We were excited to see Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Rework. In it they share some of their iconoclastic, iterative, and wholehearted approach to doing business.

The book reflects their clean design sensibility, with pages of drawings interspersed with quick blog-post-like narrative snippets. It is a quick read, but worth contemplating. I’ll summarize the book by sharing some of the subtopics titles within a few key chapters.

Given my day job as a project manager, I particularly value their approach to creative productivity. They’re minimalists. They advocate reducing interruptions “interruption is the enemy of productivity” and reducing time in meetings “meetings are toxic”. Why? Because “inspiration is perishable.” So you have to get the dross out of the way to be able to act.

Other recommendations they emphasize quick iterations “good enough is fine”, “quick wins”, and “make tiny decisions”, and being realistic about your human-ness “go to sleep”, “long lists don’t get done”, and “don’t be a hero”.

Want some quick inspiration? Go get Rework!

SEM companies often fail when it comes to explaining complex ideas, which is unfortunate, because if you can’t explain complex ideas, you must work much harder to help explain the importance of an idea or proposal, and it can even prevent clients from learning about good work you did.

This is just the reality of SEM: it is measurable, depends on complex interactions of systems, and often involves ideas that are relatively new. But you don’t have to give up on reporting. In fact, you can spend less time actually messing with powerpoint, more time talking to the clients and your co-workers, deliver much better reporting, and have fun in the process. Read More

We created a Pure Visibility Bookshelf (Amazon Associates Link) to share the books we use and often recommend. We’re voracious readers so the list will surely grow – this “starter” list represents some of our all time favorites and current reads.

On Entrepreneurship
MASTERING THE ROCKEFELLER HABITS: This book is our handbook for being – we follow the one page plan, hold quarterly meetings, daily standups, etc. This is the closest thing to a how-to manual for business we’ve seen.

SMALL GIANTS: If you believe that business has a higher purpose than just making money, this book is for you. Bo does a great job of presenting his research on really neat companies and the common threads that make them Small Giants.

THE KNACK: I wish I’d had this book starting out in business. You, too, can have the knack and Bo and Norm are great teachers to learn it from!

THE E-MYTH: Perhaps “the” classic for any new entrepreneur growing from a team of 1 to 1+. This book created the mantra “Work ON the business, not just IN the business.”

GOOD TO GREAT: Jim Collins has done an amazing amount of research on successful businesses (publicly held ones, because there’s more data accessible to analyze) and found some incredible similarities. You’ll hear the phrases he’s coined in Rockefeller Habits and elsewhere such as the “Hedgehog concept” and “Get the right people on the bus”.

Corporate Culture
STRENGTHS FINDER: Way more than a book, this includes an online survey that provides an assessment of strengths. Once you’ve completed the survey you’ll get tips for supporting those strengths personally, as teammates, and as leaders. Buy this for your whole team. (We did!)

DELIVERING HAPPINESS: This book by Zappo’s CEO makes a nice complement to Small Giants, focusing on how creating a happy corporate culture leads to happy clients and a happy bottom line.

REWORK: The focus of the founders of 37Signals on keeping things simple is refreshing. Even the book is simple – you can polish it off in an afternoon. (We also love their project management tool, Basecamp.)

GUIDE TO GIVING GREAT SERVICE: Zingerman’s wrote the book on great service – both figuratively and literally. Personally, I’d recommend checking out their service (and the food) first hand. And while you’re in Ann Arbor, stop by and say hi!

DRIVE: Daniel Pink’s research flies in the face of conventional wisdom about carrots and sticks, making this a must read. (And if you’ve got a teenager at home, this book will prove to be priceless.)

Selling Online
TRUST AGENTS: Chris’s book is the most comprehensive primer I’ve seen on what makes online marketing “tick”. The focus is largely on social media, but it’ll get you on the right track.

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: This book wasn’t written to be about selling online, but the message couldn’t be more relevant. Understanding buying behavior is critical to selling online. As someone once explained to me, if consumers strictly chose rationally, no one would carry American Express (higher fees, used in fewer places, etc.) This book puts research you can use behind why we make those choices.

Getting Visible
SEARCH ENGINE INC: To sell anything online, you’ve first got to get in front of the right people. This 400 page book is the most comprehensive reference to the mechanics of search engine marketing you’ll find.

SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY: Back in the day when we were answering questions at networking meetings like “What’s a Google”? Shari wrote what must have been one of the first books on search engine marketing. This 2nd edition of her original is still a good primer on visibility.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION: This book bridges a lot of categories, with about half of it dedicated to making your site visible. We’re a bit biased about the quality of this book, given that we contributed the two chapters on paid search. That said, if you’re just getting started we’d recommend the books above first – this is definitely a technical read.

Websites That Work
DON’T MAKE ME THINK: This classic came out when I was designing my first websites, and the general principles in it remain just as true today. Generally speaking, the simpler it is to make a transaction on your site (e-commerce or otherwise) the more results you’ll generate from your site.

WEB ANALYTICS 2.0: If Avinash writes it – read it. He believes passionately in the power of data to transform marketing – as we do! The bulk of our work these days is collecting data and making the case for site changes that ultimately help users and drive bottom line results. It’s a big, huge deal and most of your competitors aren’t paying attention to these kinds of details. THIS is how you create competitive advantage in today’s online world.

And that’s the perfect book to close out this initial list with, given that it captures the essence of what we love about online marketing!

P.S. In full disclosure: If you purchase any of these books through our store, the bookworms among us thank you – you’ll be fueling our reading and book sharing fund. Thanks!

The keyword density ratio, that is, the total times a targeted keyword appears in the overall text of a page, is still something we hear mentioned as an important consideration in SEO from many firms and agencies.

It’s not. The strategy has been firmly and consistently debunked by the leading thinkers in the industry. This is not to say, by the way, that adding your targeted keyphrases to a page’s content isn’t good for SEO. Of course it is. There just isn’t any secret formula for determining how often you should add them.

So why do people keep talking about keyword density? It is one of the most persistent myths in online marketing for four important reasons:

- It was true once. Before search engines really started to grow in sophistication, a lot of spammy strategies would get traction, the most famous of which was “keyword stuffing”, or the inclusion, in meta tags and on-page copy of huge blocks of repeated terms or repeated synonyms. In a bizarre nod to “usability” often  these blocks were made invisible to the user through formatting tricks like making the text the same color as the background.

Algorithmic changes started to make this strategy increasingly ineffective as early as 2001, but the approach had been so successful, and so low-effort, that it persisted as a strategy for years. These days few people think “stuffing” is a good idea, but the attraction of a low-effort “magic bullet” remains so appealing that the sanitized “keyword density” approach has replaced it in the SEO mythology.

- It makes a lot of logical sense if you think about SEO as a way to fool web crawlers. If the use of a keyword once helps with ranking, wouldn’t adding it a second time double the effectiveness? The problem is that the web crawlers — and, more importantly, their underlying algorithms — are extremely sophisticated, and grow more so every year. Even if keyword density were a real input into search engines, it would be one of 200 or more signals considered by Google alone.

- It is easier than writing copy properly. Who wouldn’t want to get a nice list of keywords, drop them in appropriate ratios on a page, and watch the traffic roll in? Modern crawlers, however, are much more focused on the actual content of the page and the relationship between that content and other related pages. A good way to think about keywords now is as a guidepost to the crawlers who are trying to contextualize the content.

In that regard, one keyword is most likely enough, and in fact it is more appropriate to mention context-appropriate synonyms rather than repeating the same phrase.

- It is untestable. You’d think this would be a detriment. However, those who persist in talking about keyword density argue that it cannot be seen as a single input, so the variation is hard to lock down. This is less than useless, and creates ranges of appropriate “density” as low as 1% and as high as 8%

We would argue that this attraction to untestable strategies is a huge red flag. What is the point of a theory if you can’t test it, especially when your marketing budget is on the line as the bet?

These four reasons are not just a problem with keyword density; we think they are indicative of the biggest problems in the SEO field today, in that they allow people to get away with doing SEO badly. In reality, these four reasons can apply as the motivations behind many shady SEO recommendations.

The cynical side of me believes that SEO often attracts people who are excited about the complexity of a system but don’t like the intensive work in the trenches necessary to make it work. In that way, the myth of keyword density captures the essence of how this problem can be part of many SEO worker’s attitudes about their efforts, the results, and, most importantly, your money.

As an aside, if you are interested in doing SEO right, just dive into the SEO section of our blog. There are many great articles there about how to improve and optimize your site’s organic visibility.

We love the Google Analytics e-commerce system, in no small part because it is so “simple”: what you see is what you get, and it can basically be used to reflect your shopping cart system’s understanding of any given transaction.

The most essential double-check comes from the fact that any given sale is made up of two independent measures: The Transaction report and the Product report.

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Search engine marketing is generally better when using a combination of strategies, but marketing budgets are not infinite. How should your company choose between Social Media and Search Engine Optimization strategies? One major consideration that can influence your choice between SEO and Social Media that is not often discussed is the impact of  product maturity.

Products and product categories are generally tracked on a life cycle curve that describe phases of a product’s development. From a marketing perspective, the primary aspect that needs to be considered in each stage is the way that it can be described, and the level of awareness the public has about that product. A Product in early stages often doesn’t have a commonly understood name, and the public has lower awareness about it. Think about how, in the last thirty years, the “mobile cordless cellular handheld telephone” has been shortened to “mobile”, “cell”, or “cell phone”, and think, as well, how many more people are aware of what these devices are.

How does this relate to search engine marketing? Well, each stage matches to a particular marketing strategy. Early stage product growth is driven by the enthusiasm of early adopters who can evangelize to the larger community. They also create the language of need and desire around the product that can be used as the product matures and grows. This makes it a good candidate for a social media campaign, since social media is most effective when being used by enthusiastic, authentic promoters through their online communities.

Mature product growth, in comparison, is driven by effective marketing and branding of known features, most of which can be simply and clearly expressed through simple, short, phrases. Since SEO focuses on widely used and understood keyphrases to generate visibility, it is a strong fit for later stage products.

So what do you have? A new, innovative idea that is going to take the world by storm, once people understand how to talk about it through your cadre of enthusiastic early adopters? Or do you have a well made, high quality or high value product, which just needs to win visibility against its existing competitors? The answer to that question — and how you can take advantage of it through Search Engine Marketing — can provide a lot of interesting ideas for your marketing team’s strategy sessions.

It has happened to anyone who watches their organic ranking. One day you are drinking a cup of coffee and you pull up your browser to look at where your site is for your favorite keyphrase. Then you spill your coffee in horror: IT’S GONE! Your website is not there.

How is this possible? You haven’t made any major changes in months. Your website been steady as a rock at the top of the rankings for over a year. How could the site suddenly lose so much visibility?

It probably didn’t. In our experience rankings don’t change suddenly if no major SEO efforts are underway. Instead they slowly shift over time. However, there are a number of things that can create sudden shifts, or the appearance of them. Here are a list of things you can do to confirm whether or not the change in ranking is a real problem, a temporary blip, or even just a trick your browser is playing on you.

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Hi everyone,

Megan and I are in lovely Mountain View, California at the GAAC conference. We have been asked to restrict our blogging and tweeting unless the speaker specifically says we can share.

Tomorrow morning the keynote speaker is Avinash Kaushik, so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned! I will post and tweet if allowed. Our Twitter account is @purevisibility.

As Google Analytics continues to improve its excellent product, it’s important to remember the fundamental nature of traffic patterns for your business and how they can affect your reporting. Even with the introduction of advanced segmentation, motion charts, and other awesome features, there are real-time traffic patterns that can create major errors in your analytics reporting if you don’t account for them.

One of the biggest ones is highly cyclical web traffic, which can have a huge impact on trend comparisons across months.

Why does this matter? Well, let’s look at a real example from one of our clients. If we try to do a traffic comparison month to month, say, between October 2008 and October, 2007, and we didn’t check the cyclical patterns, we would think the increase in traffic in 2008 was 0nly about 0.57%, a pretty small climb for a company that is working hard to improve a site’s traffic.

However, if we look at the month to month comparison to see what the cyclical patterns are, we see that things are a little off:

In this case, the 2008 sample is has two fewer high-traffic days than the 2007 sample. This can have a strong distorting effect.

The fix is simple, however: do your time sample from week to week instead of month to month! In most cases a five week slice, starting and ending on the same day, that includes the entire sample month is all you need, although for some periods you will need a six week slice. In this case, we took a five week slice starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday. The results were pretty dramatic: Once the cyclical traffic had been synchronized, the five week period containing October 2008 had 3.75% more traffic than the five week period containing October 2007.

Google Analytics makes this comparison extremely easy with the use of the calendar function; basically choosing five weeks is nearly as easy as choosing a single month, so week-to-week synchronization is a quick and easy adjustment.

We have heard some concerns that week to week comparison are harder to explain to clients. We appreciate that this makes the time periods a little less fixed than month to month comparisons. But in fact we have created a more formal version of this blog post that basically walks them through the process, and we’ve found that with the pictures shown here, it’s generally very easy for them to understand. One of two things will happen: either they will accept the fact that month-to-month reporting may be inaccurate, but not hold you accountable for trend data at that time period, or they will embrace the week-to-week synchronization.

Most large companies have at least some online data with an outside vendor or agency. Since even good agency relationships aren’t permanent, there will be a point where the data managed by that agency needs to come back home or migrate to another agency.

Yet many companies don’t have the simplest legal or procedural checks in place to make sure that their precious marketing data stays with them. In fact we have even worked with agencies that insisted the company’s sales data was theirs and could not be transferred at all.

We have also been utterly surprised to find agencies that are not interested in taking on the existing data during a handoff. As a result, that company had to start from scratch when creating their paid search campaign, delaying effective marketing for nearly two months.

Don’t let this happen to you! Your online traffic data is one of the most important sources of information for future sales effort that exists. Here are three simple steps for protecting your precious online marketing data:

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