A long time ago I made a keyword research video which was WAY too long and came out a bit grany. I recently bought the latest copy of Camtasia Studio and am thinking about making a few short SEO videos. Here are some possible topic ideas:

• what are quality links

• what web directories are worthwhile
• link baiting and how do I appeal to web 2.0
• how to use SEO for Firefox
• how to do competitive research
• how to find the most profitable keywords
• how to write page titles and meta description tags
• how to do on the page optimization
• how to structure a website to be search engine friendly AND convert well
• how do I pick a niche
• how to evaluate the health of a website

So the question is... what topics would you like to see me make short tutorial videos about? I can't guarantee I will make them all, but I will try to make at least a few, and then listen to feedback to make a few more that are hopefully a bit better.

Google recently announced they are increasing user personalization. In the past they typically placed a turn off personalized results whenever your results were personalized, but now they do not disclose when they are personalizing the results, so you don't know when they changed, which sucks. To see non-personalized results you have to log out of your Google account.

Now instead of marking the results as personalized when they change them the results always say they are personalized.

It is kinda weird when you build a decent amount of authority from scratch because eventually people start treating your errors much differently. There are ups and downs to exposure. The biggest ups are

• You get far more credit than you deserve, so it is easy to maintain your market position. Some non-news is news because you mention it.

• If you do something good it is probably going to spread.
• You will get a lot of feedback.
• You get opportunities that you would never expect, and get to learn a lot by partnering with great people to work on amazing projects.
• You can help friends and family quit working for others and work for themselves to do things they are passionate about.

The biggest downs are

• You get far more credit than you deserve - this causes many people to stagnate, trading off of past reputation.

• You get used to doing well, so you have to learn something really cool or something amazing has to happen for you to get excited about work.
• If you get addicted to reach or authority you can let yourself change to where you identity becomes more representative of what others want you to be - even if it is not who you are.
• If you get bored and want to change what you do it is hard to change if you let your living costs scale with your income.
• Your average client shifts from people who are passionate to include many people who are not.
• It is impossible to write something that is interesting enough to be worth reading and accessible to everyone.
• People look to pull you out of context any way possible, especially if doing so can improve their market position or sense of self worth.
• You can get bogged down with menial tasks to where you stop learning unless you are aggressive at filtering out noise.

As far as my errors go, I can write a post about how important it is to write well, but at my core I am still a bad speller. About a year or so ago spelling errors started to matter much more than they did in the past. Many other errors have become more and more important as well.

More recently friends advise me to steer clear of controversy, stating things like things that got you where you are are not necessarily things you should continue to do. Largely they are probably correct, but it is a big shift in perspective to go from looking for cracks in statements and policies to being a person who just casually analyzes markets and is rewarded for their observations and ideas...especially if you like to view yourself as the underdog. :)

And now when I do anything risky I am guaranteed at least one sharp response. And everything you do is one more opportunity to look hypocritical. My sales letter claims that SEO is easy, and I think if you are passionate about your topic it is not hard to compete in just about any field. If you are passionate it is not hard to spread ideas because pure passion brings out creativity and it is easy to detect...people want to be associated with that. People want to feel important and want to associate with people who make them feel their ideas are important.

The issue with Dave Pasternack (which got me that response telling me that I need to grow up) is not that SEO is easy or hard, it is that it is hard to scale selling SEO services because most businesses need more than just SEO... they need overall business optimization. Most people are too arrogant or afraid or shortsighted or distrusting to consider that. What is worse is that many people intentionally commit fraud, and we have to be sheltered to protect our egos and livelihoods.

I just helped get a great friend's new site to the front page of Google's search results. Now their phone is ringing off the hook, but because they need to streamline their sales process and work on making more compelling offers that filter out bad prospects they are probably getting a bit more exposure than they want. Was it easy for them to rank? Absolutely. But now they need more. And they are learning quickly, but it is much easier to help them for free as a friend than to build their business as a client.

And then you know pieces of stories that you can't share. Some days multiple mainstream media outlets will contact you asking questions about how they can better optimize their sites. The same companies publish articles about how sketchy the entire field of SEO is, while cloaking links or content on their own sites, and few people see the absurdity of the claims. And if you say anything about it then people may see it as an unjust rant. And if you divulge too much you might end up costing someone their job. Everyone wants results, and accountability for risk and errors usually falls on someone who can't afford to bear the brunt of the outcome.

If you are profitable and show your results you are accused of showing off, all while closing market inefficiencies you found. If you do not show results then you are arrogant and talking out of your...

As a person who shares market inefficiencies you are going to offend some people. Right now I think many bloggers are getting paid crumbs compared to what they are worth, but if I post about that suddenly I am a chauvinistic pig that thinks mom bloggers are naive and stupid and blah blah blah.

I don't think it is bad to be naive. I still am about many things, and if you feel that saying some people may be naive is a bad thing then you need to grow up and stop viewing the world in a black and white picture that makes yourself feel important. Everyone is not equal. And if we were the world would be a terrible place to live.

My girlfriend actually likes how crass and kurt I am, but I am nowhere near as much so on this blog. Yet after reading what others say about me I often feel like I just pulled this move.

Everyone is a minority with a broken ego and wants to feel important. No matter what you do people will hate you. Some idiot recently started leaving racist comments under Jim Boykin's name.

Everyone has cracks in their identities and egos. And if a person stands up for the rights of others sometimes they end up trampling others to maintain their own authority. It is an underlying theme in Animal Farm. From my Cliff notes style poem about that book:

what you fought against
is what you became
still, you kept fighting
to protect your name

People link at definitive statements. If your content is vanilla nobody cares. People link at definitive statements. People pull your words out of context and make them more definitive such that they create a self promotional controversy. But then sometimes I do the same thing. Everyone does. There are far more words typed each day than attention to consume them. Somebody has to lose.

As you get more authority you are expected to be less and less risky. I recently got one of my sites mentioned in authoritative political blogs and noticed that SEO Book typically sends link sites nearly as much traffic as many of the top political blogs. Should I take less risk? How do you balance self confidence and perceived arrogance? Should you worry about offending a few people so much that it changes your identity and how much you enjoy doing what you do?

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.