So a while ago I was really bad at making uber literal content. Being literal and easy to understand is a good thing as it makes it easy for people understand what you are doing, but if you are too literal you miss the fact that conversion is driven from emotion more than logic and your copy may convert like crap.

I just rewrote a bunch of page titles and meta tags for a client (I did not write the original ones, but the original titles looked like something I would have wrote a couple years ago). In the past I would do things like create a page about SEO Book FAQs. I would then title the page SEO Book FAQs. Much more commonly people would search for things like Best SEO Book or SEO Book Reviews.

When people are new to SEO with limited marketing experience it is easy to be too literal, focusing on arbitrary stuff like keyword density or keyword repition, and miss out on the end goal of the page. Because there is so much search volume, and maybe only a few billion pages in most of the major search indexes pages will come up frequently so long as you are writing about a popular subject and build a few links into your site.

A big problem with the web is that stuff spreads quickly and success is self reinforcing. A website can be uber sloppy and generally messed up and still make a living.

When you are new to the web it takes a bit of time and effort to figure stuff out, but after you gain a bit of experience it is not that hard to make boat loads of cash, since on the whole the marketplace is not that competitive and most websites are garbage.

As you read more marketing books, sales letters, and web pages learning how to write better sales copy just kinda comes naturally.

Search engines are still a bit stupid. You don't want to write for them and forget your visitors. It is easy to write a bit more naturally and conversion oriented, and then just build a few more links to boost your relevancy.

Some search algorithms may eventually look at conversion metrics to help determine relevancy (ie: Google Wallet, Google buying Urchin, Overure & Google offering free conversion tracking). Things that convert are also more likely to be things that are recommended or cited frequently. Even if more people try your stuff and hate it that means that there will still be more people talking about you, linking to you, and giving you feedback on how to improve your products or services.

I guess the point of this post is don't be too literal, as I think it is a problem I had for an extended period of time. I still probably do it to a bit, but nowhere near as bad as I once did.

So I had about a half million ad displays since I started the Google site targeted ads. Still no sales from it, but good market data.

The wider your keyword set is the better your chance of being able to lower your per click costs. Doing site targeting makes sense if you have rich business models or are trying to target niche low volume sites, but otherwise it can be far more expensive than large contextual keyword based ad sets.

Some of my term based contextual ads have an effective CPM of around 16 to 20 cents, but the site targeted ads have a $2 minimum price.

You can't know for sure if your site targeted ads are a completely accurate measure of traffic volume because:

• they are only going to show on some pages with lower earnings potential

• different sites and site formats are better at monitizing content
• your overall daily budget might be too low
• your CPM bid might be too low
• some sites use multiple ad units

Despite the above I believe many of the anomalies offset each other a good bit. It is interesting to see that the traffic volumes drop off logarithmically from site to site.

Digital Point gets amazing traffic. In a single day I had over 26,000 ad displays on Digital Point. Some of the smaller SEO forums only displayed a few hundred or few thousand ad displays.

Andrew Goodman sees CPM as eventually phasing out the CPC model:

Other than trying not to antagonize webmasters who have been making a living off AdSense, I can't think of very many reasons for Google keeping the old version of content targeting around. I think that very soon it will become evident that the old content program is merely being grandfathered for a set amount of time so as not to confuse or upset publishers and advertisers. Phasing out the old program will perhaps lead to a slackening of revenues, as with any painful economic transition. In this case, the transition can be boiled down to moving advertisers dollars from bad publishers to good ones. In the long run, that should strengthen the fundamentals of online advertising and attract more advertisers to the party.

although I don't see that happening anytime soon. What makes Google's business model so powerful is the extreme targeting and allowing small advertisers to participate. I can't see them wanting to outright punt on that anytime soon. The only way they will do that is if click fraud gets tons of exposure, or if the cost of policing the small sites outweighs the returns.

Even if the small sites are a break even proposition, keeping them in the AdSense system means:

• free exposure for the AdSense program

• Google gets to boast about their program being so much larger than any competing contextual ad network
• If Google's ads are on the page then some other network's contextual ads are not.

The smaller niche channels tend to have a slightly greater CTR than the larger more well known sites. People moved to search because it was so easily trackable and targeted, but the $2 minimum on branding ads will keep some people away from participating in the brand ads.

While people may not realize the value of the small niche sites I believe their traffic quality is higher than the more well known sites since they are harder to get to (read as: what leads get there may be more prequalified). I had decent clickthrough rates on many of the smaller SEO forums & blogs (some averaging about 2 to 3 cents per click), whereas the clickthrough rates on the larger & more established sites were typically much lower.

I (at least temporarily) ended my site targeted AdSense ad campaign a few days back because I think there are far more effective ways I could spend money to promote this site, but for some business models the site target ads probably make great sense.

So I have content match turned on with Overture, and with my recent post about click fraud, it appears they are trying to make me a liar. One of the terms in my account is Improve Search Engine Rankings. My Overture content match usually costs me about $20 a month total, across a large number of words. In the last week I spent over $75 on that single term, at 44 cents a click, while my ad was in 3^RD position. Whats up with that?

I understand they enable certain terms on certain partner sites, but I just can't believe that traffic was legitimate.

I have not seen much sketchiness with their regular search product, just their content match on that specific term. Since it never really made any sales Overture content match has now been disabled :)

A while ago I said that my ebook could be improved by interviewing a good number of industry experts to help build a more broad / diversified voice.

My goal is to interview about a dozen people who are doing well or I think really know their stuff. Recently via email I interviewed Shawn Hogan from Digital Point. He claims not to be an SEO, but his site gets far more traffic than most SEO related websites.

The biggest things that stood out to me from his interview:

• he created things that he himself wanted / found useful

• he threw it out there to collect feedback & added features people wanted
• he loves to automate as much as possible

Well known SEO Ian Turner recently attended the WMW conference in New Orleans, and failed to return home. ThreadWatch has a post about him being missing.

If you attended the New Orleans WebmasterWorld conference, and stayed around through the weekend, please take a look at the thread to see if you can offer any details.

Ian is a great guy. I wish him a safe return to his family soon.