iPhone 4

EXIF IFD0

Camera Make = Apple
Camera Model = iPhone 4
Picture Orientation = normal (1)
X-Resolution = 72/1 ===> 72
Y-Resolution = 72/1 ===> 72
X/Y-Resolution Unit = inch (2)
Software / Firmware Version = 4.2.1
Last Modified Date/Time = 2011:07:12 14:18:22
Y/Cb/Cr Positioning (Subsampling) = centered / center of pixel array (1)

EXIF Sub IFD

Exposure Time (1 / Shutter Speed) = 1/914 second ===> 0.00109 second
Lens F-Number / F-Stop = 14/5 ===> ƒ/2.8
Exposure Program = normal program (2)
ISO Speed Ratings = 80
EXIF Version = 0221
Original Date/Time = 2011:07:12 14:18:22
Digitization Date/Time = 2011:07:12 14:18:22
Components Configuration = 0×01,0×02,0×03,0×00 / YCbCr
Shutter Speed Value (APEX) = 11469/1166
Shutter Speed (Exposure Time) = 1/914.09 second
Aperture Value (APEX) = 4281/1441
Aperture = ƒ/2.8
Metering Mode = average (1)
Flash = Flash did not fire
Focal Length = 77/20 mm ===> 3.85 mm
FlashPix Version = 0100
Colour Space = sRGB (1)
Image Width = 2592 pixels
Image Height = 1936 pixels
Image Sensing Method = one-chip color area sensor (2)
Custom Rendered = (null)
Exposure Mode = auto exposure (0)
White Balance = auto (0)
Scene Capture Type = standard (0)

EXIF IFD1

Compression = JPEG compression (6)
X-Resolution = 72/1 ===> 72
Y-Resolution = 72/1 ===> 72
X/Y-Resolution Unit = inch (2)
Embedded thumbnail image:

EXIF GPS IFD

GPS Latitude Reference = north latitude (N)
GPS Latitude = 37/1,1035/100,0/1 [degrees, minutes, seconds] ===> 37° 10.35′ == 37.1725°
GPS Longitude Reference = west longitude (W)
GPS Longitude = 109/1,5160/100,0/1 [degrees, minutes, seconds] ===> 109° 51.6′ == 109.86°

iPhone 3GS

Can you believe this was taken with an iPhone 3gs camera? This is one of my favorite scenes at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. Snapped while taking a break from jogging.

Camera Maker: Apple
Camera Model: iPhone 3GS
Image Date: 2010:02:18 17:04:15
Focal Length: 3.9mm
Aperture: f/2.8
Exposure Time: 0.017 s (1/60)
ISO equiv: 72
Metering Mode: Average
Exposure: program (Auto)
White Balance: Auto
Flash Fired: No
Color Space: sRGB
GPS Altitude: 208m

Track SEO results at the deepest level

Since the ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to drive revenue, the most accurate way to track results is to use metrics that correlate most strongly with increased revenue. Tracking rankings is only part of the picture – rankings don’t reveal how many visitors or sales your SEO strategies have produced.

I recommend using a combination of rankings, traffic, and conversions to measure SEO results. Just go to the traffic sources section of Google Analytics to track how many visitors, leads, and/or sales have come from organic search traffic.

The below screenshot highlights:

• The navigation structure to find the organic traffic report in Google Analytics.
• The default view will show how many visitors your site has received from each keyword
• Click on the Goal or Ecommerce tabs to view how many conversions you’ve gotten from each keyword

Identify existing rankings to improve

Since the vast majority of searchers click on the first few search results, boosting your website’s rankings by just a few positions can significantly increase the number of visitors you get. For example, boosting your website ranking from the bottom half of page one to position two could multiply the traffic you get by several times. Just follow these two steps to identify current rankings you can focus on improving:

• In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Incoming Sources > Search > Organic, then export the list of keywords.
• Input the keywords into your favorite rank checking tool and run a ranking report.
• Look for keywords that are sending decent amounts of traffic to your site that would send significantly more traffic with a small increase in position. For example, keywords that are ranked on the bottom half of page 1 or lower, but are still sending notable numbers of visitors to your site.

This screenshot shows how to export a list of keywords that have sent organic traffic to your site:

Identify paid keywords to optimize for

Not all search traffic is created equal – factors like keyword relevance and commercial intent mean that traffic from some keywords will drive more revenue than traffic from other similar keywords. It’s extremely valuable to know which keywords will drive the most revenue before you spend time and money optimizing for rankings. This is easily determined by looking at data from your paid search campaigns. Just identify keywords that convert well and drive high revenue, and you have identified the ideal keywords to optimize for. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Incoming Sources > Search > Paid.

Identify top performing pages

Identifying your top performing landing pages can help you identify a variety of opportunities to increase revenue. To begin with, you will likely need to create a custom report in Google Analytics – a report that will allow you to view total conversions and conversion rates for each of your landing pages. Alternatively, you can copy this custom report I created.

This will allow you to identify the landing pages that are producing the most sales or leads for your business. Once you have identified your top landing pages, ask yourself questions like these to identify ways you can capitalize on this data:

• How can I drive more qualified traffic to these landing pages?
• Are there additional keywords I could optimize these landing pages for?
• Can I create similar landing pages to target additional keywords or audiences?
• Why do these landing pages perform so well? Is there anything I could apply to other pages on my site?

Chris Turberville-Tully is the founder and owner of Inspiration Inc., a Birmingham SEO agency. He has a Masters Degree in Information Architecture, 10 years PR experience and has immersed himself in the world of Search and Analysis. Chris leads all major client strategies to deliver real value.

I just thought it was kind of funny that someone reserved the .org domain for the exact keyword phrase I was looking for, down to the very year of 2011. It will be interesting to see how well the exact match domain SEO tactic works next year at this time. Have a great Memorial Day!

a SEO tactic whereby numerous unique versions of an original article are automatically generated by searching and replacing keywords and phrases, but that does not make sense to the human eye.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t read as much as you’d like. Call me prejudiced, but when I read, I like to read works that are written by humans. I won’t call out the source, but I stumbled the above phrase while strolling through a neighbor’s content farm. Do you think the above was written by a human? Someone or something totally missed the point.

Notice the first sentence in the bullet point. Note the capitalization. How should the sentence have read?

Blog Engage is a “community” for bloggers, a much smaller operation than Digg, but reminescent of the large scale Digg bannings that occurred not long before Digg v4 and the decline in traffic. Many recall the controversy surrounding Digg’s ban of its number 2 user, Zaibatsu for what was arguably a technicality beyond the users control.

In this screenshot Clickfire obtained from the Google cache, David Leonhardt’s Blog Engage stats confirm his investment in the site. If one could estimate it takes 1 minute to submit a story for voting, his time spent contributing would be a little over six hours. This doesn’t include the over one hundred comments and thousands of votes.

Why did Blog Engage ban Leonhardt? Leonhardt and other Blog Engage users ponder the question in a blog post about the social media “fail.” Unfortunately, no definitive conclusions have been reached or communication received from the owner of Blog Engage as to why the banning took place. At first, it appeared it was a technical issue as Mr. Leonhardt and the owner of Blog Engage reportedly had a friendly channel of communication. However, there seems to be at this date, no answer.

One Blog Engage user speculated that the owner was not merely joking when he remarked:

“Yeah great idea for an article, now I know who to ban and not ban at blog engage haha Joking guys! At the end of the day we have to find what works best for us. If you have the right people working for you and you pay well all these ideas can be successfully implemented.”

We couldn’t help but note the irony in the Blog Engage Twitter account description that states:

…Build your Backlinks with our RSS Services, Increase SEO, Comments, Traffic, Readers, and Build your Brand

Disclosure: the owner of Clickfire also had an account deleted at Blog Engage.

1. CharlieSheen.com is Down

Celebrity status aside, one of the most important aspects of a winning website starts with, well, being able to view it. CharlieSheen.com displays the  default ”404 page not found” page in any browser that requests the page. 404 is the http status code that occurs when a website is aka losing, aka not winning. 100% down time means no train wreck to watch. Listen and hear it crying out for web hosting.

2. Charlie Sheen doesn’t own CharlieSheen.com

According to the current whois record, a Hot Rods company in Canada owns Charlie Sheen’s namesake .com. March 19, 1997 was a good day for the owner of CharlieSheen.com, but not for Sheen. Charlie starred in no less than five films that year. There probably wasn’t a lot of time for dealing with Network Solutions, the one and only domain registrar at the time. Now, even CharlieSheen.info is taken. But, why hasn’t Sheen bought CharlieSheen.com instead of spending on some of the other things we hear about? CharlieSheen.com could be a winning domain if only it were in Sheen’s hands.

3. Not Indexed by Google

How much free organic search traffic do you think Google would send Charlie Sheen’s site if it had even one page indexed? How many natural backlinks would Sheen’s domain receive? How many of the 368,000 Googlers in the image below who typed “Charlie Sheen” into the search field would click through to the exact match .com domain? Getting indexed would be a quick and easy win for this celebrity, no doubt.

4. No Content

Perhaps worse than a content farm and certainly more tragic is the conspicuous absence of web content on CharlieSheen.com. Whatever your opinion about Charlie Sheen, everyone agrees that he is a human viral content generating machine. Imagine the content that could fill the pages of a CharlieSheen.com curated by the Sheen.

5. Not Monetized

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool suggests some words and their corresponding exact match traffic that CharlieSheen.com could potentially receive. How many of those 368,000 Googlers who typed “Charlie Sheen” into the search field would click through to the exact match .com domain? Would fans buy Charlie Sheen T-Shirts and DVDs? Would the consume Charlie Sheen news from the horses mouth?

And what about monetizing traffic from social media? A celebrity with 3 million Twitter followers and over half a million Facebook likes should be able to seriously bring it.

Let it be known that I am not a fan of Charlie Sheen’s domain strategy. But, does he really need CharlieSheen.com? There may come a point where celebrity brands can transcend the need for exact match domains that trolls like us to fawn over.

Hey SEO’s, what’s wrong with this Google AdSense advertisement? Don’t you love the way that two businesses have to co-exist on the same Google AdSense ad? One way to avoid SEO malpractice is to restrain yourself from the practice of guaranteed SEO:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.

Perhaps the above quote from the Google Search Engine Optimization Guidelines should read No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google except a Google advertiser.

Have you ever been afraid to sign up for a service because you didn’t know how much of your time would be robbed by filling out forms and being pitched products you don’t want? This was a fun little experiment that tests the ease and speed of signing up for Bluehost web hosting as opposed to others. What really matters is the quality of the service, but don’t you think the sign-up is an indicator of how smoothly things are going to go as a customer? I was thinking testing Godaddy next.

HostGator has an interesting early history. Tell me about your founding the company as a college student.

I wouldn’t call the beginning all that interesting. I had always believed that I’d be successful at an early age and that by attending college I was essentially giving up on my dreams and admitting defeat. I spent my first two months at Florida Atlantic University as your typical freshman screwing off having fun. It was the first time in years that I wasn’t working 24/7 on some type of Internet venture.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that while I was having a blast I was wasting my time and accomplishing absolutely nothing to reach my goals. I found myself constantly conjuring up ideas that would allow me to drop out of college. With only a few thousands dollars to my name the only logical choice was the Internet. I was tired of the unstable advertising market and wanted a recurring revenue source, which is why I decided to give web hosting another try. There I was sitting at my crappy little dorm room desk pounding away at the keyboard in search of the perfect hosting domain name. I tried hundreds of domain names that all ended up being taken before thinking of and registering Hostgator.com.  One name I specifically remember trying to register that was taken was hostlion.com. I sometimes where we’d be today had hostlion been available.

The dorm room made for terrible working conditions. My three roommates were very loud at times, the AC rarely worked, and worst of all the Internet had daily multi hour outages. I don’t think a day ever went buy that I wasn’t calling IT and demanding to speak with a manager.

Life was pretty boring with me being either in class, sleeping, or working on Hostgator. The funny thing is that I don’t believe I ever completed any of my homework in the dorm room. In my mind the dorm room was company headquarters and reserved for only official gator work. I was required to go to class so instead of paying attention to the teacher I’d complete all my work from my previous classes to give myself more time to focus on Hostgator. It wasn’t until the end of my first semester that business really started to take off and become difficult to juggle with classes. Halfway through second semester I was being woken up numerous times a night from both support and sales calls. I also rarely made it through a class without having to take numerous “restroom breaks” to take a call.

I finished out my first year of college with decent grades and was finally able to spend my summer months 100% focused on HG. The business continued to thrive with me investing a total of about $1,000 of startup money into it. Summer quickly came to an end and due to support volumes I had to make the decision of putting school on hold or closing shop. Dropping out of school was a no brainer to me since I was already making more than the average college graduate. When I told my dad about my decision he did everything he could to try to change my mind. He had trouble understanding why I couldn’t find someone to run the business for me while I focused on school. My mom was cool about it and pretty much told me that she had faith in whatever decision I made. The rest of my family and friends were very unsupportive. They argued with me saying I was making the worst decision of my life.  Ironically many of these people are now the ones constantly asking me for a loan.

When did you start offering reseller hosting? And what was it like to launch that product line?

If I recall correctly reseller hosting was launched about the same time as shared hosting. It was dedicated hosting that wasn’t offered until years later. In the beginning I hated reseller hosting and for good reason! I wasn’t that technical of a person and unfortunately resellers were always asking me for support on issues I was clueless on. It wasn’t until I started experimenting with advertising that I fell in love with resellers. I did a $1,200 advertising campaign targeting shared hosting on yahoo, which generated zero signups. I then did a test run for reseller hosting and found that I was able to convert resellers at $80 a pop. I quickly carried the unlimited domain offering over from our reseller hosting to our shared plans. With Hostgator being one of the first hosting companies to focus on unlimited domain hosting business almost instantly exploded, and to this day we grow as fast as we can hire qualified employees.

Which of HostGator’s services are the most popular? What about the least popular?

The order of popularity from greatest to least would be shared, reseller, vps, with dedicated being our least. Our vps offering is only about a year old now, but it has already surpassed all of our expectations. The downsides to offering vps are that it’s a lower margin product and it has somewhat cannibalized our dedicated server sales.

What do you spend most of your time at work doing? How have your day-to-day responsibilities changed over the past few years?

The first two years in business I spent practically 100% of my time doing phone and chat support. The following few years I spent most of my time doing sales and support tickets. I now spend most of my time responding to customers that reach out to me as well as working with employees. We have over 400,000 customers yet our websites still says, “If you ever have a problem with the regular support, just ask that your ticket be assigned to Brent and he will personally take the time to give you the VIP attention that you deserve.” This is great as I’m able to help the customers who need it most, but most importantly it allows me to keep a pulse on the business. I have a theory that if just one customer reaches out to me with an issue hundreds if not thousands of customers are having the same issue.

Any host will say that they care about their brand, but most seem to look the other way when complaints appear on third party sites. HostGator has taken an active approach in confronting online negativity for years, responding to users on Twitter, WebHostingTalk, Clickfire and others. How has this unusual approach paid off for the brand? Has it been worth it?

We realize that our reputation is everything and because of this we will do everything in our power to protect it. Anyone who is posting, is going to be very vocal not only online but in person about your brand. If you are able to reach out to them, apologize, and attempt to make things right you’ll usually turn a basher into a promoter. There’s no way to gauge how successful this has been for us, but I personally believe if we didn’t take this approach we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Customer service comes up a lot in our reviews at Clickfire. It seems an inescapable pain point for all web hosts. We don’t get very many complaints about HostGator, so you must be doing something right. How is HostGator’s customer service different from other support models?

The majority of hosting companies claim to have 24/7 phone, chat, and ticket support along with a 99.9% uptime. The difference is that very few companies live up to this claim as HostGator does. Another major difference is that no employee is too important for a customer to talk to. If a $6 account wants to talk to me or any other upper management they can.

Why do you think so many people looking for web hosting choose HostGator over the many other shared cPanel hosts? What’s different? Is it your aforementioned attention to the brand over the years?

To reiterate what I said earlier I once again can’t stress enough how important a great reputation is to any company. If we ever lose it we’ll be no different than the other monster hosting brands that have come and gone over the years.

Not too long ago, we moved clickfire.com to dedicated hosting after our “unlimited” host  took us offline  without warning for resource overages that originated from WordPress. How can a HostGator shared hosting customer monitor their resource and inode usage so as to ensure that they don’t violate your Terms of Service?

In our control panel we have a section that reports a customers cpu usage, memory usage, processes running, as well as inode usage.

Some web hosting companies use affiliate marketing as the main channel to acquire customers. HostGator seems to deploy a wide variety of advertising. Are you satisfied with the affiliate performance and do you have plans to spice things up for publishers?

We’ve done a horrible job to date managing our affiliate program. HostGator has been lacking a proper affiliate manager; affiliate software, as well as the billing software to do the job correctly. We have just hired Taylor Hawes and have entrusted him with the task of completely overhauling our affiliate program.

How is the SEO Hosting product working out? Have any search engine companies expressed concerns over the implications of a product that enables one account to potentially hide affiliated domains?

Seohosting.com has been a very successful brand for us that represents a significant amount of Hostgator’s revenue. We haven’t heard from any of the search engines and don’t believe we ever will. We are worried about IPv6 becoming the new standard and replacing IPv4. IPv6 could destroy the market, but it could just as easily be the best thing to ever happen to it. It’s very possible that the major search engines may decide to put more relevance on legacy IPv4 ips.

Are there any new products or services in the pipeline at HostGator?

Windows shared hosting is very close to being launched.

We have been working on a new backup storage offering that will be launched in the coming year

We will be launching a new brand under the name Launchpad.com that will offer discounted domains and hosting.  The objective of this brand will be to compete with godaddy and more specifically go after their market share.

And last I’m sure we’ll be doing our own cloud hosting solution in the near future. I’m not a big fan of cloud hosting, but I do believe we’d be able to do it better than anyone, so I figure why not.

What do you think HostGator’s biggest challenge will be over the next few years?

I have no doubt our biggest challenge will continue to be finding the qualified employees require to keep up with our growth. We plan on spending millions on tv commercials but in order to accomplish this we need the man power to support it.

Okay, enough about hosting. What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy traveling overseas, paintballing, floating the river, camping, pulling pranks, and basically anything else that gets me off the computer.