Here’s another way to shave some milliseconds off of the load times of your pages. Not sure exactly what setting the async attribute to true does but according to David Walsh it will help speed up the javascript used when loading Google Analytics to your pages. The other change with this code is that it gets put at the top of the BODY rather than at the bottom of your code.

(thanks david walsh)

I read about Joe Kittinger a few years ago. Red Bull’s sponsorship of Felix Baumgartner to break Joe’s 50 year-old record and free fall from 23 miles above the earth with the hopes of breaking the speed of sound is spectacularly ambitious. This should be great PR for them.

(thanks ettf.net)

The other day I was looking for “how to find pages internally linking to a page” and I noticed something pretty interesting in the results I got. Google noticed that the first results had an anchor link to a section on the page called “Internal Linking” and asked me if I wanted to jump to this part of the page. The SEO implication here is that by adding anchor links to your pages, Google can pick them up and you’ll get an extra relevant link in the SERP’s enticing potential visitors to click through to your site. It’s not clear to me whether you can just add the code into the page or if it needs to actually be linked to like a proper anchor link. Either way, it looks like it’s worth experimenting with.

I was recently quoted on MSN Careers for a piece they were doing on how to “seal the deal” when looking for work. Here’s the smart things I had to say:

One of the big things for me is [following] up. If I’m on the fence about a candidate but they take the time to e-mail me and thank me for having them come in, it shows me that they are motivated, tactful and professional. On the other side of the coin, if I interview someone and they are using lots of banal business speak and don’t give me any impression of what their personality is like, I will usually pass. I hate when I ask a candidate what their favorite thing to work on is and they say ‘everything’ — it leaves me with the impression that they either have no personality or won’t speak their mind.

I never got this before but according to this great article over at Yoast about how to properly block pages from the bots, the best way to make sure your pages are hidden is to have them indexed first:

So, if you want to effectively hide pages from the search engines, and this might seem contradictory, you need them to index those pages. Why? Because when they index those pages, you can tell them not to List them.

Google continues to increase ad real estate in its search results. First there was the Plus Box and then Product Listing Ads and now Product Extensions are available to everyone as well, through the Google Merchant Center. There are so many ads now available that when I do a search for a term like “copy paper” I only see 2 organic results above the fold, the other 13 links are all either from the Google Merchant Center or AdWords. The importance in ranking first or second in organic results becomes all the more crucial as Google continues to put the squeeze on organic results.

I’ve been doing a little link building lately for a project I’m working on and part of that has included writing comments on various blogs related to the terms I’m trying to target. I noticed the other day on one of the blogs I was writing on that above the comment box they had the phrase “(You may use HTML tags for style)” – this means feel free to create your own anchor text, awesome. So now I type this phrase into Google in quotes along with the keywords I’m trying to target in order to find relevant blog posts that will allow me to put in my own anchor text. You can also try the phrase below that’s a WP standard “XHTML: You can use these tags:”

Happy Cheddar is an officially operating LLC. Good things should be coming soon.

I recently started working for an eCommerce site and we use both SEM and affiliate marketing extensively. I was poking around Google Insights and checked out a few of the trending search terms involving our company name. When I did a Google Search for these terms I noticed that a bunch of our affiliates through CJ were bidding on “[Our Company Name] coupon” – a lot of these affiliates didn’t even have our coupons. So not only were we bidding against our own affiliates but they were hurting our conversions by not giving our customers what they were looking for and I’m sure our cart abandonment rate increased as a result.

Then I discovered one of our CJ affiliates, sharesale.com, was bidding on our actual company name and coming up first. So we were paying them for each conversion and they were just milking us by taking advantage of our brand recognition. They were simply redirecting them to our site after getting their referral (to stay within Google’s Terms and Conditions).

My guess is that tons of small eCommerce businesses using Comission Junction and the like are getting taken advantage of by their affiliates who are too lazy to do their job and just park on their advertisers’ keywords. I think this constitutes a new kind of click fraud.

Click on the picture above to see a chart with a full breakdown of the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android.  I was kind of surprised how similar all three of them are in terms of features/specs.  I see now that AT&T is definitely sticking it to me for the voice/data/messaging plan I’m on.  Is it me or does the Pre look pregnant?