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It's a hell of a joining-of-dots, and I hate to utter anything along the lines of "two indexes" or "supplemental index" etc. But the NIH listings behave differently in the SERPs, and I can see how there's greater inherent value in a set of search results that returns verified authority links for medical queries than a set of search results that doesn't.

Might it be significant that the NIH results don't have the +1 button, nor Instant Preview, when they're in the SERPs?

I'm joining some pretty distant dots here, but that might suggest that they're part of a separate search index? I can certainly see how providing one authoritative link for a very precise medical query would enhance search quality.

If it's a good crew and a good culture, $31k isn't all that bad for a recent graduate.

You may find value in getting your details out in front of some other employers to see whether anyone values your skills higher in terms of a dollar value, but company culture, perks and vibe are very important.

Thinking of the next stage of your career, if you do the intern + perm work + 2 years that's going to look very good to a future employer. It shows loyalty and respect and that can often be the deciding factor when choosing between well-qualified candidates.

Good luck!

HyperOffice, this is possibly the single worst piece of advice I have ever read on this board.

Reach Local, stay away, this is 100% not what the original poster was asking about!

It's always interesting to see how sitemap.html performs in terms of pageviews. According to Analytics at least, many users find them useful -- and that's enough for me to usually want to recommend including one.

Try it, test it, and if users find it valuable then keep it. Like it or not, I think it's true to say that there's still a small segment of web users who use sitemaps as on of their main methods of navigation so I think on that basis, there's an argument to include them.

It might be worth spending a little time before the move drawing up a list of the most important sites linking out to the old domain, and contacting them once the new domain goes live to ask them to update their links.

I'm sure that the rebranding will involve some sort of awareness/media campaign so a "link update" message could go out on the back of that.

I would personally be ultra-paranoid about the 301s, but I know Next Digital (awesome work on the MCG site) so I'm sure you guys will have that all taken care of!

+1 for a .com.au domain name. Australians tend to feel more comfortable clicking on a .com.au extension, just as New Zealanders feel more comfortable with the .co.nz (and, no doubt, other countries prefer their "home" TLDs over a global .com)

Registering a .com.au domain name requires an ABN (Australian Business Number, which is a but like a registered company number in the UK.)

Also, hosting in Australia is going to be important. A lot of internet users experience latency issues with overseas sites, so from a user experience point of view it's worth keeping site design efficient and hosting it within AU.

I'm UK-born and living in Australia, and in terms of web design or any technical issues, there's no significant changes I can think of. Bear in mind that the spelling in this country is the same as the UK and not the USA (colour not color, lift not elevator.)

100% agree. It's only an issue if you're failing to provide unique content page-by-page, and right now I don't think there's enough to differentiate.

+1 to the above. It was a good model when it launched, but now just too cluttered to be of any real significance.

Raven Tools recently launched a Contacts feature that assists with this; it's not wholly reliable but it might help save a little time here and there.

In theory that's possible, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "correlation".

It's like spending $100,000 advertising on the side of every bus in your city. Chances are you'll get coverage and some of that coverage will be a link, but it's not to say that there's any causal relationship between advertising on buses and improving the rank of your website.

Have a look at how users behave on your site throughout the day -- maybe using a real-time stats package like Woopra.

As Riggz says, it's usually the case that most sites will have their own natural rhythms when it comes to how audiences engage. By monitoring the busy times of the day you'll have an indication of when your users are more likely to want to engage with new content.

It's also a great opportunity for a bit of testing. Over the next few weeks, experiment with different days of the week and times of the day to publish new content, and use a service like Twuffer.com to schedule tweets to the new content at different times of the day. In my own testing, I've found that tweets sent toward the end of the working day can be the most effective way of gaining traffic to content posted at lunchtime.

Your mileage may vary... but it wouldn't be fun if it didn't

David has it -- you'll want to do this in Google Analytics to get the best and most actionable data IMO. I always prefer doing this kind of thing in Analytics and not Adwords as you can also track what happens in organic / social / direct traffic, and see how that compares to your PPC clickstream.

So, in Analytics, set up a Goal at the final, confirmed "registration complete" page. You can then set up a funnel for the Goal (with the same steps as you outlined in your post).

(Setting up a funnel isn't mandatory, as you can get the data you want to extract from raw pageviews... landing page > registration page > confirmation page.)

You might also like to try this Excel Goal Funnel Report that pulls conversion data from Analytics and lets you do a lot of analysis, pivoting, and whatever else takes your fancy!

http://www.savio.no/blogg/a/100/free-excel-goal-funnel-report-for-google-analytics#b

It happens, and I wouldn't say it's "bad" as such if it's done in the right way. Twitter is quite big on Follow Spam and I believe there are limits as to the number of new follows an account can carry out in a day.

Think of it as a value proposition you're making to someone -- you're approaching them and saying, "I see you follow company A. I'm suggesting you also follow company B."

What value do they immediately see when they quickly view your profile, your stats, and most importantly the content you've been sharing?

If you've got a tweet stream with a good amount of well-presented, varied content most of which isn't self-serving or promotional, you stand a better chance of getting the Follow back.

I guess it boils down to the idea of spending time creating your prescence and voice before going all-out on increasing the audience by any means necessary.

I'd be interested in seeing your data on this if you'd care to fully share/blog etc?

Have a look at Market Samurai -- http://www.marketsamurai.com/ -- it's a paid tool with (I believe) free access to the keyword analysis module.

Don't be put off by the spamminess of their webpage - the product is sound.

Market Samurai lets you do a lot of heavy lifting with Google Keyword Tool via the Adwords API. It also pulls down global and country-specific competition. Export all this into Excel and you can crunk and ply the data until a niche presents itself.

I like to think of Market Samurai not so much as a keyword tool in its own right, but as a way to use Google's keyword tool in a smart way.

Dude... read the OP's question.

I'd say that this sort of thing is considered to be a generally spammy practice. But it happens; especially in a competitive industry like anything to do with weddings, you'll see competitors that rank highly on a lot of terms will have at least some links like this.

If you're going to do it, don't automate. Do everything naturally and make sure your blog comment is natural, intelligent, "actual". Identikit stuff helps nobody. Also, the more identikit a post is, the greater the chance that the owner of the blog will trash your comment before any web user or bot even gets to it.

One final point. You'll get more mileage by having the URL linked as your profile name and not included in the comment itself. So if you're a wedding photographer, post the comment under the alias Wedding Photographer Steve (or whatever your name is) and include your URL. That way you'll get anchor text that's partially what you want, without annoying blog owners. This is a much better way of getting some kind of link to your site; I'd forget about href links in the comment itself.

Hope that helps -- the wedding biz is ridiculously competitive and I do appreciate the need to get more creative with your linking strategies. Be sure to do it naturally, intelligently, in a way that contributes to the blog you're commenting on (which, let's not forget, is why blogs allow comments), and you should be fine.

JoelHit, the article you link has precious little if anything to do with what Ethan is asking.

It sounds to me Ethan as though it's more to do with branding and practicaility -- albeit within the confines of the max character length that Twitter allows in a username. So the question reall is, do you want to be pushing the idea of an acronym in order to unite the character accounts -- or will there be enough recognition fed through from the web series itself?

I'd be inclined to suggest everyone sits down and has a good ol' brainstorm about this. For example, might there be a way for the series to feed its audience to one character's Twitter feed, and then via @ replies and mentions within that feed, spin off and "discover" new characters?

What I guess I'm saying is, you've got a great opportunity to explore methods of storytelling as well as marketing. That, to me, is more pertinent than the idea of tagging all characters with an acronym.

If pushed, I'd say that appending "fishbowl" to each character's handle would be a nice and sticky way to tag them, based solely on resonance (a fancy schmancy way of saying, "it sounds funny, so do it")

Bear in mind that the shorter the username the more you can say in a retweetable tweet. So keeping the number of char's in a username as low as possible is an approach that also contains some wisdom.

Sounds like a fun project anyhow! Best of luck with it!

It's not an online tool, but Xenu LinkSleuth does a dead good job of making an XML sitemap.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

No worries with a 5,000 page site, just let it do its thing and index away. Under File there's an option to export to "Google Sitemap File".

I've not used the linkvendor tool that Petra linked; but I've had problems with online tools skipping out on some URLs for whatever reason. Xenu's never let me down.