I myself actually struggled to solve the CAPTCHA. I kept on guessing the combinations and I eventually managed to download the file I want. I know they want to keep out Spam, but they shouldn’t make it so difficult that even humans can’t solve it.

Have you had any problems with it?

However, showing the spam caught count using the widget uses a blue box with a white background, which, let’s face it, doesn’t fit in with every theme.

As a result, I went scouting through the code, and found that the following can be used to show the count in plain text (I’m sure this is shown elsewhere, but I’m damn well doing it again :P) in the middle of a sentence, like I have in the footer of my blog at the moment. It’s actually really simple.

The following code declares the Akismet code as a variable:
<?php
$count = number_format_i18n(get_option('akismet_spam_count'));
?>

Then, it’s a simple case of doing something like this to show it off:

<a href="http://akismet.com">Akismet</a> has protected my site from <?php echo $count; ?> spam comments. Nice try!

And bam, you have you Akismet readout sat there I guess, if you’re doing that, please keep the backlink to Akismet, it’s only fair..

Hope that helps someone..

When you get to the permalinks page, it all looks simple. Choose one of the options in the list, they are often the easiest, and personally, I think the /year/month/day/postname one is good. That’s all good. The category and tag archives should be ok, don’t worry about them for simplicity. Choose one of the filled in options, then click submits.

But what’s this? It says you should update your .htaccess now? Well, I’d better run you through that now, hadn’t I. Scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find code like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Copy that. Next up, fire up Notepad, or some sort of basic text editor. Notepad is good for Windows, and the plain text editor in Linux is fine. Paste the code in. Now save it as 1.htaccess.

Now, fire up FTP. Check that you’ve not already got a .htaccess file in your root directory, like public_html, and if there is, scroll down. I’m assuming there isn’t. Just upload the 1.htaccess file in there, good and simple, and rename it to just .htaccess.

Now head over to your blog, and click a link. If it loads, you’ve done it right. If not, something’s wrong.

If there is already a .htaccess file in your root directory, then download it, and open it with notepad. Paste it’s contents above the code above on the 1.htaccess file we just made, and you’re good to go. Follow the instructions above.

If it’s not working, follow the process again, and if it’s still not working, then it’s possible that Mod_Rewrite isn’t working or active. Ask your host about this.

At any given time, our Q&A section usually features a question or two about image optimisation. People want to know why their images haven’t been indexed or aren’t appearing for their key terms, even after they have added keywords to every imaginable attribute. Appropriate anchor text, nearby-keywords and relevant surrounding content don’t seem to have made a difference. The images don’t show up. In their place, ridiculously irrelevant things rank for a person’s keywords.

I, and others, have puzzled over Google Images’ approach to image search for quite a while. We’ve carried out experiments, silly and serious, and have discerned various truths about how Google indexes and ranks image files. However, all knowledge aside, I wonder what exactly the average website owner or SEO expects to gain from image search traffic.

Firstly, let me tell you how I use Google Images, or any other image search engine. If I venture to the second link atop Google’s search pages, I have one of four three objectives:

• Find out what something looks like. I click all the way through to the file, bypassing the page on which the image is hosted. After all, it might take me longer than two and a half seconds for the page to load, and it will probably take me at least as long to locate the image. This is precious time that I can’t waste in search of my picture. I am, after all, acting as a typical web user for whom one extra second one second too long.
• To swipe an image for my own purposes. Too lazy to Photoshop something? Need a quick pic for a blog post so it’s not totally devoid of aesthetically pleasing content? On the hunt for a new desktop image but not bright enough to head straight to Flickr? I won’t be sticking around to find the picture in its original context this time, either. I’ll click straight to the (usually) jpeg file.
• To see if any of my experiments are producing interesting results. For this, I don’t even have to click through.
• Um.

I thought that list would be longer when I started it, but I can’t think of another reason why I use image search. I don’t use image search engines to find products that I’m actually going to buy. I definitely window-shop, but my presence on these sites is as profitable to the sites’ owners as I am when I try on clothes in a store and don’t buy anything. The only time I’ve done anything vaguely commercial with an image search was at Best Buy last weekend when I searched for my television set to determine whether I should purchase the grey or graphite-coloured sound system.

If a person is researching a product in order to make a purchase, I wonder how likely it is that the image searches they carry out result in conversions on the same site. I feel that the equation is very different if a search starts at a regular search page. For me, image search is often a prerequisite for purchases, but I search for something I’ll eventually buy elsewhere. In fact, I rarely notice which sites host the images through which I’m browsing.

Although I’m basing these assumptions purely on my own search habits, I’m prepared to back up the idea that image visitors are pretty useless with some data of my own. Over a nine month period, a site I manage has enjoyed a relatively high amount of image search traffic. However, out of that traffic:

• The average time spent on the site is 1 minute, 22 seconds. Looking through the visits, this number has been skewed a bit by a couple of people who seem to have opened the site and subsequently forgotten to close their browser / tab. These people like to come by every now and again to really screw up averages. Without them, the average time on the site for image traffic is 32 seconds.
• The average number of pages viewed is 1.63. Invariably, the second click is to the homepage.
• 64.95% Bounce rate. This doesn’t strike me as too awful for an image search, but together with the other stats, it adds to the fact that these people aren’t sticking around.

Not-so-incidentally, the images are completely relevant to the search terms by which they’re found and they’re also very relevant to the general topic of the site as a whole. However, day after day, image traffic doesn’t stay for longer than a minute and very rarely returns.

So what, if anything, are we doing wrong? Image search issues being so popular lately, there seems to be a notion out there that this traffic can be captured. Perhaps I’m atypical of the average image search user, although I highly doubt it, since I was searching this way long before I got into SEO. In other words, since when I was a "normal."

We can generally accept that the more technical and specific the search query, the more likely it is that a person is in the mood to buy, rather than window-shop. Example: a search for "car stereo" is less likely to result in a purchase than "Panasonic CQ-TX5500D Vacuum Tube Car Stereo." Most of the time, the image search queries I see fit squarely into the first camp. Do people perform complex, conversion-suggestive searches for images? As I mentioned above, I did just that this weekend in order to remember what my television looks like (come on - I look at what’s on the screen, not the colour of the plastic!) but I had no intent of buying anything from the site whose picture I looked at… for about ten seconds.

What do you generally wish to gain from image search traffic? Do you even care about it? Of course, I ask in the knowledge that people who run image libraries, photography businesses and similar sites for which aesthetics are important need to appeal to image search users. However, for general web business, should we really continue to fret over the odd choices Google makes when sorting its index of pictures?

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I wanted to try an experiment tonight and leverage a bit of the terrific community vibe and willingness to share we’ve got here at SEOmoz.

In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional, or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad, or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how valuable we consider the techniques to be. Then, on Friday morning (the 4th), we’ll give the member who gets the most thumbs up in the comments a free one-week trial to SEOmoz PRO.

I’ll start with 6 of my favorite offbeat link building techniques (to help set the bar high)

• Whenever you make use of several vendors in an industry or have a depth of experience with them, create a blog post, article or content page with a list of your "favorites" ranked in a particular order, then email each of the mentioned sites and tell them that they’re welcome to use a "testimonial" quote you’ve written about them and also link to the "rankings" page. Companies love to link to anything ego-boosting.
• Have a quick trigger finger on popular news sites that allow comments and try to be one of, if not, the first comment and mention a URL on your site that better explains your point or offers more insight. This works particularly well with politically focused stories. The only caveat is that you need a repository of relevant material to draw on. Also note - if your URL is long, you can use tinyurl.com for this purpose (which also creates a sense of mystery as to what you might be linking to). The comments themselves are nofollowed (or don’t even allow hyperlinking), but even just the printed URL will get plenty of copy-and-paste traffic from big sites.
• Be on of the first users of a given social network, and make sure to mention or include your URL in either your username or your account profile. Frequently, new services will blog about who joined them just after launch.
• Embed popular media with your brand in hilariously irresistible ways - Rick Astley + your logo doing karaoke FTW! Check out Shoemoney’s genius McLovin ID cards as an example.
• Every time you send out a new customer email, send a snippet of code they can paste into the "partners" section of their website that will display your logo and a link back to your site (this works particularly well for B2B companies who like to show off their "partnerships").
• Create a wallpaper and screensaver with your company’s brand and submit it to all the free wallpaper/screensaver galleries. The vast majority allow you to link back to your original source (or a profile site).

Now let’s see who’s got the best 3 link building tactics out there…

p.s. Already have SEOmoz PRO membership? We’ll mail you a deck of SEOmoz Werewolf Cards or a t-shirt (as if thumbs themselves weren’t enough of an incentive).

p.p.s. Couple more rules - you can accumulate points for multiple posts, so if you post 3 comments, each with 3 link building tactics, we’ll combine the thumbs score (but subtract 2 points to compensate for extra thumbs up you give yourself). Also - in order for your comment below to be considered an entry it needs to actually contain 3 link building tactics, so we won’t count every comment.

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In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I’d share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI.

1.  Know What You Want

• What do you want your website to accomplish?
• To you, how satisfying is your website’s design/usability?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• "How can we use our site to achieve organizational objectives?"
• "What opportunities are we missing because we have a poor/mediocre website compared to our competitors?"

These tips are concise, yet powerful. So many companies think "We need a website" without truly considering why they need a website. What’s the benefit? What are your goals? What do you need your website to do? Also, competitive intelligence is an invaluable resource. Who is beating you in your sphere or industry, and what are they doing that you’re not? Are they providing free tools? Offering discounts? Better customer support? Attractive images? It’s imperative to analyze your competitors’ websites to see what content they provide, which keywords they focus on, who’s linking to them, etc.

2.  Know Your Audience

You’re not designing the site for yourself, you’re designing it for your audience. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why are people coming to your site?
• What do they expect to find?
• How can you make your site easier for visitors to use?

It’s important to think of your site from your user’s perspective. Consider doing some user testing on your website–a fresh set of eyes are always good to have. Think about how you ask someone to proofread your work, or how people hire you to do site reviews for their website. The same goes for your website–you look at it and work with it every day, so someone new may very well catch something that you’ve been overlooking.

3.  Treat Your Website Like a Business

Think about how your site contributes to your business’s goals as a whole. Your site should complement your business plan.

4.  Create a Website Strategy

Have a site strategy–establish clear goals, communicate with your team, and work to implement those goals. The following is a suggested strategy:

• List your site’s objectives. Don’t confuse objectives with strategies–objectives are goals, whereas strategies are how you achieve your objectives. Objectives are the "what," while strategies are the "how."
• List your primary and secondary audiences. Your primary audience should be who you hope will receive the greatest ROI, while your secondary audience is everyone else. Consider crafting personas or audience profiles to better understand your audience’s point of view.
• Draft a list of questions your audience may have when they’re browsing your site, such as "How does your service/product work?", "How much does it cost?", "How does using this product benefit me?", "Is there any printed material I can obtain?", Do you have any partnership opportunities?", etc. Some questions will be specific to your site’s niche.
• Analyze your competitors. I already mentioned this earlier, but be sure to study your competitors’ site, their calls to action, their landing pages, etc.
• Break down your site’s traffic sources. What percentage of your traffic derives from organic search, paid search, email marketing, banner ads, direct navigation, partner sites, etc? Think about tweaking your design and offering separate landing pages based on where your traffic is coming from (chapter 4 goes more in-depth with landing pages).
• Strategize. Revisit your objectives and flesh out specific strategies you’ll execute in order to complete them.
• Understand which metrics you’ll need to track in order to measure your strategy’s success. Which leads us to the next section…

5.  Measure the Right Metrics

This section cautions against relying too heavily on some metrics while ignoring others. Loveday and Niehaus list some problems with web reporting (analytics) tools:

• There’s too much data. Too many site owners obsess about the figures without really thinking about what they mean or why they’re like that.
• They aren’t perfect. Lots of you know that different analytics programs report different stats. Don’t worry or freak out that different programs are providing conflicting figures. Think about the data in a relative sense, much like keyword research tools. What you don’t want to do is not trust analytics simply because you think the numbers aren’t 100% accurate.
• They lack context. Don’t just look at your analytics and say "We had 5,000 visitors today." Is that good? Bad? Look at the bigger picture and consider your stats as a whole. Know how to take the analytics information and read into it.

Key principles of measuring the success of your website include:

• Focus on what people do vs. what they say. Don’t ask someone how they would find a specific product on your site–watch them try to do it.
• Think of success metrics in dollar figures. Which is easier to wrap your head around, "Our conversion rate improved to 2.7%" or "By increasing our conversion rate, sales improved $200,000"?
• Focus on trends. See if your metrics increase long-term vs. just a one day fluke spike. Don’t obsess about something that could be nothing more than a short-term, fleeting gain.
• Emphasize consistency over accuracy. As mentioned earlier, analytics aren’t 100% accurate, so instead focus on how consistent the metrics are.
• Integrate your site with various metrics. Hopefully, you should be able to track your customer’s behavior from start to finish.

Metrics that matter include business metrics (what your organization uses to measure success at a high level), site metrics (analytics, etc), and user metrics (user feedback). Metrics that don’t matter include traffic (if you have a bunch of visitors but no conversions, the traffic doesn’t mean much), the time on site and average page views (good directional indicators, but they can easily be misinterpreted), hits (it’s not 1997 any more!), and survey (the questions can be subjective, they’re often poorly worded, skew responses to people more willing to take the survey).

6.  Prioritize Design Efforts Intelligently

Most people design their website in the following order:

From an ROI perspective, however, design attention should focus on:

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Ever since SEOmoz took venture capital investment last fall, I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and sites geared towards the startup world. Even though we’ve been around for 5 years (and Gillian and I have been doing web marketing for 10), I still think of us very much like a startup - we’ve grown from 3 people 3 years ago to 14 people today and we’re worrying about things like burn rate, productization, marketing, and launch schedules, so I’m pretty sure we qualify. Thus, I’m inclined to read sites like Hacker News and to click on posts like these:

• The Year One Startup Handbook
• How to Save Money Running a Startup
• Ten Rules for Startup Success
• Ten Rules for Web Startups
• PR Tips for Startups: How to Get and Keep the Media’s Attention
• 36 Startup Tips
• Startup Advice for Entrepreneurs
• Advice and Reading List for High Tech Startup Entrepreneurs
• Pithy Insights on Startup Marketing (at least here, one comment asks if the post is subtly recommending SEO)
• 7 Biggest Mistakes of Business Startups
• Startup Marketing: Big Bang vs. Darwinian Evolution

Let me just be clear on this point - not one of those posts has the word "SEO" in it, nor makes any clear reference to getting traffic from search engines. I’m forced to ask myself - are these people idiots? Are they being coy? Or have they really never experienced the built-in marketing channel that comes from ranking at the top of the engines for a relevant keyword phrase?

I hope it’s the latter, because there’s really no excuse for the sort of abject ignorance of startup "advisers" who suggest guerrilla marketing and word-of-mouth campaigns but never even examine the possibility that there might already be people searching for the product/service/website you’re creating, and that by getting in front of their eyeballs right when they ask for it, you might have a good chance of succeeding.

Let me just beat a dead horse for a minute here.

Let’s imagine you’ve just dreamed up some brilliant new web startup company that’s going to change the world and fill this great unfulfilled need. Now, if only there were some way to figure out if other people were interested in solving the same problem. If only we had access to some sort of a repository of human queries that would tell us how popular and worthwhile our idea might be… Gee, that would be great…

For fuck’s sake, people - get a clue.

See that screenshot up there? It’s a basic keyword research tool from Google. You type in words or phrases related to your new business and Google will tell you if people are performing any searches in that arena. They’ll even tell you how relatively popular or unpopular those queries might be.

So, for example, let’s just go over to something like this big list of recent startups and choose one at random… how about Dripbook. What is Dripbook? Let’s see… From their About Us page:

Dripbook is an online portfolio and community site for artists. Dripbook’s mission is simple - to allow artists to easily publish their work online by taking the hassle, guesswork and expense out of creating a well designed, easily modifiable web presence.

That sounds pretty interesting, actually - like a competitor to what DeviantArt has been doing for a long time. Now if only there was a free way for them to market their service simply by attracting links and attention… Yeah, you can guess where I’m going with this. Let’s start by taking advantage of that AdWords tool.

Wow… That’s some pretty valuable information if you’re starting up a site targeting online galleries for artists. You can see terms that people are searching for, how relatively popular they are, how much "advertising competition" (which usually translates directly into commercial value) each has, and even brainstorm potential areas to advance into ("fine art publishing" sounds interesting, for example).

Now just take it one step further and imagine that you’re the CEO of (or the venture capitalist planning to invest in) Dripbook. How valuable would it be to see your site on this page?

Those top positions are probably bringing a few hundred visits every day, and every one of them is directly interested in your subject matter. In fact, they’ve even told you right as they arrive that they’re desperately seeking a place where artists publish on the web. A good marketing opportunity? Yeah, I’d say so. In fact, I’d say it’s better than being on the front page of TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb - after all, there’s not a whole lot of TC readers who are going to sign up for art publishing accounts on your site - it’s just not the right audience. Why not at least try to rank for something - with a title like "Dripbook | Welcome" it feels like you’re not even making a half-hearted attempt.

Maybe I’m underestimating the SEO intelligence of web startups here. Maybe they already know the ins and outs of SEO so well - from the value proposition to the keyword targeting to the link strategies necessary to succeed - that it’s totally unnecessary to even mention it as startup advice… Since I mentioned Y Combinator and Hacker News earlier (as it’s one of the big sources for startup advice), let’s see how some of the Y Combinator companies are performing on SEO (there’s a list here):

• Draftmix - Fantasy Sports?! Oh man, there’s a ton of searches around that topic. Fantasy Football alone has millions of searches every August. Let’s see how they’re… OH MY GOD!!! They don’t even have a public page on the site with the words "fantasy football" in the title.
• Virtualmin - the web’s most powerful web hosting control panel? That’s terrific - they’re actually targeting the keyword phrase in the title. Now if only they ranked in the top 100 results for "web hosting control panel" (which gets quite a few searches), I’d be even happier.
• Adpinion - This clever site lets advertisers sign up and solicits input from their users to tell them how to make better targeted ad campaigns. If only they had some targeting of their own (for goodness sake, the home page’s title tag is "Adpinion"). Maybe ranking for keywords like "web advertising" or "web advertising strategies" or even "online advertising programs" (all of which have significant search volume) would help to bring some targeted leads their way.
• Octopart - Oh man… You’re killing me here. It’s a search engine for electronic parts, but it’s not even making a sliver of an attempt to rank for the incredibly valuable search query - "electronic parts."

Going through the rest of the list just seems cruel - clearly, there’s no SEO savvy here, not even the basic recognition that keyword targeting might be worthwhile. So much for the theory that startups already know their stuff on search engine optimization. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect that it’s because of the general attitude these communities tend to have about SEO. For example (from this thread):

How Important is SEO on your Startup’s Priority List?

2 points by cperciva 173 days ago | link

Not important. If you build something which people want, they’ll tell their friends about it. If the majority of your users are discovering you via Google, you’re doing something wrong.

I know that’s just one opinion, but if you spend enough time outside the SEO world, you’ll find that it’s a pervasive attitude. I’m not sure whether to be depressed or ecstatic - after all, that just means more search traffic for those of us who understand the power of SEO.

p.s. I should mention that my beef here is not with startups and startup CEOs (who have a ton on their plate). I’m frustrated with the experts of startup success providing online marketing advice that ignores SEO - to me, that’s the real tragedy.

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Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.

I have nothing but respect for the people that do search marketing for Performics, but I think this is the best decision. People hold Google to a unbelievably high standard, and I think it’s important that we try very hard to avoid any conflict of interest — or even the appearance of conflict of interest — in our business. Many people I respect have wanted Google to take this step and I think it’s the right call.

(As always, remember that this is my personal blog and personal opinions.)

Okay, I admit that my “I’m tired of April Fool’s” post was just a ruse. A couple people almost fell for the bait.

I did a couple April Fools posts this year; one about getting a Firefox tattoo (it was a temporary stick-on tattoo) and one joke about how the iPhone has the magical power to connect to almost anything.

To make up for playing pranks today, I recorded a brief movie about some of the signals that Google uses to rank web pages. We publicly say that Google uses over 200 different signals in our ranking algorithms, but we don’t always talk about them much. If you’re interested to hear more about the signals that Google uses, here’s the recording.

And I apologize for all the April Fool’s jokes — you just have to give yourself one day a year to have fun, right?

I recently discovered something really wild: the iPhone has a secret SATA interface. Using the SATA interface, the iPhone is much easier to hack because it looks just like a hard drive to a computer, so you can replace individual executables and symlinks with no effort. Readers know that I’m a bit of a storage freak. A month or so ago, I was reading on Lifehacker about this cool SATA USB docking station where you can just slide a hard drive into the dock:

So I ordered one and set it up. The accident that unlocked all this is that I was getting up out of my desk chair while reading on my iPhone. The chair bumped me and I dropped the iPhone from a couple feet up. By some weird chance, it landed in the docking station. Not only did it fit perfectly, but a hard drive picture appeared on the iPhone’s screen. Just a few seconds later, my Windows XP computer recognized the iPhone as an external hard drive! I pulled the iPhone out and was able to reproduce it by pushing the iPhone down hard into the docking station. Dropping it from couple feet the first time forced it into the connector, and it does take a little more muscle to make the connectors mesh than I’m used to with peripherals.

Anyway, this is what the iPhone looks like when it’s docked as an external hard drive:

The iPhone is formatted with HFS+. I happened to have drivers for HFS installed on XP; the default installation of Windows doesn’t have these drivers, but you can download hfsutils here. If you have hfsutils installed, the iPhone looks like a regular hard drive. I’ve been able to backup my iPhone and restore the image to my wife’s iPhone with no problems (she still keeps her phone number of course). I’m not an expert iPhone hacker, even though I know a few things, so it’s been slow-going. But I’m making solid progress and wanted to alert other people that the iPhone works in this way. I’ve tried a few other external SATA enclosures, but I’ve had best results with the Thermaltake so far.

Update: Some people are claiming that these images are photoshopped, but they’re actual images. What’s even more fascinating is that I discovered that the iPhone works as an external hard drive with my laptop as well:

Is anyone else seeing this behavior with their iPhone?

Update 2: Okay, this is getting a little scary. I started thinking about how the iPhone connected with both my laptop and my external hard drive dock. And I asked myself: “Where else can I stick my iPhone?” So I tried putting my iPhone into a CD player that was nearby:

To my surprise, a CD-ROM image appeared on the iPhone. Sure enough, the CD player started playing my iPhone! Of course, it was a data CD, so instead of music I got an awful racket as the CD player tried to play the data CD on the iPhone.

My mind reeled as I considered the possibilities. If the iPhone worked with electronics, maybe it would work with other appliances as well? I took a lamp, unscrewed the light bulb, and sure enough it worked:

The iPhone light turns on, and it’s surprisingly bright. From there, my brain really started to work. What if the iPhone could connect to anything mechanical? I walked over to a neighbor’s house and held my iPhone up to the lock on their door. Sure enough, a key appeared on the iPhone screen:

A few seconds later, the lock clicked and the door swung open. So far, every lock that I’ve tried with my iPhone has opened, even the industrial-strength ones.

I did have one bad experience though. I started to run all over the house plugging my iPhone into things. In the kitchen I dropped my iPhone into our toaster:

It worked really well, but in my enthusiasm I somehow buttered my iPhone and ate it in just a few bites. On one hand, the iPhone makes for a really expensive piece of toast. On the other hand, it was delicious. So that’s it — my iPhone is gone now. So I’m going to ask: has anyone else done similar experiments with their iPhone? Where you can stick your iPhone and what happened?