SEO Question: When writing content for our websites what is the optimal copy length? Is page length important for search engine optimization?

Answer: Every page and every site is unique. There is no universal correct or incorrect answer to how much content is right.

Overall Considerations:

Optimize For User Experience:

A page should not just be optimized for search. It should also be optimized for user experience. If you optimize just for search it could be to the detriment of your business.

One of my friends has most of their content on their home page. Because their homepage has most of the content and the most link equity it gets most of their traffic. They are afraid to move the content because they do not want to lose traffic, but if they moved the content they would probably maintain about the same amount of traffic, drastically improve their conversion rates, and do a better job of filtering the prospective clients.

Structure Your Ideas:

The content needs to be structured so that it is easy to consume. Use subheaders to make the content easy to consume. Also break pages into logical chunks that are easy to site or link at...don't write endless stream of mind random copy if you want people to read it.

Avoid creating low value near duplicate pages, as duplicate content filters are getting more aggressive.

Variation is Good:

Make sure there is variation amongst your pages so as not to set an unnatural pattern or give your writing arbitrary constraints. Some ideas take many words to express. Some take less. Real content sites do not have exactly 500 +/- 5 words on each page. Use as many words as necessary to express your ideas.

If you are trying to market a piece of content over-invest in ensuring it is of high quality. If you want your content to act as your marketing by being linkworthy make it appear comprehensive and well researched. If you are the first person with an idea make sure you do it well enough to spread your message far enough that you become synonymous with that idea.

Emphasize Your Style:

You also need to consider your personal style. Instapundit can write short snappy posts because Glenn Reynolds is a great writer who needs few words to convey his meaning, and tries to be first with the news. Some pages may have more credibility with less words on them. If a currency converter was given an obtuse name and had many keywords separated by commas in the footer it might make the tool look less credible and less trustworthy.

Omit Words:

I just started reading The Elements of Style, which states Omit needless words. In Don't Make Me Think Steve Krug shortened this down to Omit words.

Good writing does not add extra words for the sake of word count. Each word carries purpose and meaning. I can tell when I haven't read books in a while because I notice my writing gets looser.

General Search Indexing Trends:

Getting content indexed is becoming a major hurdle. If you have forums and other noisy parts to your site it would be a good idea to have them segregated on a subdomain away from your higher quality and more in depth editorial quality content.

There are three general trends going on that make me think longer copy is better than shorter

• Since Google's relevancy algorithms are looking more for natural writing, the value of having small hyper-focused pages is not as good as it once was...good copy gets just as much traffic for long tail keywords you didn't intend on optimizing for.

• Google is getting stingier with how they crawl and what they are willing to index. If they will only index 100 pages for x units of PageRank then having nearly 100% of a 100 page site indexed is far better than having 40 or 50% of a 200 page site indexed.
• The line between pure PPC ad pages and content is blurring. With domainers increasing the uniqueness and content weight of their domains it is going to be harder for search engines to filter out their sites, and thus search engines are going to get even more stingy with what they will let in the index.

On a philosophical level it also makes sense that search engines want to index richer content. The web is a series of incomplete thoughts. The more search engines can make people write in depth high quality content that provides complete answers the more they improve the value of Google. Search engines will try to push people toward writing more well thought out essays rather than empty me too cut and paste posts.

Content Suggestions Based on Publishing Formats:

AdSense Site:

A page which has 500 words on it will overlap many more keyphrases than two different pages that have 300 words each. As long as you can put your AdSense ads in a prominent position that gets a decent clickthrough rate without sacrificing your linkability I would recommend going with 500 to 600 word articles.

If you write naturally and your site gains a decent amount of authority you will end up accidentally ranking for many great keyword phrases that never showed up on keyword tools.

Site Selling CPM Ads:

If you are selling CPM ads that may favor breaking longer articles into many shorter pages so each read article gets more page views. This is especially true if you have a strong brand, great mindshare, great link equity, and many direct readers, like Wired.com.

Lead Generation Sites:

Focus your content on conversion, perhaps even using brief pages with little content, but ensure your content is unique. Get what legitimate links you can and add linkbait to your site to build up the authority of your site.

Blogs:

Do whatever you need to in order to keep your social currency. Use your market influence to push other profitable business ventures (perhaps indirectly). Only mention a few commercial offers, or place ads in a non-intrusive manner if you are in a competitive vertical and do not enjoy a large self reinforcing market position.

Site Selling Products and Services:

If you sell a commodity add some value to the transaction (consumer feedback, free shipping, brand, etc.) to make your shopping experience a non commodity.

In your content actively guide the user to do the desired goal. Home pages and other high profile pages should be targeted toward navigating users to the desired actions. Even your interior pages which are well integrated into a commercial site should be focused on conversion, building credibility, and filtering bad leads.

Get what legitimate links you can and add linkbait to your site to build up the authority of your site. If possible add consumer feedback.

How to Be Different:

Benefits of Consumer Feedback:

As noted in this study [PDF] consumer feedback adds credibility and trust which help make the online shopping experience feel more like the offline experience. Consumers also add content which makes your content unique relative to similar content from other merchants selling the same products. We tend to use language in similar patterns. Many consumers also misspell words, which helps you target many longtail keyword phrases.

Be First or Be Different:

Sometimes the easiest way to be first is to put a different spin on an idea. If you are the first with an idea push spreading it until you have enough market leverage for your ideas to spread themselves. On your best ideas do not rely on the market spreading it, use email, instant message, advertising, and other other tool at your disposal. Push your ideas to spread quickly because it is much harder to get people to link at your news when it is a couple days old. Put few or no ads on the ideas you want to spread until AFTER they have spread.

When Yahoo! bought Overture they had the market default position as being THE KEYWORD TOOL. As a company that makes most of its profits from selling keywords, how dumb is is for them to let their keyword research tool die without warning? If they are upgrading their paid search platform, killing the current tools without warning is a dumb first step toward getting marketers to warm up to the exciting new system.

Stop double and triple mailing the direct mail pieces. Do a bit of market analysis on your market position and current resources. Fire the people who keep doing the dumb things. Your easiest points of improvement come from analyzing your market position and leveraging what you already have. When you start again from an established market position is is silly to kill off your old market position, especially if you are already behind.

I need to fix my keyword research tool, since the death of Overture killed my keyword tool. I am thinking about either switching it to being driven from Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. More on that soon.

Many people are syndicating the story that search personalization will kill SEO. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each time search engines add variables to their ranking algorithms they create opportunity. Plus as the field gets muddier those who understand how communities interact with search will have more relative influence over the marketplace. Quality SEO is not based on using a rank checker for arbitrary terms and cranking out meaningless ranking reports. It is based on measuring traffic streams and conversions. If the search engines are sending you more leads or better converting leads then your SEO is working.

Customers worth having don't care about ranking reports. They care about conversions. Other than to create a straw man scenario for self promotional stories, why have rank checkers suddenly become important?

The difference between getting 5 links and 50 links for a story is often just a couple good mentions. With 5 links the story may be marginally profitable, and the same story could be wildly profitable with 50 links. Every day key bloggers are hunting for stories worth talking about. As long as you send them personalized email many of them will talk about your story if you create something worth talking about. And because blogging is so temporal it is important to push a story to spread it quickly (in other words, nobody wants to blog about a story that is 3 days old unless they have something unique to add).

Link exchange requests go nowhere, but if you offer something that people feel is of value they will link.

I get many link requests, many Digg requests, many requests for feedback, and many other announcement type requests. Many people also let me know how much money they are making. One of the biggest differences between top earners and those just getting by is a lack of shame ... a willingness to ask for favor after favor. Some of the top name SEOs / marketers / bloggers are labeled as such due to nepotistic marketing. You wouldn't know it by asking them, but if you are sorta in on some of the ideas, create some of the ideas, market some of the ideas, and see good ideas go nowhere while bad ideas spread you start to notice some of the patterns.

If you do not have much of a brand you can't be risk adverse if you are hoping to build a brand or exposure. Shame is for sissies. Targeted personalized emails are for profit.

On top of targeted emails there are many other ways you can push your message out there:

• buy AdSense ads targeted to specific bloggers

• buy ReviewMe ads on channels you want to be seen on (I have equity in ReviewMe, but have bought many ReviewMe reviews myself)
• buy Feedvertise ads in feeds targeted to bloggers
• buy targeted interstitial ads on AdBrite
• participate in forums, social news sites, and other community sites
• ask for feedback from industry experts and let others feel they have ownership in the idea or exclusive on the news

Think of how many CDs AOL has sent you. Most any business of scale used some amount of push marketing to gain it.

Many people dole out information with deceptive intent, or to push their own agenda. Recently I created a contest to rank for Dave Pasternack, and so far the results have been quite revealing. Where you rank for generic terms does not matter much if you are looking for good SEO clients, but to say SEO is of limited value across the entire spectrum is dishonest. As NFFC said:

I think the root of the problem is the fact that SEO is very difficult to scale. By that I mean that SEO is a craft best practiced by a small highly motivated team, it doesn't lend itself to a production line approach. That stands equally for those SEO's working inhouse as it does for those consultants plying there wares. Now David isn't a complete idiot, to his credit did-it have plenty of years experience of having their clients bitched slapped all over the SERP's by kids in basements. He knows better than anyone that SEO doesn't "scale".
.
So I think the general reason that people are pissed off with David is that instead of him holding did-it's hands up and saying "we don't have the management skills to be able to offer SEO services to our customers", he instead tries to make out that SEO is not a good choice for his clients and that they need PPC. That implies a readiness to be economical with the truth and a lack of ability to be critical of your own companies short comings that, imho, doesn't bode well for those looking to do business with his company.

I realize that a large part of pushing a profitable company is market differentiation, but if you have to lie about the viability of a competing field to push your current business model that is shifty at best. And if you are using the media to spread your misinformation that is blatantly wrong, and you should be called out for it.

Since the contest has started Did It has done the following:

• spoke of protecting Google's purity

• begged for links by offering to donate money to the American Cancer Association
• put up a t-shirt page on Cafepress that links to David's biography page
• linked to David's profile from Kevin's blog
• linked to David's profile page sitewide on Did It
• created duplicate content

Lets run through those one at a time.

Protecting Google's purity: What makes this claim so entertaining is that David Pasternack wasn't ranking #1 for his own name. How a person calls SEO garbage without even ranking for their own name is beyond me. I rank in the top 10 or 20 for words like Aaron or Wall, and am the 5 results for Aaron Wall.

On top of that, PPC people believe you can buy any term you see fit. How can they believe in protecting Google's purity, especially if the consultants also push paid inclusion?

American Cancer Association: You have to throw the cancer card to rank for your own name? That is pretty sick. What do you do if you are asked to compete in a competitive marketplace? Talk down SEO? Oh yeah, I forgot...

T shirt and blog links: If you have been doing decent SEO, and SEO is a one time event, then why the need to come up with these techniques to get a few more links?

Sitewide Link: You are going to change your entire site structure based on a silly $1,000 contest? Sounds a bit reactive for a forward thinking marketing company, isn't it? Hopefully you give your clients more holistic and forward looking advice.

Duplicate Content: Creating a near identical second profile page is lame. And maybe an effective strategy if it were a few years ago, but not for today.

The terms that are worth more than any others, as a branded person who frequently speaks to the media, are your company name and your name. But to already have mainstream media exposure and STILL need to use all of those gimmicks to (hopefully) rank for your own name is pathetic. Ranking should be a given.

Notice how reactive Did It was to a silly $1,000 contest. Clearly SEO isn't a one time thing, or they did a bad job of SEO on their site.

SEO Question: I have been submitting my articles to article directories and submitting my site to directory after directory, but I am not getting anywhere in the search results. What should I do to promote my SEO site and services?

Answer: Rankings do not matter.

The first thing you have to understand about getting good SEO clients (as in clients actually worth having) is that ranking is not the key to getting good clients. Building trust is the key. In fields which have a bad reputation (especially ones where there is high value and a lot of competition) you need to do more than just rank to sell. Here are four examples to back up this point of view.

• Ranking for SEO Book sends me far more traffic than ranking for SEO. Most generic searches in the SEO industry are automated traffic, competitive research, and low quality leads.

• When SeoBook.com did not rank for SEO Book for a while during an aggressive algorithm update that filtered out sites with too much similar anchor text my ebook sales were 85% of their prior month volume. Imagine selling almost the exact same amount of an ebook about ranking in search results when you don't even rank for your own brand name. That shows that my sales come mostly from recommendations, not search results.
• ClientsideSEM is a new site and we have not marketed it aggressively, and the site does not rank for many keywords, yet we already get more leads than we can possibly handle.
• I ranked in the top 10 for search engine marketing a few years ago and got very few leads from it. I didn't start getting many leads until I wrote a popular article about the Google Florida Update. Oddly enough, my rankings were worse when I was getting those leads, but because people were reading my stuff and talking about me I got more leads than I knew what to do with.

As an SEO you don't build enough trust just by ranking. And you don't build trust (or rankings) by getting an unlimited supply of garbage links on the edges of the web. The key to picking up clients is to be seen where the potential clients are. Participate in the active parts of the web and be seen as an expert. Submit articles to sites like WebProNews.

Target YOUR Audience:

Pick your audience and appeal to their interests. And while not all traffic is created equal you do not have to target Digg if you are looking for clients, it is easy to bias your demand toward the target market.

If you can come up for reasons people would want to talk about you then you will get more exposure than you can handle. There is still a lot of opportunity out there. For example, you can commission a study of fortune 500 websites to see which of them are using cloaking or IP delivery, and then market the hell out of it. If you do a good job a few weeks later you are suddenly one of the experts of SEO for fortune 500 websites.

Making the Invisible Visible:

SEO is largely painted as a bad hated field and SEO services are often viewed as an invisible service. If you know how to get people to talk about your brand and SEO you should be good at getting people to talk about other topics (for your clients) as well.

If you know how to make the invisible visible you have an endless supply of affordable quality links at your disposal.

Go Offline:

And if you go to conferences and meet people in person it is far easier to build a solid trusting relationship. That is where the best potential SEO clients are, as they have capital, knowledge, and an interest in the topic. If they have enough resources to attend a conference they probably can afford to hire a good SEO too.

Are you suffering from the Google Sandbox, the -30 penalty, the -950 penalty, too many reciprical link partners, an anchor text or link spam related penalty, duplicate content issues, or the latest algorithm, search index, or quality update? It may not be what you think. DigitalGhost recently described Google's most common SEO related penalty:

Let me tell you about the most common penalty Google uses.

It doesn't have a catchy name, and people generally refuse to talk about it because this particular penalty requires taking responsibility. It's much easier to blame the +-30 penalty, the Sandbox or the new 950 penalty than it is to accept that you've been nailed with the most common penalty of all. What is it you ask?

It's the My Site Sucks Ass And Google Just Figured It Out penalty.

I have a theory that for most people it is easier to create something worth marketing than it is to push something of no value. And that is probably one of the hardest things to get around as an SEO, because SEO can make it seem addictive that we can influence markets without creating real value, but the people who make growing income each and every month are generally those who have at least one real site of real value. Sure you can use SEO to boost it, but it works best if the SEO is done in conjunction with other marketing and real market integration.

It sorta ties in with that whole how easy is it to clone your business concept I recently mentioned. If what you are doing is easy to clone then why not think of a way to add value and make it harder to clone. Sometimes that added value can be just slapping on a few marketing hooks, other times it might be listening to the needs of the market, or commoditizing the business models of competitors.

Recently a friend of mine launched a site and I got them to the top 20 using the general SEO techniques I can apply to any site, but I had them read that clone post and they told me brilliant ideas they could do to add value to their market by commoditizing people who do not even realize they are in the same market. If your marketing strategy is just SEO eventually you lose out when an SEO aware competitor cares about their market and/or uses other marketing techniques.

Jonathan Leger tomorrow will be hosting a chat with me on his site at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific time. Feel free to stop by if you would like to say hi.

Dan Thies, an expert in many fields, recently announced his retirement in a podcast highlighting the increasing complexity of internet marketing, and his future plans as an instructor at StomperNet.

Specialization is Needed for Growth:

In Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, a 1945 article about creating a memory extension, he stated:

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Many Great Markets Grow Fast:

Even within a field that once cottage industry can feel like a broad niche. Fields worth being in will eventually grow beyond the means of one person. Danny Sullivan recently stated:

This is rocket science. SEO is only not seen as rocket science BY THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW IT. Everyone in the industry forgets how much knowledge they've acquired, learned, absorbed to the point it becomes second nature. I've joked at that some point, how second nature it is reminds me of a classic scene from The Matrix

Did you see Todd's recent video about Digg? Did you see this .htaccess file for fixing duplicate content issues? Did you know audio search can match words in videos? Did you know you can use geotargeting on AdSense ads, or that they now allow some publishers to pick a list of video ads to run, or that they allow advertisers to filter out an unlimited number of bad publishers?

You Can't Do Everything:

And that is one of the things that makes the web difficult...it is so easy to think that you can do everything that you try to do everything. A few years ago I was a moderator at about a half dozen forums, had many clients, took on a client who had an asp website and started learning how to tweak the asp code, and answered every email I got even if a person would ask me 20 questions in a row without buying anything. That works well if you are unpopular and your job becomes your identity, but eventually that tears your health apart, and as soon as you start trying to live away from the computer it seems a bit silly. You need to start filtering things.

Once you have significant demand or significant market influence the market will push your prices higher but your time toward a commodity and force you to filter.

Signs of a Bad Customer:

Daily I get emails with subjects like "Site review for a broke man :)" but the problem is most websites and businesses are broke on many levels. That email subject that I just mentioned... that person stated they read my ebook, but he didn't even have unique page titles on his site. How is that possible?

And then if you reply, you get more emails until you stop answering them or provide obtuse answers. They ask can I run my ads with Google's ads. You answer read Google's TOS. Or eventually you stop answering.

And even worse, if you seriously engage bad customers who refuse to listen they not only waste your time, but also do stupid things like spam your site, and then blow up when you stop them.

Long after they give up on ineffective marketing methods and broken websites you will have another customer pitching the same or requesting things like the following:

the author of SEO Book,
I just want to say:

the contents of your SEO Book is ok, but a horrible problem is that most of your contents are organized under completely wrong English grammar, which made it a hard job for translators.

Before you put your SEO Book online, you should know that readers would be from every corner of the world, somebody will not fully understand your SEO Book, if their Engish is not good enough, of if you wrote many many sentences organized under wrong grammar.

I don't know where you are from, but all those disordered contents just made peope think maybe English was only your second language, maybe you were not a native English speaker, at least, not well enough to compose a "socalled" book.

The author, I just want to suggest you that you ask somebody else that is a native English speaker to check all the contents of your SEO Book, the most important point is to revise all the wrong sentences organized under wrong grammar, which already made translators hate you .......

The contents of my SEO Book is ok? I didn't realize my target audience was short fused translators that use bad grammar in attempts to criticise mine. But live and learn, eh?

You know you are answering too many emails when people are sending you support questions for competing products and services, and out of making my email less easy to find other webmasters have told me they are getting traffic for things like Aaron Wall email address.

Waste Caused By Servicing Bad Customers:

And even if you want to help people you end up getting jaded by some, frustrated, and miss others. A couple months ago a customer wanted to pay me to work a day at $500 an hour and I didn't have enough time to, even though they were pre-sold. Refusing thousands of dollars of income for a few hours work is absurd.

All Value Systems Are Challenged as They Grow or Change:

The reactive (not proactive) Web 2.0 news sites echo the echos. Jimmy Wales, on his open source search project list said:

One of the things that I believe in passionately is genuine human communities, as opposed to "crowdsourcing".

What do I mean by that?

I mean, people who get to know each other, over time, as real human beings, and through that process, gain a sense of trust and responsibility for each other and for the task at hand. So for me, if we are to succeed here, this is the first place we need to focus attention...

And in spite of that belief system he decided to apply nofollow to Wikipedia in an attempt to filter out some of the noise, but odds are that it is too little too late. Google trusts Wikipedia too much for people to stop spamming it.

Every community or authority system, left unchecked eventually kills itself unless it reacts to the shifting marketplace - just see Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

Every Publishing Format is Dated or Full of Noise:

Forums build friendships, but generally are noisy. I have had my instant messengers turned off for most of the past 3 months and spoke to one friend who just told me he started his IM list with a new username from scratch. Many blog posts (especially on my blog) are incomplete thoughts or just echo what is already stated elsewhere.

It is important to consume information from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats. Unless you have market leverage and inside sources it is easier to create value by relating information from other markets to your own field rather than trying to always be the first with the story, especially if you are an individual competing against groups or entire companies which have more resources.

Growth Forces Change:

As time passes, we learn, markets change, and business models evolve each of us find ourselves doing different jobs at different points on the value chain. At the low end, some of us work half the day to pay interest on debt as slaves controlled by computers:

Early this year, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., using a new computerized scheduling system, will start moving many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge retailer but could be a major headache for employees.

But as you gain trust, mindshare, and market influence it is easier to create real value if you filter out the noise, but as you learn and time becomes more scare what used to be useful becomes noise. In an ideal world you would be able to learn from your students, and have the price point act as a filter to prevent potentially bad students from wanting to participate. If your framework is set up well your students will want to help one another as well. This site (and the associated business models) are probably quite far from that ideal world, so that is part of the reason it is important to keep trying new things.

Trying New Business Models:

Our early feedback on the first Elite Retreat was great. Chris Hooley knows his shit, and he said the following about me:

Aaron Wall gave his SEO seminar (which started with the basics then was nice and detailed. I think he could have gone a bit further with specific new NEW linking strategies, but he was still pretty good and to his defense my expectations were probably extremely high). I loved when he spoke of trusted sites like wikipedia and how to leverage their power without being at all shady.
Aaron may be the most brilliant single mind in the SEO space. As he spoke, he brought up tons of his web properties (some that you may not even know of) and explained in depth how / why each of them worked. He also used our (attendees) spaces as examples and busted through numerous tools.

which I take as a huge compliment coming from him.

The hardest part with working in a group of successful people is generally related to egos and making time for everyone, but once you get past that the sum of the parts turns out to be greater than the pieces.

• Would I be anywhere near as good at working with large clients if I wasn't working with Caveman? No way.

• Would ReviewMe have went as well if I launched it myself? No way.
• Would I have wanted to put on Elite Retreat by myself? No way.
• I can only create so much content myself. My cohort in crime that works on my content websites is a well oiled machine that can produce quality content for less than $20 a page and in two weeks he went from new to a top 500 Digger. But the key to working with people like him and getting full value out of each other is trusting one another AND limiting how many people you work with. Working with 3 great partners is probably far better than working with 10 bad partners. Working with 3 great clients is better than working with 10 bad clients.

What Are Some Ways I Filter?

• Instead of answering the same question over and over again I sometimes make blog posts I can point at. For example, if someone asks "how do I build links" I send them a link.

• Give people a free spot to start from. If people ask for a free intro to SEO to see if my book may or may not be worthwhile I send them a link.
• If they instant message me and I do not know them I usually block them.
• If they send me an email and I respond only to read "you need to confirm your email..." I delete it.
• If they are a blow hard or start their introduction with excuses or reasons they can't change and won't listen to suggestions do not service them.
• If I call the support center of a monopoly to cancel something I lie and say I want more services so I actually get a human response instead of being lied to when they say they are overwhelmed with calls (thanks Verizon).
• If a telemarketer calls I am never me and never home. In fact I just moved or died.

Filtering Your Way to Profit:

Ultimately your ability to create profit and enrich the world revolves around your willingness to learn, your work ethic, your marketing, your creativity, and how good you are at filtering out noise. And people will hate you for filtering out noise because it may make them feel insignificant, may challenge their value systems, or may make them envious.

If you are so consumed with petty tasks that you stop learning you are dead, and need to come up with new rules to filter noise out of your life. If you don't filter you lose market-share and become less efficient than competitors who are filtering out the bad parts of the market.

What is the difference between good and bad clients? Andrew Goodman stated:

Looking back at the absolute worst business experiences I've had, it makes no particular sense to draw universal conclusions, because some bad stuff can't be predicted.
...
Just now I ran across a reminder of perhaps one of the most toxic I've ever met. And I thought: what might we have noticed that would have filtered this guy out?
...
At the time I missed a key difference: willingness to consider optimization (in the broadest sense of the term) suggestions. Someone who realizes that there are broken parts of the website and poorly optimized images and wants to fix and optimize the user experience as much as possible; vs. the one who disagrees, changes the subject, and uses a combination of profanity and sarcasm in his next anecdote, to further confuse the issue.

If you want to enjoy your job the key is to create an environment of abundance and then come up with algorithms and procedures to filter out the bad parts.

Google creates so much value because they create a framework that connects so many people and allow others to filter out the bad parts. Success is nothing more than pushing self serving rule-sets and giving others enough incentive to make them want to buy into and promote your worldview and filters.

I guess the easiest way to leverage content owned by others is to have a partnership to syndicate their content with ads:

As a example, Warner Music has defined multiple video channels along themes like "rock music" or featuring the "Divas of Pop Music." A Web site owner can select a video channel and embed it on a section of the site dedicated to running Google AdSense ads. Visitors then can click to watch ad-supported videos within the video channel on sites running the ads.
...
The Google advertising system splits the resulting revenue three ways to the video content owner, the Web site publisher and Google. The exact revenue splits were not disclosed.

Google continues to profit from blurring the line between ads and content. The future of AdSense will look much more like a mesh of Google Related links, Google interesting items for you, and YouTube recently popular videos (with ads) than its current form today. And don't be surprised to see those ads offline, in video games, or on your cell phone (Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board).

Right now search relevancy algorithms are heavily tied to overall authority, but given enough time publishers and search marketers will undermine that measure of relevancy the same way that keyword density and raw PageRank died off. By owning toolbars that track everything and buying into other methods of data collection (from contextual advertising to email to user accounts to widget platforms) search engines will be able to move away from the random surfer model to a less random model of relevancy. If search relevancy becomes more community centric how will your site stand up?

• What words are associated with your brand or site? What sites are associated with those words?What searcher intent is associated with those words? What else are they searching for?

• What sites are buying similar keywords? What other words are they buying?
• What ads appear on your page if you use Google AdSense? What does Google related links suggest?
• What are similar people tagging (or perhaps tagging with similar words) - Del.icio.us and Google Search History
• What are similar people reading? (Via My Yahoo! or Google Reader or MyBlogLog) - Graywolf recently highlighted how MyBlogLog can use your readers to show what community your site is in.
• What sites does this site link to? What sites link to this site (don't forget Google also owns blogger)? What resources are co-cited (in blog posts, popular directories, and other sites)?

Right now algorithms are authority centric and weighted toward promoting old domains, but it won't take long for us marketers to find ways to rip that apart. At that point they are going either have to place more trust on signs of community integration.

What sites are related to your site? If the algorithms shift toward neighborhoods will you still rank well?

If you are well integrated into your community then search personalisation and the death of a few market research tools will not hurt you.

I recently read Gord Hotchkiss's second eye tracking study, and it rocks. It is quite meaty in nature, and well worth a read for any serious search marketer. It costs $149, but is a great value if you are a lover of search or a professional search marketer.

On to a few interesting highlights ...

• Google is perceived to have better relevancy than other search engines, and is able to help concentrate attention at the top of the search results due to being primarily branded as a search site (instead of a portal), starting from a clean page full of white space, better use of real estate (by doing things like showing fewer ads on non-commercial queries, or showing them less prominently), better SERP formatting (including whitespace and perhaps even formatting using the phi ratio), and better ad targeting.

• On average for Google and Yahoo the ads are viewed as more relevant than the organic results.
• Interaction with search results is quick (roughly 10 seconds). We scan for information scent rather than fully analyzing, with a bias toward a semantic map that matches our goals.
• Many top ranked search results guide toward a specific bias (say shopping) even when that makes them somewhat irrelevant for the user intent based on the search query. For generic queries we are biased toward research. Brand specific queries are more commonly biased toward purchasing. This biased intent may be fully decided before we even enter a query, and make us prone to ignore or specifically look for certain sites, or types of sites. Using strong emotional words (such as scam) or words that indicate research purposes (such as compare or reviews) may evoke a better CTR.
• There is a direct connection to the thalmus to the amygdala which allows the amygdala to emotionally react to a sensory impulse before the neocortex can evaluate the input, thus when the neocortex does logically evaluate something you may already have that emotional bias worked into the equation, and thus try to justify it as being right...I think this was also mentioned in Blink, but is an interesting point.
• The psychological noise of portal pages and the sensationalism associated with traditional headline news may erode emotional confidence when searching from a portal page, as compared to Google, which may be viewed as a way to escape the real world and do what you want.
• We like to scan things in groups of 3s.
• When text is placed inside an image it is easy to ignore it due to the feeling of images as low value or low information spaces likely with noise.
• Google AdWords discounting for click relevancy ends up creating a self reinforcing market where the top ads are the best in many markets, especially in competitive marketplaces with high search volumes. Low volume keywords easier for bids to organize position...higher volume keywords primarily driven by ad CTR.

Those were just a few points from an information dense report which was refreshingly well put together. And in a market where so many people talk about getting top rankings it is great to see someone writing about how people interact with search results, and how to leverage them for their full value.

Gord has his head wrapped around search. When Greg Boser recently called out Did It

I also didn’t really consider David’s comments newsworthy. After all, he certainly isn’t the first PPC zealot to write a shitty article telling the world that SEO consultants were a high-risk waste of precious marketing dollars, or that organic SEO is as simple as hiring a monkey and giving them the URL to Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Gord added further context to the debate by talking about search from the perspective of the searcher, which is a topic oddly lacking in nature in discussions in our industry, given how much we talk about rumors of everything else.

If you have a strong brand and do not want to risk your brand image or search rankings you can still employ aggressive marketing techniques by using them on white label sites or affiliate accounts. Most people who use white label sites leave footprints that make it easy to associate the site with the main company. The good thing about using affiliates instead of a white label site is that just about everyone has spammy affiliates. Think of how many spammy AdSense sites you have seen...those are Google's affiliates.

You can sign up to be your affiliate and track your performance just like the performance of other affiliates. You can also sign up with different affiliate ID numbers for different websites or marketing methods. As long as your program is well integrated into the web a couple spammy affiliates are not going to make Google want to nuke everyone who is using your affiliate program, plus it can give you more leeway when doing things like bidding on competing keywords, etc. If one of your affiliate sites gets blocked from buying a keyword or removed from the index you still can use the same (or similar) technique(s) on other affiliate sites.

SEO for Firefox was recently updated. The new features are scraping Google cache dates, and allowing you to CSV export the data. What are some cool ways to use SEO for Firefox?

• Check out how old competing businesses are.

• Evaluate the competitive nature of a marketplace.
• Research the backlinks to a competing business to see whch links are their most powerful.
• Do a site level search on a site to see which pages are most frequently cached, and to check the general health of a site.

What are your favorite ways to use SEO for Firefox? What other features should be added to it?

You can now submit your site to the Open Directory Project again. Submissions were down for a while.

I recently had an editor go through SEO Book and clean up my grammar. If you are a grammar Nazi my book is probably as good as it will ever be today ;)

Given Google's reliance on core domain authority and displaying outdated PageRank scores, cache date is a much better measure of the authority of a particular page or site than PageRank is.

What Google frequently visits (and spends significant resources to keep updated) is what they consider important.

If a site can throw up a bunch of new pages and see them in the index right away that is a much better indication of trust than just the raw PageRank score. Plus the site can recoup its costs much faster than a site stuck in the crawling sandbox. This is especially important consideration if you are in a news related field, as sites that are quickly indexed rank for the new ideas while they are spreading, and enjoy many self reinforcing links due to automated content and the laziness of journalists, bloggers, and other webmasters.

Jim Boykin has a free tool to check the cache date of a page or site. It will also show how recently other pages linked to from that page have been cached.

I saw an email today with the subject line of PROVEN Adsense Templates, but given Google's recent change of TOS how can they be proven? And what are they proven to do? Are they optimized for earnings so much that they cut into the site's authority or linkworthiness? This template is probably proven
www.stormloader.com/members/nadoftop/40.html
but also is useless to people visiting the site.

If your site design looks similar to designs of sites that were optimized for earnings first will people think lowly of your site because of the information quality of similar sites?

Yesterday one of my AdSense sites made about $500. The same site made $600 a month just over 6 months ago, and it is still growing quickly, does not look like an obvious AdSense site, and is still gets many organic citations. Is that proven? Well to me it is, but there would be no reason to put that URL out there as an example site unless I was trying to use that for self promotion. I probably could bump that same site to $700 a day if I maximized its current earning potential, but that would be at the expense of future earnings.

The idea of proof in marketing techniques is silly because invariably consumer habits and markets shift. Read some old articles about making money from banners and I bet the author will sound short-sighted.

SEO can change even quicker than content formatting strategies, and there is a sea of outdated facts to swim through on the path to learning SEO. In something like SEO a technique may only be effective because it is rarely used, and by the time everyone knows to do it the relative value of manipulating that variable is reduced to where the ROI is nowhere near as good as it once was, and if excessive manipulation of one variable becomes so important to your strategy

• Might search engines discount sites with similar footprints if that footprint is generally associated with low information quality?

• Might a former signal of quality be turned into a signal of low quality used for demotion?
• Might pushing too far on some fronts cost you the ability to pick up other signs of quality?
• Might you be missing easy opportunities to create legitimate value in your marketplace by filling market needs that have gone unserved if you spend too much time thinking about market manipulation from an algorithmic perspective?

Some people using outdated techniques will ask to know everything you do and call your stuff rubbish if you don't share it (some guy going by the name of DomainDrivers recently did this on my blog here and then pitched similar self-promotional stuff on LED Digest), but why be specific beyond the point of being useful? One of the biggest problems with Internet marketing in general is that we read one article at a time, and until you have some experience and a solid framework set up you think one idea is the key. And then you read the next article and suddenly that is the most important thing.

People like the idea of neutrality and the idea of proof, but ultimately beyond self promotional purposes those words rarely have much value. If you are too systematic in your marketing you miss understanding some of the synergistic opportunities created by your brand and market position. If you optimize for any one aspect too much then you increase short term earnings at the expense of your long-term profit potential. Effective optimization is realizing that there are many stakeholders in your site, and creating cost effective ways to as many of them as you can.

Unless someone is a great friend helping another friend you won't get told exactly where to do exactly what works at a set price. The reasons are many fold:

• every market is unique

• every site is unique
• we all know markets shift
• if there is an exact known cheap formula and it is exactly shared we reduce our work to the value of commodity workers in 3rd world countries, who we soon will be competing with... as an example, I have had offers for some of my high ranking domains from people who I was almost certain were low waged and in third world countries
• how can we justify charging our clients some rate for our work then sharing everything we did together with all their competitors?
• the whole reason many techniques work is that few people use or abuse them relative to how often they occur as natural parts of the web. share all your tricks and secrets and all you do is push yourself toward becoming a commodity.
• the whole reason reciprocal links diminished in value and effectiveness because the technique has been abused and is generally associated with low information quality
• any real website with a real brand should have some intrinsic value associated with it that is not easy for competitors to duplicate
• you can push frameworks of thinking and observed general algorithmic trends, but there is never a point in giving exact details of everything you do on one specific site unless your goal is to get media coverage for your own brand and/or that site and use THAT as a competitive advantage.

The value of any web page or idea is next to nothing until you add marketing experience and context to it. The web is a series of incomplete thoughts. All information is biased. And almost all of it is self promotional in nature, especially if it is packaged as proven or formatted as facts.

Recently Miva announced that they were dumping a partnership with Yahoo! in favor of distributing Google ads.

MIVA said in its papers that it will adopt Google advertisements on applications and sites managed by its subsidiary, MIVA Direct, which produces white-label toolbar and Web search. The deal, which will run for two years and has "broad termination rights," will begin within 30 days.

The market responded by bidding Miva's stock from $3.40 up to $4 a share. What does that mean to marketers?
If a small ad network makes more profit redistributing the ads of a large player than selling ads directly they probably don't have much value in their advertising product. This is why increasing the efficiency of your AdWords account by 10% is worth far more than trying to find under-priced clicks from 50 pay per click search engines you never heard of.

The second interesting thing worth noting from the market reaction to the Miva / Google partnership is that if changing from Yahoo! to Google increases the value of the company by 15% that shows how efficient Google's ad platform is compared to Yahoo!'s or that the stock market just loves Google...either way, it is going to keep smaller public companies favoring partnerships with Google over Yahoo!. It also shows the strong consolidating trend amongst ad networks. If Google is worth 15% more than Yahoo! then they are probably 40% or 50% more than Microsoft, and as monetization rate drops off there is no reason for anyone syndicating search and contextual ads to look far beyond the top few players.

The search market is also going to parallel the ad market. Google's ad network is so strong because they own so much of the search market. If you can get a few more high quality editorial links that will boost your authority in Google that is worth far more long-term than picking at the edges gathering hundreds of low quality links which may hurt the stability of your rankings.

Lots of money is being spent on new ad network start ups which largely duplicate one another. Networks that are able to deliver real tangible value and get enough media exposure to become synonymous with their ad or media type will thrive while most will fall to the fate of a Miva or a Looksmart...a legacy network with random bits and pieces which makes more redistributing someone else's ads rather than by innovating and selling their own ads.

Google is already getting a foothold in print, audio, and video ads. I just saw a Fat Joe Cadillac Escalade AdSense video ad on this page, pointing to a site called MyCadillacStory.com. That is pretty slick and streamlined for how new Google's video product is.

The race to create an ad network and buy distribution has changed to a race to create toolbars, applications, software, communities, and plugins that allow people to redistribute ads. Even some password applications (such as Roboform) have search built into them, and Google Custom Search Engine makes it easy for anyone to get paid syndicating Google results (or a biased subset of them).

A paradox to SEO and Internet marketing is that the less your sites need to rely on search engines the more search engines need to rely on your site, and the more reliable your rankings will be. Andy Hagans posted a quiz about defensible traffic sources, which is a way of testing how stable your income is. After you have a few years experience on the web, forward income stability becomes far more important than how much you are making from a project right now, especially as you transition from an SEO mentality to a CEO mentality.

From large scale stat providers right down to the smallest detail it is easy to take a statistic out of context and draw false conclusions from it.

Some examples:

Examples of bogus statistics and the value of evaluating stats out of context.

• MySpace has more traffic than Yahoo! - over-represents automated spam and does not account for the targeting and value of some of Yahoo!'s search traffic and vertical content. In addition the story about this conveniently separated the Yahoo! traffic into multiple smaller streams, and typically counts pageviews when many of Yahoo!'s products use AJAx.

• Yahoo! has 25% of the search market - over-represents Yahoo! by counting searches on vertical properties and internal searches. Their actual volume is probably closer to 10%...it is amazing how quickly their marketshare has been eroding.
• Looking at search marketshare by referral data to large websites - does not take into account algorithmic bias of some engines toward large or small websites.
• Alexa data for my site - because it is an internet marketing blog, it is heavily overrepresented.
• Lower conversion rate for leads after redesign - I redesigned a friend's site and made it easier for people to contact them or get price estimates. Originally their site was unattractive and it was hard to contact them or get a quote. After making it easier to do those the end conversion rate of the people who did those action items was slightly lower due to it being so much easier to do them.
• Higher AdSense earnings per click or clickthrough rate on a finance site on Christmas eve - the people searching may be more desperate, and thus more willing to click on anything, and they may also search a disproportionately higher rate for higher value terms.
• Seasonal bias - I have a seasonal site which I fixed broken links right around when it was going out of season. It did not make more, but fell less hard than it would have. When the seasons changed again the earnings shot through the roof.

Why do Bogus Stats Matter?

As a marketer it is important to realize how statistics can lie for two main reasons.

1. so you are measuring the right stuff

2. so you can present market data in a way that biases your story such that it is remarkable and easy to spread

1.) After Brian Clark rewrote my sales letter my number of ebook sales per day jumped up in the short term, but that was largely because

• a trusted voice recommended it

• other trusted voices echoed that trusted voice
• a new audience got exposure to my site

A better measure of the effectiveness of the new sales letter would be to look if the percent, conversion rate, or number of affiliate sales goes up. An even better measure would be a Google AdWords A/B split test.

2.) The MySpace has more traffic than Yahoo! story was a way to promote the Hitwise statistic service. But you do not even need to collect a bunch of expensive market research data to create a piece of market research data that would easily spread. Simply cross reference a few free or cheap publicly accessible tools like Quantcast, Compete.com, Alexa, Technorati mentions by day, Google Trends, Spyfu, Key Compete, buy AdWords to track search volume, and the number of Google search results over time.

Statistics & Humor

It is easy to find errors or weird biases when you look for ideas connected to weird human actions. And if they are funny, the emotional responses will help them spread quickly. For example, you can use Google trends to research which country or city the most perverted country in the world.

Serious Statistics

When you cite stats from any trusted brand you leverage the strength of their brand.

Many statistics are nothing but self promotional public relations drivel. If you do a great job with your public relations then you can make reasonably believable stats sound factual, even if the collection method is biased. Leverage the bias or errors in some of the publicly available tools and then try to spread that information to the media. Once you get a trusted third party to buy off on it, you then use that exposure as leverage to make the data even more concrete and believable, and to get additional exposure.

Selling Stats to an Audience:

How hard would it be to make the Digg homepage with a title like An Analytical View of Digg's Growth or Digg Traffic to Pass AOL by January 2008, especially if you cited third party research that backed up your claims?

How hard is it to spread stories on blogs about how important bloggers are? If it has a few images and stats in it a story feels far more concrete and is easy to spread, especially if spreading it makes the messenger feel important / valuable.