Tom has written about the treatment of IT / it in the search engines before (it is hard for search engines to distinguish between ‘it’ and ‘IT’ when searchers never capitalise things correctly!). Since one of our clients provides IT support, we spend quite a lot of time looking at the results for various IT-related searches and so I have another oddity to share.

In general, when you carry out a search on the major search engines, they highlight the words and phrases from your query in the titles and snippets of the results. In the case of paid search, your search words are highlighted wherever they appear in the advert and URL (among other things, it is this that makes dynamic keyword insertion - where your search query is used automatically in your advert - so powerful).

If you take a real look at a search results page, you will see that this is a very powerful effect drawing your eye to any mentions of the search phrase you used. While the paid search results are carefully crafted to include mentions of the search query, the natural results also tend to (as a result of the relevance element of the engines’ algorithms, and also because they select the snippet they display in part by finding parts of the page with the query string).

Now try a search for it support (google, yahoo, live). Yahoo! gets it pretty much right (as Tom said on his post, they seem to have cracked this particular problem quite well). Live is bumbling along with a clue (apart from the paid results, those look like ’support’ results to me (including requests for support for charities), not ‘it support’. And Google is interesting:

See the difference between the highlighting in the paid and natural results?

Paid search has realised that IT support is a phrase whereas while the natural results are relevant to IT support (they haven’t got the same issue as Live whereby they effectively discount the ‘IT’ bit), they aren’t highlighting the whole thing as a phrase, but rather just highlight support: IT support.

It’s a tricky problem, and also opens up a whole load of interesting questions as soon as you start thinking about it in a bit of detail…

So I was browsing Wired while on a break (honest Will!) and came up against the following page:

I Was a Neuroscience Guinea Pig: How Scientists Scrambled My Brain

Now - frankly, who ISN’T going to click a link like that? I dare you to read to the bottom of this blog post without clicking that link. I just dare you. However interesting you find SEO, scrambled brains is always more exciting.

So, since I have a pulse and a working mouse I clicked. Only to be presented with this (click for full image):

How on earth am I supposed to be able to read the article with that thing in the way? When visiting the site for real that thing was spinning too.

Adverts like this aren’t that uncommon - they pop up and spin around and generally try really hard to get your attention but the only thing which ever gets my attention is the little cross in the corner to get rid of it so I can find the content I was looking for in the first place. The problem is that this advert didn’t have a cross. There was no way that I can see to get rid of this thing other than to click on it - and who knows where they’re going to take me when I click on it!?

The Second Moral Of This Advertising Nightmare

Turns out that when you do click on this link it takes you to this survey. I mean for crying out loud guys - this is Wired not the BBC news. Your readers are among the most tech savvy online and know their way around the internet pretty well. If you present them with something out of 1999 then they’re just going to click away. If you want to make it mandatory to complete a survey to read the article just say so. Otherwise you’re just making it mandatory for people to click the flashing spinning brightly coloured circle before they read the article. And if you’re going to make me take a survey then at least make the survey look nice and add a Wired logo (assuming of course that the survey is actually for Wired? Who knows what info this page collects or who gets that data once I’ve filled it in). Suffice to say I didn’t go past the first page.

Anyway - exactly how interesting is an article about Neuroscience once you take out the association to guinea pigs and scrambled brains? Since I didn’t read the article who knows.

So waaay back in August (which isn’t actually all that long ago - but it feels like an age!) I left this comment on Rand’s post asking for feedback to take to the MSN/Live team about ways they could improve their service.

It’s not so much an improvement to a current feature but I think there’s a gap in the market at the moment for them to over-take yahoo as the SEO/webmasters portal. Currently I use Yahoo for the majority of my link analysis and a hefty chunk of my keyphrase research. The problem is that Yahoo’s traffic data is now outdated and their link tool is getting more temperamental every day. If MSN/Live can come up with something which works and is effective then they could seriously undermine or even overtake Yahoo’s dominance in this area.

Well it looks like link data is finally available through Live if you simply add a ‘+’ before the search (example) - hat tip to Joost for picking this up!

Why is this better than Yahoo?

• Firstly you don’t have to log in - Yahoo plays up if you don’t log in which is a real pain when working on a computer which isn’t your own.
• Secondly it indents results from the same domain - no more having to scroll through masses and masses of links when you get a sitewide link.
• Thirdly - it appears to not count nofollowed links.
• Fourthly, it’s quicker and cleaner than Yahoo.

As I mentioned - I currently use Yahoo a fair amount but I’d love an excuse to ditch them. Now I have one and Yahoo is gone. I predict I most likely won’t visit Yahoo again this year.

In the UK Live/MSN and Yahoo send about the same amount of traffic (in my experience, maybe Live sends a little more) but I can’t help but get the feeling that Yahoo is sending less and less and Live is sending more and more. With all the things Live has in the pipeline I think by this time next year we’ll be talking Google and Live more or less exclusively and Yahoo will be a distant memory - like Ask, bless them.

A post of relatively little content today - but it is Sunday, so I’ll let myself off

The main reason for writing on a Sunday at all is the excitement at being (somewhere deep at the back of) a supplement with The Observer today called The Future 500. More on that below.

In the mean-time, a quick round-up of where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing (instead of blogging, clearly!) and why we’re in the paper:

Will in Morocco

I have been quiet on the blogging front because I was out of the country - a few days in Morocco visiting the Morocco apartments my fiance’s family are doing up. We had a wonderful time, met great people and sampled some brilliant food. It felt a million miles away from London - especially since it was warm and sunny!

While I was there, I (finally) read Good to Great (following much badgering by Rand and especially Gillian).

Gillian even flew to London to badger me to read it (OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). Somehow in the chaos of everything I realised we haven’t written about the great day we spent with Gillian and Scott in London. I’ll try to rectify that - in the meantime, the photo on the right shows them with the Distilled crew (minus Duncan who was playing sport and joined us for dinner). We’re seen here just after getting off the London Eye.

Anyway, Gillian’s badgering worked and I read the book. We have many lessons to learn from it - we’re still digesting everything it has to say (and Duncan is reading it now). A big part of what we need to learn is about working out exactly what we can be best in the world at (and enjoy, and make money doing) and then truly focussing on that. I’m sure we’ll write more about that in the future.

Distilled iPod covers

Before I went away, I commissioned Suzi, Duncan’s fiance to make me a cover for my iPod. I obviously wasn’t, however, rating her creativity enough, because I was amazed (and delighted) with the final result that included an embroidered Distilled logo on it!

If you want a branded iPod cover, Suzi’s your man (so to speak).

In the Observer

Before I went away, I received a call saying that we were going to be included in The Observer’s list “The Future 500″ of people to watch. Obviously we were thrilled (if a little puzzled - how did we get nominated? are they kidding? should we really be on a list as small as 500?).

Then natural competitiveness kicked in and you start thinking “well, if we’re in the top 500, why not the top 100?” - because the top 100 were profiled in the supplement, while we just appear in a list at the back. Still, pretty damn chuffed.

Especially chuffed to have as authoritative a source as The Observer say something like:

Keep an eye on these shining stars: you’ll be seeing a whole lot more of them

So… watch this space, apparently!

Before you all go and unsubscribe let me explain what I mean..

We are fortunate to work in an industry where sharing information is commonplace. Research is shared, Ideas are shared and even Finacials are shared. If you have a question, there is probably someone out there who has already blogged about the answer.

I, like many others can attribute a large chunk of what I know to the various blogs and forums I have read over the last 4 or 5 years. My first foray into SEO came via the Cre8asite Forums where I used to hang around reading all I could. I remember reading that Ammon Johns used to do a days work researching and testing and then he would start his day job.

Research is something that takes time. In my first few years I spent upto 8 hours a day just on researching stuff. Ammon Johns - Cre8asite

Now, I’ve done and continue to do research. I read (a lot), I have websites that only exist to test a hypothesis, but I’d love to be able to do more. Its not that I don’t trust the answers that are out there, its just that you learn so much more when you do the research yourself.

Research is key

Second hand research is (often) better than no research, but there are times when the research is just plain wrong, or taken out of context. I could point you to this article, as proof that you should always use “click here” as your anchor text.

If you aren’t constantly researching what works and doesn’t work then you are always relying on second hand knowledge. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to what people are saying and shouldn’t take on board a lot of excellent advice but you do need to take everything with a pinch of salt.

To (semi) prove my point let me ask you this. If you came across the big secret - a magic bullet that enabled you to constantly gain top rankings would you tell anyone? I’m not sure I would, that big secret would be gold dust, up until I told everyone, at which point it would be worth diddly squat.

People are discovering, using and then blogging about these magic bullets all the time - but by the time you hear about them it’s always a bit too late. In order to capitalise on them you should be trying to discover your own secret bullet. You’ll never do that unless you experiment

Paralyzed with fear

I’m sure everyone reading this post can point to numerous sources telling me the power of directory links isn’t what it used to be, reciprocal links are worse than useless and that paid links are bad. Recently even the ’saviour of SEO’ link bait has been questioned by a couple of sources, saying it won’t be as effective as it used to be, and that such a massive spike of traffic and links won’t count for much.

Taken in isolation each post you read may stop you and make you think. 10 minutes later you continue along your link buying, directory stuffing, reciprocal linking way.

Just like chinese water torture will drive you insane, however the constant posts bashing everything you currently do may eventually stop you doing what you have always done. You change your tried and tested methods. Things stop working and you’re not sure why, you’ve stopped getting reciprocal links (well they are worthless anyway), you haven’t submitted to a directory in years (not what they used to be you know) and you would certainly never even dream of paying for a link (spawn of the devil).

To conclude

I love this industry, but the echo chamber can be a deafening place to be. Sometimes you need to chillax, plug yourself in and ignore what is happening around you and find out for yourselves.

I can promise you this, I will still continue to read the industry blogs I subscribe to (what else would I do in the evening when Suzi is watching corrie?), and I will continue to trust most of what they say. However I know that if I only listen to what they have to say I can only ever be second best, and that isn’t quite good enough.

I’m not really sure if this is news or not but I certainly haven’t seen anyone mention this before (which may be because they’ve been around for ever!) but I recently stumbled across (not stumbled upon - that would be entirely different!) Amazon allowing profile pages to be indexed in the search engines:

You can go and visit my profile here: Tom Critchlow (might as well try and get this ranking higher than page 3 ) and if any kind folks fancy buying me anything off my wish list then go right ahead!

The first I knew of my profile page was when I found it ranking in the serps. I have to admit to being a little surprised. I would have thought that Amazon would have alerted me to the fact that I had my own public page. After all, people love having their own pages which they can edit! While the page doesn’t contain any directly personally identifiable information it does show my full name. The news here is that wish lists are automatically viewable by everyone and anyone. I would imagine you could easily have sensitive items on your wish list which you didn’t want to be viewed by anyone.

Privacy Settings

In a similar way to Facebook you can also choose who gets to view your wishlist - you can set a closed list of invitees, only you or anyone:

You also get to customise which parts of your profile are viewable externally - such as recent purchases (which I have enabled on my profile). Unfortunately, you can’t shuffle the layout like you can in facebook which means that most of the content on my page is all down the right hand side without much content in the middle.

Does everyone get an Amazon profile page?

No. As far as I can see you only get one if you have ever left a review of a product or if you have ever created a list for listmania. Amazon gives a bit of info on this page. However, even if you don’t have a profile you can still search for people’s wishlists. For example - I found Will’s wish list which is viewable by anyone.

What’s on your wish list?

You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run Kenny Rogers

Sometimes, when you are running a PPC campaign, you find a keyword, ad group (or even a campaign!) that has low volume. So low that you can go a while without any conversions. When you find yourself in this situation, it’s important to know (as Kenny would say) when to fold ‘em.

The way I have approached this problem, is to select a conversion rate (whether it be a target, the conversion rate of other elements of the campaign or a historical conversion rate) and then pose the question as:

How many clicks have to elapse without a conversion before we are sure (with 95% confidence) that the conversion rate is lower than our estimated conversion rate?

The following table shows, for sample conversion rates, how many clicks have to go by without a conversion before you can be pretty sure the actual conversion rate is lower than the target:

Historic conversion rate	Number of clicks without conversion that should worry you (95% level)
0.1%	2995
0.5%	598
1.0%	299
1.5%	199
2.0%	149
2.5%	119
3.0%	99
5.0%	59
10.0%	29

Why you need advanced maths to do PPC

You don’t actually need to have a degree in probability and statistics to manage a PPC campaign effectively. Creativity and an attention to detail are probably the greatest requirements. Calls like the one that is the subject of this post can often be made by ‘gut feel’ without needing to know exact probabilities.

Having said that, gut feel doesn’t scale. If you are running dozens of campaigns, with hundreds of ad groups and many thousands of keywords, you need to be able to automate some elements of the process. A big part of where we add value for our clients is by combining industry knowledge, creativity and that attention to detail with our mathematical approach. We build tools that leverage our maths degrees (I knew there was a reason for sitting through advanced probability and stochastic modeling) into scalable solutions that help us get deep into the heart of what’s going on with a campaign, no matter what size it is.

The maths bit - warning probability ahead!

(unless you just want to see us doing some clever stuff!)

So, the question can be reframed as:

How many clicks have to occur without a conversion before we are 95% sure that the conversion rate is less than p?

The generalised case (I have n conversions in C clicks and a supposed conversion rate of p, should I be worried?) is harder. We have a tool in development that will do this kind of statistical analysis, but it involves beta functions and I can’t do it in my head…!

The basic case, however, is pretty straight-forward undergraduate statistics.

Let W be the random variable ‘number of clicks we have to wait before we get a conversion’ (on whatever subset of the account we are watching). Then W is a random variable known as the waiting time of a sequence of Bernoulli trials. It turns out it is a geometric variable with mass function f(k) = p(1-p)^(k-1) (integer k) (*).

Let p be the probability a click converts => probability a given click doesn’t convert = 1-p.

Then P(W > k) = (1-p)^k (essentially, the probability of having to wait longer than k = probability none of the first k convert).

So, if we want to be confident at the 95% level that there is something wrong (i.e. we should have already had a conversion), we need to find the k such that:

0.05 > P(W > k) (i.e. 5% chance we wouldn’t have had a conversion within k clicks)

=> 0.05 > (1-p)^k

=> log(0.05) > k*log(1-p)

=> k > log(0.05) / log(1-p) (reverse inequality since log(1-p) is negative)

To be 99% certain, we’d need to see k > log(0.01) / log(1-p) clicks and no conversions.

Note that you can’t generalise this by simply looking for gaps of k clicks when there are no conversions over a larger number of clicks including a number of successful conversions. This is because, while 95% seems like a high number, it does mean that out of every 20 sets of k clicks, there will be one with no conversions in it. So as soon as you start looking at multiple sets of k clicks, the results no longer hold.

It’s a good quick ‘n’ dirty way of working out statistical significance on small sample sizes, however.

* Probability and Random Processes, Grimmett and Stirzaker

Welcome to the second interview on our blog, if you missed the first one with Scott from SEOmoz then check it out here!

This time we caught up with Hamlet Batista from, well hamletbatista.com! Although relatively new to the blogosphere he’s no beginner and he often blogs about the more advanced aspects of SEO and internet marketing on his blog. I’ve learned a lot from Hamlet’s posts and urge anyone serious about SEO to check it out.

I first came across the brand that is Hamlet Batista in the SEOmoz comments when he posted a link to a great post talking about how to automate passing pagerank between your low pagerank pages. Since then I’ve loved the technical and insightful posts he makes and look forward to many more!

But anyway, before I gush out my love for Hamlet on our blog let’s move on to the interview. (Note: Rebecca - even though we have a microphone image there’s no audio. Sorry to disappoint. Doesn’t stop you clicking away to your heart’s content though )

The Interview!

First up, can you introduce yourself?

[Hamlet:] Hey, I finally got my first interview! I was wondering how many Youmoz promotions and front-page Sphinn posts it was going to take. Thanks a lot; I appreciate the invitation and recognition.

My name is Hamlet Batista. I suppose those who have seen my blog or my comments on other blogs have not been able to miss my name, as I use it in all my public profiles. I am a native of the Dominican Republic, a beautiful and tropical country that shares an island with Haiti. Spanish is my first language, but I learned English at school and by watching American TV via satellite. I graduated with Telecommunications Engineering (Ingeniería Telemática) in 1996, spent about five years in various jobs, and I’ve been running my own businesses now since 2002.

In your bio you mention that you have a strong programming background but that you moved to start your own search marketing company. How much did you know about SEO when you made the jump?

[Hamlet:] Actually, I knew nothing about SEO when I made the jump. Everything was circumstantial—my original idea was to offer programming/consulting services. I learned about search marketing when my initial business idea didn’t work as well as I’d expected.

I had quit my job as Director of Technical Services for iGlobalmedia (now PartyGaming) when they had their operation in my country. They are the owners of PartyPoker and several online casinos, and by now I assume many online and offline properties. I know the owners personally: Anurag, Ruth, Russ, Vikrant. They were in Forbes list of billionaires last time I checked. I can say I learned a lot about being competitive from those guys. It is amazing how they were able to move from a tiny room with a couple of servers and some desks to the operation they are in now. They were severely affected by the US law banning online gambling, though.

I remember how some days we struggled to keep pace with those guys. They were able to work several days without sleep and were extremely demanding, which was an important reason driving me to move faster with my own startup plans.

Prior to working for them, I was a Senior System Administrator, maintaining Solaris and Linux servers for the Internet operations of Verizon Dominicana (now Claro/Codetel). It was a more calm and corporate type of environment. I learned a lot about organization, things that I still try to do with my business.

And how did you learn about SEO and where did all this advanced knowledge come from?!

[Hamlet:] He, he, he. It is really funny and interesting how I got started. As I mention in my About page, my initial market was Viagra. One day I noticed that one of my Adwords competitors was showing up in the regular search results as well. I was extremely curious as to what the guy was doing. How come he was showing up there? I decided I needed to understand how he did it.

I signed up to several newsletters: Sumantra’s Roy, Jill’s HighRanking Advisor, and others, adapted my content to match his use of the keywords, and then I started following his links. Most of his links were from other sites’ home pages, but when I visited them I noticed that the links were invisible. To make the long story short, he was subscribed to a service called AutomatedLinks. I managed to sign up for the service and my site started ranking too. A couple of weeks after achieving high rankings (I was #15 for Viagra and higher for other variations) AutomatedLinks and all the sites in the network were banned, including mine.

After that experience, and most importantly after seeing how profitable it was to be ranking so high, I decided I needed to learn more about search engine optimization. It was when I read the paper describing Google’s search engine that I clearly understood why AutomatedLinks was able to help us rank high: the ALT text in the invisible images was keyword rich, and served as anchor text. Understanding the power of anchor text when nobody was talking about it was a gigantic opportunity. The money I made during 2002–2005 when I had fewer staff was more than what I make now with more people.

When you are targeting highly competitive markets, you need to know something that your competitor doesn’t. Back then you didn’t have Aaron Wall or Rand spilling the beans. In one way it was good because the limited knowledge provided a big competitive advantage. Now, it is a lot more difficult because a lot of people know how to game the search engines. But I can tell you that you will not find a competitive edge in public forums, blogs or e-books. You need to go to the source: research papers.

The beauty of research papers is that they are really scary to non-technical types. I feel a great deal of respect for Bill Slawsky for the great work he does deciphering patents. Even so, if you are not a programmer or don’t know linear algebra you will miss some interesting concepts and ideas. That is still where I find my competitive edge today.

You mention on your about page that you got into SEO after hearing about “pay-per-click, Viagra, and the almighty dollar”. Do you play in competitive markets for your own sites, or are you mainly focusing on client work at the moment?

[Hamlet:] We play with our own sites and projects in highly competitive markets. We do mostly affiliate marketing. We refer customers to other merchants and we have our own affiliates as well. Our most profitable project to date was our online pharmacy affiliate network opanetwork.com. It’s been a tough industry as US laws and regulation keep getting more difficult and we’ve needed to adapt to stay in business. I am not sure I want to continue doing that specific business. I’ve missed a lot of vacation time the last couple of years.

You have your own search marketing company Nemedia but you don’t promote them on your blog - rather you promote your own personal brand in the blogosphere. Why did you make that decision?

[Hamlet:] Nemedia is not a traditional search engine marketing company. Our plan is not to focus on client work, but to support RankSense customers. The idea is to complement the product offering with a guiding hand of related services (PPC, Analytics, etc.). I am not convinced yet that offering consulting services is as scalable and profitable as selling a packaged product. And since RankSense is not yet released, I haven’t had the need to promote Nemedia.

Further to that - what are your goals for your blog? What would you like to achieve?

[Hamlet:] I am a serial entrepreneur, and sharing my ideas and experiences in my blog accomplishes several positive things:

1. I can build up authority in my domains of expertise.
2. I can create/improve products/services based on the feedback/critiques I receive via the comments to my posts.
3. I can gradually build a following that can potentially buy and/or recommend my products/services to others, as I have established a relationship based on trust and on delivering high quality.
4. I can interact with my peers and meet highly-regarded figures in the industry. For example, I recently demoed my software via WebEx to Bill Slawsky, Andy Beard and Halfdeck. I received great feedback, critiques and ideas that I took back to the developers and we have implemented most of them. Those guys would not have listened if we hadn’t ‘met’ in the blogosphere.

My goals are to keep growing readership, share and get more ideas, announce new products, both free and paid. Along with the feedback I hope to get some sales and recommendations.

You are currently building RankSense - a software suite for search marketers and business owners alike. Talk us through the product.

[Hamlet:] I could probably fill out many pages talking about our product. In essence, RankSense has been a dream of mine for some time. A few years ago, I saw that SEO, while extremely effective, is a little hard to grasp for people with no technical background (even though I myself love the complex stuff ;)). Additionally, most home-based and small business owners are not able to afford the services of reliable SEO companies. We all know that good SEO costs a lot of money, but large companies that can afford SEO services or have the talent in-house can also afford other marketing channels. This leaves the little guy without many options. Books, training and seminars are a popular alternative at the moment. Integrated tools are losing popularity because they are still trapped in SEO 1997. How does submitting your site to thousands of unknown search engines help nowadays?

We designed RankSense thinking primarily of the little guys, similar to the way you have accounting packages like Quickbooks and Peachtree that make bookkeeping easy and efficient for small businesses. In three years, we’ve invested more than 20,000 man-hours into RankSense to make the complex processes of today’s SEO easy and accessible to virtually anybody.

RankSense has integrated tools that can make your site search engine friendly, identify keywords opportunities, research competitors and do advanced link analysis and on-page optimization. It is fully integrated with popular blogging platforms and can work with your website files whether they are on your computer disk or on your hosting web server.

You can learn more about the product by visiting the RankSense website.

Once that’s out the way, what’s next? Do you plan on releasing more tools or going in a completely different direction?

[Hamlet:] We obviously will need to keep updating the software. Moving forward we’ve thought about getting into automated bid management, but I feel like Google will eventually make third-party offerings less attractive by incorporating more features (like portfolio-based bidding) into their paid platform. Another possibility is to create a version that focuses on social media, but I haven’t seen any concept yet that does not look like spamming.

We just started working on our next big project, which is an affiliate network with a radical new concept, but I don’t think it is wise for me to share the details at this moment.

Now, you grew up in the Dominican Republic and still live there. That probably makes you the highest profile non-English-language search marketer out there (at least within my feeds you are!). How has being based outside of the US and the UK affected your experience of SEO?

[Hamlet:] I am not really high profile yet, but working hard to get there! The beauty of the Internet is that it is as if everybody around the world is sitting right next to you. I probably don’t read or write as well as my native English-speaking peers, or have a full understanding of your culture. I live in a developing country where finding highly qualified talent is extremely difficult. That is not the case in developed countries and you also have many people to look up to and inspire you. My situation here is dramatically the opposite. My challenges haven’t been geographical, but rather resource and cultural constraints.

As a result of that - have you had to deal with a lot of international or multilingual seo clients and projects?

[Hamlet:] Not really. As I mentioned, at the moment I work primarily on my own sites and projects. I am just starting to work with a handful of clients. I chose to do SEO in English because that is where the biggest market is.

I feel geo-targeting is a hot topic right now, particularly with the release of the new geo-targeting tools within Google’s webmaster central. How do you see geo-location affecting SEO over the next 12 months?

[Hamlet:] We used geo-targeting a lot in some of our other projects and it is definitely an excellent tool when you think about delivering the right content to the user. From the SEO point of view, I’d use the new geo-targeting tools in Google’s Webmaster Central if I were trying to target a local audience. I am sure a lot of SEOs have clients with such requirements. On the other hand if you are targeting the wider audience, it might not be a good idea to limit the scope of your site and pages in the index.

You have mentioned PPC a few times in your blog but the main focus seems to be on SEO - do you see SEO as a bigger market? Is that where your focus lies?

[Hamlet:] As I work on my own sites, the ability to generate revenue is critical. Personally, I always do PPC, even if I am doing really well with the organic results. I start my campaigns with PPC and use the information to better define my SEO tweaks. I can test titles, descriptions, positions and, most importantly, conversions. It is really nice to just hit start and start receiving traffic. If I were doing client work, I’d probably be doing mostly SEO because that is what they ask for. The ever-increasing bid prices are not appealing for many.

I spend more time writing about SEO on my blog, because SEO poses greater challenges and is more interesting to study and research. Also, it seems that it is what my readers enjoy the most.

On a more personal note - you published some pictures of your golf villa on your blog and you have a pool table in there, if you’re ever in the UK drop me a line and we’ll have a game What would you class as your hobbies outside of search? What do you enjoy getting up to? Tell us a bit about the man behind the SEO guru!

[Hamlet:] You will probably eviscerate me. Sadly, I bought that villa almost two years ago and I’ve only been there five times. I mostly rent it out. My main problem is finding time to do things I enjoy. I haven’t had a decent vacation in a while

I guess my hobbies are little bit boring for many. I enjoy playing chess, going to the movies or reading science fiction novels; Michael Crichton is my favorite author. I am a churchgoer, but I don’t think you would call that a hobby. :-). When I visit the States or Canada I like to visit theme parks, IMAX theaters, and eat crab legs (I love them). I’ve never been to the UK, but I went to Spain and I loved it, especially the great food. The cigar smoke was a little bit hard for me to take, though.

Some things that I’ve never done but I’d like to when I squeeze in the time are skydiving, scuba diving and sailing.

Your new redesign has a speedboat in it. Do you own a speedboat? Is that yours!?

[Hamlet:] Sadly, no. I put that picture up to remind me of my goal: free time to sail the world’s seas and experience new adventures!

Thanks a lot for the invitation, Best, Hamlet

And thank you Hamlet for stopping by and answering all our questions! We wish you the best of luck with RankSense (and the speedboat )

As eagle-eyed readers of yesterday’s post will have already noticed, Reputation Monitor has been undergoing a major facelift (well done, D) and re-implementation of the front-end in CakePHP. This means it is not only prettier, but easier and more intuitive to use (and faster, though that might be partly down to a database trim - feels like we are saving the entire Internet some days!).

Anyway, there is still a free trial available on both the individual and pro accounts - the first month is free on both those accounts so there is really no reason not to try it out.

Rather than me waffling on about it, go and have a play and let us know what you think.

The price is going to go up shortly for new sign-ups with the introduction of some new reporting / statistical features, so if you have been on the fence, now is a really good time to go ahead and sign up as you will continue to benefit from the current looooow prices.

We have been having a lot of fun recently - building success for our clients online, launching a new-look version of reputation monitor (more about that soon) and pitching to some large household names for SEO work. As we continue to improve our knowledge and try to offer increasing value to our clients, we are often reminded that there are many business owners who would like to know more about what we do. Whether they want to do it themselves, or understand more about the process and benefits before employing a company to carry it out for them, a lot of business people would love to know more about online marketing.

In the past, we have run a number of short seminars - primarily for existing clients - on specific subjects. This time, we are organising an introduction to the whole topic of online marketing, with our introduction to online marketing seminar.

• When: 5th December 2007
• What time: 9.30am - 12.30pm
• Where: Distilled offices, Tower Bridge Road - near London Bridge station
• How much: £120 +VAT

Our seminar is designed to be an introductory session (suitable for absolute beginners and non-technical businesspeople), we don’t intend to hold back anything that we think would help you in getting everything set up right to succeed online.

Our seminar is ideal if you want to learn more about how the search engines work. You will leave the seminar bursting with ideas that will improve your website and help you attract more visitors. Our introduction to analytics will help you turn this increase in visitors into an increase in business. If you only put into action a handful of the many tips and tricks we are going to show you, we guarantee that you will easily recoup the entry cost.

For those of you who manage a company, the firm grasp of what you should be doing online will bring you huge benefits in knowing where to invest time and money. Our industry is full of buzz words. We promise you will leave our seminar knowing what you are talking about and what you should be concentrating on.

You can read more about our seminar on its dedicated page, but briefly, we are intending to cover:

• natural search engine optimisation (SEO) - why it’s important, how your site needs to be set up, how to promote your business online through the search engines
• pay-per-click advertising (PPC) - the pros and cons, how to set up your own campaign, how to structure a campaign for success and what lessons you can learn from a running campaign to improve both it and your other marketing efforts
• online analytics - how to measure how well your website is doing - what key performance indicators you should really be caring about and how to use that data to improve your website continually

Because we are limiting the number of places to 15, well, firstly places will go really quickly, so if you are interested, book now, but also, we are intending to be able to answer specific questions you might have. We are even hoping that you might send us through a link to your site and specific questions you might have in advance so we can take a look and help you out.

So how about that! For the price of just one hour of our consulting time, you not only get some personal advice about your site, but you also get three hours of dedicated advice from Distilled’s search marketing experts, and a bunch of goodies, including a copy of Avinash Kaushik’s book “Web Analytics An Hour a Day”.

So don’t delay. Book now!

PS SEOmoz premium members get £20 off the ticket price - just email us a link to your SEOmoz user page showing your premium badge and we’ll refund you £20.