Question: How long does it take to rank a website? How many hour of work do I have to do each day to compete and rank my website at the top of the search results?

Answer: I get this question almost every day, and it is one of my least favorite questions to answer. So I figured I would answer it as best I can once here, then point people to this page when I get asked again. To compete in competitive marketplaces you have to out-think the competition or invest more than they do. When you start from how little or how quickly you have the wrong mindset. Ask not what your search results can do for you, but what you can do for your search results. :)

Keep launching quality original content, keep working at brand building, keep making social connections, and watch the traction build. When you are new, can you predict what one idea is going to make the difference? For most people I don't think so. Some types of success are deliberate, but for most independent webmasters, I think they accidentally step into success by working hard, being ignored, and then watching something blossom that they did not realize the importance of when they first launched it.

After you have some success then you can engineer further success, but for many it starts out as an accident or a byproduct of constant motion.

How long does it take to rank?

If the search results are uncompetitive (use SEO for Firefox to survey the competitive landscape) you might be able to rank in a month even if your site is brand new.

Is your site brand new? If so, how old are the top ranked competing sites. If they are a number of years old then it is probably going to take at least a year to catch up unless they are bad at marketing and link building or you have a great marketing idea that will help you build many organic links. If the companies that are ranking are multi-billion dollar corporations then you can't outrank them with a one man website unless your site is integrated into the conversation of that marketplace and/or your site offers valuable tools and/or original linkworthy content.

If your site is brand new, you probably want to develop links over time in a fairly consistent manner. If you grow x links this month then you want to create x or more the next month. And that number sets the baseline for the following month. Months where you have no viral marketing ideas try to list your site in a few quality directories, join trade organizations, and get other clean links.

If you are sitting on an older site you may be able to grow links a bit more aggressively, and you may be able to get away with being a bit more aggressive with the anchor text you use in the inbound links.

In many regional search markets outside of the US the competition is much less fierce than it is in the US, and it is easy to rank for some fairly competitive keywords.

An exact match domain name may also provide ranking benefits in some search relevancy algorithms, which allows you to rank quicker without needing to build up as much link authority.

How many hours of work will it take?
I have ranked sites on 5 hours of work, and I have put hundreds of hours of work into sites that do not rank as well as I want them to.

• How hard are your competitors working? If you are unsure track their current link count and their link growth. Also look for signs of public relation and the quality level of their inbound links.
• How big is their head start?
• How much are they investing?
• Are there ideas they forgot to focus on?
• Is your brand more focused than their brand?
• How much risk are you willing to take?
• Are competitors weighed down by bureaucracy?
• Are you more passionate about your topic than the leading websites? Eventually people will discover that, especially if you are not afraid to market yourself.

Ask not what your search results can do for you, but what you can do for your search results. :)

WebmasterWorld has another thread about lowering AdSense prices.

When the economy is good and advertisers have robust ad budgets, an ad network might be willing to sell them whatever they are willing to buy. If the advertiser wants to overpay for some ads and associate that spend with branding then so be it. But when the economy slows down, the ad marketplace needs to separate the best ad inventory from the weakest ad inventory to protect the rates of their best ads.

From Google's perspective, search is the golden goose tied directly with conversions. Syndicated ads, which can lead to conversions, may often carry a premium price based on branding value. Here are some of the forces that might be lowering AdSense earnings

• Some brand advertisers cutting their ad budgets, trimming brand related ads before they cut direct response ads.
• Those brand ads being replaced by less trustworthy ads from smaller advertisers who bid less and are less likely to get clicked on.
• Google changing the clickable region of AdSense ad units.
• Google lowering the estimated value of content clicks to help protect the value of search clicks and shift more of their network spend toward search.

Given Google's market dominance over the contextual ad market there is virtually no floor to how low they can price AdSense ads on non-premium publishing partner websites.

I have one site where the ads are AGGRESSIVELY integrated into the content, where that site gets thousands of search driven visitors per day in a big money vertical. That site has a CPM rate which is roughly equal to what one to two clicks would cost if I had to buy that traffic from Google directly (rather than me arbitraging their organic search results then selling that traffic). Clearly there has to be a better way to monetize that site. The ad prices are so cheap that I would be the buyer if I had a higher value model in that space.

If you have been using AdSense as a business model now is a great time to create new revenue streams and test shifting from an AdSense ad seller to an AdSense ad buyer.

As a person who has studied search for many years I thought I would analyze how I thought a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo could change online publishing and internet marketing strategy and business models. This post assumes that the purchase goes through with Yahoo's board and regulators, and that the underlying search architecture and ad platform of Microsoft is used rather than Yahoo's current mess.

Organic Search

• Yahoo! Search is stale. They place way too much on user generated content and worthless tag pages located on sites with a high authority score. Microsoft Search makes it much easier to rank pages on lower authority sites so long as they have fresh inbound links.
• Like Google, but unlike Yahoo, Microsoft places significant weighting on domain names in their relevancy algorithms.
• Microsoft closed their small business directory. Many of Yahoo's regional directories no longer accept paid submissions. It is uncertain what parts of Yahoo might get killed off in staff cuts before and after the acquisition. Submit to the Yahoo Directory while you can.
• Yahoo Shopping and Microsoft Shopping are two of the bigger shopping sites clogging up Google's search results for many queries. A potential merger of these could help the top one rank better while freeing up space for other competitors.
• Yahoo places 4 ads above the fold for commercial searches, driving down organic search results. If Microsoft buys them and runs fewer ads to win marketshare that allows more of the organic search results to receive a solid stream of traffic.
• Yahoo offers a paid inclusion program to sell rankings in their organic search results. If Microsoft buys Yahoo I believe that program will be phased out as it is hard to image that it makes as much profit as it costs in public relations damage, especially if Microsoft intends to catch Google in search.
• Yahoo! News is the leading news site on the web. If Microsoft combines that asset with default installed desktop widgets on Vista they can further enhance that market position.
• Microsoft is bad at following 301 redirects, but they have had that problem for a while, and one would hope they would get that fixed prior to powering Yahoo! Search.

SEO Recommendations

1. Spend some time tracking rankings in Microsoft to better learn their relevancy algorithms if you have not yet studied them.
2. Ensure your website has a fresh content strategy or reason to keep picking up new links.
3. If possible, when starting new projects, try to build them on domain names that match your primary keywords.
4. Submit to the Yahoo Directory while you can. If the Yahoo Directory dies off it may create a hole in the market leaving a profitable business model for another directory or even a site like Mahalo to take its place as a leading generalist editorial catalog of websites.
5. If domain authority (i.e.: running few large sites) was a big piece of your search strategy creating numerous smaller niche sites once again became a profitable strategy.
6. If you were reliant on paid inclusion for traffic that traffic stream may dry up, so your best off learning about Microsoft's ranking algorithms ASAP.
7. Check to see if your site meets the requirements to be included in Yahoo News.

PPC Ads / Paid Search Advertising

• Yahoo! Search's ad platform is still exceptionally clunky. In spite of being recently upgraded they still do not have a public facing keyword tool and only let most advertisers use their keyword tool while they are in the middle of creating a search campaign. Microsoft, is much more open and innovative with their ad platform and advertiser tool set.
• Google has been hoarding data for years without giving much of it back to prospective advertisers. When Yahoo upgraded to Panama they followed Google's path. Microsoft recently launched an Excel ad plugin that shares a ton of useful data with advertisers. If Microsoft buys Yahoo! their data will become more accurate and likely force Google to show more aggregate advertiser data.
• Ad campaign management gets easier because advertisers only need to maintain two ad accounts, which might make self-management of search campaigns more practical for small businesses.

Pay Per Click Ad Recommendations

1. Open an adCenter account using this coupon code for $50 in free ads, and set up your adCenter account to get used to their interface and ad platform.
2. Use the Ad Intelligence plug-in to see how sweet it is.

Display & Contextual Ads

• Microsoft purchased aQuantive earlier this year to own large scale display ad serving capabilities.
• Yahoo has more pageviews than any other website. If behavioral data has hidden latent value they should be able to leverage it across their network and partner websites.
• This merger will likely take YPN out of perpetual beta, creating a credible alternative to AdSense, which will increase the share paid to smaller publishing partners.

Display & Contextual Ad Sales Recommendations

1. Display ads likely to fall in value due to recession, and a glut of inventory from social media and other websites, so I still like higher value businesses that remove greater friction from commercial transactions when possible. The one exception to this belief is in game ads, which I see as having a lot of upside if you can publish games good enough to attract a large audience.
2. The combining of the Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks should create many arbitrage opportunities.
3. If you have a site that profits from AdSense it is in your best interest to try Microsoft's network after it launches. Odds are that Microsoft will be willing to give publishers a large share to win marketshare, and giving Microsoft a try will help them create a more robust network which forces Google to increase AdSense payouts.

International Search

Short term I believe this acquisition is about gaining momentum in the US market. But Yahoo is strong in Japan. They also have significant market coverage in Spain, South Korea, and China. Microsoft has notable search share in some European countries. Both have about 4% marketshare in the UK. You can learn more about international search by downloading this 2007 Global Search Report [PDF].

I think a solid strategy going forward for Microsoft to gain search share in foreign markets is for them to offer their operating system free or at a reduced price for bundling search in the desktop. They already give away operating systems in exchange for feedback or exposure.

If the Microsoft purchase of Yahoo clears, expect Google to start distributing a Google flavored version of Ubuntu to the general public before the year is out. Inside of 5 years Microsoft's operating system will be free or irrelevant.

If you want to read the documents that started Microsoft's major push toward web search they are here and here.

Danny Sullivan offers some great coverage of the deal here

Because social media is new it is easy to hype, marketers do. While I too have hyped the interactive nature of blogs and the web, I find that connecting directly with the end targets and their interests is typically more predictable and more profitable than running strategies through sites like Digg. With that thought in mind, I asked if social media traffic is worth a cent.

Google slightly missed their Q4 whisper numbers, by a wider margin than some appreciate, due to gains associated with weak US dollar value. Paul Kedrosky stated that Google's quarter over quarter gain due to exchange rates was $93 million, and year over year was $200 million.

Why were Google revenues soft? Perhaps analysts were expecting too much. Perhaps the pending recession. Who knows, but the one thing that Google did state as a big weakness was social networking inventory. On the call George Reyes, CFO of Google, said

We have found that social network inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.

Social media has little to no value to advertisers. There is little to no implied intent. It is the exact opposite of focused marketing like search marketing, direct navigation domain names, and targeted affiliate sites. You simply can't put a value on a social media connection like you can on search.

A recurring theme in the 2008 link development panel was hand checks and the editorial nature of search, especially from Roger. Great article well worth a read. Thanks Rae!