Let me just start out with the ending. The Google Doc below takes a list of pages containing embedded YouTube or Vimeo videos and uses magic to grab all the data you need for a video XML sitemap. Then it makes the sitemap for you. You can have it by going to the link below [...]

I’m a huge fan of Garrent French’s link building tool, the Link Prospector, so I was jazzed when he released the Broken Link Finder. I wanted to give an overview of why broken link building is important and how this tool can save you a ton of time and effort. What is broken link building? [...]

If you missed today’s webinar, “SEO: 50 tips in 50 minutes,” you can get the slides here: SEO: 50 tips in 50 minutes View more presentations from Ian Lurie And, if you don’t mind giving us your e-mail address (mwahahahahahahahaha) you can get the entire recording, here: http://webinar.portent.com/webinar-vid-request/ While the Portent team and myself may [...]

Yesterday I wrote about how effort does not equal results. Results are always better. Great results come from testing and tweaking your own routine. You can set up a virtuous cycle: You get more efficient, and have more time to learn more about your job, which helps you be more efficient, and so on. I’ve [...]

Announcing a new tool: The Gramanator During my MozCon content creation session today, I announced a new tool: The Gramanator. It is mighty. It is the Gramanator: Bow down before it. What it does The Gramanator will take any public Google Reader Shared Feed and: Clean it up, removing stop words. Assemble all of the [...]

A few weeks back, I wrote a guest post on PPC Hero about the Profit per Impression (PPI) metric. In the post, I talk about calculating PPI manually using an Excel Spreadsheet. To that end, I created a free spreadsheet to do just that: the Ad Comparison Tool! How does the Ad Comparison Tool work? [...]

I’ve been building some custom reports for Portent in Google Spreadsheets. They do fun stuff like grab Google Analytics data, insert data from other APIs and such. One thing that nearly drove me batty, though, was figuring out how to automatically add a new row below the last row with data. Turns out, Google App [...]

I’m addicted to Quora. There, I’ve said it. I know some folks have doubts. I love StackOverflow too. But something about Quora has me on there, all the time, answering questions. I do have an ulterior motive: If I can get on there and help lots of people out, I can build an audience. If [...]

If you use the KeywordDiscovery API, and Python, my pain is your gain. It took me a few hours to get this to work. You can grab it and go. Here’s the function, written in my usual Python Pigdin. I don’t recommend using it without a passing knowledge of Python, but that’s up to you: [...]

Note that I am using ad.ly as part of this test. I am not saying ad.ly is bad. They have a great site, a nice toolset and make no promises. I am suggesting (spoiler alert) that sponsored tweets rank in profitability somewhere below hiring alchemists to try to turn lead into gold. Sometimes, I just [...]