Yes, this is very irritating, glad to have switched this option OFF.

To hide your currently playing music from the Facebook ticker, just head into Spotify’s Preferences and scroll down to the “Facebook” section. Uncheck the “Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to Facebook’s Open Graph” box, and that’s it—your music will no longer show up anywhere on Facebook. There’s no need to disconnect Spotify from Facebook, and no reason to wade around through Faceobok’s privacy settings.

Read “How to Stop Spotify from Posting Every Song You Listen to on Facebook” on Lifehacker

Looks like Google’s new (ish) +1 button is being rolled out more widely with the news that it’s being added to AdSense. It’ll be interesting to see how much difference it makes.

Starting in October, the +1 button will begin to appear on display ads on your site. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections.  We believe that these recommendations could lead your readers to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

Read “+1: Now making Display ads more relevant” on Inside AdSense

I was lucky enough to beta test Article Samurai this month, the latest product from the Market Samurai boys and with the product launched today thought I’d give my initial feedback.

The product is designed so that internet marketers can easily spin articles automatically and distribute them to a wide number of article directories and blog networks, cutting down on the amount of time it takes to do.

First of all, if you’re familiar with Market Samurai then Article Samurai will be immediately familiar to you. However, I did find it a bit tricky to work out how to use at first, especially when it was spinning phrases I wanted it to leave alone. That said, I did work it out and no doubt it’s covered in their video instructions anyway – I didn’t look at those. Auto content spinning is provided by Content Boss (up to 50 articles/month) but I’d like to see an easy way to import pre-spun content from software such as The Best Spinner – maybe that’s still to come.

After submitting an article it goes through a manual review stage to ensure that the quality of articles being send to the network is high. While this delays the article in being published, it will help preserve the integrity of the networks over time and is a smart move – it will keep the spammers out.

I’ve also used Article Marketing Automation for about a year and while the articles get a reasonable amount of syndication, they don’t tend to rank in the top 100 and so don’t provide much in the way of linkjuice. Likewise with a similar service, Article Ranks, which is good if you have few articles to syndicate as they have a “pay as you go” option of a few dollars per article.

However, I was surprised to see articles syndicated through Article Samurai were appearing in Google. Not on the first couple of pages, sure, but they were ranking. In fact, I first thought that a competitor in one of my niches was waging an article war before realising the articles were mine! During this period the target website climbed from #4 to #2, although I’m also ranking at #1 and #5 with other websites.

So, based on that it appears that Article Samurai is going to be much more effective than similar services, and if you get some links to your articles they may even be able to rank on the first page. Obviously that depends on the niche and strength of competition, but is a nice bonus.

When I heard the retail price of $197/month I was a little surprised. However, I do believe it will be massively effective and if you are Going Pro then you should definitely be looking at Article Samurai – I have signed up for the full service (at $97/month for Beta testers).

At that price it isn’t aimed at newbie internet marketers, so if you’re just starting out you need to learn the ropes first. However, it does give you access to some major networks according to the company behind it, although they can’t divulge which networks those are to help keep them below the radar. I’ll be using it over the next three months and will report back what it can do.

Click here for the Article Samurai website

Earlier on I wanted a quick way to pull all the URLs listed in a chunk of HTML code. I did think about putting my PHP skills to use, but after thinking about it for about 2 seconds decided to see if someone had a useful online tool to do the same thing.

Most of the results were about how to write code to do the job, but on page 3 of the search results, there it was. All you need to do is copy some HTML into the text box and it will output a CSV file with the links in.

Simple and brilliant!

Click here for the Extract Href from HTML tool.

A recent experience has got me thinking about good web design and how poorly it is understood even by many professional web designers. The problem stems from thinking of web design as being an aesthetic issue, and although that may be true for some websites, it is certainly not the main one; stats show that for many markets the most effective web design is one that is quite basic and almost under-designed. Based on that I’ve created 7 DON’Ts of web design for small businesses – let me know what you think.

1. Don’t think that the main criterion by which a website design is judged is how it looks

Good website design is about creating an effective website, one that encourages targeted visitors to take a specific action, whether that is get in contact, join your mailing list, or – best of all – place an order online. In order to achieve that both the objective of each page needs to be decided and the preferred action made clear; make sure your website knows more than just design.

2. Don’t start anything until you’ve done the SEO research

Please, please, please – don’t start planning your website until you’ve done at least some research. Unless you know what people are searching for you won’t know how your site should really be structured at what keywords to be used. The best tool for this is Market Samurai without a doubt.

3. Don’t include something clever just because you can

Too many websites look cluttered. Part of the problem is trying to do too many things on one page, which means the visitor just ends up confused with the result they hit the back button. You’ve got to ask yourself, if someone visits that particular page, what are they most likely to be looking for. Once you know that it’s simple – provide that information and nothing else. Remember this mantra – one page, one job.

4. Don’t forget structure

A good design also also about how the site is structured.  First, you need to make sue visitors can find the information or products they are looking for quickly and easily. Second, search engines need to be able to find all the valuable content on your site so that it list your in the results. And good internal linking tells the search engines which pages you consider most important and give more traction in those in the listings.

5. Don’t forget to have a clear call to action

You may think it’s obvious what you want visitors to do, but do they? So many website lack a clear call to action, focusing the visitor’s eye on what you want them to do next. Don’t think that they will spend time looking if it isn’t clear – they won’t and if they can’t find it quickly they’ll leave your site and go elsewhere. So make it large, make it red, make it stand out; and test, test, test until you can’t do any better.

6. Don’t over-design

Get the template right, decide how the information will be presented throughout the site (photo or video goes here, text goes here) but don’t try and design it pixel by pixel. That may work on the printed page, but it isn’t how HTML works and you’ll get different results in different browsers anyway. Pick a template, modify it and use the same template throughout unless you really have to.

7. Don’t use Flash

Flash sites mostly look awful, don’t work on many devices (including iPads) and don’t rank in Google. So just don’t.

If you’re interested in how I can help you develop your website please get in touch. Going back to first principals I can help you design a good looking website that will rank well in Google AND convert more visitors to customers.

It struck me recently that almost every single person I know really has no idea what I do. Worse, they have clear ideas about what I do that are completely wrong. So here I wanted to redress that a bit.

1. Web designer

I can set up WordPress and really get the most out of it, but I almost always use pre-designed themes and simply add a new banner to them. I’m also pretty conversant in HTML and CSS if I have to. And sometimes I like building websites – if you ask me I may do yours. But… I am not a web designer.

2. Programmer

Likewise, I can get by in PHP and Javascript when I have to, I even have some programming books on my shelf, before I worked out that it was far easier to outsource my requirements to India for a small fee. These days I confine my programming to hacking WordPress plugins to do what I want -  I would never even think about coding a plugin from scratch. And while I do derive some benefit from programming, it tends to make me a bit… autistic … if I have to spend long periods at it. No… I am not a programmer.

3. Spammer

I do send out mass emails to my list regularly, but everyone on that list has opted in and can opt out if they so desire. I send at least one email a week and mostly they are well received – I get massively positive feedback and my record CTR for a mailing is a staggering 80%. That all means I am not a spammer.

So what are you then?

Simple. I am an internet marketer, an online entrepreneur. I specialise in identifying profitable markets and exploiting those markets by means of the internet and my primary means of doing so is search engine optimization, or SEO. Ever wondered why some website rank higher than others in Google? That’s SEO at work.

If you’d like to use my services please get in contact. Even if you don’t have a website, I can help you with the entire process. Complete the form by clicking here and I’ll be in touch.

Matt Cutts has published an article about how Google intends to fight web spam going forward. The first thing he mentions is low quality sites; the second is “content farms”, which he defines as “sites with shallow or low-quality content”. According to Cutts:

As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.

Read “Google search and search engine spam” on the Official Google Blog