SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

Answer: PPC ads go through redirects, so they do not count toward your link popularity, but there are other ways to tie together PPC ads and organic search placement. Search engines claim there is no direct linkage between buying ads and ranking, but they only talk in ideals because it helps reinforce their worldview and help them make more money.

Buying AdWords Ads

What They Won't Tell You:
Highly commercial keywords may have the associated editorial results go through more relevancy filters and/or be editorially reviewed for relevancy more frequently. Also, because they want people to click on the AdWords ads there is a heavy informational bias on the oranic search results.

I know some people who have large ad spends that get notifications of new ad system changes ahead of time, and others who get to give direct feedback to allow them to participate in cleaning up search results and minimizing unfair competing actions in the ad systems. So that is one type of cross-over / feedback that exists, but I think that tends to be more rare, and the more important cross over / feedback that exists is an indirect one.

Just by Being Real
You can't really explain why and how everyone does what they do. Some people who find your product and enjoy it enough to leave glowing testimonials will even tell you that they don't know how they found it.

In the same way that targeted ads can lead to purchases, they can also lead to an increase in mindshare, brand, reach, usage data, and linkage data. Just by being real and being seen you are going to pick up quality signals. If you try to factor all of those into your ad buys most markets are still under-priced.

Cross Over Due to Buying AdWords:
A well thought out pay per click campaign can feed into your SEO campaign more ways than I can count. Here are a few examples.

Integrating Offline & Online:
In a TV commercial Pontiac told people to search Google, and got a ton of press.

Big Controversial Ads:
Mazda quickly bid on Pontiac.

Many companies also have strong ties between the legal and marketing departments. If buying or selling an ad gets you sued and gets you in the news the value of the news coverage can far exceed the cost of the ads and legal fees.

Small Controversial Ads:
When I was newer to the field one friend called me the original link spammer. He meant it as a compliment, and I still take it as one. In much the same way I was an aggressive link builder, I was also quite aggressive at ad buying.

I caused controversy by buying names of other people in the industry as AdWords ads. I was prettymuch a total unknown when I did that, but some of the top names in the industry elevated my status by placing my name in heated discussion about what was fair and reasonable or not.

You can always consider placing controversial / risky ideas or ads against your brand or competing brands as a way to generate discussion (but of course consider legal ahead of time).

Drafting Off New Words & Industry News:
When the nigritude ultramarine SEO contest started I bid on AdWords. Some people discussing the contest mentioned that I bid on that word. If an event bubbles up to gain mainstream coverage and you make it easy to identify your name as being associated with it then you might pick up some press coverage.

Industry buzz words that are discussed often have significant mindshare, get searched for frequently, and larger / bureaucratic competitors are going to struggle to be as plugged into the market as you are or react as quickly to the changing language.

Snagging a Market Position Early:
When a friend recommended I read the TrustRank research paper in February of last year I knew it was going to become an important idea (especially because that same friend is brilliant, helped me more ways and times than I can count, and was the guy who came up with the idea of naming the Google Dances).

I read it and posted a TrustRank synopsis. In addition to trying to build a bit of linkage for that idea I also ensured that I bought that keyword on AdWords. Today I rank #1 in Google for TrustRank, and I still think I am the only person buying that keyword, which I find fascinating given how many people use that word and how saturated this market is.

Buying AdSense Ads

Buying Ads Creates Content:
If your ads are seen on forums people may ask about your product or brands. I know I have seen a number of threads on SEO forums that were started with something like I saw this SEO Book ad and I was wondering what everyone thought of it. Some people who start talking about you might not even click your ads.

Each month my brand gets millions and millions of ad impressions at an exceptionally reasonable price, especially when you factor in the indirect values.

Appealing to an Important Individual:
I have seen many people advertise on AdSense targeting one site at a time, placing the webmaster's name in the ad copy. It may seem a bit curt for some, but it is probably more likely to get the attention of and a response from a person than if you request a link from them.

Ads are another type / means of communication.

Appealing to a Group of People:
I get a ton of email relating to blogs and blogging. And in Gmail I keep seeing Pew Internet ads over and over and over again. Their ads range from Portrait of a Blogger to Who are Bloggers?

Going forward they will have added mindshare, link equity, and a report branded with that group of people. When people report on blogging or do research about blogging in the future the Pew report is likely to be referenced many times.

Selling AdSense Ads

Don't Sell Yourself Short:
Given the self reinforcing nature of links (see Filthy Linking Rich) anything that undermines your authority will cause you to get less free exposure going forward. So you really have to be careful with monetization. If you do it for maximal clickthough rate that will end up costing you a lot of trust and link equity.

There are other ways to improve your AdSense CTR and earnings without costing your credibility and authority.

More tips:

• AdSense Tips and Linkworthy Content

• Tracking AdSense Ad Clicks by Page and Keyword
• Track Google AdSense Clicks via Google Analytics

Don't Monetize Too Early:
Given the lack of monetization ability of a new site with few visitors and the importance of repeat visits in building trust and mindshare you don't want to monetize a new site too aggressively unless it is an ecommerce type site. It is hard to build authority if people view your site as just enough content to wrap around the AdSense.

Spam, Footprints, & Smart Pricing:
In the past search engines may have discounted pages that had poison words on them. Search is all about math / communication / patterns.

If your site fits the footprints of many spammy sites then your site might be flagged for review or reduced in authority. MSN did research on detecting spam via footprints, and link spam detection based on mass estimation shows how power laws could make it easy to detect such footprints.

Graywolf recently noted that landing page slippage may be an input into landing page and site quality scores for AdWords ad buyers. Google could also use AdSense account earnings or AdSense CTR data to flag sites for editorial reviews, organic search demotion, ad payout reduction, or smart pricing.

SEO Question: Many people tell me to get authoritative links. How do I find authoritative links?

SEO Answer: It helps to get links directly from sources that would be considered trusted seed sites in algorithms like TrustRank or topical hub and authority sites in Topic Sensitive PageRank. As TrustRank, Topic Sensitive PageRank [PDF], and other similar trust / topical trust related algorithms flow around the web it also helps to get links from sites that are linked to from seed sites.

Sites like DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Wikipedia might be considered obvious authorities and trust seed sites, and there are numerous other ways you could find potential trusted seed sites.

One example of a way to find general high authority / high trust domain might be to look for sites that link to multiple trusted related resources in one field that also link to multiple trusted related resources in other fields. For example, you could do something like Yahoo! Search (linkdomain: a couple sites in field 1) AND (linkdomain: a couple sites in field 2).

Sites that you know the brand of even if they are outside your industry, or see ranking across a wide range of queries are also well trusted authoritative domains.

Some algorithms might transfer a lot of trust to anything listed in multiple seed sites. So if you wanted to find what sites were listed in DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory that link at a competing site you could do a Live search for something like linkdomain:seobook.com linkfromdomain:dmoz.org linkfromdomain:yahoo.com.

Some algorithms may take the top x% of sites from each category of trusted seed sites and consider those as trusted sites as well. The Yahoo! Directory lists sites roughly in terms of authority, so viewing the top sites in a specific category is a good way to find the most authoritative sites in that category.

Yahoo! also paginates results in each category. If you are in need of co-citation in the Yahoo! Directory and your domain lacks adequate authority to be listed on the first page of your category you can buy a category sponsorship for about $100 a month without worrying about Google calling you a link buying spammer or removing your site from the results (even though you are buying an ad for distribution, link equity, and co-citation - typically with more indirect value than direct value).

The Google Directory is powered from DMOZ data, and sorts listings in order of PageRank, so that is another good way to find the top authorities in a specific category. Also when you search the Google Directory for a domain like seobook.com it will show pages listed in the Open Directory that mention that domain.

You could also create a Google Custom Search Engine which was seeded by a seed site such as the Open Directory Project's RDF dump, and then search that for domain mentions.

When looking for topical hubs you could also look at:

• sites which link to many top ranked authority sites using a tool like hub finder.

• top ranked sites for related fields broader than yours...for example, if you had an SEO site you can look for top ranked pages and sites about search
• who links at industry standards and other important documents in your field
• top ranked sites for your keywords + blog (helps if your topic is somewhat tech or web related in nature)
• track mentions of competing sites using Google Blogsearch or Technorati
• topical authority blogs in Technorati
• once you find a few hubs or authorities use the Google related sites feature to find related sites related:searchenginewatch.com

Another way to get authoritative links is to see what social sites and people outside of your industry are talking about and linking to that is related to your industry or related industries. Think of ways to create related ideas and industry standards.

Yahoo! tends to sort backlinks roughly in terms of authority. In addition, Yahoo! allows you to search for .edu, .gov, .mil, .ac.uk or things with .k12 in the URL. Combine those types of ideas with a specific topic or a link search function to find a targeted link opportunity.

And, if you are into looking at competitive linkage data right in the search results SEO for Firefox is the extension for you.

SEO Question: I have a 100,000+ page website. Is there any easy way to ensure all major search engines completely index my website?

SEO Answer: Search engines are constantly changing their crawl priorities. Crawl too deeply and get many low quality pages while increasing indexing time and costs. Crawl too shallow and you don't get down to the relevant pages. Crawl depth is a balancing act.

There is no way to ensure all pages get and stay indexed...they change their crawl priorities constantly. Having said that, you can set your site up to make it as crawler friendly as possible.

Five big things to look at are

• content duplication - are your page titles or meta description tags nearly duplicate (for example thin content pages that are cross referenced by topic and location)? or do other sites publish the same content (for example an affiliate feed or a wikipedia article)? are search engines indexing many pages with similar content (for example different model color or splitting feedback for one item across many pages)?

• link authority - does your site have real high quality links? how does your link profile compare with leading competing sites? what features or interactive elements are on your site that would make people desire to link to you instead of an older and more established competing site?
• site growth rate - does your site grow at a rate consistent with its own history? how does your growth rate compare with the growth rate of competing sites in the same vertical?
• internal link structure - is every valuable page on your site linked to from other pages on your site? do you force search engines to go through long loops rather than providing parallel navigation to similar priority pages? do you link to low value noisy pages (sometimes a search engine indexing less pages is better than more)?
• technical issues - don't feed the search engines cookies or session IDs, and try to use clean descriptive URLs

Some signs of health are

• you don't have pages you don't want getting indexed - wasting link equity on low quality pages means you have less authority to spread across your higher quality pages

• most the pages you want indexed are getting indexed, actively crawled, and are not stuck in Google's supplemental index - supplemental problems and / or reduced indexing or crawl priority are common on sites with heavy content duplication, wonky link profiles, or many dead URLs
• your site is building natural link equity over time and people are actively talking about your brand - if you have to request every link you get then you are losing market share to competitors who get free high quality editorial links
• you see a growing traffic trend from search engines for relevant search queries - this is really what matters. this includes getting more traffic, higher quality traffic, and searchers landing on the appropriate page for their query.

things you can do if conditions are less than ideal

• focus internal link equity at important high value pages (for example, on your internal sitemap consider featuring new product categories, new and seasonal items, or link to your most important categories sitewide)

• trim the site depth (by placing multiple options on a single page instead of offering many near duplicate pages) or come up with ways to make the page level content more unique (such as user feedback)
• cut out the fat - if many low value pages are getting indexed block their indexing by doing something like nuking them / not linking to them / integrating their information into other higher value pages
• use descriptive page relevant URLs / page titles / meta descriptions - this helps ensure the right page ranks for the right query and that search engines will be more inclined to deeply crawl and index your site
• restructure site to be more top / mid / bottom heavy - if a certain section of your site is overrepresented in the search results consider changing your internal link structure to place more weight on other sections. in addition you can add features or ideas which make the under-represented pages more attractive to link at
• use Sitemaps - while you should link to all quality pages of your site from your site and use internal link structure to help them understand what pages are important you can also help search engines understand page relationships using the open sitemap standard

SEO Question:

I am using Overture, Wordtracker, and KeywordDiscovery to do keyword research, but I want to know why the search volume numbers vary so much, and which numbers I should trust. How do I do keyword research?

SEO Answer:

Each keyword data source has flaws inherent to its model. Rather than looking at keyword suggestion tools as something which offers an exact quantitative measure of traffic look for them to be more qualitative (ie: rather than looking for exact numbers look for them to be more of a yes no tool).

Also look at keyword depth, related words, and reasonable modifiers. Depth and related words matter far more than just the sheer volume for a generic term because the longer queries are more targeted and thus easier to monetize, and longer search phrases are typically easier to rank for than shorter keywords.

Overture:

Overture is owned by Yahoo!. Since Yahoo! is a major search provider and has a fairly open ad inventory system they have a ton of automated search queries from things like

• rank checkers

• search result scrapers
• people doing competitive research
• arbitrage players
• bid checkers

When I searched for "seo book" as a keyword Overture returned 1,579 monthly queries. This number is low because those people searching for my brand (or seo products in general) are typically more likely to search on Google.

When I searched for "seo book" as a keyword Overture returned 33 monthly queries for book engine optimization search seo seo seo software. Notice how they returned the words in alphabetical order, the words in the search queries most likely were in a vastly different order. Also note that is an absurd search phrase. Like who would search for something like seo book seo search engine optimization seo software? Probably nobody, so it is most likely an automated query. You can also back up the lack of legitimacy of that keyword phrase by the fact that Overture did not show any search volume for other similar but shorter and more reasonable queries.

Another problem worth noting with Overture data is that they run singular and plural search words together. Some queries have far different meanings and/or far different search volumes between the singular and plural versions.

Although I mentioned this above, it is worth noting again: keyword depth matters far more than the sheer volume for a generic term. Longer queries are more targeted and thus easier to monetize. Plus those queries are easier to rank for. Since seo book only had 3 returned queries, with one of them being brand related and another being likely a fake query, it probably would not be a great keyword to target for traffic (but the lack of competition and limited market depth might make it an easy term to brand...which was part of the thought process when I created this site).

To test keyword depth and find related keywords you can use a variety of tools, like Overture, Google Suggest, the AdWords Keyword Tool, and Google Sets.

I also have ownership in one of the top ranked Forex websites. Because of the highly commercial nature of the search term (forex means foreign exchange, which is typically searched for by people trading money) Yahoo!'s search estimates (93,240 searches a month) are absurdly overblown for that core term.

But on a positive note, that market has amazing depth. People are looking for courses, books, news, tips, and strategies on the topic. Forex also has synergistic related keywords like currency trading, forex trading, currency exchange, and modifiers galore including types of trades, country names, and currencies. While the market is exceptionally competitive the depth still makes it somewhat appealing.

Wordtracker:

Wordtracker has a much smaller data set than Overture (Yahoo!), Google, or even MSN, so Wordtracker numbers are going to be more easily skewed by the small sample size. If I use one of Wordtracker's partner search engines and search for an uncommon query it is going to make that query seem far more important than it is.

Digital Point offers a free tool which compares Wordtracker and Overture values side by side.

Keyword Discovery:

I view Keyword Discovery as being somewhat similar to Wordtracker. Keyword Discovery may have a larger keyword index than Wordtracker, but don't expect either of them to offer precise quantitative data.

If you want to test the quantity of traffic for a specific keyword, set up a search targeted campaign on Google AdWords, and ensure you bid enough to show up somewhere on the lower half of the ads on the first page. Also ensure that you target your ads to the appropriate regions, and use a large enough budget that your ad shows up on almost all of the searches for that particular keyword.

In the past I did a more comprehensive review of keyword research tools. I also offer a free keyword research tool which is powered from Overture data and cross references most of the useful keyword research tools on the market.

SEO Question: Many people say write naturally for SEO, but what does that mean?

SEO Answer: About a month and a half ago the New York Times published an article by Steve Lohr titled This Boring Headline Is Written for Google. The article flits with the idea of writing newspaper articles with Google in mind. That story got a decent amount of buzz because newspapers usually do not put much consideration into search engine marketing.

Old School Search Engine Optimization:

A few years ago you could do SEO like this:

• start your page title with your keyword or keyword phrase
• include that keyword phrase on most every heading or subheading on that page
• link to the page sitewide with that same keyword in the anchor text
• build a ton of links from external locations, with most (or all) of them containing that keyword phrase

Does Old School Still Work?

For MSN (and, to some extent, Yahoo!) you could still use a somewhat similar keyword stuffing philosophy and see outstanding results, but the problem with the stick my core phrase everywhere SEO method! is that Google does not want to show the most optimized content. They want to show the most relevant content.

As noted above in the New York Times article, most news articles (and likely most quality web documents) are not heavily focused on concentrating on optimizing for a keyword. Instead they use the natural language associated with that topic.

If too many of your signals are focused on just one word or phrase and you lack the supporting vocabulary in your document you may get filtered out of the search results for your primary keyword targets. It has happened to me several times, and it is a pretty common occurrence, especially for websites that have few authoritative trustworthy votes and try to make up for it by aggressive use of a phrase in the page content.

Here is an example of a snapshot of a spam page I saw ranking for a long tail keyword

The problem is, that page was ranking for Michigan Smoker's Life Insurance when it targeted a way different phrase. The page will never rank for the main phrase it was targeting, so unless they redirect searchers to a more relevant page it is going to be hard for them to convert any visitors that land on a page like that.

Read a bunch of SEO forums and you eventually come across threads with titles like Non optimized pages higher in SERPS than optimized ones???

How to Optimize for Google:

So if old hat optimization is considered overoptimization and/or is potentially detrimental to your rankings what do you do?

You could

• say screw Google they will eventually rank me if I get this keyword on the page 1 more time ;)
• say screw Google I am pulling in plenty of money from Yahoo! and MSN
• not worry about SEO at all
• evolve SEO to a more productive state

Onward and upward I say. How to mix it up to become Google friendly:

• Start the page title with a modifier or couple non keywords instead of placing your primary keyword phrase as the first word of the page title. Example... instead of search engine marketing company start your title with professional search engine marketing...
• Stemming is your friend. Use plural, singular, and ing versions of your keywords. I have seen pages that used a bunch of the plural version filtered out of Google for the plural version but still ranking for the singular version. If you mix it up you can catch both.
• Mix up the anchor text, subheaders and page content. Use semantically related phrases, and, in some cases, write subheaders that are useful for humans even if some of them do not have any keyword phrases in them.
• Make sure each page is somewhat unique and focused in nature.

Semantically related phrases:

If you think of words as having relationships to one another and you visualize optimizing for a keyword as optimizing for a basket of relevant related keywords it will help you draw in relevant related search traffic while also making your page more relevant for its core keywords.

For example, the acronym SEO would have the following as some semantically related phrases

Now you wouldn't necessarily need to get all of those in your page copy, but if a person was writing naturally about the topic of SEO it would be common for many of those kinds of words to appear on the page.

Where do I Find Semantically Related Phrases?

GoRank offers a free semantic research tool. You can also find semantically related phrases by using a Google ~ search, the Google Keyword Tool, clustering engines, or concept pairing tools like Google Sets.

I link to all those tools on my keyword suggestion tool, and here is a background post on latent semantic indexing.

An Over Abundance of Modifiers:

In addition to using words that are semantically related it makes sense to use words that are common modifiers. For example common buying / shopping searches might include words like

• Free shipping
• Coupons
• Coupon
• Deals
• Deal
• Cheap
• Expensive
• Budget
• Bargain
• Bargains
• Affordable
• Low Cost
• Free
• Find
• Get
• Buy
• Purchase
• Locate
• Compare
• Shop
• Shopping
• Search

I created a keyword modifiers spreadsheet with free keyword modifier ideas for a few different search, transaction, and classification types. I might try to expand it a bit if people find it useful.

If it All Sounds Like a Bit Much...

If it seems complex or complicated then don't focus too heavily on the modifiers or semantic related phrases or even your core keyword that much.

First write your article about your topic without even thinking about the search engines. Then go back and tweak it to include relevant modifiers and semantically related phrases. Make sure that you use multiple versions of your primary keyword phrase if it has multiple versions.

To make the page easy to read and to make it easy to add related phrases and alternate versions of your keywords break up the page using many subheaders. Also add leading questions that lead people from one section to the next. For example, I could say did you find this search engine marketing article helpful in your website promotion quest? Do you think it will help you do a become a better search engine optimizer and more holistic internet marketer?

I am a bit tired and I think this was a bit verbose, but hopefully it helps somebody. If not, arggggg... hehehe.