Best Purchase: M-Audio Firewire Solo Runner up: Two tennis rackets and 20 tennis balls at the thrift store for $12
Best Moment: Hearing Jane laugh for the first time
Biggest Achievement: Getting hired at Crocs
Scariest Moment: Getting caught in a thunder storm while jogging, thought I was going to get struck by lightning.
Most Painful Moment: Getting jalapeño juice in my eye, thought I was going to go blind
Suckiest Moment: Getting my first driving ticket. Runner Up: Sinus infection
Biggest Drag: Going to Mt Rushmore for the 4th of July but not being able to see the fireworks because it was too foggy.
Biggest Letdown: Hot stone massage, wasn’t that great
Thing I Thought I Would Never Do: Run a half marathon (2 hrs. 19 mins.)
Funnest Moment: Being in Teenage Bottlerocktet’s music video.
Best Movies I saw: Adventureland, Star Trek, Taken, 500 Days of Summer, Office UK Christmas special, Drag Me To Hell, Man On Wire
Best Music I Got: Dillinger Four – Civil War, Teenage Bottlerocket – They Came From The Shadows, Off With Their Heads – From the Bottom, Rancid – Let the Dominoes Fall, Cobra Skulls – American Rubicon, Everything by The Lillingtons
Best Books I Read: Moneyball, Predictably Irrational, What Would Google Do, Punished By Rewards
Worst Movies I Saw: Bride Wars, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Knowing, Synecdoche New York, Paul Blart, Ghost Of Girlfriends Past

A lot of businesses don’t take advantage of their Contact Us page. Most Search Engine Optimization comes down to keywords in the meta title and content on the page and the typical business’s Contact Us page meta title says “Contact,” and the only content on the page is an email form, phone number and physical address. Yet there is much more you can include to get the most of of your Contact Us page.

One of the most frequently searched add-on keywords is “find a,” “how to” and “where is” – as in “how to find a good dentist,” and “where is the nearest dentist.”  These kinds of keywords are highly used in search engines by people looking for businesses but not always easy to place on the website. The Contact Us page comes in as one of the few places on the website you can use these keywords.

In the meta title and content say things like, “Looking to find a local dentist?” or “How to find a dentist can be hard…”

Also in the meta title include your business name and location.

Other things to consider including in the page content: Realize that your Contact Us page might be the first interaction someone has with your website. People don’t just enter into your site from the homepage. You’ll want to include important keywords like your location and what services/products you provide.

• If yours is a local business say something like, “At [business name] we are here to help you with all of your [business services keywords] needs. Please contact us at our local [your city] office.
• Give a brief synopsis of what you do. Treat it like a mini About Us page.
• List your services. Use the keywords people use to find a business like yours.

And don’t forget to include a map, directions, picture of your business and all that good stuff.

These are a few examples of posts including lists that took me about 5 minuets to find:

“6 SEO Website Redesigns Your Developer May Not Know,” “7 Tools to Optimize the Speed of Your Website,” “Top 100 Internet Marketing Posts of 2009,” “12 Best Free Online Resources for Learning SEO,” “55 Google Website Optimizer Tips & Tricks, “9 Great Collaboration Tools For Teams,” “10 iPhone Apps To Avoid Disaster,” “5 ways to Expand B2B Blogging Beyond the Marketing Staff.”

People write posts about lists because 1. They get lots of clicks; you are curious to see if you know about all 10 ten things. 2. They are easy to put together; a few Google searches and you’ve got a pretty good list going.

I love lists. But only when they are from people that I trust and put those items in some context.

Finding tools and tips and tricks and ideas doesn’t make you smart. Using all those ideas and then reporting back with experience and a suggestion on the best way to go forward is. What the Internet needs now is not more lists. What the Internet needs now is more analysis and commentary  that looks at all of the stuff out there, and says this one is the best. I need more recommendations from smart people who have my best interests at heart and less “comprehensive lists.”

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Does anyone else ever feel like me when reading content online that too many writers take too long to get to the point? I’m annoyed by long introductions in blog posts. People feel like they need to give me a synopsis of the history of what they are about to write and tell me why what they are about to write is important. Get to the point.

Or maybe my attention span is shrinking. According to the trends tab in my Google Reader: “From your 98 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,466 items, starred 0 items, shared 67 items, and emailed 5 items.” I do most of my reading on Tuesdays with an average of 1068  items that day and my favorite time of day to read articles is at 7 p.m, with an average of 818 items. I guess it’s easy to see how the average American could consume 34 gigs a day.

Most of these barely count as reading (Photobomb, Punknews.org, FreeAppAlert, etc.). But in the case of actual articles, I see a title and decide quickly weather or not it’s worth reading further, in the case I do end up reading further, I skim and pick out ideas and move on. Engaging headlines help, so do pictures, charts and lists. Long winded introductions don’t.

Some examples:

Mashable: As the news industry looks to reconstruct its suffering business model, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media. Because of cutbacks at many news organizations, the jobs available are highly competitive, blah blah blah.

PPCHero: Testing your ad copy and your landing pages can significantly improve your paid search efforts. Of course, building a solid keyword base, creating an optimized account structure, and executing a well-planned bid management strategy are also crucial. However, testing blah blah blah

Hubspot: Calls to action are the gateways that your visitors must click through to become leads. If your calls to action aren’t optimized and attractive to your visitors, they are less likely to complete the actions you want them to on your website. Creating a great call to action isn’t simple of course, blah blah blah

Choose wisely the metrics that you use to define success.

Pick a bad metric to measure and you’ll adopt poor methods. For example, if high average time on site or page views/visitor is the metric you choose for gauging the success of your site you may end up with a bunch of visitors who are annoyed with how long it takes them to find anything.

Or if having a huge amount of visits is your metric of choice you may be tempted to use spammy techniques to get traffic; is it better to get a click and then annoy someone, or better to only reach the people who care?

I think a good question to ask is, therefore what? “I want to double the amount of email subscribers to my site,” therefore what? “So that I can get more sales.” Howabout seeing if you can improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2% on those currently in the subscriber list, which also doubles the amount of sales your email subscribers generate, and in the process creates loyal customers that will have a desire to generate word of mouth for you and  improve their lifetime value?