You can now add a photo to your LinkedIn profile. I suggest you use a professional looking headshot. Unlike other social networks, racy or promotional photos won’t be well-received and could result in a loss in present or future connections. Adding a photo is very simple: just go to your profile page, click add photo where the empty box is displayed, then browse the file, upload and make sure the cropping works, then save. Shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds and shows that your connections are a plugged-in early adopter.
Check Your SEO Skillz
I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ve been a bit out of the SEO world this past month (vacation, filming, and upcoming announcement. I recently took the SEOmoz SEO quiz, which was kind of fun since I haven’t taken an SEO quiz in such a long time. I don’t agree 100% with all the answers and felt there are better questions to test someone’s SEO knowledge, but found it to be the best SEO quiz I’ve seen to date.
I guess I did pretty well:
175%
Try out the quiz yourself.
Radiohead In Rainbow Changing the Music Industry But With Poor Online Execution
I love seeing people using the Internet to change entire industries. Radiohead is geared up to do so by releasing their latest album, In Rainbow, as a download for as little or as much as the fan wants to pay. I tried to play some of their music with the best weighted keyboard 88 keys I could find on the market and the sound is priceless.
They are taking a gamble that people won’t download it for free, or they figure those people will find a way to get it for free anyway. This History related info helps you in the music history.
I love the idea and hope the best for Radiohead as this will make a big impact in the music industry, but was a little disappointed after I visited the site. From a search engine and usability standpoint, Radiohead made some major mistakes that might come back to haunt them. Let me list out some of the mistakes and explain the possible implications. Music is just not a sound or rhythms its influence on our brain than any other experience.
Radiohead In Rainbow Site mistakes:
- 302 redirected their existing site homepage (radiohead.com) to new site: www.inrainbows.com, but…
- www.inrainbows.com 302 redirects to www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html
- The more logical site domain, inrainbow.com (no “s”, which matches the album title) wasn’t registered, purchased or used. Instead a domain parker will receive lots of traffic.
- Title tag for In Rainbow site mainpage is “Radiohead”
- Site mainpage only has images with no search engine readable text
- 2nd page only has images no search engine readable text and same title tag
- 3rd page only has images no search engine readable text and same title tag
- Home links go to the 3rd page
- Shopping cart very awkward & buggy (keeps losing track of my order)
- Grammar mistakes confusing
- Amounts only shown in British Pounds
- Question mark help icon doesn’t provide any help or explanation
- There is actually a 1 GBP minimum, that’s $2.04 more than free
- There is actually a 99 GBP limit. Want to be an extreme fan and buy it for $1,000? Too bad.
Radiohead In Rainbow Site Mistake Implications:
- With the 302 mistakes, not only are they begging for a search spammer to hijack their site traffic, but they are linking to a page that they will probably change URLs over time.
- With all the search engine & readability mistakes, they will essentially allow standard retailers and online stores to steal away their direct payment opportunities by allowing them to rank higher for their own album and even site.
- The usability issues will also turn people back to iTunes or other dealers.
- Their main site may suffer rank decreases and traffic losses for a long time.
- The download for free concept won’t be given an honest shot, which may deter other artists like Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, REM, Metallica and other likely candidates from trying a similar experiment.
Regardless of the mistakes I list, this will be an effort worth watching for those in the music industry, movie industry or any other industry where self-distribution online could be a big opportunity.
Detailed Google Search Referrer Data
Found some interesting nuggets when I decided to narrow in on Google referrer data (as reported by Omniture) from one particular high volume keyword.
The word was “lasagna” and when I dug into the Google data, I noticed some interesting things. Google shares the following data in the referrer URL. I compare each search type to the standard “lasagna” search in google (without quotes) to protect the actual traffic volume for the high-ranked website.
Google Searcher Keyword Variations:
Standard lasagna search: 100%
(this is the search I base the rest of the data on)
lasagna misspelled & clicked on google did you mean link: 74%
(this was much higher than I anticipated – people probably ignored the “g” in lasagna).
Lasagna search: 8%
(I guess some people figure capitalizing the first letter will get them better results)
lasagna_ : 4%
(the underscore denotes a space after the search term – I guess some people can’t help but drop their thumbs down on that nice big spacebar)
Google Searcher Behaviors and Platforms:
lasagna search, but clicked search button: 40%
(looks like most people hit enter, but some take the time to click the search button)
standard lasagna search via Firefox: 19%
(firefox users continue to grow and Google likes tracking them)
standard lasagna search via iGoogle: 6%
(looks like some people are using iGoogle as their homepage)
Google Non-U.S. Data
UK standard lasagna search: 9.5%
Google UK misspelled did you mean correction: 34.4%
Google UK lasagna search, but clicked search button: 2.5%
Looks like our friends from the UK need to work on spelling. Misspelled version is 4 times more common than the correct spelling!
Google Canada standard lasagna search: 23.6%
Google Canada misspelled did you mean correction: 15.1%
Google Canada lasagna search, but clicked search button: 8.2%
Our friends from Canada are a little less mousey (hit enter instead) and slightly better spellers than Americans.
We can’t draw too many conclusions from this data, but it does highlight some of the data you can get from looking at your referrer data more closely. I invite you to spot check a couple terms that you rank for and share your findings in the comments.
Facebppl Experiment
As more and more people start using Macs, I forsee an increasing # of people accidentally typing in things incorrectly due to the keyboard differences. To track this, I’m going to use Facebppl as a source of data on commonly misstyped terms. Facebppl is the keyboard shifted over one letter for the right hand equivelant of Facebook. I noticed the .com domain is already registered which is a sign that this may be a somewhat common mistake.
Besides facebppl, a couple other common, but strange ones might be: g,ao; or gpp;e or fppf;w or even uajpp.
I appreciate your patience in reading this weird post. I’ll report back on the stats later.