I occasionally browse my Twitter feed to stay in touch with SEO news and random internet shindigs. One thing I’ve noticed is some SEO’s only interact with a certain group whereas others are more open to “outsiders.” This social phenomenon shouldn’t be too surprising since it’s easily observable in high school where you have the popular kids, jocks, math geeks, environmentalists, goths and so forth hanging out with their own clique. In fact, we can sum it up with one timeless quote… ...

I’ve been preoccupied this month with my recent job change so I don’t have anything insightful to share. However, that doesn’t mean cool things aren’t happening on other websites! Below are my top five favorite blog posts for the month. Web Analytics Consulting: A Simple Framework For Smarter Decisions Avinash does an incredible job detailing the different components of consulting as a web analyst. I’ve always clumped the three aspects together but his framework has helped identify my strengths/weaknesses and what clients I should take on in the future. That being said, I believe every SEO should be competent in data analysis (DA). ...

There are many pivotal moments in a life time and one of mine occurred earlier this month when I made the difficult decision to resign from CafePress as the in-house SEO Analyst. After nearly two years of dedicated service I felt my time was up as my professional long-term vision no longer aligned with company goals. This is not to say CafePress wasn’t a great place to work. In fact, that could be further from the truth because I absolutely LOVED my time there. I worked with some of the brightest minds in the online marketing industry and learned a lot from everyone. ...

I love optimizing websites for search engines so much I regularly do consulting work on the side. But what I love more than THAT is showing clients the amazing year-over-year results of a successful SEO campaign. The data from the images below come from an eCommerce website in an extremely competitive niche. When I first started in April 2011, they received an average of 80 visits per day; that number jumped to ~200 visits per day - a 150% increase! ...

I discovered the Search Commander’s URL tool awhile back when I needed a scalable solution to check the HTTP status for a large list of URLs. It worked as intended but when I tried it with 1k+ URLs I pretty much broke the checker and took down the page along with it. Thus, in my pursuit to learn programming I said to myself, “how come I can’t build my own?” If you’re a Mac user you can use this right away since cURL is already built into your Terminal. For Windows users you’ll first need to download Cygwin with the cURL package. ...

Update: Conference has unfortunately been cancelled. I don’t have anything major to share this month besides the fact that I will be attending Distilled’s SearchLove conference in San Francisco (not an affiliate link). I am super excited about it and can’t believe it’s less than 1.5 months away! If you plan to attend please let me know and we’ll meet up. Date: June 18th-19th, 2012 Location: David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA Price: $849 Speakers (I look forward to): Tom Critchlow, Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds, Annie Cushing, Justin Briggs, Kate Morris Sessions (I look forward to): Advanced link building strategies, latest ways to measure and action your metrics, link building in the age of social media, integrating social media into your SEO activities The only gripe I have with their marketing scheme is the fact that** BERKELEY IS NOT SAN FRANCISCO**. It is a 30-45 minute drive away from The City….what an insult to us San Franciscans so get it right ya bloody blokes!

After delaying the Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam for an entire year, I finally decided to get it over with and I passed! Here’s a screenshot of the certification PDF they sent me. GAIQ Certificate Below is my score card for the GAIQ test results. GAIQ Results In retrospect, I should’ve used the remaining 45 minutes to double check my answers and boost up my score but my over-confidence convinced me otherwise. At least now I know I should read up on E-commerce Tracking - probably got dinged for the technical Javascript implementation questions. ...

In the first week of January 2012, I conducted a small research project where I manually extracted the text from SEO job postings on LinkedIn and plugged them into a word cloud generator called Wordle. I was curious to know what hiring companies nowadays are looking for when they want to fill an SEO position in terms of perception (job description) and qualifying factors (job experience). A small disclaimer: I make sweeping generalizations for each image so it may not apply to every position, description, experience or company. That being said, feel free to offer your own explanations in the comments section below as I am always open to hearing how others interpret this. ...