For me it is a bit of a dilemma, as I have quite a love <> hate opinion about Infusionsoft

On the plus side

I love marketing tools that help magnify your ability to make money from existing leads and Infusionsoft is one of the best tools for tracking and segmenting email marketing campaigns (within affordable limits for most online marketers)

On the negative

• The affiliate module sucks, although a lot of the blame can be squarely placed on custom integrations that break the affiliate tracking. One of these days I will write a much more detailed post.
• The people who provide the custom integrations you often seen used by big marketers for one-click upsells etc charge a fortune
• $2 to send each 1000 emails over your limit
• Infusionsoft have had tons of my feedback for over 6 months, and I can’t see any evidence of it being implemented

So lets look at what you are likely to receive in this special Stompernet module valued at $49/month

What Is In The Stompernet Infusionsoft Special Edition?

The following is speculation, as I don’t know all the details

Here is what the basic Infusionsoft plan currently looks like, which costs $199/month

Lets divide those numbers by 5

2 Users 1 user
10,000 Contacts /5 = 2000 contacts
25,000 Emails/month /5 = 5000 emails

I think divided by 5 is a safe bet, but they could be more generous.

Lets look at other features

Here is the full feature list (click to view)

I doubt you will get any of the shopping cart and affiliate modules, it will just be basic features.
With a bit of luck they will leave the API in

Many internet marketers are going to be turning their noses up at this, after all they would want all the bells & whistles, and will likely experience a heart attack when someone wants to bill them $15K-$20K to do what the gurus do, and then it doesn’t work. They will also be pummelling their lists every few days, maybe multiple times per day – those $2 per 1000 emails add up when only 10-15% open your email, even less click through.

But what about ecommerce?

• Most people starting out with an ecommerce store or doing consulting would be over the moon to get 2000 people on their mailing list, especially if they are all customers.
• You might well be processing credit cards in a different way, or using your existing shopping cart, or even looking to replace your existing shopping cart with Stomper Commerce.
• If the API is in, all kinds of integration is possible, provided it is achieved at a low enough cost – who knows maybe Stomper Commerce can add it as standard.

For anyone who has considered looking at Infusionsoft as an alternative, one of the major problems is their very short trial period (though I have heard their partners can get it extended a little), plus to be honest I bet a large chunk of Infusionsfot customers don’t need more than 1/5 of the capacity anyway.

It makes a lot more sense for someone interested in Infusionsoft who isn’t interested in their shopping cart and broken affiliate module to consider the route now open for them via Stompernet as part of their deal for just under $200/month – you get lots more training and useful tools.

I am offering a bonus for those who purchase through my affiliate link (don’t forget to clear cookies) and forwarding the receipt.

Many might mistakenly look at pure $$$ values offered as affiliate bonuses which is easy to magnify with digital products which you will never have time to use, especially in the run up to Christmas. All I can say is good luck to you.

At the same time I am quietly confident that I have already managed to help one article directory owner save Christmas.
If you don’t have immediate problems, there is value in insurance.

p.s. for those who have been wondering why they haven’t seen me inside Stompernet yet, active on the forum, blame Stompernet – some of the admin around this launch is leaving a lot to be desired, but I am sure things will settle down eventually.

Update From Infusionsoft

We now have 2 comments from trusted sources at Infusionsoft with details of the package on offer.

Tyler Garns (October 6, 2009 at 4:07 pm)

Andy and readers,

The edition of Infusionsoft being offered through Stompernet is not available on our website. We’ve actually created a specific “Infusionsoft Stomper Edition”. This edition is similar in functionality to our “Basic Edition” but, since its free, the limits are smaller. It has full CRM functionality, email marketing, autoresponder, follow-up sequences, direct mail, fax, & voice broadcast integration, web forms, automatic actions on web forms and email links, world-class list segmentation and targeted marketing. You can compare the editions here. The only difference between the Basic edition and the Stomper edition is that the Stomper edition is limited to 750 emails/month and 5,000 contacts. Any edition can be upgraded at any time. There are no long-term contracts required, but we do offer a 12 month “Double Your Sales Guarantee”. For more details, tune into the Stompernet webinar happening today. I’ll be on there to show Infusionsoft and possibly answer some questions.

Obviously you will need to purchase email credits, but at $2/1000 it works out very reasonable compared to many competitors pricing for “pay as you go” credits, for instance Mailchimp the cheapest you can pay for credits is $5/1000

Email costs for high volume low margin email marketers might be a little painful, but they tend to use brute force/mass bombardment anyway.

Damn, I have seen the sales page twice… you don’t need to mail the same email 5 more times, from 2 different autoresponders.

I think Stompernet with Infusionsoft is a truely complementary offer.

Update

The Stompernet Infusionsoft offer has a hard limit of 750 emails per month, and whilst I have discussed the possibility of added email packages extensively with Infusionsoft, I haven’t had any form of indication that these have been made available.
The offer has value as an extended trial period for complex setups, and possibly for consultants with very few clients.
There is also the possibility that you could use the email features of another service such as Getresponse along side Infusionsoft, but use Infusionsoft for tagging – that would however limit your ability to email a specific segment of prospects based upon tagging.

Read carefully – there is a competition at the end to get my bonus for Stompernet without buying anything

These anchor links have been around for a few weeks now, first reported on Google Blogscoped, but it was announced on the official Google blog.

Benefit Of Sitelink Anchor Links In Search Results

• For users, quicker access to the information they are looking for avoiding the need to scroll through a long article (initially)
• For site owners… I have no eye-tracking screenshots to show you, and I have only seen them on the first result so far, but at a guess if the first position gets you 40% of the clicks, this could bump that to 50%, a 25% increase in traffic for a top listing.

Would this result in higher conversions? Possibly, but bare in mind the visitors might never see what you prepared for them above the fold, so you need to include a marketing message at the bottom of a page as well.

Lets take a look first at the examples Google provide

Trans Fats

The first example Google provide is for trans fats

The top results is for a Wikipedia page

Google link through to the anchor for nutritional supplements from a horizontal line of sitelinks

Lets take a look at the structure of the elements on the page.

The Table Of Contents

This is what it looks like

Here is the code

<table id="toc" class="toc">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<div id="toctitle">
<h2>Contents</h2>
 <span class="toctoggle">[<a href="javascript:toggleToc()" class="internal" id="togglelink">hide</a>]</span></div>
<ul>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="#History"><span class="tocnumber">1</span> <span class="toctext">History</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2"><a href="#Chemistry"><span class="tocnumber">2</span> <span class="toctext">Chemistry</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3"><a href="#Presence_in_food"><span class="tocnumber">3</span> <span class="toctext">Presence in food</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4"><a href="#Nutritional_guidelines"><span class="tocnumber">4</span> <span class="toctext">Nutritional guidelines</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5"><a href="#Health_risks"><span class="tocnumber">5</span> <span class="toctext">Health risks</span></a>
<ul>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6"><a href="#Coronary_heart_disease"><span class="tocnumber">5.1</span> <span class="toctext">Coronary heart disease</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7"><a href="#Other_effects"><span class="tocnumber">5.2</span> <span class="toctext">Other effects</span></a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8"><a href="#Public_response_and_regulation"><span class="tocnumber">6</span> <span class="toctext">Public response and regulation</span></a>
<ul>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-9"><a href="#International"><span class="tocnumber">6.1</span> <span class="toctext">International</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-10"><a href="#Australia"><span class="tocnumber">6.2</span> <span class="toctext">Australia</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-11"><a href="#Canada"><span class="tocnumber">6.3</span> <span class="toctext">Canada</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-12"><a href="#Denmark"><span class="tocnumber">6.4</span> <span class="toctext">Denmark</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-13"><a href="#Switzerland"><span class="tocnumber">6.5</span> <span class="toctext">Switzerland</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-14"><a href="#European_Union"><span class="tocnumber">6.6</span> <span class="toctext">European Union</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-15"><a href="#United_Kingdom"><span class="tocnumber">6.7</span> <span class="toctext">United Kingdom</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-16"><a href="#United_States"><span class="tocnumber">6.8</span> <span class="toctext">United States</span></a>
<ul>
<li class="toclevel-3 tocsection-17"><a href="#Local_regulation_in_the_United_States"><span class="tocnumber">6.8.1</span> <span class="toctext">Local regulation in the United States</span></a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-18"><a href="#Food_industry_response"><span class="tocnumber">7</span> <span class="toctext">Food industry response</span></a>

<ul>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-19"><a href="#Manufacturer_response"><span class="tocnumber">7.1</span> <span class="toctext">Manufacturer response</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-20"><a href="#Major_users.27_response"><span class="tocnumber">7.2</span> <span class="toctext">Major users' response</span></a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-21"><a href="#See_also"><span class="tocnumber">8</span> <span class="toctext">See also</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-22"><a href="#References"><span class="tocnumber">9</span> <span class="toctext">References</span></a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-23"><a href="#Further_reading"><span class="tocnumber">10</span> <span class="toctext">Further reading</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-24"><a href="#External_links"><span class="tocnumber">11</span> <span class="toctext">External links</span></a></li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>

The links to the named anchors:-

• Used relative named anchors – that may or may not be suitable for a blog post depending on what level of interaction you want to provide for someone viewing from an RSS reader.
• Use human understandable names
• Wikipedia use underscores as a separator – a hyphen would probably make this easier for Google
• The anchors contain no unique reference which could potentially cause problems in an RSS feed or on a blog.
• Are arranged in an unordered list

The Named Anchors

Lets dive straight into the code

<h2><span class="editsection">[<a href="/w/index.php?title=Trans_fat&amp;action=edit&amp;section=4" title="Edit section: Nutritional guidelines">edit</a>]</span> <span class="mw-headline" id="Nutritional_guidelines">Nutritional guidelines</span></h2>

• It is nested within an H2 element on the page
• The anchor doesn’t use a name construct which was deprecated in xhtml 1.1, but an ID id=”Nutritional_guidelines”
• It could be considered suboptimal, because there isn’t an easy way to grab a link to that section of the page
• The ID is applied to the span within the H2

Good Cholesterol Level

This is the Google search result pointing to this page as the first result.

Google provide a siltelink to a named anchor or ID from within the snippet

• American Heart have a double listing even without the exact search term in the Title Tag and URL
• The anchor link is placed immediately below the snippet title in the search results listing, and is almost like an ancillary title.
• Either Wikipedia are slacking and don’t have a suitable page, or Google might have decided they are not a reliable source for medical information – their highest position is an article on HDL that references the 2nd article from American Heart – of course with a nofollow

The Table Of Contents

Here is what the TOC looks like on the American Heart Association site

Here is the code

<p align="left"><font class="content">A complete fasting lipoprotein profile will show:</font></p>

<ul>
<font class="content"><li><a href="#total">Your total blood (or serum) cholesterol level</a></li>

<li><a href="#HDL">Your HDL (good) cholesterol level</a></li>

<li><a href="#LDL">Your LDL (bad) cholesterol level</a></li>

<li><a href="#Triglyceride">Your triglyceride level</a></li>
</font></ul>

The links to the named anchors:-

• Used relative named anchors – that may or may not be suitable for a blog post depending on what level of interaction you want to provide for someone viewing from an RSS reader.
• Use human understandable names (though short)
• Only a single word so no idea of separators
• The anchors contain no unique reference which could potentially cause problems in an RSS feed or on a blog.
• Are arranged in an unordered list
• Whilst the anchors were short, a saving grace is that the link text matches the title

The Named Anchors

Lets dive straight into the code

<p align="left"><font class="content"><a id="HDL" name="HDL"><b>Your HDL (Good) Cholesterol Level</b></a><br>
<br>
</font></p>

• Uses both named anchor and ID – named anchors were deprecated in xhtml 1.1 and replaced with the id tag
• A link is provided which can be copied to link to that section of the page
• Both the ID and Named anchor are applied to the link
• Both the ID and named anchors use a keyword that appears within the link, but notably it is not the search query
• The anchor link contains the search query that was used within the rich snippet

Anchor Links In Search – Requirements

On the Google Webmaster blog they have gone into further detail on the requirements for the additional listing

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

WordPress TOC (Table Of Contents Plugins)

First of all I am going to explore common attributes, desired features and required features to achieve rich snippets and anchor sitelinks, and we will look at how many each of the current offerings fulfil.

• I am not giving points for supporting the latest WP2.8.4
• A plugin gets no additional point for being in active development – if it works it works
• My ranking criteria may be totally different to a typical WordPress designer or user – ultimately I want something that works first, has fancy features second.
• In compiling the lst of features I had glanced briefly at some of the existing plugins and noticed some failings, but all judging was carried out after requirements were specified. (I am not picking on anyone)
• I might well overlook something especially on plugins that don’t seem to meet a number of requirements – this is a work in progress to help me make decisions as much as anything, and possibly some motivation for plugin authors to improve their offering.

Required Features

Table Of Contents

• 5 points – Automatic mode – it should be possible to create a TOC just by placing a shortcode, or having a widget with no specific editing
• 5 points – Ability to place TOC after a few paragraphs of content as an introduction. This might be a factor when creating excerpts, which in theory may or may not have the TOC, but certainly shouldn’t have it mangled.

10 points total

Anchors

• 2 points – IDs (Not Named Anchors) – To satisfy the validation nazis, we shouldn’t be using deprecated XHTML where possible, and we want something that is universal
• 2 points – Keyword Rich IDs – Google has specified this as a factor, though it appears it may not be universally necessary as long as the keyword is within the element
• 2 points – Unique IDs – I could list this under desired, but many blogs have full content appearing on their home pages or categories, and would frequently have something such as a download link or preface – IDs on a single page have to be unique.
• 2 points – Anchored elements contain keywords/section title – there are ways to do anchors that might create an invisible link or span first, and then a separate element would contain the actual title – this isn’t appropriate as the ID can’t be assigned to the text
• 2 points – ID is applied to a link that can be copied easily at he place in the text where the content is (no scrolling to TOC)

10 points total

Desired Features

• 1 point – Widgets
• 1 point – PHP Code for manual placement
• 1 point – Shortcodes
• 1 point – Ability to prevent placement on home page if desired
• 1 point – Both Ordered and Unordered Lists for TOC
• 1 point – Support for WYSIWYG editor buttons
• 1 point – Support for non-WYSIWYG buttons
• 1 point – good styling of TOC
• 1 point – appropriate styling of anchors
• 1 point – can it cope with code within a post that might contain headings

10 points total

GRAND TOTAL 30 POINTS

Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1

This article is already quite long, so I am breaking things into 2 parts, with the “review” of the existing plugins in part 2.

However I want to leave you with some example code from one WordPress plugin just to analyse here in the comments and to see who gets closest to my final score though if you find more problems I miss, those would be added to my “final score” (moving goal posts).
Whoever gets the closest will get the same bonus package as I have offered to those people purchasing Stompernet through my link.

WP-ToC

WP-ToC (blank page) but can download on WP.org

Chosen as the first on the list if you search from within WordPress – a ToC is placed just using a shortcode

The Table Of Contents

This is what the “broken” Table of contents looks like

The Table Of Contents (Code)

Note: I manually removed the code for the edit link shown in the screenshot

<ol>
<li><a href="#2%29Benefit%20Of%20Sitelink%20Anchor%20Links%20In%20Search%20Results">Benefit Of Sitelink Anchor Links In Search Results</a></li>
<li><a href="#2%29Trans%20Fats">Trans Fats</a><ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha; list-style-image: none; list-style-position: outside;">
<li><a href="#3%29The%20Table%20Of%20Contents">The Table Of Contents</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><a href="#2%29Contents">Contents</a><ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha; list-style-image: none; list-style-position: outside;">
<li><a href="#3%29The%20Named%20Anchors">The Named Anchors</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><span class="mw-headline" id="Nutritional_guidelines">Nutritional guidelines</span></li>
<li><a href="#2%29Good%20Cholesterol%20Level">Good Cholesterol Level</a><ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha; list-style-image: none; list-style-position: outside;">
<li><a href="#3%29The%20Table%20Of%20Contents">The Table Of Contents</a></li>
<li><a href="#3%29The%20Named%20Anchors">The Named Anchors</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><a href="#2%29Anchor%20Links%20In%20Search%20-%20Requirements">Anchor Links In Search - Requirements</a></li>
<li><a href="#2%29WordPress%20TOC%20%28Table%20Of%20Contents%20Plugins%29">WordPress TOC (Table Of Contents Plugins)</a>
<ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha; list-style-image: none; list-style-position: outside;">
<li><a href="#3%29Required%20Features">Required Features</a>
<ol>
<li><a href="#4%29Table%20Of%20Contents">Table Of Contents</a></li>
<li><a href="#4%29Anchors">Anchors</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><a href="#3%29Desired%20Features">Desired Features</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><a href="#2%29Reader%20Competition%20-%20Almost%20End%20Of%20Part%201">Reader Competition - Almost End Of Part 1</a>
<ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha; list-style-image: none; list-style-position: outside;">
<li><a href="#3%29WP-ToC">WP-ToC</a>
<ol>
<li><a href="#4%29The%20Table%20Of%20Contents">The Table Of Contents</a></li>
<li><a href="#4%29The%20Table%20Of%20Contents%20%28Code%29">The Table Of Contents (Code)</a></li>
<li><a href="#4%29The%20Anchor%20Links%20%28code%29">The Anchor Links (code)</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><a href="#3%29Competition%20Rules">Competition Rules</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>

The Anchor Links (code)

<a name="2)Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1"></a><h2>Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1</h2>

Competition Rules

• No Purchase Required
• If you have already purchased Stompernet through my link, I will double the time I spend with you
• All Countries Eligible
• No need to sign up to an email list to enter, but use a real email address for comments/entries so you can be contacted
• Leave a comment with the total score, and just to prove you thought about your answer, list at least 3 of the reasons why you gave that score (no random guesses)
• I will delete comments that link to junk websites, don’t include a name in the name field etc Just because you make a pseudo entry doesn’t mean you can get away with spam.
• Judges decision is final
• First correct/nearest entry wins based upon date/time entered
• All entries shoulld be a new comment, not a reply
• Minimum of 10 correct entries before I publish part 2 with the results for all plugins
• Anyone who charges their clients more than $100/hr or has what I would determine an established business can join in for fun, but will not be eligible for the prize – I won’t help with 3rd party “client” sites
• No linking, tweeting, Stumbling etc required to enter – Google doesn’t like that but I do
• Provided I have received enough qualifying entries, part 2 should be published within 48 hours

Enjoy… I now have to go and fix someone’s website that Google has maimed in the search results

You don’t need to place an entry to comment – let me know what you think

It was an amazingly successful offer, and I have heard (from memory) they shipped 18,000, though to be honest I am not sure whether that figure relates to the first “physical” offer on a DVD, or the more recent “digital” offer.

Either way, it is a product I look on as a solid foundation course in SEO, probably the best one available.

Today they are offering it for FREE

This is real FREE, no strings attached – no credit card required

Here’s what you’ll get immediate access to:

Stomping the Search Engines 2 – 7 Module Series – by Stomper SEO Faculty

7 Part Series:

1. Google Analytics 100A: Installing Google Analytics – by Andy Edmonds
2. Google Analytics 100B: Web Design Parameters – by Andy Edmonds
3. Google Website Optimizer – by Andy Edmonds and David Bullock
4. How to create Inputs for Your Test that Get Higher Response and Conversion – by David Bullock
5. What to test to increase conversion rate – by David Bullock
6. What to test now? Going in the right direction – by David Bullock
7. Creating a Landslide of Leads – with a few special methods – by Don Crowther

How To Get Stompernet STSE2 100% Free No Credit Card

You will have to create a My Stompernet Account but that doesn’t prevent you at a later date from purchasing the full Stompernet through any affiliate link you choose – here is my Stompernet Bonus if you do decide to join.

Enjoy!

Somewhere down the list I am also going to mention money but when you do the math, and then look at the way my bonus is structured, I will effectively be creating the closest thing to a J.O.B. I have experienced for the last 8 years.

I Have Loved The Concept Of Stompernet for 3 Years

I ate up every moment of their initial launch almost 3 years ago, it was a big deal for me, and I even toyed with the idea that I would one day be on the faculty.

If you gather together enough people who have exceptional online marketing skills, who can also teach, the chances of making a significant impact on the lives of 100s of people, potentially thousands is magnified.

At the time it was a little out of my reach and would have wiped out a large chunk of my cashflow on which I depended to keep profitable Adwords campaigns running.

However I also knew that my primary reason for joining wasn’t necessarily the training – I already had my startup germinating in my brain, and it was something that could benefit Stompernet customers.

I Am A Marketing Geek

I might not be a rocket scientist like Leslie Rohde, a scientist like Andy Ed, or even my good friend Tim Nash, and I can’t dig into patents like David Harry and Bill Slawski – but I am still a geek.

If a large chunk of the people you admire are members of a certain club, it is certainly a place you would consider joining.

Whilst Stompernet isn’t a club per se, it has become an “institution of Internet Marketing” in a remarkably short time and the people there translate geeky stuff into words and video normal people can understand.

I Am Joining Stompernet… Finally

The last time I promoted the main Stompernet course I built up a significant amount of interest, and totally threw away any chance I had of signing up a few referrals by posting just as I launched a list of the reasons why I wasn’t joining.

I still have a copy of it – I believe a few people might have mistakenly read it and though that it was in some way a negative review of Stompernet. Far from it, I hold them in great esteem.

You see I have always believed that the natural extension to Stompernet was providing state-of-the-art tools – in fact when they first launched there was some kind of syndication network available. I am not sure if that is still in there, or has morphed into something bigger and greater.

Also the FreeIQ video marketing platform in some ways encroaches into areas I want to persue.

I have always placed my startup in a “protected zone” – anything that in some way could harm it, I have avoided, and that at least in my own mind has included what could be looked on as “Foreign Intellectual Property Contamination” – I really wanted to be able to claim as much as possible that what I was creating was proprietary and 100% the fruit of my own labour.

Likewise I like to blog about things other blogs don’t – if I wrote a blog post about how to optimize the title of a blog post, people would be shocked and possibly think I out-sourced it. It is not my kind of content.

If I don’t have something original to write about, I generally don’t write anything, and it is restrictive enough having access to data from the few clients I have worked with over the last few years that could surprise people.

This time around it seems like 90% of SEOs who blog about anything the least bit interesting are now members of multiple private SEO sites. You also have people releasing SEO tools after having access to other people’s proprietary SEO tools.
To be quite honest, I think a lot of that really sucks, but I doubt the new copycats are anywhere close to the competition.
Also if tools are combined with training, and you need the tools to maintain a competitive edge, it is hard to resist.

If I had access to the Stompernet archives, I would always been concerned about whether what I blog about is in some way something I learned from them that might be considered proprietary.

Synergies

I first conceived my startup plans 4 years ago, and whilst they have mutated a fair chunk and there has been massive feature creep, the synergies with what Stompernet do are so strong, you can almost taste them.

To be honest when I first heard about the new launch, and that there would be a number of new tools introduced, whilst on one hand I thought my startup had finally been killed, on the other I was straining at the bit to see what they had come up with.
You see the SAAS I want to create are because they are what I would personally want to use. Some of the features encompass things I have blogged about, and some of the things I blog about are because I would be over the moon if someone implemented them. It would remove some of the feature creep that is weighing down any chance I have of self-funding or even Angel/VC funding, as they are looking for single solutions to problems.

e.g. I am not going to go out to create a new RSS reader and I would love an email service provider to finally provide all the features I am looking for, even if it partially limits the footprint of what I want to achieve.

In many ways the synergies are stronger than ever.

So I Asked Brad… Directly

I spelled all this out in an email to Brad, and have confirmation that there wouldn’t be a problem joining

Being a member is important, as without being a member, it is hard to compete in the pending Stomper 999 bonus battle.

Hang around… there will be something about bonuses coming up, as well as some reviews rants and unique tips

Andy Jenkins Left Stompernet, and explained why.

Various “concerned internet citizens” thought there was more to the story and went digging, and then making as many people aware of the documents as they could.

Note: I am not going to accuse anyone of being “trolls” or trying to fan the flames, and I don’t really want to go into whether anyone really has the right to know or discuss these things on open forums.

Ultimately Andy Jenkins made a response he probably didn’t have to make, but certainly lays a lot of ghosts to rest.

Why this post?

I will be exploring the reasons why I have decided to promote the Stomper 999 launch in some detail, but at the same time I knew that just mentioning Stompernet would encourage caring internet denizens to emerge and make people aware of the preceding couple of months of gossip.

This post is intended to be a way to “segment” dirty laundy, assure my readers I am aware of the situation, and the direct contact I have with both Brad & Andy over the last month or so has never suggested that these statements by Andy were in any way disputed.

If at any time I feel that comments are heading out of control, are disrespectful, incoherent, rambling, scaremongering, slanderous or just shouldn’t be here for any reason at my own discretion, I will moderate heavily, ban, block, or even just eradicate the whole post.

Here is what I commented over on Andy Jenkins new blog:-

So glad all the “interested observers” will hopefully stop sending me links to PDFs hoping I would mention something and should it happen in my comments I will have something definitive to point people to read.

The irony is that this is all about a company and team of people that is a huge success because they do so many things right.

To be 100% honest, whilst you could spend hours reading both of the long posts by Andy Jenkins, and all the discussion including comments by Brad and at least half of the Stompernet faculty, you could just take my word for it that this stuff is now water under the bridge, Brad & Andy are still friends, and Andy is partying in San Diego on Brad’s money.

Any discussion in other posts regarding Stompernet & Stomper 999 regarding Stompernet changes will just be deleted without any warning.

Google Reader still:-

• Doesn’t support simple HTTP authentication so you can use RSS for private stuff
• Doesn’t provide a mechanism so content producers can restrict sharing stuff

This is important… if you want to provide premium content from a membership site in a form that is most accessible for your subscribers.

It is even important for anyone using stock photos with a contract/license limited to a certain number of views for which you are personally liable. If you allow people to share blog posts that contain stock photos, it is a significant financial risk… but I am not a lawyer.

But segmentation? Not unless every subscriber had a unique feed… Feed Magic had it

In theory you could also segment private feeds provided by membership software such as Your Members, but that is complex customization.
And of course you would want your multi-modal marketing efforts – RSS, Twitter, Email, Video etc to all be somehow within. the same interface so you could segment based upon various content interaction.

If you have 5 different people who shared a segmented RSS feed, which was personalised, you would be in all kinds of problems – the viewing and click data would be useless… plus there are privacy concerns.

I Am About To Hammer My RSS Feed

I am sorry, blame Google
Blame the people who supported and evangelised sharing of RSS rather than exploring ways that it could be used to make it more personal, valuable and ultimately important in people’s lives.
RSS could be more than just reading blogs… there is no such thing as RSS spam – it is opt-in only.

There will be a percentage of my readers that will appreciate what I will be reviewing extensively over the next week or so, Stomper 999, including offering a significant bonus as soon as the site goes live.

Stomper 999 isn’t just about training… there are some nifty new tools as well, plus a few old favorites.

There are also likely to be 1000s of people looking (via search engines) for solid information about what is on offer, and I believe I can give some significant insight whether or not they feel my bonus offer is the one they are going to pounce on.
Syndication of my RSS feed helps people find my content.

You may have already seen something about the Stomper 999 launch – it has been spammed all over twitter, there has been chat on a number of forums, and a few people have already been hammering their mailing lists… at least those who don’t segment their email lists extensively.

If you haven’t.. it is worth checking out, and you will hear a lot more over the next few days, and that will include multiple blog post form me, many of which will contain useful insight.

I am also going to intersperse a few rants and unique tips for variety.

I apologise in advance if you are someone who believes everything should be free – information, tools, consulting time etc, or if you can’t budget to invest a little more in your business (I am a strong believer in only investing profits in your online education). If you can’t really afford something, don’t buy it… or do as I often do and be highly selective in where you invest your money.

If you have seen rumours about the new Stompernet pricing, the rumours are true, and it is a lot more affordable, and in many ways the offer at the new significantly lower price point is better than when you had to invest $800/month.

It will be a Mafia Offer – an offer too good to refuse, and one I can’t think of anyone who can honestly compete with it.

No I am not going to tell you how much just yet… affiliates have been asked not to reveal pricing, though I am not going to be the one leaking it.

Here is a blatant affiliate link - http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/SEO-Training.html

I listen to the “undercurrent” in SEO circles, and Stompernet is often criticized, though typically just by inferrence.

This post is to address some of the things I see repeatedly online, especially among SEO bloggers, and hopefully it will offer some additional benefit to bloggers in other niches.

1. Bad Information

SEO information has a “sell-by” date – whilst there are many exceptions where content could be looked on as perrenial, what often happens is that a blogger will create a fresh post with new information, leaving the old information still indexed and bringing in visitors.

The problem is there is a network effect, especially if content is heavily promoted and referenced, on sites which take less care with updating their content.

There are a number of solutions

• Update old posts, possibly referencing new posts
• Update older posts, and then recycle them, something Michel Fortin does very well with his copywriting posts
• Create a new post or page, and then use redirects to transfer link equity or optimizing HTML  links

One glaring example is how many SEO, Marketing & Design blogs have recommended using Robots.txt for handling duplicate content. That article is now 18 months old, was widely read, yet the web is innundated with blog posts still suggesting using Robots.txt on category and other archive pages.

This is often on “authority content” that gets hundreds of thousands of views.

It could be looked on as criminal negligence especially if you are still actively promoting that content.

There are serious resource problems in updating content, but far better to refresh old content than have to constantly churn out fresh articles.

The biggest resource problem is updating video, especially if it is widely syndicated – recreating a series of screen capture videos every time WordPress has a major update is one of the reasons why I have never attempted to offer any basic tutorials — it becomes dated too quickly.

Last I heard Stompernet have a staff of 30 people working on creating content for their members and keeping it up-to-date – it is hard to compete.

I am going to be going back through my archives, pruning, redirecting & rewriting – I really hope other SEO blogs and even the major SEO forums do the same. There is too much junk out there.

2. Unique Information & Secrets

Whilst it is possible that some information is totally unique on the web, such as if you carry out extensive testing yourself, the vast majority of information on the web isn’t unique, and quite often there are 100 different answers to the same problems, from 20 different, even authority sources.

Look back at that and do the math.

I have seen 5 different answers to the same problem from the same expert author – which one is correct?

Sometimes it is possible to do a site search and work out which solution is the most current recommended solution, but quite often someone will take action on out-dated content.

Whose fault is that?

Oh but what do you care, the disclaimer on your website will cover your ass.

3. Refined Marketing Process

Have you noticed that Stompernet and other successful marketers typically launch their new or refreshed content in cycles?

• They get their sales funnel in place
• They refine their landing pages
• Add value to their free content ensuring it reinforces their marketing
• They have a marketing sprint and then close the doors (scarecity)
• They get a new wave of inductees that is easier to teach systematically

With this method they can ensure a cohesive marketing message, and that the material they provide is accurate at the time they release it. Incremental upgrades are still possible on content that is paid for, but it is vastly more complicated.

Offering Premium SEO Content or Tools?

SEO bloggers offering premium content unfortunately think the SEO benefit of the links they might gain from their premium content and possibly the traffic, but don’t think about their affiliates.

Are you going to provide deep linking capability for your affiliates to your next major piece of SEO or Marketing linkbait, with a refined sales funnel and launch process?

Offering an SEO Service?

All the recycling process still applies, and you can think about how you can periodically suck your sales prospects further down the sales funnel, possibly with coordinated webinars and free “live” site evaluations.

What is important to remember is “Results in advance” – if people benefit from your knowledge in a material way, they are more likely to open their wallets.

4. Kicking Your SEO Optimized Behind

I am not going to get into a debate whether the best information within Stomping The Search Engines 2 or Stompernet’s Elite membership is any better than what can be achieved by joining one, or several other membership sites, possibly once you sift through outdated information.

As I recently mentioned about prior knowledge and disclosure, I don’t join SEO training sites, though I am probably overly cautious. It is quite possible I might even disagree with some of their content – that would be a fun discussion.

That being said I have learnt a huge amount from the material Stompernet have provided over the years for free in various forms, and much of the published work of their faculty from 4 years ago could still be looked on at cutting edge.

Being able to recommend STSE2 allows me to avoid writing about basic SEO concepts, because it is the best introductory SEO course I have seen, and I have it siting on the desk infront of me, a review sample sent 6 months ago.

When discussion took place about first link priority last year, there was certainly some disagreement, and also mention of a few “exceptions” to the rules.

My brain is wired to think of exceptions as things which can occur less frequently, or work-arounds that can be used to negate an otherwise common effect.

Prior Knowledge & Non-disclosure

Over the last few years a significant part of what I have written about on this blog has been about SEO – I try to be original, cutting-edge, providing a different perspective.

I don’t attend conferences, so what I write about isn’t something I have overheard at the bar, told in confidence, heard from a speaker on stage or anything else.

Recommending SEO products or courses is a little like tightrope walking – I don’t join any program that suggests either in the sales materials or legalese that it might be proprietary – I know tons of people treat proprietary knowledge casually – rip off other marketers etc.

I don’t

If information comes out in public that is from a notable source, and it has significant ramifications – thats worth blogging about, especially if I can offer perspective.

There are people I trust as sources, or whose opinion I value, even when they challenge my own view of the SEO world, and one of those is Halfdeck who occasionally blogs at SEO 4 Fun – last blog post a year ago. Better to catch Halfdeck on Twitter.

So I take stuff like this seriously…

Twitter conversation with Halfdeck on First Link Priority

What Halfdeck is saying, is that if I use some crazy anchor text such as “Thisiscrazy Anchortextthat doesn’texistanywhere” to do some testing, and that anchor text doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web, Google have stated (somewhere?) that they will count the anchor text even if it is nofollowed.

Sounds great for creating random long-tail phrases and comment spamming, but I digress.

As the tests I have seen used unique to the web anchor text, based upon what Halfdeck is saying, that is why the anchor text for the nofollowed links were used, and the second followed links were ignored for the anchor text.

Thus in theory, as a “Home” link is common as anchor text, if you nofollow it, Google will ignore it… totally.

Fortunately as part of their 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes Series, Stompernet have conveniently included a 23 minute 10 second video by Dan Thies designed to give you actionable training on creating your own SEO experiments.

Dan Ties Explains The Common Enemy in SEO & It Is Not Google

Testing First Link Priority

Based on what Halfdeck has stated, we need to use anchor text that already exists elsewhere on the web, not necessarily on the same domain, though a test purely on the same domain could potentially be just as valid.

Keyword Priming

First priority is to get what ever keyword we plan to test with “out there” on the web, being used as anchor text pointing to various pages that whilst they don’t contain the whole phrase, contain at least one of the words to retain some continuity.

So rather than use “WordPress SEO Themes” we might borrow a word from Dan and use “Groovy WordPress SEO Themes” and a number of other phrases, and ensure enough juice flows to get everything indexed.

Whilst the purest of the pure SEOs will disavow anyone who suggests it is good to have lots of sites out in the ether, plus convenient social media and forum profiles, one of the benefits is they are useful for running obscure SEO tests.

Set Up Keywords or Keyword Priming

Actual Tests

We now just need to test various link configurations using the same primed keywords, but to totally different pages.

Testing First Link Priority With Multiple Pages & Multiple Primed Keywords

Just Nofollowed Links

What Halfdeck pointed out only potentially invalidates the nofollowed link, but not how home pages and archives on WordPress blogs use the entry title for the first link, which often tends to be sub-optimal.

There are all kinds of solutions to handle the top navigation, including removing it totally, various javascript solutions, onclick, ajax etc.

Invalidating Other Tests

Google using nofollowed anchor text if the anchor text is unique could potentially also invalidate other tests.

As an example, in the 3rd video in the current Stompernet series Dan Thies demonstrates a simple test for whether alt tags in image links pass keyword reputation, but in that simple test he used a totally unique phrase.

What if Google only use alt text if the alt text is totally unique?

What if an image link is nofollowed? Is it treated different to a text link?

I only wish if Google have made a statement regarding treatment of nofollow anchor text that is unique, that is was a little more conspicuous.

Time to do more testing

Update

Last year there was also an interesting conversation when Debra Mastaler called Matt Cutts to the “batphone” over multiple links on the same page.

Matt replied twice, the second time to clarify what was being misinterpreted

Dudibob, no, I confirmed the converse: if the anchortext is the same, we’ll typically drop the second link.

This is the sort of thing where people can run experiments to see whether different anchortexts flow in various ways.

Matt Cutts – July 11th, 2008 at 9:29 am

This doesn’t tell us a whole lot… other than place an emphasis to do some testing.

Ultimately Stompernet have the resources and a team of wizards who thrive on creating statistical seo tests, so you don’t necessarily have to.

I don’t think there is one “premium” WordPress Theme that doesn’t claim to be perfect for SEO “out-of-the-box”, so I thought I would bash some theme developer heads around and maybe knock some sense into them.

They might achieve 50:50 of what could be expected of a true SEO theme (though I haven’t seen the latest Semiologic Pro out in the wild), and potentially with the aid of 3rd party plugins currently available, they could reach 80:20.
However most claim they don’t need 3rd party plugins to achieve their eminence in WordPress SEO

That doesn’t leave WordPress SEO plugins off the hook, there isn’t one plugin that gets beyond 60:40 or with some tweeking possibly 70:30, depending on what factors you feel are important, or are aware of.

Awareness is certainly one of the problems…

First Link Priority

First link priority is something that was first raised as a concern at the end of 2007 in a number of tests carried out by Michael VanDeMar.

You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers

Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text – Part Two

In mid-2008 there was continued discussion at SEOmoz, it was debunked by SEO CO, and “re-bunked” by SEO Scientist

Shaun also did some testing in October 2008 on first link for internal links.

Michael followed up with even more testing in November

Now around mid-August 2008 Stompernet were also starting to ramp up the launch of their new premium SEO training product, Stomping the Search Engines 2.

This product actually has some very personal history, as I was first expecting it to launch… in 2005 – I was pretty much a newbie online marketer, intrigued by SEO and blogging (I was already into internal linking in a big way) and approached Andy Jenkins to see if I could blag an early review copy.

That version never materialized, but I belive became a cornerstone of their coaching program and eventually Stompernet.

In Stomping the Search Engines 2.0, Module 4 Session 4C, Leslie Rohde talks about a concept called First Link Priority. This training occurs at 4 minutes and 9 seconds into the video.

Grab the 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes Course to learn more about First Link Priority

I don’t know how much Stompernet have tested this, exactly when they started their testing, or when they made this information available to their members, but lets give Michael VanDeMar the benefit of the doubt as the first person testing this, and Stompernet were probably testing this early 2008.

I have always stated you want the content first, before any navigation, but had assumed a nofollowed link wouldn’t be counted. For a long time I was using a nofollow link in my header, and many of the blog posts above came during my “blogging break”.

Now open a new tab in your browser, and visit a few blogs running premium WordPress themes that supposedly are “Perfect” for SEO, and have everything covered, and many are even heavily promoted by notable people in the SEO community.

There are 2 things you will notice:-

1. If they have some kind of header navigation, it appears in the source code before the content
2. Many of them use a home link at the beginning of the navigation, and some even nofollow the link in a vain attempt to stop the link counting for both juice and anchor text.
3. If you look at the source code, you will find they are still using SEO plugins of various types.

If you know what you are doing with CSS, you can have top navigation appear even in the source code for the footer of your theme.

Referential Integrity

I must admit the first time I heard the term “referential integrity” in connection with SEO was in a free Stompernet video which you can gain access to just for joining their mailing list, as part of their 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes series. It is a term normally asociated with databases, though I can understand why Leslie “borrowed” the term.

I loath explaining things in depth when someone else has already done an excellent job, thus I strongly recommend you sign up, as Leslie does a great job of explaining an “emergent property” that isn’t on any patents.

Grab the 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes Course to learn more about referential integrity

One major factor explained in Leslie’s video is what you say your own pages are about, not just the on-page factors, but also how you reference your own pages.

As “pagerank sculpting” was the big SEO topic of 2008 (something Leslie first taught in 2004), we could look on this as “keyword sculpting” or “topic sculpting” – please understand this isn’t exactly the same as siloing – very close cousins but not the same.

In many ways “topic sculpting” is repairing the damage caused by lazy webmasers using modern content management systems, pumping out content pages and internal navigation on auto-pilot, and only really caring about the links they received from external sources, often resorting to search engine spamming to gain referrential links with the anchor text they required.

That however is only the “confirmation” element in the above screenshot.

Definitions

Just to avoid confusion, I want to define the following terms

• Entry Title – The title you add in the text entry field above the visual editor in WordPress, that is then used in various WordPress functions to create default slugs, the “Entry Title” DIV on Posts and Pages, and is also used in wp_list_pages(), wp_list_posts() and even the default meta titles.
• Meta Title – this is the title that appears in the header of each page, and appears as the title in Google search results. Sometimes this is confusingly labelled as “page title” within WordPress SEO plugins.
• Short Title – A title that can be used as anchor text for navigation elements that is optimized for passing of internal reputaion or anchor text to the destination page.

I should also point out that the idea of Short Text isn’t new, other CMS solutions have had this feature for years, and the ModX community use it as a key unique selling point of why ModX might be better than WordPress.

WordPress Pages – Topic Sculpting

You have always had the ability to precisely define the anchor text of WordPress pages, simply by creating your navigation menus manually with a little HTML directly in your theme files, or using a text widget.

By Default if you use a widget or theme using wp_list_page() then the link anchor text will be the Entry Title for the page.

Some work has been done to optimize the anchor text pointing at WordPress pages – the Thesis theme has recently introduced ways to define specific anchor text, and there are existing WordPress plugins that achieve the same functionality, or possibly with more flexibility such as Page Lists Plus by Tim Holt.

Page Links Plus allows you to define the anchor text used for links to WordPress Pages

This still isn’t a perfect solution:-

• You might want to use multiple widgets contain 7 links plus or minus 3 (this would be a concept familiar to you if you have watched a previous Stompernet video series, and downloaded the Stompernet Scrutinizer)
• You will probably want different sets of links or widgets appearing on different pages – there are some clunky solutions available, maybe things will improve with WordPress 2.8
• If you are a geek interested in optimizing your conversion, you might even want to split test things – with the way I have created my split test code for WordPress, I can actually split test different widgets on the page, removal of widgets etc.

WordPress Posts Topic Sculpting

With WordPress posts, things become a lot more complicated, though the hardest part was realising it is a problem that needs to be fixed.

I have deliberately created the Entry Title for this post extremely long – you will see post titles used of various lengths on blogs. General advice from SEOs is to ensure you have keywords somewhere near the beginning as it was historically thought that the position of the keywords in links, headings and meta titles matters.

Shaun actually narrowed down the maximum length for anchor text to 55 characters last year.

Based upon my Entry Title, that would mean my anchor text for this post would be:-

“A Geeky Look & Some Simple Solutions To Achieving First”

Sucks doesn’t it?

But with a standard WordPress installation, using conventional blogging techniques, even using premium SEO optimized themes, that is the crap anchor text you end up with.

Yes I am using slightly crude terminology, but when I was at college studying engineering, we had a technical term for the material that Lada engine blocks were made out of… crapite.

WordPress could be likened to a Lada

Lada – Credit

A Lada can get you from A to B – technologically fairly simple, but an enthusiast can tinker with the engine, add “go faster” stripes, and get some performance out of it.

In many ways WordPress is similar

WordPress Post Anchor Text Usage

To understand all the complexities of title use in WordPress, you have to know where they can potentially be used, baring in mind the purpose for the links.

How Different Titles Are Typically Used In WordPress

(I created a nice, compliant XHTML table in Seamonkey composer, but WordPress without plugins hates tables)

The Simple Solution

Whilst everything above might seem extremely complex, there is in fact a very simple solution that can be used with almost every theme, without modification, other than a radically different approach to CSS styling and conventional post entry.

However this approach requires that you through aside any misconceptions that might have been falsely hammered into you that content is king, and you don’t really need to think about SEO, just create great content.

You need to think like an SEO & Marketer… just a little

Got it? Great!

Please forgive me, I really couldn’t resist using a provocative title in the example.

You don’t have to be quite so bold with your headline.

Your Entry Title would still ideally be H1 on single pages, and H2 on navigation pages, but styled to be a lot less conspicuous.

This method effectively forces you to use custom excerpts with HTML, otherwise you are not going to have much of anything to encourage clicks.

The Geeky Solution

There are plenty of intermediate solutions, many using custom fields, modified themes etc.

This is the personal solution I am currently using on Andybeard.eu

This is rough code… there are some CSS problems in Internet Explorer resulting in links being hidden, I am only currently handling navigation links from the home page and various archives, and I still need to add some simple code to check whether the Headspace WordPress SEO plugin is installed.

Here is the end result:-

Geeky solution to First Link Priority & Referential Integrity With WordPress

Headspace allows you to define custom meta data for each post, that then gives you a text entry box along with other SEO data entry fields.

This is actually vital for work-flow, having all the options you need to think about within a single panel, and because Headspace is a framework with plugin modules, it is possible to simplify the interface to only include the items you need, and then hide other functions behind the “advanced” link.

The Headspace WordPress SEO Plugin allows you to add custom meta entry fields that can be used in themes directly, or using filters

Here is some code to play with, taken straight from my functions.php of the child theme I use with the Thematic theme framework.

<?php
// Information in Post Header TOTAL REPLACEMENT
function gwo_thematic_postheader() {
    global $id, $post, $authordata;

    // Create $posteditlink
    $posteditlink .= '<a href="' . get_bloginfo('wpurl') . '/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&amp;post=' . $id;
    $posteditlink .= '" title="' . __('Edit post', 'thematic') .'">';
    $posteditlink .= __('Edit', 'thematic') . '</a>';
    $posteditlink = apply_filters('thematic_postheader_posteditlink',$posteditlink); 

    if (is_page()) {
        $posttitle = '<script type="text/javascript">utmx_section("PostHeader")</script>' . '<h1 class="entry-title">' . get_the_title() . '</h1>' . '</noscript>' . "\n";
	} elseif (is_single()) {
        $posttitle = '<h1 class="entry-title">' . get_the_title() . "</h1>\n";
    } elseif (is_404()) {
        $posttitle = '<h1 class="entry-title">' . __('Not Found', 'thematic') . "</h1>\n";
    } else {

$shortie = MetaData::get_custom ('shorttitle');
	if ($shortie == '') {
		$shortie = MetaData::get_page_title ($post->ID);
	}
	if ($shortie != '') {

        $shortlink = get_permalink();

		$shorttitle .= '<<a href="';
        $shorttitle .= $shortlink;
        $shorttitle .= '" title="';
        $shorttitle .= __('Permalink to ', 'thematic') . the_title_attribute('echo=0');
        $shorttitle .= '" rel="bookmark">';
        $shorttitle .= $shortie;
        $shorttitle .= "</a>\n";

// Open Div For Our Shortlink Tab
		$posttitle .= '<div class="short-tab">' . "\n";
// For IE
        $posttitle .= '<div class="tab-canv">';
        $posttitle .= $shorttitle;
        $posttitle .= '</div>' . "\n";
// End IE
// For All other browsers (SVG Object)
        $posttitle .= '<![if !IE]>' . "\n";
        $posttitle .= '<object class="tab-obj" type="image/svg+xml" data="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns=\'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\' xmlns:xlink=\'http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\'><a xlink:href=\'' . $shortlink . '\' target=\'new\'><text text-anchor=\'end\' padding-top=\'10\' x=\'-10\' y=\'20\' font-family=\'Tahoma\' font-size=\'18\' transform=\'rotate(-90)\' text-rendering=\'optimizeSpeed\' fill=\'#888\'>' . $shortie . '</text></a></svg>">' . "\n";

// Fallback Old Browsers
        $posttitle .= '<div class="tab-old_canv">' . "\n";
        $posttitle .= $shorttitle . "\n";
        $posttitle .= '</div>' . "\n";
// End Fallback
        $posttitle .= '</object>' . "\n";
        $posttitle .= '<![endif]>' . "\n";
// End For All other browsers
        $posttitle .= '</div>' . "\n";

}
	$posttitle .= '<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="';
        $posttitle .= get_permalink();
        $posttitle .= '" title="';
        $posttitle .= __('Permalink to ', 'thematic') . the_title_attribute('echo=0');
        $posttitle .= '" rel="bookmark">';
        $posttitle .= get_the_title();
        $posttitle .= "</a></h2>\n";
    }
    $posttitle = apply_filters('thematic_postheader_posttitle',$posttitle); 

    $postmeta = '<div class="entry-meta">';
    // $postmeta .= '<span class="author vcard">';
    // $postmeta .= __('By ', 'thematic') . '<a class="url fn n" href="';
    // $postmeta .= get_author_link(false, $authordata->ID, $authordata->user_nicename);
    // $postmeta .= '" title="' . __('View all posts by ', 'thematic') . get_the_author() . '">';
    // $postmeta .= get_the_author();
    // $postmeta .= '</a></span><span class="meta-sep"> | </span>';
    // $postmeta .= __('Published: ', 'thematic');
    // $postmeta .= '<span class="entry-date"><abbr class="published" title="';
    // $postmeta .= get_the_time(thematic_time_title()) . '">';
    // $postmeta .= get_the_time(thematic_time_display());
    // $postmeta .= '</abbr></span>';
    // Display edit link
    if (current_user_can('edit_posts')) {
        $postmeta .= ' <span class="meta-sep">|</span> ' . $posteditlink;
    }
    $postmeta .= "</div><!-- .entry-meta -->\n";
    $postmeta = apply_filters('thematic_postheader_postmeta',$postmeta); 

    if ($post->post_type == 'page' || is_404()) {
        $postheader = $posttitle;
    } else {
        $postheader = $posttitle . $postmeta;
    }

	echo apply_filters( 'gwo_thematic_postheader', $postheader ); // Filter to override default post header
}
add_filter('thematic_postheader', 'gwo_thematic_postheader');
?>

The modified section (for first link priority and referential integrity) is commented in the code (Begin / End Shortie Code)

The logic is fairly simple:-

1. If short title is defined, use it
2. If there isn’t a short title, but a meta title is defined, use that instead
3. Otherwise don’t display a short title at all and stick with the original entry title as the first link and anchor text.

I will repeat, the code is rough, and if the Headspace plugin is currently switched off, it will break your blog.

I used SFV Object, you could also use SIFR to replace and style text, or custom images that somehow dynamically style the text link, though make it relevant to the text link and article, and maybe use GD Library to add a text caption.

Here is the CSS I am currently using. It is broken in WordPress in Internet Explorer, at least using The Thematic Framework, though works in isolation on some simple test HTML.

html>body .tab-canv { display: none }
html>body .tab-obj  { display: block }
.home #content .post {margin:0 0 0 40px;}
.archive #content   {margin:0 0 0 40px;}
.tab-canv, .tab-obj { height:300px; width:30px; }
.tab-old_canv { font-family: 'Tahoma', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; }
.short-tab {position:absolute; margin: 0px 0px 0px -40px; max-width: 30px; width:30px}

<![if IE]>
.tab-canv { float:left; text-align:right; padding-bottom:20; filter: flipv() fliph(); writing-mode: tb-rl; font-size:18px; font-family: Tahoma; background-color: white; display: block; color: #888 }
.tab-canv h2{font-size:18px;}
.tab-obj  { display: none }
<![endif]>

Please make sure you check out The 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes from Stompernet – learn your SEO from the source

Special Note: This is the kind of content I will be preparing for private member access soon, and at least some of this content once I have refined the code a little, will be removed from the public.

Please check out the follow-on post in this series

Is Stompernet Wrong About First Link Priority?

As well as offering an alternative opinion about first link priority, you will learn how to run your own SEO experiments.

I have been considering offering a bonus for Launch Tree, but whatever I could offer currently isn’t at the stage of completion I would be happy with “out in the wild”.

I am however on a lot of mailing lists and have been seeing both the promotion efforts and bonuses roll in.

Whilst there are tons of incredible bonuses on offer, many full of items you will never read or use, I would prefer to highlight the effort Andy Jenkins and Stompernet have gone to in their preselling of Launch Tree.
Apparently the bonus is a process map and videos on how Stompernet itself was launched, which has never been seen.

The StomperNet launch was the biggest launch in the Internet Marketing Education Space, and it has been since 2006. And only a handful of people know exactly every move and pivot, and position statement, and launch object, and stick mechanism that was used to pull it off.

As an example check out their “Tripled Sales Conversions” video created to highlight some of the sales process.

The other thing I want to highlight that coincides with my “Affiliate Product Launches I Refuse to Promote” post is that the bonus Andy is offering is specific to this launch, and nothing to do with products (that I know of) either current or planned.

If at this time I offered a bonus myself for Launch Tree, I would probably in some way reduce the value of my future product offerings.

Here is Andy Jenkins’ naked affiliate link http://www.launchtree.com/a/go?a=571 – make sure you clear cookies before ordering.

If karma is enough of a bonus, I am not going to refuse people using my link

Don’t forget to also check out Stomping The Search Engines 2 while you are over at the Stompernet site, a Real value $497 SEO course for $1

You need to learn about something called “Referential Integrity” – a name for something that has been rattling around in my head for 18 months in various stages of vagueness, and how best to handle it with WordPress.

p.s. this isn’t the first time I have linked to someone else’s review or bonus during a product launch. There is a method to my madness.

• It is not for karma
• It is not just to get a few more eyeballs on STSE2
• I love highlighting great content (like Andy’s video) but that isn’t the whole reason either

One of these days I really hope I can give you more details.