part end users like us ever see is the SERPs. These are what pops up once we type our query in the search box and hit “enter.” You can think of the SERP as the search engines’ actual product.

So, to get the information from your website onto the SERP, it has to be included in the index, which means that your website has to be web-spider friendly. There are a lot of things that can trip up web spiders. Paywalls, logins, javascript, multiple variable URLs, Flash (this is changing), images, etc… Of course you can have all of this stuff on your site, but you don’t want to make things like that central to the usability of your site. For instance, you don’t want your navigation to be entirely composed of Javascript generated links, because a spider won’t be able to read them and your site won’t get fully indexed. Pure Flash sites run into this problem a lot, as well.

Just like most technical things, there a lot more ways to screw it up than get it right. The best thing to do if you’re not well versed in this stuff, is to… A) Keep it simple, things like Flash andand javascript can go a long way to enhance user experience on a website, but they should not be used to control critical information acrhitecture like navigation. B) Get some good help. Also, even if you’re not interested in becoming a web marketing guru, it’s always helpful to educate yourself with tools & resources like our Voltmeter Report and the ones found in The Web developer’s Field Guide.

An oft-overlooked aspect of search engine optimization is assessing the broader characteristics of the domain itself. A search engine’s purpose (you’ll hear us saying this next bit a lot) is to automate the business of determining website quality. It’s half of their battle. The other half is determining topicality, but that’s another post.

Pages Crawled (Domain Size)

Size matters to search engines. Big, original-content-rich sites get crawled more often and are more likely to rank well for their targeted terms. A larger site that has a lot of original content is going to be more important in the eyes of a search engine for obvious reasons. Search engines are traffickers of information. The more you have, the more valuable you are. This is provided they can’t get it any where else. Remember that original content is key. Aggregated or scraped junk can actually be somewhat detrimental, search engines hate that: you’re adding noise while they’re trying to boost the signal. (Don’t panic about hosting a feed or two, I’m talking about site clones or even whole site network clones that end up getting the SE smack down.)

Domain Age

Older websites tend to rank better – search engines infer quality by assuming a higher level of investment in aged content. Moving slow and respecting elder sites allows the search engines to partially eliminate flashes in the pan and black hat SEO’s from trying to game the system with the latest unclosed loop holes in the formulas that determine the layout of search engine results pages (SERPs). An older website, espacially one that’s remained active, is the mark of a webmaster committed to their content. So, in short, an older domain scores some points with the engines.

Internal Links Per Page

This is a fairly tame issue, but can shove it’s way to prominence if abused. Your internal link to page ratio should ideally be somewhere near 1/1. If you have an 8 page site and 300 internal links per page, something goofy is going on. (An example of “something googfy” would be internal keyword spamming – posting tons of keyword rich links, usually not user-visible, from each page to the next. An old SEO trick that was short-lived)

External Links Per Page

A site that links out a lot is usually good for search engine marketing. Most webmasters pay attention to their incoming links and will follow traffic back to its source. This can result in a reciprocal link or at the very least another user. It’s a good to idea to watch who you link to though. Lay down with dogs and you’ll get up with fleas. Linking to malware, phisheries or link farms is a good way to see you SERP rank drop.

Another reason we look at this metric is user experience. In terms of SEM and SEO, it’s also a usability thing. (In general a massive amount of external links per page is not going to make for good user experience. It’s overwhleming and they’ll just back out.) Good user experience leads to more incoming links.

Summing Up…

Overall, domain factors usually aren’t a huge deal. Like most search engine optimization areas, deficiencies here can be overcome with a glut of high quality incoming links. Having said that, these factors are often low-hanging fruit for search engine optimizers looking for little edges in the online battle for attention.

When it comes to pop art, the following video is nothing short of astounding. It’s the animated intro for the new video game The Beatles Rockband.

Pop artist extraordinaire, Banksy once said:

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Hate it or not the central statement there is, and for the most part always has been, true. Art has always had patrons, whether it be The Vatican, a video game studio or Hollywood may or may not diminish the art your mind, but you can hardly argue with the pedigree of commercial artistry in the video above. Personally it’s why I like advertising. Gorgeous art with a purpose becomes design in my eyes. It’s communication backed by reason, which I love. Art with no purpose is lost on me.

Make sure you watch the high-quality version here at the official site. (Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with The Beatles Rockband in any way. Although I am now lusting after an Xbox 360.)