[Executive Summary: Twitter is not for everyone but if you’re in the web entrepreneuring space you should have been on it last year already. Don’t feel bad if you never heard of it; just join and don’t admit you weren’t aware. Matt McGee is an SEO guy out of Marchex, who is into social media and web marketing. He’s a nice guy and it appears he needs to get out of suburbia a little bit more, to help curtail sprawl. He wants to rank for Last Person on Twitter, and needs attention for his charitable foray onto Twitter, hence my contribution here. Oh, and I couldn’t help but make this post way more about bikes than necessary.]

Matt McGee is The Last Person on Twitter. Twitter is not just a silly web app, but a concept, realized. Twitter represents the removal of barriers, and is therefore a success in those realms that were blocked by the barriers. Is it useful? meaningful? Practical? That doesn’t really matter… it is evolutionary. A step forward in the process, and a necessary one. Who cares if it is useful, if it is a necessary step forward?

So Matt McGee resisted Twitter for a while. Big deal (I wanted to say BFD, but that’s a tangent in itself). Now Matt McGee says he wants to be the last person on Twitter. I see now he has signed on to twitter.. or at least that is the rumor?

Matt McGee is one of the most down to earth, likeable guys you’ll meet in the modern world. I met him in Portland, and he stills owes me an explanation for his “You’re John? No way!” comment. He lives in Washington, a very green state, yet until recently he didn’t own a bike. And when he needed one, he bought a Schwinn. From Joe’s. And he blogged about it. I know he bought a Schwinn Suburban, but really how suburban is Matt? A Schwinn? In 2008? From a BigBox store? I refrain from commenting from my perch in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, where everyone rides a bike and everyone knows that Pink and Kona are local bikes, bike.com is owned by the best bike company on the planet (Rocky Mountain just miles north of here), and the Swobo Otis is the rad-dest urban/suburban 3-speed bike with a twist shifter (and a coaster brake!) evah! If you want to relive your youth in modern fashion, buy local (Portland at least) and here’s just one reason:

Why grown ups still love coaster brakes, or why calipers are for sissies

Seriously… if we get Matt onto Twitter… just maybe…

Matt created a Twitter account, and in characteristic just-try-it, no-pretenses Matt fashion, Matt’s stepped into a Charity Fundraiser using twitter. The Last Person on Twitter is looking for followers. Follow him and help me to help him move forward, okay?

[Executive Summary: Twitter is not for everyone but if you’re in the web entrepreneuring space you should have been on it last year already. Don’t feel bad if you never heard of it; just join and don’t admit you weren’t aware. Matt McGee is an SEO guy out of Marchex, who is into social media and web marketing. He’s a nice guy and it appears he needs to get out of suburbia a little bit more, to help curtail sprawl. He wants to rank for Last Person on Twitter, and needs attention for his charitable foray onto Twitter, hence my contribution here. Link to him if you want to help him rank, or to just make a point.]

Via the remarkably inspiring HowToAvoidTheBummerLife.com

Journalism is a funny beast I don’t pretend to understand. As a consumer, though, I can say that I used to pay a lot of money to subscribe to certain products of good journalism. I paid in advance, and the information appeared in my mailbox. The currency of the information was judged by relative measures… I considered it good journalism because when I read it, I felt informed where I would not otherwise have been so informed. My interactions with my peers provided the external validation I needed to continue paying so much for my subscriptions.

As an academic, I learned that published papers were already many months old at best, and typically a year old. As I attended academic conferences I came to understand the value of insider knowledge, often gained during those many months of preparation for publication. The first time I was handed a manuscript that was in a confidential peer review process, and asked to take it home and read it and prepare to discuss it at a project meeting on Monday morning, I understood why so many top investigators somehow always found time to “volunteer” for peer review panels. Be it as it may; but thanks for letting me know.

At one point in my career I found the value of journalism inadequate for my needs. I would have paid more, but I determined experimentally that if it was in print and I didn’t already know it, it wasn’t important for my work. I don’t say this out of arrogance. I determined it through experimentation. I knew or had awareness of so much in my area, that anything coming out in print was already old news. Or maybe the journalistic process was failing…maybe all that insider leaking was disintermediating the journalist. Or perhaps I was just highly specialized at that point. Either way, I stopped paying for subscriptions in my fields of interest. My entertainment spending increased, but not my expenses for core information sourcing. I was getting my information from people, email, and my own work, and no longer giving it to journalist-employing publishers. And yes, I was being asked to speak at meetings to share my own perspectives.

When blogging came online, I enjoyed remote access to perspectives. When a content creator blogged, I got to hear her unedited, non-peer-reviewed perspective on issues. Everything was a nugget of value. What was said was valuable. What was not said was valuable, especially if I knew what was going on and not being blogged. How it was said, who linked to whom.. all insider knowledge gained without having to be there in person. Sometimes these observations prompted me to blog my insights on that process I was observing. Guess what folks, I, blog reader, had become the journalist.

RSS feed aggregators helped me (the journalist) do a better job, cover more ground, and subscribe to the authors I was researching err...stalking err.. monitoring. As I learned to trust my feed reader, I began that same process the other now extinct journalists had mastered - the road to irrelevance. Do you read techmeme every day? If you do, do you have time to read anything else?

The more I read the popular press, the less inclined I am to blog about my own perspectives within my narrow specialty. Blog posts become “he said this which is cool” or “check this out, I found it interesting”. Pretty soon, if I rely on what I see to represent what is now, I will probably be of little value as a reporter and lose my subscribers, so to speak.

In this case, I am my own subscriber base. My research supports my work. I don’t get paid to publish based on my research. I get paid to put it to use. If what I read has become commodity… everyone is reading it… then it has less value. It is true that execution is what matters, but the road to execution is paved with strategy, and in this Internet world, strategy is fueled by market awareness.

Sadly, it seems bloggers have largely stopped blogging unless they can get on Techmeme or whatever. Why blog for a mere 120 subscribers who never comment? Why blog so 37 spammers can post phentermine ads on your posts? Why spend so much time on the act of blogging, if the information published is not externally validated? Good questions… and although I would have answers if asked these questions, many people don’t. So people are not blogging like they used to.

I do go to conferences now, but it is very expensive. Not just the travel costs but the time and emotional effort. As many people have said to me over the past 5 days, “the past 15 minutes has made all of the costs of coming to this conference worthwhile“. So true, and for me as well. Like those expensive journals I used to subscribe to, the information I glean from my conference interactions is very valuable. And as I engage in discussions with my peers, they validate that assertion. I am better off for having gone. Remember, though, I am careful about which conferences I attend, and base those decisions largely on who will be there, and what sort of access I will have to them. And I am less inclined to blog about my experiences than I used to be.

I just looked at the cost of attending a conference, and realized I could visit 3 cities over 3 weekends and have dinners and lunches with key people living in those cities, for the same total out of pocket expense of that one conference. If those contacts of mine each did the same, I’d have a dozen face to face “conferences”, for just slightly more than the cost of attending the one conference. If we each agreed to bring one new associate to those dinners…well, I bet you get the idea.

I think we’ve come full circle. The conference organizers are targeting the masses and newcomers more than the established players, almost to the point of making themselves irrelevant. Blogging is falling off, except for some high-frequency bloggers. Maybe the productive bloggers now are the ones trying to be journalists, not the ones marveling at the liquid value of the information. Maybe the value of the post has exceeded the value of the blog. Maybe those blogging journalists are finally ready to give up on the shallow, here’s what happened and here’s what he said about what she said posts, and start paying the real bloggers to write real articles for their blogs, since they are losing site of the value of blogging it themselves. Maybe they will become like the old real journals, presenting valuable information not otherwise easily uncovered.

I see some very smart people walking ahead of this road even as it curves back and forth, uncertain of the future course. And they are traversing in the same direction I am looking. I think it’s once again time to start walking where there is not yet a road.

The DomainRoundTable Conference hosted Matt Cutts of Google and a panel of SEOs, to discuss search marketing and domaining. One topic of conversation afterwards was the value of keyword domains. Is a domain “better for SEO” if it contains exact match keywords?

Matt said yes, keywords in the URL can help rankings, but you don’t need that in order to rank. I would like to expand on that, as I understand it. Since I blogged about Matt’s comments, I have seen several SEO discussions online that I think demonstrate a lack of understanding of what matters with domain names (as relates to SEO) including Matt’s comments. Please comment if you have more to add, or can help me better understand your own knowledge or experience.

Consider the search user. If the searcher asks Google “where can I find books for sale online” by entering the Google search query “buying books online“, Google will serve up a set of results it believes will be useful to that searcher, and which will engage that searcher. Google considers various factors in making that results set, but when it displays that results set to the user as a SERP, the destination URL is displayed prominantly as the name of the listing. That name is the only authoritative identity guaranteed to be present in the SERP for that particular web page.

When the user scans the result set, that user has an expectation, which we assume is aligned with the query “buying books online”. When Google’s customer sees the URL contains the keywords they are searching, that keywordy URL reinforces their hope that the results set provides that which they seek. But it is more complicated than that. The substance of that noticed match must also convey a sense of safety and possibly authority, or opportunity.

There are various facets of user action motivation, but for now let’s just accept that Google anticipates that Google’s customer will trust “OnlineBookStore.com” more than they will trust “buy-books-here-discount-reduced.info” for the query “buying books online”, all other things being equal.

And so Google will give an advantage to OnLineBookStore.com in this case. Keywords in the domain, yes, but more importantly, authority and trustworthiness expressed in the domain name. The keywords added authority (via relevance).

What if the domain is books.com? That is a very expensive domain. Simply because it is expensive, I believe, Google gives it more trust (all other factors being euqal.. such as content and reputation). So in theory, everything else being equal, is books.com is better for seo than onlinebooks.com, for the search “buying books online”?

I don’t think so. Due to the keyword match of both “online” and “books”, I would give the edge to OnlineBooks.com. I don’t think the added value Google might give Books.com is adequate to overcome the value of the easy to remember and well matched OnlineBooks.com URL. That is my opinion, limited to this example.

What about “BuyingBooksOnline.com”, you ask? That’s an exact match to the query. Yes, it is, and that is good. But…. Google is focused on Google’s customer. Books.com is easy to remember, easy to recognize, and authoritative. The user will appreciate it differently than BuyingBooksOnline.com. It is up to Google to decide whether or not users will appreciate BuyingBooksOnline.com as a destination for the query “buying books online”. I would assume there is benefit from the exact match, and benefit from the user experience associated with soley that domain name displayed in the SERP, and that the combination helps Google rank the results set. I would place OnlineBooks.com ahead of BuyingBooksOnline.com, all other factors being equal for this one query, because I think it is a but more accepted by the user… I think they would view BuyingBooksOnline.com as more of an information site than a book store.

So what about OnlineBookstore.com, you ask? Again, all other factors being equal (trust and reputation, backlinks and content, etc), I have to consider the cultural aspects of the Google customer. In what context does the Google customer refer to “bookstore” as compared to the context for the use of “books” in our language? College students refer to “the book store” quite frequently. Gift givers look for books more than they look for book stores. OnlineBooks may refer to PDF files you can download instead of books you hold in our hand. And store is often a synonym for shopping cart or ecommerce web site. That’s right… I am suggesing that Google incorporates cultural sensitivities into the ranking algorithms. if for no other reason than because the corpus of information Google uses to determine relevance comes out of our culture: the index of documents studied by Google. We, like Google, have to consider the context of our question “buying books online” when sorting through available web pages and compiling a set of search results.

Based on my perspective, I’d give the edge to OnlineBookStore.com over OnlineBooks.com, except in the context of college life I’d definietly go with OnlineBookstore.com. That’s an opinion… I don’t have Google’s resources. But I think it demonstrates my thought process, and maybe you can see how it would be applied to other search queries where you and I may have significant insight into the vernacular of our customers. Google wants the search results to be good for the user experience, and if the URL adds to the user experience (or detracts), Google wants to consider that in the ranking/scoring algorithm.

But does Google do that? Theoretical discussion are great for academics, but does this really matter? Does Google count it? Yes, Matt Cutts tells us that when the domain adds to the user experience, there is an advantage (all other factors being equal). And he said so in the context of a question addressing whether or not keyword domains are better for SEO.

Matt won’t tell us if Google discriminates between OnlineBooks.com and OnlineBookstore.com, but our example of assuming “everything else being equal” is a tough constraint anyway for our practical world. Small differences in back link quality or quantity or content quality are probably more important than the difference between OnlineBooks.com and OnlineBookstore.com. And that’s an important point!

Maps.com is a great domain name. But MapWorld.com may be better, because it contains the second keyword “world” which matches queries that contain “world”. It also suggests a content theme “world” which is semantically associated with many search keywords commonly paired with the word “map” (such as “maps of the world” and “maps of north america” because of the semantic association of “North America” with “world”). Think about that search index.. when Google tries to guess searcher intent for a query, it looks at word associations based on the indexed documents and their relationships.

Again… there is so much more being considered by Google for ranking web pages, but the domain name “MapWorld.com” contributed significantly to user experience and semantic meaning in the context associated with a large number of search queries. That adds value. For a global map business do you need maps.com or can you do it just as well on MapWorld.com for a much lower initial price for a domain?

I know this is complicated and somewhat subjective. That’s part of the point. It’s not all about the domain name, but domain names that carry meaning for the searcher do have more value, within a specific context. Think user experience… user experience… user experience, all other factors being equal, and then make sure all other factors are not equal, in order to compete.

ISPs are placing the security and privacy of their customers squarely in the hands of a third-party ad company

Dan Kaminsky is always fun (and scary) to watch, and he is describing how some ISPs are utilizing a 3rd party DNS service in an attempt to monetize user activity. According to Dan, that third party is exploitable (XSS vulnerability), and this outsourcing action is putting ISP subscribers at risk. Via Wahington Post.

This is live blogging from matt’s session. It will update as I enter information.

Matt said: about his role on the web spam team, he defined spam as sites that “rank higher than they deserve”. Go figure that one out.

Matt asked how many people were into domaining because it was like a garage sale, where you find a rare book worth a lot on sale for only 50 cents. He also asked how many were in it for the money, and then how many had a life long commitment to creating new content and publishing content of value to users on the web…. Can you see where Google is going with this? Sure you can.

He highlighted GMHS.com which is a for sale domain. User won’t be happy if they typed in the name of a high school and got this. Not too happy a user.

Earthday.org parked page… says it is relevant. Lots of user stuff. Complete new user might be happy landing on it. A savvy user will not be as happy with it.. they will wirte in and say… Matt suggested hiring a blogger to be the EarthDay Blogger for 10% of the eventual value… cherry pick your top 10,20 domains and give a blogger some equity to write content.

Ajaxian.com neat site about AJAX. Take gmhs.com and get somebody to develop it.. that’s the high end of content and value add, because not everyone is providing that. For the valuable domains, that is what Matt would do.

Q for Matt: standard dupe content question. Matt says he can handle that. Litmus test is “were was the first place this content debuted (was viewed)”. Gigablast is like 2 guys and can’t do that, but Google can. Google filters out dupe content that is not as useful as the original. What abut shuffling content, dictionaries.. trying to evade detection, as Matt says. He says it is easier to find someone to generate that content for you.

Q: on DMCA process from Ron Jackson, do you complain to Google or the host? Matt says google.com/dmca.html to describe that process. There is a process for counter-notify and dispute, and if that happens Google stops and leave the debate for the involved parties to handle.

Q: from a lawyer… an admittedly frustrated lawyer, not having great success because people just switch web hosts when challenged. Matt says Google “doesn’t ant to play police”. The lawyer says Federal copyright registration is a prerequisite to DMCA, and not easy to get a copyright on a web page. Matt suggests that after you’ve been scraped a few times…people look for ways to embed links in the article to take advantage of the scraping… “I get a lot of links”…”I’m guaranteed to have more page rank than they do”… he personally says “oh well, that’s links that go to my website”.

Q; on tld’s and their impact on ranking. Matt says early literature shows G didn’t care about what TLD was using.. just # links and how reputable those links were. He says except fro some corner cases, it doesn’t matter, and he says most people will never fit those corner cases.
Note: Matt says the new york times is more reputable than your college friend (he was addressing link value). Think about that.

Matt: “you never want your users to be angry” , Matt remembers his mother in law with a huge infection of scumware, and how much Matt spends the first day of a visit cleaning up her computer. Some people don’t want their ads showing on parked pages. Matt says Google helps show people how the domain channel can work as a profitable advertising channel.

Q; about how long it takes for a new site to monetize. Taking longer now than it used to. Matt says people think a page gets a little pagerank just because it is a page, which is a misconception. Page rank is peanut butter… you’re spreading it around, it gets thin. You need more links (more peanut butter?). Think about marketing aspect.. catchy angle that attracts people’s attention, and then spread that around your network. Q: Gestation period has gotten much longer…. Matt says it can take time for pages and trusted pages to develop.

Matt showed off searchmash.com. Will we see some of these features on Google? Entirely possible. Notes the integration of DomainTools for whois as of yesterday. “please don’t scrape this”…. Google has built in a “fair amount of checking” so too frequent queries will cause it to block you. “We like this idea of trying out experiments”. He searched “aa 127″ and got American Airlines flight status for flight 127.

Matt says if a domain changes hands, Google resets the links vale to zero/near zero. [Update: Matt apparently said this about expired domains in 2007. I can’t be sure of exactly what was said here, but these were contemporaneous notes so perhaps we will have to wait for the recorded sessions to be sure].

Domain names are the primary way of mapping where domains are on the web and Matt expects that to continue. Domain names are important and inseparable going forward.

Generic domains that users are likely to remember, will indeed carry more weight than others. There is a real value to those FuneralHomes.com for example. Google does give keywords in the URL a certain amount of weight, but you don’t need it in order to rank.

“We have a deal with GoDaddy that if you sign on with GoDaddy you’re automatically registered with Webmaster Tools”.

Q: Parked Domains: ” We try to detect parked domains, and once they leave their parked status, we let them in relatively quickly”

Q: If a domain says it is for sale, does that harm it’s chances in Google? Matt: Our litmus test is not whether or not it’s for sale, but if their’s good ocntent on it and it’s helpful to users.

Q: if you stub your toe [violate google guidelines] on on domain of thousands, do all of their domains suffer? Matt says no.. just because one domain is doing something bad…. BUT, it does increase the odds of google scrutinizing the other domains. Says google knows how to find other owned domains via common templates etc. If just doing everyday stuff, one domain in trouble doesn’t hurt other domains.

Q: Breakup page of more than 100 links… people complain about it.

Q: Ip cloaking to block abusive users. Matt says be careful.. ok to block scrapers etc but Google runs spot checks from different IPs… matt will go to his old school account to see what the page looks like. If user and Googlebot see same thing, should be ok. Matt cares about cloaking Google, not other users. BUT be careful not to get it wrong.

Q: Geo IP cloaking question… Matt says ” different MD5 sum means high risk category” ;-) Dont treat Googlebot like it was it’s own unique country (Googlestan), getting Googlestan content. We crawl from California… if you cloak it, be very careful to say what you are doing “it looks like you are outside of Colorado..so we’re serving you outside of colorado content…”

Q: on use of nofollow. Directory owner, asking if nofollow helps or hurts. Matt says nofollow is a “very simple thing”. Nofollow link doesn’t flow pagerank, doesn’t flow anchor text. Link level to say “I trust this link but I don’t trust this link”. You don’t want to flow page rank through them if you don’t trust them. Real business 3-4% of your links will be stale, don’t worry don’t need nofollow. If check them at some point, willing to vouch for them, at some point checked them for quality, then don’t need to worry about nofollow. If just a domain directory, use no follow.. it is a matter of how much due diligence you put in.

Q: Webmaster asked about DiamondsDirect.com and why it and other sites don’t appear in Google. Matt looked at it, said the site was good, most users would lik eit, but the feed data was dirty (some control characters showing up) and appeared at many places.. probably more unique content.

I’m at Domain RoundTable, in San Francisco, with several hundred Internet entrepreneurs. Like other webmasters, these guys own the Internet. Unlike most webmasters, these guys own a significant percentage of the Internet. But besides scale, they have similar interests to other webmasters: managing risk, earning and monetizing traffic, navigating politics and managing cash flow.

They have the same search marketing concerns as well. If Google publishers a new browser that is “free”, will they assume control of the traffic stream outside of consumer awareness? What will this do to your business model? If Yahoo! becomes Microhoo!, what does it mean? If Matt Cutts says “no donuts for you“, how will you pay your developers?
If you can sell a domain today for 500 years revenue, why wouldn’t you do that? If someone offers computer.us for sale at $17,000, why wouldn’t someone based on the Euro buy that piece of American entitlement for what is really something like $8,000 ? Of course they should (and they did).

So about live blogging - will I live blog all of the key, important strategic bits direct live from Domain Roundtable? Of course not. That would be silly. A day pass is $400 and the value is incredible. You should be here, as I am and several hundred other people are. We will all enjoy a competitive advantage OVER YOU as a result of that investment.

Aaron Wall recently asked via his twitter stream, could blog should go behind access restrictions, to serve a select audience instead of an open, public audience. Of course it could, and it should. The market might not be ready for that, which is why I think Aaron asked the question.

If you want to know my perspective on what is going on over here at DomainRoundtable, watch this blog. i will be blogging. But not nearly everything, and probably not the strategic bits of greatest value. If you want those too, let me know in the comments or send me an email.I’m thinking about Aaron’s question, and welcome your comments.

Google’s mission is to make a fortune off other people’s content organize the world’s information, and now Google and DomainTools are joining forces to bring the power of WHOIS lookups to the Google interface. Again.

Google started hitting the Network Solutions WHOIS lookup without permission back in 2004 before Netsol promptly shut them out. That seems like a really silly and abusive action for Google to have tried, in hindsight, but I bet it seemed like a good idea at the time. At least this time they will be working with the pros.

The Google/Name Intelligence collaboration was announced on the DomainTools blog in March, but many SEOs are still unaware. I think this is a very important development, which needs additional consideration. Please think about it when you get a chance. I guarantee it will come up in discussion at meetings and conferences for quite some time into the future (partly because I will be bringing it up in conversation!). Of course it is one highlight of the upcoming Domain Roundtable meeting, where Matt Cutts is very much involved this year (I will be there as well, on the SEO Experts panel).

What will increased public access to the whois data mean for your business? Think further than that… what will easy access to WHOIS data like that do to the value of the WHOIS data? Once so trivialized, will the WHOIS data become less important and less trusted? Will it become less reliable, as it becomes less accurate, simply because Google has made it more accessible? I think it will. I’m loving this new development.

Related references:

• Google Finds Unregistered WHOIS Data from johnon.com March 2007
• Blip.tv hosted video where Jay reveals the upcoming collaboration with Google (via Domaintool Blog)
• Send a question for Matt Cutts to answer at the DomainRoundtable meeting
• Google monetizing my web content and trading on my name
• Name Intelligence monetizing my WHOIS information

Well, maybe not Alexa rank, but they do make a rank t-shirt and z***** is pretty innovative…

(Update: oh well, they disabled the hotlink. It was a picture of a custom t-short showing rank, but I guess they prefer no publicity over a hotlinked image. So much for assuming they were an innovative company…)

By describing the strategic use of Wordpress blogs for search marketing for a customer, I defined a process I am calling SEO-Aware Wordpress Publishing.

You start with Wordpress, configured according to SEO best practices, and then … you don’t start publishing, but rather you get a little SEO training. Training in SEO copywriting, yes, but also beyond just SEO copywriting. I could have called it SEO copywriting on Wordpress, because we make strategic use of page slugs/permalinks, H tags, outlinks, and excerpts, and the various SEO plugins for Wordpress as they support our publishing mission (where at least one outcome metric is search marketing).

Since I know that YOU know what I am talking about, I am inviting you to continue this conversation on your own SEO blog. Below I will present three SEO tips for Wordpress Publishing that I would include in that initial SEO training session for an in-house copywriter/author responsible for publishing on the platform. The goal is to help them become SEO Aware, to reduce the amount of SEO involvement needed on the blog. If you have other tips you would recommend, why not publish them on your blog as a follow on? If I see the potential, I’ll collate the best tips into a larger article with credit given back, of course.

When publishing with the SEO’d Wordpress blog, consider these tips for SEO-aware blogging:

• write the excerpt first, from a perspective of “here I am telling the desk editor what this blog post is about and why it is important from her desk’s perspective“. You can always go back and edit it again later, but writing it first makes sure it gets something in it. Drafting the excerpt will also probably help you forumulate your post (especially the attitude of your post, and the closure it needs).

• The post slug or permalink defaults to the standard “null permalink” provided. This ensures your drafts are saved in a safe location until they are ready for publication. But since we craft permalinks like we craft headlines and titles (after the post is written), consider making the first line of your post “Permalink: ” so it remains painfully obvious that we need to create a permalink before approving the post for publication.

• Consider hiding buried treasure messages in the “title” field of embedded links. When your reader hovers over the anchor text, they will appreciate the way the hover tip gives them additional, off line communication about the link. The message can also can help them to store a concept in short-term memory, giving them confidence to not click away just yet, but rather stay and finish reading your prose. For example, Michael Gray made a video about SEO for Wordpress

• If you didn’t just hover of that link to Michael’s blog and see the buried treasure message, do it now.

Good job! I hope you SEO consultants recognize the potential value in continuing this conversation with 3 of your own tips published on your own SEO blog.
Topical Tags:SEO