With the football world cup in South Africa only a few days away, I've created a calendar so that you can easier keep track of all the match times. Simply click on the link below to add it to your existing calendar. FIFA World Cup 2010 Match Times - Google Calendar (also available for ICAL (.ics))Below is a preview - add it to your calendar by clicking the button at the bottom right:Read More
If you are following the latest SEO industry news, you have probably heard about the Google "May Day" update. Google's Matt Cutts confirmed that this Search algorithm change mainly affects long tail searches (watch the video here). Long tail searches can be obscure and/or rare queries where the set of fitting search results is relatively small. Most commonly however they describe those searches where at least 3-4 words (and often more) are used.After the May Day update many websites reported a significant loss of traffic, while others have seen improved traffic from search engines. After all, Google's Search index resembles an ecosystem where one site's loss is another one's gain.If you are using Google Analytics there is an easy way ...Read More
Today Google publicized the split of revenue they share with their hundreds of thousands of AdSense publishers worldwide.In short, Google pays out 68% for AdSense for Content (AFC) ads, and 51% for AdSense for Search (AFS) ads. Quote from the post:AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. [...] Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. [...] The ...Read More
Every now and then you hear somebody saying something which you have always felt, but couldn't properly express in words. Today I stumbled over a TED talk video posted over at David Noël's blog which really hit that spot. The message by Simon Sinek is that whatever you are trying to sell, you will only gain devoted followers by presenting them your vision, not your mere action plan or money.You can see examples of this everywhere: why do so many people work for little money at NGOs while they could easily make more elsewhere? Some organizations, even startups, have people queuing at their door to work for them, others can't hire no matter how hard they try, and when they ...Read More
A while back Google Analytics announced a new feature which allows users to add annotations to their traffic data for easier tracking of changes in website traffic. This feature allows users to make better sense of the data by incorporating a log of all internal and external changes which could influence the traffic to the website. This feature is especially handy when you manage several websites and want to keep track of updates across the different domains.Annotations now seem to be rolled out to all users and here are 8 suggestions on how you can use it in your SEO projects.In general you should make a habit of creating a note in Google Analytics for the following reasons:- Technical adjustments including ...Read More
My name is Hessam Lavi and I live in Berlin, Germany. I'm an ex-Googler and have worked with Search and SEO for almost 5 years now. Apart from the obvious (optimization, conversion, web analytics etc) I'm also passionate about music and photography. Read more here...
