As some of you may already know (if you follow me on Twitter), Friday is my last day here at InsureMe. I’ve had an amazing, life changing, and exciting 5 years with InsureMe and deciding to leave wasn’t an easy choice. I’ve been given a new opportunity with a start-up in Europe, and at this point in my life it feels like time to take a chance and step out of my comfort zone.

Actually, one of my favorite quotes, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before, seems to apply well in this situation:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain

One of my greatest joys over the last two and a half years has been writing this blog for all of you. It truly was a labor of love, and all of the feedback, comments, and relationships that have grown from the blog have made the process of writing almost 700 post worthwhile.

Hopefully over the years you’ve read at least one thing here that has helped you be more successful as an affiliate marketer…if that’s the case, I consider this blog a success.

The good news is that InsureMe plans to continue posting to this blog going forward. While post might not be as frequent as they currently are, InsureMe has a team of talented online marketers here that will continue to add tips, tools and news to the blog to help you succeed in your affiliate adventure. So make sure you subscribe via RSS and keep an eye out for future posts.

If you’d like to stay in touch, or follow me on my next adventure, track down my personal blog and website, which is easily found by searching for “James Omdahl” on Google. You can find my contact info there if you want it.

Thanks so much for reading and stay tuned…more InsureMe Affiliate Blog goodness is on the way…

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the first time I have spotted an instance where Yahoo! is calling out an email spammer right in their search results. Let’s look at the screen grabs.

At the top of the search results, Yahoo! shows this message:

And then in the results they show this:

And when you hover over that, Yahoo! pops up this:

You can see the whole screenshot here.

Looks like Yahoo! might be trying to differentiate themselves as the company that protects users from spammers. The real question is, if a company is so bad that they flag them, why show them in the results at all?

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran across this downloadable and printable SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet today, and I’d suggest you make yourself a copy and keep it somewhere close by. The cheat sheet covers many of the important rules and best practices for SEO web development, which includes:

• Important SEO HTML Tags
• Search Engine Indexing Limits
• Recommended Title Tag Syntax
• Common Canonical Homepage Issues
• 301 Redirects for Apache
• Important Search Engine Robots
• Robots Meta Tag
• Common Robot Traps
• Robots.txt Syntax
• Sitemap Syntax

If you hire someone to do web development for you, you may want to pass this list on to them. Making sure your site is built properly can make a night and day difference in your search engine rankings, so do what you can to make sure things are built right in the first place.

Here’s a link to the PDF, and here is a link to the SEOmoz post about the sheet.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, so I had never heard of the AdWords Change History Tool until today. Yeah, laugh if you want – but I bet there are a number of you out there that have never heard of it either, so this post is for you.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Change History Tool, it is a feature in AdWords that allows you to look back on the account changes you’ve made in since 2006. In doing so, the tool helps you remember what changes you made that could have caused a change in your accounts performance.

To access the tool, just login to your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools” under the “Campaign Management” tab. Once you have done this, click on “My Change History” and enter a date range.

The way I see it, this is an invaluable tool these days, especially for people who are managing large AdWords accounts that require constant tweaking to try to increase ad ranking and decrease cost-per-click. By utilizing something like the Change History Tool, a PPCer will be able to better interpret the effects of account changes on their quality score/ranking/etc.

Also exciting (and the way I learned about this tool), PPC Hero announced that Google will be adding some graphing features that will give advertisers a more graphical look at how the changes effect their accounts.

If you’ve got an AdWords account or 20, make sure you start taking advantage of the Change History Tool…it could help you answer some of the magical mysteries of AdWords.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aaron Wall has put together an insanely comprehensive blog post that shows how you can put a value on a #1 Google Ranking. At over 5,000 words, the post is epic, but certainly worth the time…and since it is so long, I’ll make this post short.

Go read What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth over at the SEOBook blog.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PPC Master, John Hasson found a way to increase his Google AdWords content network conversion rate by 35%, and decrease his cost for conversion by 46%..

How?

Dayparting.

For those of you not familiar, dayparting, or ad scheduling as Google calls it, is the process of setting different bids for your PPC keywords depending on the time of day the search is being conducted.

So for example, if you knew you got your highest conversion rate from 5 PM to 7 PM, but extremely low conversion from 11 PM to 8 AM, you could set your cost-per-click to a higher or lower number to make sure you get the higher converting traffic and you get less of the lower converting traffic.

The funny thing is, I don’t know if there are really a whole lot of people who bother to use dayparting features when they are available. To many people it seems like setting everything up might be a bit too complex and might not be worth the time.

But seriously - if you could increase your conversions by 35%, and your cost-per-conversion by 46%., wouldn’t you?

Check out John’s blog post to see how he determined what times to run various bids, and how he made dayparting boost the effectiveness of his AdWords content campaign.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our PPC peeps, Brittany, found a very interesting article for all you PPC folks on Search Engine Journal today. The article, Google Leaks Quality Score Variable (Pscore, mCPC and thresh) in Search Results, show some screen shots of what one can only assume to be quality score data appearing in the search results.

The data is broken into 3 different variables, which are:

• Pscore – no one is totally sure what this is, but some believe it is a numerical value that represents the statistical significance of the match to the search term
• mCPC – thought to be maximum cost per click
• thresh - didn’t see any speculation on this variable

If this is accurate information, it’s terribly interesting to me that these three numbers would show up in the search results. The example shown in the SEJ article is for the term “warwick honda dealer” and shows that out of the two AdWords results, the corporate Honda website is likely bidding much higher than a non-official Honda site. The interesting thing is that the non-official site has a higher Pscore, which could mean it is considered more relevant that the corporate Honda site.

Of course, with anything like this, I’m left with more questions than answers. Namely, are these the only three scores that are used to determine placement? Also, why would something like this end up in the visible search results? Is it something that is normally visible to Google employees only? Finally, what the heck is “thresh”?!

Let me know your thoughts on the leak…and if you figure out what a thresh is.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Let’s face it. Google is in a tough position when it comes to user privacy. Google wants to give users the best possible experience and the most relevant search results and ads, but since everyone is different, they need personal user data to give the best results. However, most users don’t want Google to keep track of their online activities.

So what to do?

Well, if a Google patent application uncovered by Bill Slawski is any indication, Google has decided to use a lot of information to improve their ad serving through AdSense. And by a lot, I am talking everything from individual click activity, to your interest in certain topics, to mouse hover activity in certain regions of a webpage, and even your facial expressions.

When you pull the privacy element out of the mix, the solution would be fantastic for users and advertisers both. Users would get AdSense ads they may actually be interested in. Advertisers would get more targeted users, meaning higher click-to-conversions, and a better ROI on content matching through AdWords.

But then there is privacy. The patent application lists some potential concepts of learning user interest and intention to creepy new levels – specifically “user eye direction relative to the document” and “user facial expressions.” Not sure how they plan to get that info outside of a controlled environment, or if it’s just in there to future-proof the patent. Either way, “watching” how the average user surfs the Internet and reacts to it outside of the browser window just seems to be a bit too intrusive to me…even more intrusive of tracking click and visited site activity.

Like the Google’s ideas or not, reading Bill’s analysis of Google patents is always interesting and usually gives some insight into the way Google views the world and its role in it. Head over to the post, have a read, and let me know what you think. Does the patent seem as creepy to you as it does to me, or does it seem like business as usual for the GOOG?

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)