Monday December 22nd Roundup

 Well, I am away for Christmas week, so this post has to get finished early, meaning that we’re a little short of content.

This week we have interface tricks for Omniture’s SiteCatalyst, some SEO science on why you should sometimes “avoid the average”, research on how social media links affect ranking, and our own Erik Vold on how to modify adword tracking code.

• Over at Search Engine Land, Michael Gray of Wolf Howl is discussing the relationship between social media links and organic rankings. He selected four URLs, analyzing titles, dig titles, number of backlinks and rank across all three major search engines, finding some interesting things, including that ranking from social media appears to stick.
• If you can ignore the god awful color selection (light grey on white? Seriously, guys) link relationships has a good article on the relationship of Zipf’s Law to natural search footprints, and why you should sometimes avoid the average. A nice reminder about what really looks “natural”.

• NETTUTS decided to tackle the problem of IE6’s transparency issues. Given that 20% of W3C’s traffic is still through IE6, you probably want to consider how your images will display in it.

• The Omniture Blog has a great article on SiteCatalyst Interface Time-Savers. Included is how to add/remove metrics with a double click (you already know this, don’t you?), as well as view reports in trend view, reorganize menus, create global calculated metrics, and more. Over all a very useful article for people struggling with the rather complex SiteCatalyst analytics tool and experienced analysts looking to save some time alike.
• A second from Omniture, this time on the collaboration of testing ideas. They discuss a series of testing ideas, in the hope of building a widespread dialog discussing ideas for testing success. Over all a fantastic idea.
• Our own Erik Vold came up with a very cool way to track conversions as button clicks, or what have you.

• Regulars on our Monday roundup, seomoz has a piece on collecting past due payments from clients. Their ideas aren’t as much fun as my guns and liquor approach, but I think your clients may appreciate them more.