OK, a little background: Sandra and I did a webinar for Aquent last month, and had over 2000 people register to attend. We thought that was pretty great. They also mentioned they were going to also put our slides up on SlideShare, but we didn’t think too much about that at the time.

In a follow-up post from the Aquent blog, Matt Grant noted that SlideShare had featured our presentation on the home page at one point, and that over 8000 people had viewed it so far. Wow. As Sandra said, we’d have spent more time on those slides if we knew they were going to get that kind of play. Anyhow, I went over to SlideShare to check it out and halfheartedly thought “I wonder if we’re on the Most Viewed list.” But we weren’t… Wait, that only shows the current day’s most viewed. What if I click This Week? Bingo:

That’s 8595 views for our presentation vs. 7354 views for Ms. Jolie.

As it’s taken me two weeks to complete this post due to a blog platform issue, my fifteen minutes of fame are long gone now. But still… to have our presentation get more views than something titled “Angelina Jolie Pictures” feels like a pretty major accomplishment. Especially with such unalluring title slide.

And now we’re the 6th Most Viewed for the month, still just ahead of Angelina. See it for yourself, before we roll off.

Maybe there’s a market for this whole Web Design for ROI thing after all…

While at SXSW in March, I ran into Shannon McKarney from Jaded Pixel, the company behind the popular Shopify hosted e-commerce platform. Shannon asked if she could interview me for the Jaded Pixel blog and I agreed. I’m cross-posting the interview below. The original is here.

What inspired you to write the book?
We were struck by how many of the sites we worked with suffered from the same design and usability problems. But that was really a symptom of the way people think about and manage their sites. So in addition to providing some concrete design guidelines, we wanted to try to change the way people think about web design. Personally, I wanted more people to see the money they’re leaving on the table by not designing their sites well.

How the Book Was Born
I had just finished a presentation on Designing for Conversion at Web Design World in Seattle in July 2006 and was answering some audience questions in front of the stage afterward when a kind but serious-looking gentleman handed me his card and said “I really enjoyed your presentation. How’d you like to write a book about it?” A quick glance at his card identified him as Michael Nolan, Sr. Acquisitions Editor at Peachpit Press/New Riders. After a stunned silence while my mind fixated on the long-held perception that ‘I don’t write so good’, I smiled crookedly at him and said with all the gravitas and certainty I could muster “Ummmmm… Sure?”

(Read the full article…)

I’m very pleased to announce Closed Loop Marketing’s partnership with Widemile, Inc. Closed Loop Marketing is one of thirteen leading agencies invited to use the beta-release of Widemile’s new multivariate optimization platform.

Designed and developed with partners in mind, Widemile’s new optimization solution will allow Closed Loop Marketing to offer our clients a robust, enterprise-level multivariate testing platform that integrates smoothly with our Paid Search, Conversion Optimization, and SEO services.

As long-time advocates of site testing and optimization, we’ve helped a wide variety of clients improve the effectiveness of their landing pages, sales funnels, and other key site areas. When we combine testing with SEM campaign optimization, the result is a dramatic, end-to-end improvement in quality traffic, conversions, and ROI for our clients.

About Widemile

Based in Seattle, Washington, Widemile is a leading provider of site testing and optimization technologies. Widemile’s third-generation software-as-a-service (SaaS) multivariate optimization system is based on open standards, includes proprietary testing and analytic techniques, and is designed to exceed mission-critical enterprise standards for security, stability, scalability and performance.

And I can also say, having worked with them in the past, that the Widemile team is a group of super-smart, high-quality people. We at CLM are excited to participate in this beta-release, and look forward to a long and rewarding partnership with Widemile.

More information:

• See Widemile’s press release
• Coverage on ClickZ

I gave a talk at Web Design World in Seattle last month on Balancing Design, Usability & SEO. While doing some research on that presentation, I was trying to find some examples of sites that were strong in only one of these areas. As I’ve done some work in the printer ink space and knew there were plenty of well-optimized but really ugly and unusable sites there, I did a search on ‘ink cartridge’ and hit the jackpot on the first result.

This site was perfect for my needs: A #1 ranking for an insanely competitive keyword, ugly as hell, and horrifically unusable. Score!

Then I did a link: lookup command on Google to get a sense for the link pop this page has, certain that they must have engaged in some serious link-building to get this result. Little did I know…

As I scanned the results of the link query, I was struck by how many unrelated sites seemed to be linking to InkandStuff.

I figured they could be paid links, but many of the sites listed didn’t seem like the kind you would normally associate with posting paid links. So when I saw a listing for the World Islamic Forum Foundation, I clicked through to figure out why in the world this site was linking to InkandStuff. This is where things get interesting… because I couldn’t find a link on this page.

Now I was REALLY intrigued. Google was seeing the link, so it had to be there, right…? So I did a View Source to check out the code and figure out where the link was, and saw this:

What the…? Google is attributing link popularity to sites who have embedded invisible sponsored links in free stat counters? Apparently so… How else is this awful UK site ranking #1 on Google.com for “ink cartridge”?

So next I figured I’d check out MyWebStats to see what they were all about. Sure enough, on their FAQ page they state:

“If this service is so good, how can it be free?
We are lucky to have sponsors who cover the complete cost of running this service. To show our appreciation we accompany your counter with a small link to one of these sponsors.”

“To show our appreciation” - I love that.

SO - That apparently is the secret to gaming Google. All of Google’s tough talk about paid links and how they’re so proactive about making sure people can’t spam their way to the top is apparently just that - talk. This should be SO easy for Google to detect and act upon, but they haven’t… If they had, InkandStuff and/or MyWebStats would’ve been penalized, right?

I was one of those people who looked down on buying links for a long time. It just seemed wrong - and surely the brain trust at Google would clamp down at some point. I just couldn’t believe that buying your way to the top of the organic results could A) be SO easy, or B) yield sustainable results. That was three years ago.

This scheme of embedding links in free stat counters in order to juice link pop has been around for at least that long - and should be among the easiest for Google to detect. It should be a big yellow flag when a site gets lots of inbound links from totally unrelated sites over a short time period. And it should be really easy to detect the code pattern like the one shown above for those inbound links (it even says “invisible” for God’s sake!). Finally, it is pretty irregular to have a UK page show up at the top of the results for a competitive term like this on Google.com. It seems like that might have thrown a flag somewhere along the line as well. The patterns are easy to spot. But Google is either oblivious to all of these issues or they’ve decided not to do anything about it. I’m not sure which is worse.

People will point out that Google may already be aware of this and not be flowing PageRank from these links, per Matt Cutt’s post here. And maybe InkandStuff has enough link pop from other sources that are driving them to the #1 spot for “ink cartridge.” But I really doubt it. And that argument misses the point. InkandStuff is clearly trying to game Google with this and other activities - and they are doing so quite successfully - to the detriment of searchers and their less-savvy competitors. Bottom line: Google is letting these guys blatantly spam their engine and get away with it.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz (on whom one of my team members has what she calls an “SEO crush”) wrote an excellent post on this topic a while back: Paid Links - Can’t Be a White Hat With ‘em, Can’t Rank Without ‘em. (Rand - If you want to know the identity of your secret admirer, slip me a $20 while we’re on stage at SES. Just my way of trying to spice up the otherwise sedate SEM Pricing Models discussion)

But I digress…

It makes it really hard to be white hat SEO practitioners when we see things like this happening. Sadly, this is the second time I’ve run across this exact same scenario (an invisible sponsored link embedded within a different free stat counter) in the past few months while trying to figure out why a really crappy site was ranking so well for a competitive term. So count me among the growing legions of grey hats now, I guess… Given the competitive environment and the fact that “everyone is doing it” now - and it’s working - it no longer serves my clients’ best interests to advise against buying links. I hate saying that, but don’t feel like I have a choice any more. It’s the price of entry if you want top rankings on any competitive terms these days.

I happen to be a big fan and promoter of Google’s. But they risk killing (or at least injuring) the goose that laid their big golden egg if they don’t get more serious about cleaning up their results. Granted much of this may be beyond their control. I don’t expect them to be able to singlehandedly solve this problem for good. But it seems like they could be putting up more of a fight and at least making someone have to work to game their engine. As is, it’s just too easy.

I’m going to report this as a paid link. But their bluster aside, I’m not going to hold my breath hoping it will do any good. I first saw this result two months ago, and as of today both the InkandStuff and MyWebStats sites show a PR6.

This just in: Sandra and I have been asked to speak at the upcoming Voices That Matter web design conference taking place in San Francisco from October 22-25. Sandra will be presenting a session called Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads, which also happens to be the title of our upcoming book. I’ll be giving a talk called You Can Have It All: Designing to Please Users and Search Engines Alike. I just gave a similar talk called Balancing Design, Usability and SEO at Web Design World in Seattle and it seemed to go over pretty well, so I’m looking forward to fine-tuning and updating that with some new material for this event.

Here’s the official announcement about the conference:

You’ve read their books.
Now grab the chance to listen to, learn from and mingle with your favorite New Riders authors and the most respected professionals in the Web design industry at Voices That Matter: Web Design, a conference hosted by New Riders.

At Voices That Matter: Web Design, our lineup of speakers will teach you new techniques; some will show you how to avoid the potholes and pitfalls in how-to sessions; still others will inspire you to try new pathways in creative, energizing, thought-provoking, idea-driven sessions.

Entertaining, informative, authoritative, but most of all, inspiring, Voices That Matter: Web Design will bring you face-to-face with the authors whose books have shaped your career.

Speakers: Corey Barker, Dan Brown, Andy Clarke, Curt Cloninger, June Cohen, Brendan Dawes, Robert Hoekman, Jeremy Keith, Peter-Paul Koch, Steve Krug, Eric Meyer, Steve Mulder, Sandra Niehaus, Derek Powasek, Dan Saffer, Nathan Shedroff, Dori Smith, Stephanie Sullivan, Charles Wyke-Smith, Jeffrey Zeldman.

I just realized they left me out of this list. How crushingly disappointing…

We’re actually pretty excited about this event, as this will be our first post-book-launch speaking opportunity (assuming all goes as planned between now and then).

So if you’re based in the Bay Area or you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit San Francisco, this could be your big chance. October is the best time of year to see San Francisco…

We hope to see you there.

Update: Leave us a comment if you’d like to get $100 off this conference.  The organizers have given us a discount code for our clients, prospects and fans (we have fans?).