David Leigh

Just another update on Stompernet’s SIMPLE course for all those who are interested. Although I laid into it last week some time, I’ve been perfectly happy with what we’ve done since. This week we’ve gone through some really specialist stuff in Google Analytics and added some A/B split testing code to our sites.

Now, I’ve done split testing and Taguchi tests in the past, but the way that this has been set up is really good. I love it; really love it.

A lot of what SIMPLE has done in the past wasn’t new to me at all, but I’ve never minded that because a) it was aimed at the complete ecommerce novice and b) it never does any harm to go over what you already know.

Now I’m really getting some hardcore learning; I’ve been using Analytics since the day it was offered free but never imagined some of the power of it, lying wasted by most of us.

This info is absolutely top - some of the earlier stuff in the course needs cleaning up a bit, but what we’re doing now is way out there.

Keep it coming and you’ll keep me very happy indeed.

EDIT - can you believe that WordPress’s spellcheck doesn’t recognise “Google”!

The other day I heard that a Windows version of Saffari was now available as a beta trial to download. What was interesting is that it is supposedly twiced the speed of IE7 and 60 percent faster than Firefox.

Well, I mentally bookmarked it to download when I had a moment; and that moment came yesterday.

I haven’t had a massive chance to play with it yet and no chance at all to measure those speed claims, but the interface is what you’d expect from Apple and it does seem to run fairly fast. I’m not sure about the font display which is completely different from IE7 and Firefox, but maybe it just needs getting used to.

Download Safari for Windows

I should have posted this first; I actually managed to get to the beach this morning for a couple of hours. The sun was shining at last and so we jumped in Miriam’s car; the water is a bit cool, but I’ve been looking forward to this moment for weeks, so there was no way I was not going to swim if I could.

I’ve also been trying to stick my wetsuit - the zip is coming away from the neoprene, and although I’ve tried glueing it several times it hasn’t held more than 2 dives so far. Hoping to dive on Sunday. Back to Barcelona on Monday night - I’m not on holiday until August, so this is just warming up for it :-) .

Matt Cutts is asking for feedback on Google’s webmaster guidelines, which is a good thing as they are too vague in places and contradictory in others. Maybe when I have a bit of time I will comment, but I’m out of town at the moment so it’s not the right moment for me.

 What I really want to know is why Google sunk one of my sites in September. I then wasted 3 months going through it, tweaking, rewriting and searching for anything that Google might no think was up to scratch.

Despite following Matt’s advice and requesting feedback in the webmaster forums and submitting a reinclusion request, the site never ranks higher than 30 for any search term. That sucks.

Maybe one day I’ll finish my 5 things I love about Google and 5 things I hate. Matt makes an appearance, but I won’t tell you on which list

 He deleted the first comment I made on his blog, I have’t been able to return the favour to date.

Yesterday evening I made a point of watching a documentary about Second Life, because it’s one of those things I just don’t get. Why do people want to enter a virtual world in which they do all the mundane things that they do in the real world? What’s the point?

After watching it I still don’t know, but suspect that it is all hype. (more…)

Did I ever say anything about buying FC Barcelona tickets online? No? Oh well.

I just listened to the StomperNet SIMPLE call between Ed Dale, Leslie Rohde and Jerry West. Excellent content, I wish we’d heard this a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, that minor complaint aside, if we keep getting content like that then it goes some of the way to addressing the problems I was talking about yesterday; I’ve never doubted the quality of the faculty, only that SIMPLE isn’t a finished product yet.

Thank you.

Not only is Brad Fallon is the coolest guy on the planet, but Google thinks he’s the coolest guy period. Is there really no one cooler than Brad Fallon?

Here is a list of links that I find useful. You’ll find there are no links to SEO forums; the simple reason is that there is too much noise and I just can’t be bothered anymore. I decided the time had finally come to call it quits when I visited one forum where someone had a question about the title Google was using for his website.

After some complete nonsense had been posted it took me 2 minutes to find the answer; a backlink using the Google title as anchor text. Was that so hard? Only if you’re clueless. I also noticed the site was using javascript cloaking, and advised the person to remove it.

That said, here we go:

Software

SEO Elite - Several SEO tools in one easy to use interface.

Keyword Elite - Uncover underexploited niche markets.

Webposition - check your ranking in the search engines and check your on-page SEO.

Free Ebooks

The Affiliate Masters Course - Ken Evoy of Site Build It! wrote this and although a little too wordy, no PPC advice and nothing on using social networking it still stands up. Download it, it’s free AND far better than most of the $47 affiliate marketing ebooks.

Adwords Made Easy - Brad Callen’s strategies for getting the most out of Google Adwords.

Mailing List

Want more information? Why not join my mailing list for information on Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Remember - I’ll never Spam you and you can update or remove your details at any time.

I went shopping this afternoon, something I really hate doing. Whenever I can I shop online, I’m not particularly price sensitive, especially for small purchases and prefer ease of purchase instead.

So it really makes me insane when shops are so bad at serving their customers. And one of my real peeves is when I’m standing in a queue, money ready and with shop staff buggering around talking to their friends instead of taking my money off me.

This happens so often that I’d say I only complete 50% of the purchases I’m ready to make. I have even left an entire supermarket conveyer full of my stuff because the service was so slow.

The other thing I hate, particularly in supermarkets is they have too many options. They have so many types of specialist product - think cheese for example, where you can get dozens of variety of chedder; low fat; vegetarian; New Zealand; Irish; mature; medium; bland; dyed orange; traditional; low salt (and that’s just from a memory of a UK supermarket I used to go to 6 years ago) - that sometimes it’s impossible to find the product that I actually want, or I pick up the wrong product by mistake. Both of those piss me off.

So rememeber that when you’re designing an online store. Don’t make it too confusing for customers so they can’t find what they want - more isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just more for the sake of it; and if they want to give you their money the clock is ticking; make it easy to pay and take it from them.