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. ...

Happy new years eve, everyone! To continue my tradition from last year, below are the top funny and interesting search phrases for CafePress in 2011. Enjoy! Funniest Don’t ask me, ask google The sun is trying to kill me Pow! I just shit my pants I eat my road kill Dick cheney eats kittens Barack you like a hurricane I’m sick of hearing what rich people think ...

Enjoy the new 2011 Google Zeitgeist video below. We made it. =] YouTube: Year in Search 2011

In the past few months I’ve taken a new interest in learning how to program and code as it applies to SEO. This came out as a need to research and evaluate SEO campaigns in a scalable manner where popular SEO tools didn’t work for my situation or I had no engineering resources available. It was like I had both hands tied behind my back. For example, I found myself asking certain questions and performing SEO fixes that were very labor intensive. What is the redirect destination for a list of 200+ URLs? How many links are pointing to the new location? And to take it further, how many times were those pages crawled by Google in the last month? ...

It’s been very busy for me this month so unfortunately I do not have anything to write about. However, I am introducing my monthly link round-up where I share some of the most link worthy blog posts out there about SEO - I guess that’s my treat. As for the trick? Well - there is none. I am not putting up any old links just for the hell of it. I passionately endorse these articles because I know I will refer to them again in the future. ...

Feb 2014 Edit: The calls, functions and worksheet used in this blog post may be outdated. If you know of a better guide please contact me and I’ll send a link your way. I want to share with everyone a very quick rank checking tool that I built using the ImportXML function from Google Documents. But first, a quick history lesson… Or you can just grab the G-Doc ImportXML Rank Checker here. Historical Context I used to love rank checking when I first started out as an SEO analyst. I thought it was the only thing that mattered and took great pride when the keyword rankings jumped to the top of the fold on page one. However, as I matured professionally and took on more important responsibilities at CafePress*, checking for keyword ranks fell to the wayside and lost its novelty as it became a time suck. ...