Ads becoming content is not only true from a thin affiliate site perspective, but also on larger more traditional ad buys. Selling content hosting is going mainstream. About.com has been selling custom branded sponsored content for about a year. This WSJ page hawking Accenture is a PageRank 4, and this BizJournals lead generation page is also an indication of where sponsored content hosting is heading. How long will it be before you can log on to the WSJ ad platform and just buy a topic and upload a page?

A few months back Threadwatch had a post about Yahoo selling subdomains. Yesterday I stumbled across an AdSense ad for a company selling subdomains that they forward to other sites. I don't believe it is smart to build a big site on someone else's domain, but if you wanted to fling up a bunch of spam or create a single targeted ad page that goes after a competitive phrase why not leech of their authority and let them assume the risks?

There are no search engine guidelines on hosting advertisements for third parties because it is not an idea Google wants people thinking about or talking publicly about, and they can't edit out WSJ.com if they will want the WSJ to spread their public relations messages and business interests.

I recently came across a number of new and useful SEO tools. Some of them were emailed to me and others were from browsing around the web. Below is a roundup post citing some of them. Here is a free tool to search for DMOZ categories that are being actively maintained. Now someone just needs to cross reference that by the DMOZ extortion prices.

I recently installed the Xinu competitive research tool on my tools subdomain.

On DaveN's blog Rob recently mentioned many cool greasemonkey SEO scripts.

Tips on how to use a free open-source spam generator. (I have not tested this).

TrustMeter Wordpress plugin - shows where your pages rank for their page titles.

Joost also recently created a meta tag plugin for Wordpress.

oyoy.eu - lists a whole bunch of free SEO tools.

Many of the large web players offer or will soon offer analytics products for free. If you use them they may eventually charge you for the service, or they may keep them free but look for other ways to charge you, and use your own statistics against your best interests, by doing one or more of the following

• using your site to help categorize keywords that competitors should bid on (and do SEO for)

• compare your direct traffic to search traffic and flag your site for review to potentially reduce your search traffic if it is outside the normal range for your given industry
• compare your traffic from their engine to traffic streams from other known clean sources (such as competing engines) and flag your site for review if it falls outside of a certain range
• compare your keyword cost and conversion rate relative to other words and reprice accordingly

The General Competitive Trend:

One day you are the top ranked lyrics site making good money pitching ringtones. A few months later the search results are cluttered with YouTube videos, show a Google music vertical result at the top, and sites like Yahoo Music start offering lyrics. Income is down 60% and the trend has just begun.

Are Your Stats a Commodity?

As more of the ad networks become automated and leverage CPA based targeting, advertisers are going to have a better idea of where there is value. Google and your large competitors have access to enough data to capture the large trends, but what happens on the micro-level is what is most relevant to you, and, if your site is not as strong as competing sites, keeping that data private (or, at least as best you can given new affordable competitive analysis services) is required if you want to maintain and grow your business.

How do Ad Networks Increase Profit Margins?

Saying that a search engine may use your data to make them more money is more logical than it is cynical, especially if they are offering the product for free. Some of the smaller search / ad networks, like Shopping.com, have already repriced entire categories of keywords based on advertiser conversion data from free tools. Google has already used my name and brand as the AdLink text for competing offers. And who hasn't been hit by an AdWords quality score?

Independent Free Services Have Costs Too

Even free services like StatCounter and SiteMeter are not free due to one or more of the following reasons

• they usually require a sitewide outbound link

• sharing some of your stats with everyone
• selling your stats to a third party
• limiting your feature set or account size and then charging you to keep all the data they built up about your site over months or years

Think of how much you spent building your brand, your link equity, and your traffic stream. Is it worth giving someone all that data and a sitewide link for something you can get for a one time $30 fee?

Mint is Soooooooo Much Better...

Shawn Inman's Mint (available at HaveaMint.com for $30) is a server based web analytics tool that you can buy licenses to for $30 per site. It tracks traffic trends, referrals, and search trends. In addition it has many extensible peppers which allow you to track things such as

• browser type

• country origin
• internal searches
• outbound clicks
• watching specific pages
• hottest and coldest page trends

How to Leverage Your Stats

• Look for the pages that rank for a wide array of keywords and use the format from those to model your other pages against

• Point more link equity at your best performing pages.
• If you have a deep section that has little link equity and little to no traffic try promoting it in the site's navigational scheme. If traffic picks up and conversions increase keep promoting that section.

What if I Want to Share My Stats?

If you have an authoritative site and make your money from selling ads you may want to make your stats public, which Mint allows you to do with one click. Doing so does not require you to hassle with logging into multiple Google accounts or having to worry about compromising your other features at sites like Google.

What Does Mint Look Like?

I set my stats here to public, but I may change it to private at some point.

Is This a Paid Ad?

Nope. I just recently bought Mint, and thought it rocks, so I wanted to post about it.

I just grabbed Quantcast's free rankings of the top 1,000,000 sites. Currently Seobook.com comes in at 112,095, which is 5 spots below PornHater.com, which is apparently a PageRank 3 porn blog stuck in an industry with an endless supply of traffic. Based on some of the SEO sites that were missing from the Quantcast top sites database I don't think you can fully trust their data as being exceptionally accurate, but if you search through it you should be able to come up with at least a few cool ideas, especially if you combine it with other free and cheap data sources.

The last couple days I have been planning a fun project and feel like a kid in a candy store with competitive research and Internet marketing tools. Now hopefully some of the ideas I came up with will work. :)

I recently got a beta account to the upcoming Compete.com Search Analytics tool. I am not sure of their pricing yet, but Jay Meattle, from Compete.com, told me "the price points will be extremely attractive to small business owners."

You can get leading category based keywords, top competitors for a given keyword (exact or broad match), compare competing sites head to head on keywords, and get the breakdown of traffic sent to any website.

How Accurate is Compete.com?

Their model of data collection is going to make their data more accurate for frequent search terms and larger sites, but I tested their keyword data against some of my smaller sites and it was surprisingly accurate.

How to Clone Smaller Competitors

This is yet another way authority sites will pick off smaller competing sites. It is a simple process. If your site is one of the most authoritative sites in your space you can clean up.

• Use Google's site targeting ads stats to check what sites are running AdSense and getting a lot of traffic (you don't even need to buy ads on them to do this)

• Go to Compete.com to get the top keyword phrases competing sites rank for and create content targeting the same keywords. You can also run the keywords through Google's Traffic Estimator to sort the keywords by Google's value estimates.
• Beyond that, you can run Google's site targeted ads or general contextual AdSense placement reports to find out what pages are the most popular on competing sites, and then create content covering the same topics.

Lowbrow webmasters are fast becoming the outsourced market research department for bigger, more technologically advanced, and cash flush companies.

The Effect of Better Competitive Data

All of these analytic services are going to increase the value of domain authority (since it can be easily leveraged for greater profit) and force webmasters to move themselves up the value chain (since models like AdSense give away too much competitive data, especially when combined with Compete.com).

Other Ways to Use Compete.com

• Compete can be used to see how strong a brand is in its field. The top keyword in the credit card category is Capital One. Both www.capitalone.com and capitalone.com are also in the top 5 keywords. They are obviously a leader in that space. You can also see what percent of a website's traffic originates from its brand related keywords.

• You can search for a broad match phrase to see how established your site is inside a vertical, how consolidated a vertical is, and how much potential upside you have by increasing your share of search traffic.
• Compete can also show you the if a competing site is heavily reliant on a few strong keywords or if their traffic distribution is wider. This can be used to see sites worth investing in (especially if you understand search relevancy algorithms) or sites which have a lot of risk and are worth avoiding.