Raise your hand if you love data. Now raise your hand if data presented like this makes you want to stick a fork in your eye:   It’s colorful. It’s brimming with data. But HOLY HORSESHOE is it confusing! Having data is awesome. Using it to persuade others is powerful. Presenting it in a way that inspires eye-forking is criminal. Here are three simple design tips to help you make sexier, simpler charts that are sure to elicit applause and approval, not violence. TIP #1: Make friends with white space. Tempting as it is to fill your chart with every possible data point, detail, and label, there’s an extremely good reaso

Posted by Aaron Wheeler It’s often pretty difficult to make a short title for a webpage that offers a lot of varied or super-specific information. At SEOmoz, we say that the best practice for title tag length is to keep titles under 70 characters. That’s pretty pithy considering that the title also includes your site or brand name, spaces, and other nondescript characters. So, does it matter if you go over 70 characters? How important is it to strictly adhere to this best practice? Cyrus Shepard does SEO for us here at SEOmoz, and he’ll answer that very question in this week’s Whiteboard Friday. Think title tags coul

Part of the reason that Facebook has outpaced MySpace as the largest, most important social networking site in the world is that Facebook has opened its doors to external programmers. Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville have been a tremendous success and F-Commerce sites (Facebook commerce sites) are now catching up to the games and apps. Here are five examples of how they are doing so: 1.  Be Interactive Example: StarbucksStarbucks has a highly established market share and name recognition but they are also renowned for their open management style and the speed with which they implement new ideas. At first glance, it would seem impo

Posted by iPullRank Before I even start saying anything about keyword research I want to take my hat off to Richard Baxter because the tools and methodologies he shared at MozCon make me feel silly for even thinking about bringing something to the Keyword Research table. Now with that said, I have a few ideas about using data sources outside of those that the Search Engines provide to get a sense of what needs people are looking to fulfill right now. Consider this the first in a series.   Correlation Between Social Media & Search Volume The biggest problem with the Search Engine-provided keyword research tools is the lag time in da

Posted by Cyrus Shepard Good news to all you link builders out there. SEOmoz just updated the PRO SEO Web Directory List. The long overdue update includes over 400 directories (up from 180) separated into three categories – Web, Local and Social. Wait, aren’t link directories dead? The practice of obtaining links from online directories has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. The stereotypes of the past are both true and dangerous. Spammy, low quality directories flood the lower cesspools of the Internet. An unbridled strategy of obtaining links from these non-discriminate directories can actually hurt your SEO. But tim

Episode #167 – September 23rd, 2011 This week on the Marketing Update, Karen and Mike sit down and talk with their guest Anne Holland, the publisher of WhichTestWon.com. Anne shares her expertise and opinion on this week’s most talked about topics, including PETA.XXX and Facebook’s ‘TimeLine’.   1. PETA.XXX PETA is planning to shock everyone with a pornographic website called PETA.XXX. PETA’s goal is to utilize shock-value/pornographic photos and videos to attract and redirect their audience’s attention to their animal rights and vegan diet message. However, this sexually suggestive e

Posted by dohertyjf I love using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics. Sure, you can export a big chunk of data to Excel and then use some Excel wizardry to clean up the data and display it in different ways, but what if you just need to get a quick snapshot of certain traffic or trends, but the default segments don’t go far enough? I’ve put together a few of my favorite Google Analytics Advanced Segments for you, so that you can add them to your own Analytics and use them as you need. Segment 1:  1 word keywords This first segment will just give you all of the one-word keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Some

A big personal highlight from the recent Inbound Marketing Summit was seeing my friend and mentor Guy Kawasaki speak in person for the first time. Although I’d already read Enchantment, watching Guy dig deeper into each of the 10 enchanting actions was a fantastic reinforcement of what the book has to teach marketers about the art of changing hearts, minds, and actions.  Here are all 10 actions, from start to finish: Achieve Likability, Achieve Trustworthiness, Prepare, Launch, Overcome Resistance, Endure, Present, Use Technology, Enchant Up, Enchant Down.  As can be expected, all of these can be applied to inbound marketin

Posted by Benjamin Estes Recently I had a client who (generally for the enlightenment of their executive branch) wanted traffic information reported in an easy-to-digest format. The idea was that while they had consistently used Google Analytics for some time, there were people in the company who had an interest in knowing certain traffic data, but were too far from the day-to-day running of the website to be spending a lot of time sifting through Analytics reports. Enter the Dashboard. It sounded like the perfect solution: a screen full of nice, big numbers! Lines going up and to the right! Charting all the things! But lo! my dream was sho

Posted by Bryce Howard Howdy folks! I wish I was writing you with better news, but in the spirit of TAGFEE, we want you to be as informed as possible about your PRO membership:  Due to a major PRO web crawler service outage that occurred on Friday evening, crawler-related PRO features (link analysis and crawl diagnostics) are currently disabled. However, rankings, on-page optimization, and all tools except Crawl Test are functional. So what the *bleep* happened!? Amazon turned the lights out on us. Well, not exactly—I’ll explain. We host a number of our web applications from Amazon Web Services (AWS). For many of these host