Sunburnt SEO Articles

How To Get An RSS Feed For Twitter Users And Lists

Sunburnt SEO — Tue, 1 May 2012 07:38:10 +1000

If you're a fan of reading your news via RSS, you might be interested to know that it is possible to read Twitter updates with RSS too. You just need the right URL. There are two main formats, just replace the sections in bold:

1. Twitter User Feed

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=username

e.g.

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=SunburntSEO

2. Twitter List Feed

http://api.twitter.com/1/username/lists/listname/statuses.atom

e.g.

http://api.twitter.com/1/SunburntSEO/lists/SEO/statuses.atom

Review of Australian Merchant Accounts

Sunburnt SEO — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:37:27 +1000

If you want to accept credit card payments either online or offline you will need a merchant account. Having a good merchant account goes a long way to simplifying the payments and accounting for your business.

Here are some notes I collected on various merchant accounts when I set up the merchant account for Sunburnt SEO. They are separated into three types of accounts: online accounts from Google and Paypal, gateway accounts, which can be integrated directly to your website so all payments can be made automatically, and MOTO (Mail-Order, Telephone-Order) accounts, which let you login to the bank's website to process credit card payments manually.

The different product features are:

Hosted Payment - The bank hosts the secure payment form for your online store.
Embedded Payment - The bank still hosts the secure payment form but it looks like it's your website.
API - Payments can be made programmatically and integrated transparently into your online store.
MOTO / Virtual Terminal - For handling mail-order/telephone-order payments you can log onto the bank's website and enter the card details.
Batching - A facility to process a credit card payments in bulk at the same time, for example for subscription products.

Why YouTube Videos Go Viral

Roger Keays — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:44:31 +1000

If you have a spare seven minutes, take a look at this TedTalk video from YouTube's Trend Manager, Kevin Allocca.

With over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, Kevin identifies three characteristics of those videos that go viral and get over one million views. They are:

Tastemakers / Influencers (people who kick-start the viral trend)
Participation (e.g. video remixes, imitations, parodies, sharing)
Uniqueness and Unexpectedness

Here is the video. You may need to view it online if you are reading this from your email account.

Business Email Settings

Sunburnt SEO — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:58:49 +1000

How Much Does SEO Cost?

Sunburnt SEO — Fri, 6 Jan 2012 03:49:00 +1000

For the last 2 years SEO Moz has conducted a survey of the SEO market, what services are on offer and how much these services cost. The results for 2011 are in, and here are some statistics which may interest you.

Hourly SEO Costs Vary Across Countries, but $76-$200/hour is Most Common
With the exception of India, over 50% of all firms had an hourly cost range of $76-$200. This price range was most common in Australia/New Zealand, followed by the US and then Canada.
By-the-Project Pricing is Popular and Most Commonly $1,000-$7,500
70.1% of respondents said they offer project-based pricing (the most common pricing system selected in the survey). 43% of consultancies were represented in the price range range of $1,000-$7,500.
Every project requires roughly one dedicated employee.
Although the smaller companies could handle a few projects per employee, the larger companies tended to have one or even two employees dedicated to each project, probably because these projects were also larger.

Click the image below to see an infographic of all the data collected in the survey.

Social Sharing Trends in 2011

Sunburnt SEO — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:39:14 +1000

Here are some interesting statistics from Clearspring, the company behind the AddThis widget which we use to share content on our websites. The data is for 2011 and shows that Facebook and Twitter continue to be the favourite networks for sharing links.

Changes At Google You Need To Know About

Roger Keays — Fri, 2 Dec 2011 05:44:00 +1000

This year was a year of big change in Search Engine Optimisation. Google particularly have made some sweeping changes to their algorithm. Google are now

listening to social network signals such as tweets, shares and likes
placing more emphasis on recognised brand names
rewarding fresh content for some search queries
penalising "low quality content" heavily
pushing their own products more agressively
hiding query keywords from webmasters

Take a look at the infographic below to see how and why these changes have been made. As you will see, SEO remains a game of cat and mouse.

Or more accurately, "500-pound gorilla" and mouse.

SEO Suicide

Roger Keays — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:21:20 +1000

Pop quiz: What is the easiest and quickest way to destroy your search engine rankings?

Answer: Rebuild your website from scratch!

I see this a lot. People get bored with their website and feel the need to revamp it. They're bored of it because they see it so often, but their customers, who see it much less frequently, think their website is great!

The consequences are also quite severe. When you rebuild your website from scratch with an entirely different software platform, all the incoming links to your product pages and other content break. Your links are your life in search. Lose them and you can kiss your rankings goodbye.

Google Trends Gives Great Titles

Roger Keays — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:24:00 +1000

One of the biggest and simplest factors in getting good search engine rankings is having a Good Page Title and URL. But not only is your title important for the search engines, it is also vital to attract real visitors to your content. Titles are so important in fact, that many people make a living entirely out of coming up with and testing titles on the web and in print media (like newspapers for example).

So what makes a good title? Well, that's an excellent topic, but to be honest I don't have the time to write a thesis about it. I just want traffic and search engine rankings, and I want them now.

So I'm going to teach you a little trick.

Google SEO Hack - Put "Facebook" In Your Page Title

Roger Keays — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:26:40 +1000

Today I Googled myself. It's really interesting to see what Google are doing with social networking. The first page of results were nearly all links to my profile on various social networks I am a member of. A few years ago this was not the case.

That didn't surprise me much though. We all know that Google has been paying close attention to what people are saying on Facebook and other social websites. What surprised me though was that a page I wrote with the word "Facebook" in the title showed up in the results.

Although it only shows up on page 5, the page shouldn't be even showing up on page 50. There are no external links to this page, it isn't written in English and it doesn't even have my name on it (although I did post it).