Hundred Dollar SEO

In response to a question asked by AnnSmarty at SEOmoz I want to talk a bit about the difference between color for branding and color for conversion.
Color for branding - When choosing color for your website scheme, logo and business collateral you are most concerned with the psychology of color. Does blue make you trustworthy, [...]

Do you optimize your ads for pay-per-click manually? You should.
Both AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing offer a convenient option to “Optimize” ads.
Yahoo! :

Google:

It is tempting to use these option if you are new to the system, but they do not have your best interest in mind. Both systems will skew the ads they serve based [...]

Micheal Martinez is an interesting fellow. He writes expansively. Most days he puts out more written content than I put out in a week, and today is no exception. I actually have a little trouble reading his entries because of the small type and compact organization — but that is beside the point. Today he [...]

Most web users have short attention spans. So you need to cater to this in your design and copy on landing pages.
For design this means generally means minimalism. Reducing the number of color that you employ make the visual processing easy. You can easily make the most important parts of your page the most interesting [...]

People like pictures. People like graphs. Most people don’t like reading.

Bob Massa wrote an entertaining and incisive response to checklists about choosing an SEO. It inspired me to look into what other people are saying about landing pages. E-consultancy and Digital Web Magazine do an adequate job of starting the discussion.
Digital Web asks some good questions like:

Is the whole page focused?
Does the message match the [...]

SEOmoz held a landing page competition. It was supposed to end in mid-August, but it had to be extended to reach statistical significance. Frankly this excites me, because my entry was the reason. Paul Robb and I were so close that it took almost 3000 visits per page to reach confidence that one performed better.
But [...]

Congratulations to Paul Robb, who won the competition, beating my entry by 0.14%.
It is exciting that the two entries were so close that SEOmoz had to extend the competition by 3 weeks to reach confidence on which had a higher conversion rate. Both of the entries made significant improvements over the original — increasing the [...]

I am a former teacher and part-time artist. I love to travel and enjoy any excuse to go somewhere new or try something I have never done before. Current goals include a trip to Europe and the completion of a photography project that is in the planning stages. I am a fan of gold sprints [...]