Christopher Davis

Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla gave a brilliant, deeply poetic recital, sponsored by the Omni Foundation, Saturday at the War Memorial Green Room. Dylla captivated a large, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable audience with sensuous tone, rhythmic flexibility, and deeply felt emotion in a program of conservative 20th-century works enlivened by a modern masterpiece and a 19th-century Caprice.

This chart unsettles a lot of people, because there must be something wrong with it. Further proof of how easy it is to fear the unknown and accept what we've got.

I think that any time reality doesn't match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved. Perhaps it was advertising, or perhaps deliberate story telling by an industry. Or perhaps it was just the stories we tell one another in our daily lives. It's sort of amazing, even to me, how much marketing colors the way we see the world--our reaction (either way) to this chart is proof of it.

BrightEdge reports that the “improper black hat SEO tactics” are much more widespread than you would think. While BrightEdge is keeping the names of brands surveyed anonymous, the SEO firm said that a quarter of all brands surveyed probably have these back link issues. Most companies have no clue this is being done because outside contractors are hired to do SEO work.

A couple things:

What makes a link illegitimate? Is it because it's paid? Or is it because it has optimized anchor text? If it's the second, Brightedge has no idea if the links are illegitimate or not. For the most part, they probably have no idea what people creating the links were thinking, and they certainly can't look into their bank accounts to figure out if a link was paid.

Links with optimized anchor text happen naturally. So do branded links.

Bright edge is clearly capitalizing on big brand's fears of getting caught using "blackhat seo tactics". Why? Because brightedge sells enterprise level SEO tools, and they want a bunch of marketing VPs and executives to get their companies on board to pay for them.

All of this leads to the obvious question: can you trust Google?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is you can *always* expect Google to do what is in the best interest of Google.

Exactly.

The duo plays Appalachian State University’s Broyhill Music Center’s Recital Hall for a free show Feb. 27 at 2 p.m. Expect works by Fernando Sor, Gioacchino Rossini and Antoine Baron de Barcó.

It’s landing page testing time! In this article, I will outline five ways to test elements on your landing pages.

Before getting started with landing page testing, it’s important to ensure the following:

• Identify testing goals. Are you trying to increase sales? Leads? Identify them.

• Test variables that have a direct impact on your goals. For example, if you are selling a product, test call to actions, headlines, etc. Testing the look and feel of your landing page may increase conversions but not as much as variables more directly related to your goals.

• Ensure when it’s time to make a decision on what element to keep (or chuck for that matter) that the data you are using is statistically significant. In PPC, this means the metric is responsible for at least 100 conversion events (not clicks).

Here are the suggested landing page tests to try:

1.  Test Different Calls To Action

Try incorporating an imperative verb into your call to action:

• Buy now
• Order today
• Add to cart
• Get a quote

If you already have this, try mixing in some benefits with the imperative verb:

• Get a free download today
• Start a free trial today

Also, try varying headline length. A call to action can be as simple as “order today” or as elaborate as “get your free whitepaper download today”.

Test & experiment all different types of headlines. “Get started with a free trial today” is a longer variation of “Start a free trial today”.

A big mistake that people make is to save the call to action for last. Aim to have call to actions above the fold where they can be seen and don’t be afraid to repeat it several times on your landing page.

Did you know that lead forms in the upper right hand side of the page convert better than on other places on the page?

2.  Test Different Headlines

Different headlines can increase your bottom line. This is especially the case if landing page headlines are tied to search query (and ads). Here are some different ways to test headlines:

Try rephrasing a headline into a question.

Headline: Get the coolest shoes

Question headline: Need cool shoes?

Headline: Get educated today

Question headline: Looking for an education? Want an education?

Also, try testing numbers vs. words in headlines:

Get the top five tips today

Get the top 5 tips today

3.  Features & Benefits

I like to list features and benefits on landing pages. Try testing the number of features and benefits you include on a page.

Will the magic number be 3, 4 or 5? The number of features and benefits do not need to be the same. Heavier on the benefit side is usually better.

If you don’t talk about all your features and benefits, try testing the ones you don’t use. There may be some gems in there.

I like to take a look at reviews of products and to get an idea of the features and benefits people are really looking for.

Try playing with Future Now’s WeWe Monitor to test your landing page to see if you are customer focused. It will provide a score and let you know how you’re doing.

Below is an example for crazyegg.com.

4.  Try Testing Long Landing Pages vs. Short Pages

Try testing a longer page vs. a shorter one. Here are some page modification suggestions:

• Adjust the length of the marketing copy on the landing page.
• Try testing a one-column page vs. a 2 or 3 column page.
• Eliminate distracting elements on landing page (for example elements that don’t feed into your conversion goals). Keep your visitors focused.
• Try testing product options. Can they be reduced to one or two important ones?
• Try testing larger & clearer product images (if applicable).

5.  Test Price

We’ve done a bunch of testing in this area. Depending on the product, higher priced products can convert better. This is definitely the case with in-depth workshops and seminars (half day with breakfast, to full day with lunch).

People tend to treat free seminars with less seriousness, and will often bail. (All they have to lose by not showing up is the pretty nametag.) If they pay for it, they are more likely to show up and convert to a customer (if the seminar is part of a conversion funnel).

Also, test price on a page vs. no price. In several verticals, we’ve seen conversion events increase significantly the when prices are visibly displayed on landing pages.

Stay tuned for a part two on easy landing page testing. If you have any easy testing ideas of your own, feel free to share in the comments section.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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This is a big deal. It means a big part of SEO in the next year or so is going to involve building communities. In other words, Search engine marketing people are going to have to become community managers.

His recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon made his reticence hard to understand. Not that his technical polish and strong interpretive intuition were surprising. It has long been obvious from the duo’s recordings and concert performances that both the Assads are virtuosic, soulful players. But even though their fraternal bond and, as they have told interviewers, 10 hours of daily practice have helped them cultivate unusual ensemble fluidity, duet performance inevitably requires a measure of personal interpretive restraint.

Freed of that restraint, Odair Assad proved a remarkably elastic player. In Agustín Barrios’s “Chôro da Saudade” and Villa-Lobos’s Chôro No. 1, he emphasized the rhythmic freedom inherent in this quintessentially Brazilian popular form, a quality often lost, or at least compromised, in classical performances. Villa-Lobos’s Prelude No. 3 and Étude No. 10 were similarly unbuttoned: Mr. Assad’s phrasing is highly personalized, with extreme rubato and articulation so varied as to sound almost improvised.

Leo Brouwer’s broad-boned “Sonata del Caminante” was the program’s most involved work, and Mr. Assad, for whom it was written, was undaunted by its contrapuntal thickets. And he gave a spellbinding performance of Kevin Callahan’s “Red Fantasy,” an inviting study in chordal melodies, speedy single lines and occasional bent pitches.

Though not at his brother’s side, Sérgio Assad was not altogether absent. He contributed colorful arrangements of the “Invierno Porteño” and “Primavera Porteña,” the “Winter” and “Spring” movements from Piazzolla’s “Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas” (“Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”) as well as his own “Seis Brevidades,” an appealingly showy six-movement suite. The program also included “Memória y Fado,” a gently melodic meditation by Egberto Gismonti, and a pair of short character pieces by Alfredo da Rocha Viana Filho, the chôro composer better known as Pixinguinha.

The Google Blog announced a new tool to help news publishers earn money online with their content. The system is called Google One Pass and it enables publishers to use Google to charge for content and subscriptions to their content.

Google said, “publishers can maintain direct relationships with their customers and give readers access to digital content across websites and mobile apps,” with Google One Pass. “Readers who purchase from a One Pass publisher can access their content on tablets, smartphones and websites using a single sign-on with an email and password,” google added.

The features and benefits include:

• New revenue stream
• Purchase-once, view-anywhere functionality
• Ability to give access to existing subscribers
• Lightweight technology implementation
• Business model flexibility (e.g., subscriptions, day passes, metered access, pay-per-article, multi-issue packages)

One Pass is currently available for publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

I would bet this system lets bots crawl around too. And also has functionality to allow first time visitors arriving from search to view one page, then get taken to a payment page.

At least I would hope it does that.

As the company moves toward an IPO in 2012 and then starts to ramp up monetization (as public companies inevitably must) it will almost certainly encroach on more companies and their models — just as Google has.

This is a good article. Especially the last bit. Google plan: develop as many free services as possible, extend their reach into every aspect of a users online life, serve that user ads. Facebook's monetization strategy is really no different: extend reach, serve ads.