The Mario Lemieux Foundation was created by the one and only Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins (you know…hockey…ugh, nevermind). I’ve been a proud supporter of this charity for about 10 years now. I’ve volunteered there, made donations, and support the charity each NHL playoffs by growing a bad-ass hockey beard. Last year my beard raised closed to $1,000!

To give you some background, the main objective of the Mario Lemieux Foundation is to fund promising medical research projects being conducted by talented scientists. The foundation makes donations to critical programs, including the Children’s Hosptial of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center.

In addition to making these donations, the Mario Lemieux Foundation has also setup other important charities, including the Austin Lemieux Neonatal Research Project which supports babies that are born prematurely. There are a number of other amazing organizations that the Mario Lemieux Foundation supports and I’d love to be able to make a huge donation through Purposeinc’s Poker Tournament in PubCon.

In the meantime, I encourage you to make a donation to the Mario Lemieux Foundation today!

Let’s go Pens!

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

My Favorite Charity: The Mario Lemieux Foundation

Hello all of you awesome RSS subscribers! I wanted to give you the heads up on a very special project I’ve been working on that won’t be showing up in your RSS feed. I have put together a very thorough and comprehensive step-by-step guide to using Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

I really think their toolset improve the efficiency and quality of your Internet marketing work. If you haven’t done so already, sign up for their free 30 day trial and use the guide to help you get used to it.

I’ll be constantly updating it as they continue to release new features. Without further adieu: The Raven Internet Marketing Tools Manual.

Enjoy!

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

Raven Internet Marketing Tools Guide Released!

Thanks everyone for your great feedback on my first PubCon presentation. It was great meeting you all and I hope to continue the conversion conversation here on my blog (I promise to blog again soon!) and on Twitter.

You can download a copy of my presentation here:
Knowing What to Test

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

PubCon Conversion Presentation

I find conversion science fascinating. From science to psychology, conversion is made up of multiple areas of study. I like to refer to this as the conversion cocktail. In this series of posts I’ll detail what ingredients are required for a successful conversion test.

As I’m reading through Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg a second time, the cornerstone and key to success of any conversion test is jumping off the page: hypothesizing. Bryan calls this out in his amazing book, and in his book he goes into great detail about hypothesizing (in case you can’t tell, I’m encouraging you to buy his book and read it…like now). I think this critical element is too often overlooked, and thus our first key ingredient to our cocktail.

Looking at your conversion rate, you know there is always something to test (unless, of course, your conversion rate is 100%). Figuring out exactly what to test is where people immediately get lost. This is where hypothesizing mixed in with patience and educated guessing comes into play.

Open up the page you want to test. Analyze what your critical conversion points are. Now its time to get into the mind of the user: what could you do to better call out your conversion point? Would changing the location of your “Contact Us” form improve conversions? How about adding or changing the color of the submit button? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself.

From your list of questions, form a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposal intended to explain certain facts or observations. Continuing with the example above, your hypothesis might be: If I move my contact form above the fold, more people will fill it out. The reason this ingredient is so critical to the conversion cocktail is that if you don’t have a theory behind a test, you won’t be able to learn from it.

Sure you can get a rough idea of how to improve your conversion rate by blindly testing anything. But if you can provide theory behind the reason for your test, you’ll be able to get a better grasp on the way your client/customer thinks. Once you’ve tested your hypothesis, it will lead to more questions and more questions after that.

When it comes to conversion you can’t just surf the web to see what other people are doing to improve their conversion rates. Some theories spill over, but for the most part their customer/client-base is completely different from yours. An engineer will think completely different than a Doctor or a Teacher.

Still struggling to form your hypothesis? The best way to get into the mind of your users is to ask them! Setup user tests with current clients/customers or even potential clients and customers. Learn from their struggles, comments and their thought process to develop your hypothesis. Refer to my previous post about the keys to successful user testing for more details on setting these tests up.

The hypothesis you create will become the cornerstone of your conversion test.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

The Conversion Cocktail: Hypothesizing

Well folks, the time has come for me to start something new. As you may recall, I stopped blogging back in July when I determined that I wasn’t getting enough return for the effort I was putting into my blog. Things have changed.

I’ve been itching to get back into the blogging world, and I’ve decided it was time to revamp my blog, and ultimately change my blog name. It was time for me to shake Gonzo SEO and go with something even more…awesome.

My tagline suggests why I chose the name Awesome SEO (because anything less would not be awesome!). I plan on blogging regularly again (for me that means about two posts per week), and I’ll be focusing on SEO, conversion, analytics, and of course, client management. 

I hope you all are as excited as I am about Awesome SEO, and I hope you’ll subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date with what is going on here. If you’re interested in guest posting, fill out my contact form, I’d love to have you. Within the next 24 hours my first “real post” will go live on Awesome SEO. Until then, you can catch me on Twitter.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

Goodbye Gonzo, Hello Awesome SEO!

Pubcon is my favorite conference to go to each and every year. There is such a large turn out and there is always something to do (it is Vegas after all!) Many people, including myself, have been keeping an eye and ear open for the best events to attend. Fear not, my faithful readers, there are great resources at your finger tips to figure out where you want to be each and every night.

Kate Morris posted her Pubcon itinerary for the week.

Joseph Morin is keeping us all up to date via his Twitter feed. Make sure you subscribe!

Pubconr is an aggregate of all the Pubcon talk on Twitter. You can also use Twitter Search.

Purpose Inc. is holding some awesome networking events. Including the Poker Tournament (I finished 10th last year), HighRoller meetup, and a FightClub.

Dan Perry is also putting together an in-house marketers meetup. It sounds like a blast!

SEOmoz will be holding their 2nd annual werewolf…thing. It was a lot of fun last year.

Search Bash will be taking place Thursday night, as well. I’m looking forward to attending it for the first time.

I’ll be arriving in Vegas early Monday evening, so if you’d like to get together for drinks at TI, let me know. I’d love to get together with as many people as possible, so leave me a comment or shoot me an email < pratt dot taylor at gmail dot com> if you want to meetup.

Also, I’ll try and keep this post updated, so if you see any events I’ve missed please let me know in the comments. See you there!

UPDATE: dk pointed me in the direction to the Pubcon schedule he put together. It is an excellent resource and you should all bookmark it! Thanks dk!

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

Going to Pubcon?

A major Adwords policy has been revised, and it seems to be going unnoticed. For reasons that no Googler could explain, you were unable to bid on any beer or champagne related keywords. You could, however, bid on wine keywords. This is no longer true.

According to the Google Adwords rep I spoke to on the phone yesterday, “Beer, wine and champagne may now be promoted from ad text and may be the focus of your site. We consider beer, wine and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption of adults. Therefore, ads promoting beer, wine and champagne will be given a ‘Non-Family Safe’ status. For information on how the family status of an ad may affect how it is served, please see Google Adwords Support.”

What about hard liquor? Nope. Still can’t bid on those terms. According to Google, “Hard alcohol and liqueurs are considered Restricted Products and therefore cannot be promoted in ad text or be the purpose of your site (occupying a significant portion of your site).”

Happy bidding!

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

Google Opens Up Bidding on Beer and Champagne

Let’s face it, it is much easier to complain than it is to actually do something about a problem. When it comes to the turmoil that is the United States, I think it is time everyone got off their ass and did something about it.

Kate Morris asked me if I registered (since I’m new to Texas and all), and my response is, “hell yeah!” Let’s make a difference this year. Don’t let your voice go unheard, speak up for what you believe in. I’m not going to tell you who you should vote for, I just want you to care enough to vote. Can’t you see that now is the time to act?

Now let me ask you guys:

Karl Ribas
Shana Albert
Brian Chappell
Pamela Lund
Anne Haynes

Are you registered? Are you going to vote?

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

Vote Dammit!

A few folks have been asking me why I haven’t updated Gonzo SEO in a while. The answer is quite simple, really. This blog doesn’t make me any money. I recently discussed my thoughts about not blogging anymore with Karl Ribas and Rae Hoffman. Ultimately those discussions (as well as a few great posts), have led me to the conclusion that I’m wasting time (a.k.a. money) by blogging about things that are discussed over and over again on thousands of blogs. Anything super original that I would want to blog about, I keep to myself.

Instead of trying to lead the SEO industry back to the great community it once was, I’ve decided to quit bogging myself down with the drama and pretty much stay out of the conversation period. I should be using my “talents” to do something that makes me money.

I’m sure I’ll post things in the future based on what I’ve learned from the new sites I start up, but I’m not going to feel the obligation and give in to the time commitment it takes to run a great blog. I highly recommend that my subscribers look at the Gonzo SEO’s that I endorse on my blogroll. They offer great tips and advice.

I’m a very active twitter user if you miss me!

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

Why I Don’t Blog Anymore

I never would have thought that Toby Keith’s lyrics would have actually applied to real world issues. Funny how things like that happen, eh? Enough about country music (I know you all secretly love it), and onto my point.

About two weeks ago I wrote a heartfelt plea to the Internet marketing world to knock off the recent drama and nonsense that has been plaguing this industry. I had been meaning to write that post for some time, but I was worried that if I posted it here on my blog it might fall on deaf ears. I eagerly awaited Andy Beal’s scholarship contest where I knew it would gain exposure. Unfortunately, I feel as though it faired the same result.

The Internet marketing world has become nothing more than a tabloid. Post after post we are seeing personal attacks and outcries. I find myself double checking what blogs I am reading because they are sounding more and more like Star Magazine cover stories. Why is it that we only focus on Search Marketing ethics now? And why can’t we stay focused on those debates without getting personal? I’m all for constructive criticism, but I’m begging you all to please start writing about Internet marketing tactics and strategies again. Please!

I couldn’t agree more with what Lisa Barone said on Twitter today with regards to Mystery Guest’s SEOmoz post:

“I don’t mean this offensively and I love MG, but, yes, there’s sexism on the Web. So what? Pointing it out does nothing. Be the change.”

I couldn’t have said it any better. I’ve read one too many posts complaining about X, Y and Z. Nothing is going to change unless you make it change. Yes you can argue that it helps to start the conversation, but don’t we have enough of those going already? We’re all in this industry together. We are like one giant team. Sure, we are competitors in a sense, but this industry was founded on coopetition.

Put on your white hat or black hat and get back to marketing! If you don’t like the way something is, be the leader and take the steps to fight back. It’s going to be hard, and it would be a lot easier to just write about it – but nothing is going to change unless you make it change.

Save the hypocrite comments. You won’t hear another peep about this from me, I’m making the change.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

What The SEO World Needs is a Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action