August 5

• Josh Dreller gave out pointers on “How To Master Paid Search Bidding”
  Some of it was over my head at first reading, but still think I will get back to it, right before I will need to bid for the first time.
  
• Siddharth Shah dived into “Making Sense Of Multi-Click Data.”
  My first learning from this article was that “multi-click” is just an alternative name to “click-path”, which I was already familiar with. The second is the comparative conversion of brand and generic keywords.

August 4

• Geoff Kenyon wrote up a step by step guide on how to get ther right anchor text for links pointing towards an ecommerce site.
  This was a really useful post for me as I never had to do a link building campaign for, even though I have an ecommerce site on my backburner.
  
• George Aspland posted the second part of his guide to “effective online article marketing”
  I appreciate when a guide starts off with the goals instead of just jumping into the “how to” part. My mind likes logically built and annotated step-by-step guides and today we were blessed with two.
  
• Paul Bruemmer shared “How Retailers Can Improve Product Visibility Using Structured Markup”
  This article combined two ideas for me: I know more and more on how to format a website for SEO, including microformatting, but didn’t occur to me to use schema.org for ecommerce sites.

August 1

• Learned about Google’s new hotel finder service/experiement from Mike Bluementhals blog.
  Good timing: I wanted to reserve two nights for later in August today. Played with the interface, but the price range didn’t go low enough for my budget. Nice interface though, particularly the mapping of the geographical area where one is looking for lodging.
  
• Daid Roth summarized 3 key points for enterprise SEO: Executive Support, SEO involvement early in the project, SEO ownership of standards
  Good points for the future when/if I will be responsible for enterprise level SEO and not just for SMB.
  
• Myles Anderson rehashed why and how diversity is important in SEO.
  Yet another article, where every points are supported by common sense, and the value of the piece is the collection, editing and explanation.

July 28

• Barry Schwartz introduced Google’s new “Page Speed” service: Google fetching the content on your web site and then serving it up with speed improvements of 25% to 60%
  Sounds great, but I feel that there should be a watchdog over Google ensuring that they don’t rank higher unfairly pages sped up by them. This feeling comes from the observation, that Google serves more and more like a utility in our life as opposed to a public company. Different rules apply to business and governmental environment.
  
• Vic Drabicky mused whether Has Paid Search Become The New NYC Mailbox?
  It is a lamentation of poorly written and misleading adwords, with the bottom line on focusing value. Just makes simple business sense to me.
  
• Pamela Parker reposted and analyzed Twitter’s announcement about “promoted tweets”, that can stay on top of the queue until the follower checks in or removes it.
  I’ve been waiting for ideas how Twitte can monetize their business. This is OK from their perspective, but I personally might be annoyed by the minor change in user interface. Tweets should sank lower as time passes, shouldn’t they?
  
• Barry Schwartz retold Searchmetrics results concluding that images, videos and Google’s own materials show up often in Google’s blended/Universal search.
  On one hand: D’uh, that’s the point of blended search. On the other hand this is a reminder to produce more pics and videos and tag/alt them correctly.

I’ve been bookmarking blog entries since my last SEO post, just didn’t have the time to post about them. So now here is the sumary of two workdays. More coming later.

Learnings of the days:

1. How two mark up reviews using schema.org’s review specs: schema.org/Review
2. How to create a custom YouTube channel including a very specific custom image.
3. I finally implemented the prerequisites of having my picture show up in Google SERPs. It doesn’t guarantee it will happen, but this way it might.

Fun updates:

• I added “Follow me on” and “Share me on” buttons to my home/about page.
• Added the Social Slider to my blog.
• Added (my poor) Google + Stream to the sidebar of the blog using a widget.

July 27

• Greg Finn shared the news that “Facebook Launches In-Depth Guide For Businesses.”
  Timely, considering that I just attended last week a Roohi Moolla’s Facebook for Business Workshop.
• Rand Fishkin announced the launch of the Open Site Explorer v3.
  I played with it and even the non-paid version is quite useful to get a quick overview and comparison of sites from SEO perspective.
• Danny Sullivan wrote an article on How Being “Friends” On Google+ Leads To Better Rankings.
  Nothing earth-shattering there but a thorough look into  related aspects.

July 26

•  Mike Blumenthals listed “What Else Went Missing on the Places Page in the Update.”
  I don’t know how I think about Google not displaying information they gather, but still say to site owners to submit them. I guess that’s what they’ve been doing all along and by making the data less transparent and the process of them hiding it more evident.
• Phil Nottingham explained how to turn an SEO report into a good video.
  Best parts: reasons to do so; most useful part: pitfalls of doing so.
• Eric Ward promised “A Google Plus Primer On Links & Rank”
  What he really got is a recommendation to share links in Stream and a list of articles to read. The latter was worth it.
• Greg Finn showed that Google +1?s Being Sold By The Thousands.
  Oh, the scams people think of. I couldn’t and didn’t. But now even Newt Gringrich did it with Twitter.
• Barry Schwartz reported that the “Google Plus One Button Now 3X Faster”
  Good, but there are still issues with using AddThis and Internet Explorer.