Marco Janck On Linkbuilding

Marco Janck from Sumago held the session with the title “Von Landminen, Lenkwaffen oder Problemen der modernen Linkführung”.

The (shall we say interesting) layout of the slides and the heading of this session was in warfare mode. That is not how Marco comes across at all. The session was very straight up and delivered from the heart. Marco gave a fair amount of advice on simple ways to make more of your links. When he asked how many in the room owns more than 10 domains, many hands went up – yet many own domains that just sit there an do nothing. Often these domains are rather old and if they would be used, they could generate good links.

More than just off-page SEO

Many people only focus on off-page SEO – links, links, link… “Where can I get links from?”. If you look at on-page items, there are many things that can be done. Especially in the internal linking structures. Are they making sense? If not, rework them.

Link prices generally range between 50 and 1500 EUR – that is when the bullshit radar should be switched on. Many people sell a lot of non-sense and it is up to you to realize what is good and what is not. Question the ‘link packages’ that people try and sell you.

There is also the very boring task of link management, it is important to keep and eye on the links you have worked for to get.

Networking with real people is key. It takes much time and effort to build and maintain your networks of people with whom you do SEO-related work.

All in all, this session was giving the message that if you want to do SEO, you need to use common sense and make sure your bullshit radar is on…one of these presentations that must be seen live, that you cannot just read the transcript from.

Case Study: Karriere.at

Klaus Hofbauer is head of SEO at karriere.at. He talked about how the site increased their traffic by 200% over the last year (with 120% of them being from SEO).

Before we get staeted, let’s just look at some numbers related to karriere.at:

• 450k visitors per month
• 8200 jobs
• 1400 clients
• 36k CVs

The site uses paid traffic generation from sources such as PPC, Job-Aggregators, TV, Radio, Offline Display Networks and Other Partner Networks. The unpaid traffic sources are SEO and Email Job-Alerts (which is heavily promoted via a pop-up when visiting the site.

Unpaid traffic makes out 55% of the site’s traffic which is also why the SEO department within the organization is divided into three parts:

• Inhouse SEO
• Marketing department for linkbuilding, PR, blog content etc
• IT Team for the technical stuff

Google Indexing

Landing Pages & Sitemaps

At present, the site has about 1 million pages in its own landing page index. That is why they are first checked for duplicate content before submitted to google via the sitemap. Furthermore, they use tools such as google analytics and google webmaster tool to avoid duplicate content. Often the Rel=Canonical tag is the helper as well.

Site Speed

Site speed is really important for the site as it increases the crawl rate and thereby also the freshness. By reducing the use of javascript and css, the user experience has improved and the organization have seen that this has lead to better ranking.

Linkbuilding

• Manual
• Organic
• Big Scale

Note: This slide was really good – you should ask the guys from karriere.at for this slide until I get the link to it here.

Panda

Through panda, they reduced the number of the sites in the sitemap by nearly 50% – as a result they were not hurt by panda. Actually, panda helped them grow their traffic

Measuring & Reporting

A rather large 70 page monthly report is created in which everything is monitored. This includes reports from tools such as: GWT & GA (main ones), OVI, SEOmoz, Majestic, Linkresearchtool.

The ROI on the SEO efforts

Over the last year, traffic went from 150k to 330k visitors. 40-60k of this increase is explained through ‘natural increase’ due to the job market situation. If they had to go out and buy this traffic via PPC (at 0.17EUR CPC), the costs would have been 20k-23k Euros. Via SEO, they have spent 12k-14k. So the savings are good and makes perfect sense for the organization.

According to Klaus Hofbauer, the key to success here is the fact that everyone in the company is involved in SEO. Everyone understand the way they can contribute and they understand the impact.

SEOkomm 2011 Pre-Event Post

Live-Blogging To You This Year

Together with Thomas Sickl and Bernhard Hochrainer, I will be doing the official live-blogging from the SEOkomm 2011. I have never attended this event, but the feedback from last year makes the conference seem very promising. Furthermore, there is a very good line-up of speakers with some pretty awesome topics (especially if you are active in the German-Speaking area). I will mainly be following ‘track 3‘.

Unfortunately, I will miss the party tonight (24-Nov) – The good thing about that, is that I will not be hung over and therefore able to provide you guys with better updates . Feel free to hook me up on twitter and if you see me, feel free to have a quick chat. I really prefer to get interesting content with input from the crowd (after all the event is for you) – rather than just echoing the speakers. We decided that I write my posts in English, but I speak German, English, French and Danish – so don’t be shy. I look forward to the event and even more to meet some of you guys.

Below is a picture of me (one in conference mode and one in party mode) – I am sure there will be some of both tomorrow.

Google’s Green Message In Conflict With Google Chrome For Mac

‘Being Green’ has become a widely used marketing message from leading tech companies. This is also the case for google. They have even dedicated an entire section of their website and $780 million on being green and energy efficient etc etc. Very good and very nice. But google could become seriously greener by simply looking at their software engineering for their web browser Google Chrome for Mac.

Let me share my story and view with you.

Like millions of other people, I am all for being green, but also like millions of other people, I do not cut the electricity of my energy hungry computer setup, tv, stereo – the list goes on and on. I have it all on standby when I don’t use it – yet knowing that it is still using serious amounts of energy. Yes, it adds up on my  electricity bill – but so be it. I should care, but I don’t and I am getting of the point of this post now anyway

So after the motherboard of my highly loved 3-year-old macbook pro decided to give up on me, I was forced to get a new one (fuck investing 600 EUR in an old computer to get it repaired). The amazing apple engineers have managed to produce laptops with significantly longer battery life which was something I was seriously looking forward to. Going from 2-3 to 6-7 hours of battery life on one charge is awesome after all.

Google Chrome really is draining my battery life

I got the new baby and recovered the settings/software etc from my apple time capsule and a few hours later I had my old computer back inside a new piece of hardware. It did not take long before I noticed that I am NOT getting the 6-7 hours of battery life as promised by apple. Being the tech geek that I am, I went through various tech forums to find out why this was. It did not take long until I read about google’s web browser Chrome being the cause for all this.

Check out the screenshot from the battery life indicator while Chrome IS running.

And now see the battery life indicator while Chrome IS NOT running.

So holy shit – this is actually true. Google Chrome is really the cause for my battery life to be far below what it should be. That sucks major time – especially as running Apple’s Safari does not impact the battery to anywhere near the same extent (firefox also causes more energy use, but nowhere near the same as Chrome).

What this means for energy consumption

Let’s get back to ‘green’. I don’t want to be like an idiotic corporate strategy consultant, but putting together a little energy calculation is needed here.
If Chrome causes my computer to use 2x as much energy, I will also need to charge it 2x as often when using Chrome. Therefore using 2x as much electricity out of my electric socket.

I looked around the internet for ages trying to find out how much energy is actually used to charge a macbook pro 15″, but couldn’t find it. Anyway – it doesn’t matter right now. According to Wikipedia, Chrome’s rising market share is currently somewhere around the 15% mark while apple has just over 10% of the US PC market with about 1.8m devices sold per quarter. That means every quarter about a quarter of a million additional mac users are using google chrome in the US alone. OK, this is getting confusing now and these numbers really need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

What now?

My point is, that if so many people need to charge their macbooks 2x as often, we are looking at a fucking lot of energy consumption here that is not necessary when the apple and firefox guys were able to develop a web browser that does not use as much energy. So here is my suggestion to google. Why not take some of the $780 million in your ‘green fund’ and put it towards engineering a version of Chrome that takes it easy on the energy consumption. It would leave macbook Chrome users with longer lasting batteries and cheaper electricity bills while making google’s green effort look more genuine and something people can relate to.

Please do me a favor

If you think this article makes sense and is generally useful to your and/or peope around you, please give it a facebook like, retweet or google +1 (I would actually really like the google +1 as that is google’s own product.) Finally, it aint that often that I write stuff on here and I really don’t spam people, so please also consider signing up to the newsletter.

Thank you for your time – if you have additional input or comments, add them in the comments section. I keep and eye on it and will reply to them so that you are not talking to a wall

iPhone 4 is now available in Luxembourg – Luxgsm, Orange and Tango’s offers are analyzed and compared right here

Written 3-Aug-2010

In my post prior to the iPhone 4 launch in Luxembourg, there were many active readers of this blog discussing and sharing information on the launch of the iPhone 4 in Luxembourg. Now it is here. All three providers (Luxgsm, Orange and Tango) started to sell the iPhone 4 on the 30th July 2010. Due to the large readership of the prior post, I have decided to also make a comparison of the iPhone packages by Luxgsm, Orange and Tango.

Luxgsm, Orange and Tango iPhone 4 Prices and Packages

All three providers have at least 3 kinds of subscriptions. In order to provide the best transparency, I have made direct comparisons of the ‘same level’ subscriptions. I simply name them small, medium and large packages.

Small Luxgsm, Orange and Tango Packages

	luxgsm	tango	orange
iphone 4 (16 GB)	199 EUR	169 EUR	199 EUR
iphone 4 (32 GB)	299 EUR	279 EUR	259 EUR
subscription / month	35 EUR	30 EUR	35 EUR
duration	24 months	24 months	24 months
calls national	120 mins	100 mins	180 units (shared with sms)
calls international	0 mins	0 mins	75 mins
calls roaming	0 mins	0 mins	0 mins
sms	120	100	180 units (shared with national calls)
data national	2 GB	2 GB	2 GB
data roaming	0	0	0
internet tethering	Yes	No	Yes
Sim-Locked	No	No	No

Medium Luxgsm, Orange and Tango Packages

	luxgsm	tango	orange
iphone 4 (16 GB)	99 EUR	49 EUR	59 EUR
iphone 4 (32 GB)	199 EUR	149 EUR	159 EUR
subscription / month	50 EUR	45 EUR	50 EUR
duration	24 months	24 months	24 months
calls national	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
calls international	0 mins	0 mins	150 mins
calls roaming	0 mins	0 mins	0 mins
sms	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
data national	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
data roaming	0	0	0
internet tethering	Yes	No	Yes
Sim-Locked	No	No	No

Large Luxgsm, Orange and Tango Packages

	luxgsm	tango	orange
iphone 4 (16 GB)	0 EUR	49 EUR	19 EUR
iphone 4 (32 GB)	99 EUR	149 EUR	79 EUR
subscription / month	75 EUR	50 EUR	75 EUR
duration	12 months	24 months	24 months
calls national	unlimited	100 mins	unlimited
calls international	0 mins	300 mins	200 mins
calls roaming	0 mins	0 mins	80 mins
sms	unlimited	100	unlimited
data national	unlimited	2 GB	unlimited
data roaming	0	0	10 MB
internet tethering	Yes	No	Yes
Sim-Locked	No	No	No

Which is the right package to choose?

This of course depends on your personal needs. Your best option is to take your itemized bill from the past months, and see how many calls you make within and outside of Luxembourg. Also look at how many sms you send and finally also check how much data you consume (in case you already have a smartphone). You will then get a better idea of what you need.
I still want to give you my opinion on things, so here we go:

iPhone 4 16GB or 32GB?

The price difference between the two models are roughly always 100EUR. If you look at the total sum you will be spending on owning an iPhone 4 (regardless of package chosen), 100 EUR is really not a lot of money. If you are honest to yourself, then you also know that your music, video and application collection is not exactly set to decrease in size – it is rather likely to increase. Remember, in theory you will have this phone for at least one or two years. In my eyes, it is therefore a no-brainer to get the iPhone 4 32GB.

iPhone 4 Data Packages

It can be rather tricky and confusing to choose the right data package. Over the past 18 months where I have been using the iPhone 3G, I have never managed to use over 500MB in a month. This is with 3 push-mail accounts, calendar and contacts synchronization as well as facebook push notifications. This is generally not very heavy data consummation, but I also view many youtube clips and I also use the iPhone as navigation device. This is the more data-hungry applications, and still – I don’t even get close to 1 GB data consumption.
In my eyes, the only thing that will really get your data consumption close to 2GB per month, is if you start using internet tethering (i.e. connecting your computer to the internet via your iPhone). I believe the number of people concerned here are very low.
Notice that the smallest data packages from every provider is set to 2GB per month. As a result, do not let the data consumption packages make the choice for you – you are very unlikely to reach the limit with any of the available data packages.

iPhone 4 National Call Packages

The medium and large packages all have unlimited national calls (except for tango’s large package). Therefore this section only concerns the small packages. I believe it is fair to say that most mobile phone users use their phone more than 100 minutes a month for national voice calls. If you choose one of the small packages, you should therefore expect additional call charges on your monthly bill.

iPhone 4 International Call Packages

Only Tango and Orange offer international calls as part of their packages. Orange as the only provider also includes international calls in their medium package. If you make numerous short international calls, this could be interesting for you. If you are more likely to make longer but less regular international calls, it is highly recommendable to use skype via your iphone. Since earlier 2010, skype’s application is also able to be used under 3G reception on your iPhone and not only wifi (as it was before). Skype’s international call charges can easily compete with any Luxembourgish mobile phone provider’s international call charges.

Other note-worthy iPhone 4 stuff

Orange offers 10MB roaming data transfer – 10MB is close to nothing. If you choose this package, make sure you ask Orange to notify you when the 10MB has been used, so you have the option to manually switch if off. If you are not careful here, you can very quickly get a nasty surprise on your bill at the end of the month.
Luxgsm has a package only for young people up to 25 years of age. If you qualify for this, it may be worth having a look at.

iPhone 4 without a contract

Unfortunately, none of the providers in Luxembourg sell the iPhone 4 without a contract. If you are looking for an iPhone 4 without a contract, you will need to order it from the French or British apple store. They are not simlocked, which makes it possible to use it in Luxembourg (or anywhere else for that matter). Note that local shipping addresses will be needed to place the order.

Antennagate – the ‘problem’ with the iPhone 4 antenna

Just after the launch of the iPhone 4 in Luxembourg, readers commented on my prior post with information concerning the antenna problem. Nobody saw any note-worthy change when touching the ‘sensitive’ spot on the iPhone 4 on Luxgsm, Orange or Tango. We therefore conclude that this problem does not seem to be anything serious for Luxembourg iPhone 4 users. Nevertheless, I recommend watching Steve Job’s video on how Apple handles the Antennagate problem. If you have purchased your iPhone 4 before September 30th 2010 – you can get a free case, by following this link.

Which provider is best for the iPhone 4 in Luxembourg?

Remember that the iPhone 4 is a very data-hungry smartphone if you compare it to other smartphones. If you are with a provider with a poor data network, you are not going to get the most out of your iPhone 4. I even go as far as saying that it can be very frustrating. Therefore, make sure that there is good data coverage in your area. I cannot tell you if it is good or bad in your area. This is where you simply just have to ask fellow consumers who have the device about their opinion or even make them get this app that can test the speed. If you test with this app, make sure that you are connected to 3G and/or Edge – not wifi. Do not ask the providers – they will not give you a neutral opinion. Generally speaking, all three providers have decent data coverage in Luxembourg City.