If you really want to measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, stop obsessing about rankings.

Search engine rankings remain a ‘nice’ diagnostic tool and should be tracked as a metric, but rankings are not the most telling measure of SEO success.

Rankings Can Be Different for Each Searcher and the giant success or dismal failure that a particular ecommerce merchant perceives may be isolated to his or her search results. Truly understanding the search factors for your site is one of the most effective ways of helping your team focus on the measures that really matter, and halting obsessive rank checking.

Which factors influence the search results for individual users….Read more.

And managing your time more efficiently isn’t the answer.

You may remember my article about outsourcing your life, which features an interview with Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling book The Four-Hour Workweek. The article revealed how you can hire a virtual assistant (VA) for as little as five dollars per hour and delegate many of the items on your to-do list to that VA in order to save you time and boost your productivity.

Delegating isn’t the only key to reducing your workload and your stress level, however. You also need to be discerning about what you take on: Not everything deserves to go on your to-do list.

Even more importantly, some things deserve to be on your list that aren’t there now. I’m talking about career goals, or life goals.

When was the last time you prioritized your “to-do” list based on what will help further your marketing career instead of merely what will get you through your week? Do you have things on that list that you’d like to have accomplished one year from now? Or in five years?

I sat down for a podcast interview with best-selling author David Allen, the guru of the productivity methodology known as “GTD” (which stands for Getting Things Done and is also the name of his New York Times Best-Seller). We discussed life and time management, and the psychology behind why so many of us struggle with accomplishing what we want in our careers and in our personal lives.

I have already written about GTD for MarketingProfsâ??an article titled “Clearing the Clutter: How Busy Marketers Can Get Things Done. In it, I wrote:

Once you stop using your brain as the holding tank for all the important things that you need to do today, tomorrow, next week, or even further into the future, the sooner you become clear and your mind will be open to wander, unfettered. Only then can your creativity truly be unleashed, and you reach a state of flow that David Allen refers to as “Mind like water.”

“Mind like water” is a pretty foreign concept to many marketers and professionals because of the way we’ve trained ourselves to think about our day. Daily to-do lists, constant phone and email interruptions, and other minutiae bog us down and distract us. The “mind like water” simile originated from the martial arts but can be applied to business because it describes a state of mind where the little things don’t get to you.

When you over- (or under-) react to the world around you, by not doing what you need to do in a timely fashion, your procrastination creates a state of chaos that affects your ability to succeed. So instead of your controlling yourself in your environment in order to get to where you want to be, your world controls you, limiting your chances for personal and professional success.

In the interview David suggested that when you avoid tasks you’re actually allowing yourself to be distracted because the task is something daunting that is outside your comfort zoneâ??even though that one thing could become the most successful thing you’ve ever done.

By over-thinking and embedding decisions in every task, you create barriers to your productivity, adding another layer of procrastinationâ??which, as I’m sure we all know, leads to stress.

One of the biggest barriers to “getting things done” is not understanding what time management really means.

David said in the interview, “You can’t manage time, you actually only manage what you do during time.” Translation? To get more done, we have to look at how we manage our focus, our actions, and our activities, because “time” doesn’t change. So “time management” is actually a misnomer.

Here are a few tips from David that I’d like to share with you to help better manage your focus and achieve your goals:

• Manage your tasks by taking the right action: Instead of prioritizing your to-do list, decide what tasks you will commit yourself through to completion. Then, figure out where and when you need to accomplish your goal, so you can better manage your tasks. For example, if you have a project management list, you might want to determine what pieces you want to be involved with, what you want to delegate, and what tools you’ll need to complete the project. From there, you can better fit the project into your schedule, because you know what you need to do and when you need to do it.
• Minimize your time stealers: Anything that distracts you turns into a time stealer, because it’s literally robbing you of precious time. Television is a big “time stealer” in our personal lives, but there are other things we do at work that affect us daily. Constantly checking your email or voicemail, or obsessing about smaller details on projects, can have an impact on our productivity. Many time stealers are essential to our work day, so the trick is to learn when these tasks are appropriate and determine whether or not you’re doing them too much or too often.
• Review your tasks weekly, not daily: One of the most common pitfalls in task management is to obsess about the unimportant details of your day. From up-to-the-minute schedules for lunch to clearing out your “in box,” daily to-do lists are difficult to maintain in the longer term because of the “people” factor. In a perfect world, robots would do everything on your list in the order you’ve prioritized them, but life doesn’t work that way. By looking at your to-do list on a higher levelâ??in a weekly appointment with yourselfâ??you can block out time to fit in your goals when it is appropriate during the week. And (here’s the best part) you’ll get more done.

Whether you work as a marketing intern or as vice-president, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has something for everyone. His concept is not just about managing your tasks; it’s about clearing out the clutter in your head to achieve “mind like water.”

With such a frame of mind you will not only “get things done” in your career but but also build a successful framework that will reach further than just “today.”

I invite you to listen to my interview with David Allen to learn more time- and sanity-saving tips that can help you in both your personal and your professional life.

In my brief tour of Oldpueblotraders.com, I found plenty of opportunities for major traffic gains through search engine optimization. The first one became immediately obvious as I was loading the home page. Directing my Web browser to load http://www.oldpueblotraders.com/, I was immediately redirected to http://www.oldpueblotraders.com/pagebuilder/.

Unfortunately, the type of redirect used was a temporary one (302) instead of a permanent one (301). I discovered this through the use of a server header checker (http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php) A 301 redirect passes PageRank and link popularity to the destination URL, whereas a 302 redirect does not. Luckily, this is an easy thing to fix.

For more about this eCommerce website audit, visit the original article on Multichannel Merchant here.

…updating and refreshing your SEO toolbox requires a continual flow of information to keep up with the job’s demands. Keeping your SEO toolbox well organized and current has never been more challenging.

Read the full SEO Toolbox article at ClickZ.

If Little Pixie Gifts has an SEO weak point, it is in the URLs. As search engines spider the URL addresses along with title tags and page content, each URL should reflect the keyword theme of the page. Instead, Little Pixie Gifts has URLs like http://www.littlepixiegifts.com.au/cart.php?target=category&category_id=62. While such a URL doesnâ??t necessarily hurt things from a search engine perspective, it certainly doesnâ??t help.

To read the full article, visit Practical Ecommerce.

With rich media in plan, dynamic Web site constructs in motion, and competing forces all around, putting together a natural search strategy has many complex components. Just as a wetland must work in harmony with the environment to produce desired results, so too must an online organization provide resources for understanding natural search, lest the spiders get bogged down by the muck.

For more about this topic, visit the full article on ClickZ.

To learn more about this tactic, read the full article at ClickZ.

Technology is not a means to higher conversion rates; it is just a tool that must be properly managed, configured, and implemented in order to reach your goals. Just having a great CMS with an advanced shopping cart system is not enough â?? there are no â??set it and forget itâ?? solutions for improving your conversion rate.

For more on this topic, read the full article here.

Retailers can leverage this dialog to gain insight into marketing research, generate product feedback, conduct merchandise testing, and initiate product improvements. By taking a dialog approach to social media instead of a louder, flashier version of commercial interruption, you can learn what consumers want, and how they want it, on a one-to-one basis.

For more on this topic, read the complete article here.

Pinkorpunk.com is a fairly new website, which may partially explain its PageRank of 0. But, the other factor in the ranking is the site’s small number of inbound links. Yahoo! sees 45 links from outside sites while Google doesn’t list any at all. Inbound links translate to PageRank, and higher PageRank translates to better search engine results. This site, with its vibrant content, should have no problem garnering links! A linking campaign is in order here. Research online directories and get listed in those that still have decent PageRank (many have been recently demoted by Google in that regard). A blog is also in order, especially with such hip content. Online press should be a target as well, as should social media avenues like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook.

For more about this niche eCommerce store, visit the Practical eCommerce website audit here.