Seo for your living

Understanding Why Generalist News is a Commodity

In my last post about how contextual advertising targets the weak and poor, I promoted the idea of niche publishers shifting to sell niche products and services directly as a better means of monetization. Dan Root asked why many of the leading news sites are dropping their pay walls. The answer is that future relevancy is driven by the point to economy, and news is a commodity.

The business models for news companies rely upon regional based monopolies that are quickly eroding.

Domain names and community activity largely supplement or replace the need for much of the generalist news or syndication based business model. I used to live in State College and talked to the guy who owned StateCollege.com. The local paper was doing worse and worse every year, and with a small aggressive staff, better technology, more interactive ads, and a great domain name beat them.

And the news that is worth money spreads fast OUTSIDE OF the pay wall. Does WSJ want the pageviews for breaking a news story, or do they want to see the TechCrunch post about the WSJ story get those pageviews?

If you do not think news is a commodity take a look at this image. It says it all, IMHO.

My very first post…
… So I got this pestering emai…

Information Credibility at a Glance: Does Your Site Look Thin Affiliate?

Many Thin Affiliate Sites Look Real

Some of my friends publish fake review sites which organize product recommendations by using the following quality measurement and rating system (affiliate payout per conversion * conversion rate). If people buy it, it must be good.

I have other friends who do real in-depth reviews, but they use such poor formatting that their content looks less trustworthy and more advertisement-like than fake review websites.

Adding Signs of Trust

Smart affiliates know how to convey a sense of trust and look editorial to enhance conversion rates. Editorial rating systems, privacy policies, headings, subheadings, security symbols, pricing data, reviews, features, a clean site design, and consumer generated content increase conversion rates. Assume I am only skimming your page. Assume the little things matter.

A Well Done Affiliate Site

While I do not agree with all the reviews, I can appreciate how well done Mike’s Marketing Tools is. Most of the reviews look impartial. And some of the reviews, like the Optilink review, even link out to a thin affiliate site owned by Mike that passes as the official site after Google banned the official site!

A Poorly Done Official Site

Take a look at how spammy and thin affiliate AnnualCreditReport.com looks. It is the official site (required by law) but it looks like crap because Experian does not get paid if you use it. In fact, it even kicks you over to the Experian site before seeing results, requires you fill out identity verification surveys, and tries to upsell you on a paid reporting service before showing you your free report.

Compare its drab look and nasty conversion process to the look of FreeCreditReport.com. Which one looks more trustworthy? Yup, its the one that is charging your credit card recurring for something that is “free”.

Does Your Site Look Legit?

Thin slicing information credibility is often about evaluating appearance. Unfortunately many of the people creating real content don’t put as much effort into formatting and marketing as the people creating fake content do.

Why Many of the Best SEO Ideas Are Not Found on Popular SEO Blogs

Bad Dated Advice

People who are well established can trade on reputation and attract strong enough clients to not need to perform tests to learn the algorithms intimately well.

Recently another well known marketer put out a video saying domain names were irrelevant to SEO. Then they got feedback from viewers who said they thought that statement was wrong. And then their reply sent to thousands of members on their list included

It’s true that your domain name has no REAL effect on your SERPS.

That answer is intuitive, but it is also incorrect. The only way one would claim that as fact is if one has not done any testing recently.

It is one thing to be wrong, but it is another thing to be wrong, be called out on it, and stand by your incorrect claim. People are spending good money to read incorrect and/or outdated information. Unfortunate really, but if you are already doing well you don’t need to track and test every little thing to keep doing well. Very few gurus openly sharing information have thin affiliate and newly launched test sites that back up their claims. But it is getting harder to succeed with thin affiliate sites as Google becomes creative director of content development.

Share REALLY Good Tips & Die

Most established people are too lazy or too busy to do in depth testing. And if they are doing it, they probably do not want to share it publicly. Share a hole and watch it get plugged. After a search engineer reads your blog and destroys one of your sites you mentioned, it makes it much harder to want to reveal tips and algorithmic holes with hard evidence behind them. Show your proof and watch Google burn it to the ground. Even if you know what you are doing you can’t overcome a hand edit unless it was unjust AND they care enough about your site to let it rank again. You were right, but only until you opened your big mouth.

Much of the game of relevancy is a mind control exercise. The conversation revolves around debates including “should be” or “in an ideal world” rather than “how it is”.

The Endless Sea of Tests & Noise

People newer to the field have less to risk by being aggressive, place a lower value on their time, are generally more excited about the pursuit, are more willing to try things that established people may not, and are more willing to share their results. But many of them have limited exposure, limited confidence, and/or are drowned out by an endless sea of incorrect information. With so many people saturating the SEO market it is getting harder to be the person first with the scoop. Today blogs are a lot like forums were a few years back. There is no way you could ever get any work done if you subscribed to all the SEO blogs, so it is impossible to read all the information.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

If you create a public facing SEO brand, so much of your time goes into brand management and marketing that it is hard to have time to launch many new sites unless you have scaled out a staff. If you have scaled out a staff, you must keep more of your secrets to yourself, because getting a site burned or losing a competitive advantage not only hurts you, but also hurts everyone who works for you. This really hit home after Google killed a site that I had a team working on.

I Was Just Looking At Your Site!

Some of the people who introduced themselves on SEO Book recently mentioned that they were in fields or owned sites that directly competed with some of my sites. If I share all my best ideas with them for free on the blog and they share almost none of their best ideas with me that gets a bit hard to compete with them on my secondary sites, especially if I am competing with them and search engineers decide to pillage my sites.

More Work for Less $ = Bad Trend

The market is getting more competitive. So longer hours are required to achieve similar profits from thin sites. People who see and feel this trend are not only working extra to make up for it, but are also working extra to establish a firmer foothold for the future. 1 hour of work today may be more effective than 2 hours of work next year, or 3 hours of work the following year. But after you get that network effect behind a site the ball is rolling down hill. Gravity is on your side.

SEO as a Subset of Marketing

As it gets harder to fake it people make more legitimate sites offering more value. But as their sites become more embedded in the web doing SEO tests related to links become less and less relevant because it is harder to isolate variables. Dominating the search results becomes a game dominated by the people who are the best at spreading ideas. And so with each passing day SEO for most webmasters is more of a subset of marketing than an independent discipline.

Open Source Media Strategies

Nice Idea, Google!

About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn’t artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people’s sites, unless you are Google.

I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.

Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.

The Transition From Open to Close

Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.

Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else’s platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.

Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer…Pay: $0

All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas….and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else’s user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else’s product, you are wasting your time.

Google`s Dreams
You re reading the third and final part of The Dilemma of Defining Google series. Finally the time has come to chat about Google s anticipated long-term plans and contributions. We will finish up our search for finding those numerous ways in which they redefine the quality of our lives and make the world a better place….
Better software development info. Get better choices for software development from the best sources. All in one.

Fumbles and Features for Search and Social Network Firms
It feels like Thanksgiving was just yesterday but of course that didn t slow down some of our favorite search engines and social networks well except in one case. Here s a quick round up of some of the good bad and ugly news currently breaking about Yahoo Facebook and Google….
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Google Not Best for All Searches
When you re looking for information do you go to an encyclopedia or a specialized book If you answered Neither I check the Internet don t click away. The question has more relevance for the major search engines particularly Google than you might think….
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SEO Is Not An Option, It’s A Requirement! (Search Engine Land)
Recently, there was a thread in the High Rankings Forum asking whether SEO is an extra skill or a prerequisite for any website designer/developer. It was a great question that spurred a lot of conversation. It goes without saying that the average small-business owner in 2007 knows that they need a website. But do they know that they need SEO, or do they just assume that once they have …

Fathom SEO Announces Search Engine Marketing Partnership with PromiseONE (PRWeb)
Fathom SEO’s management-led recapitalization agreement with PromiseOne helps the search engine marketing leader build on its success in search engine optimization, online PR, link referral building, paid search management, opt-in email marketing and online video production and distribution. (PRWeb Dec 19, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: …

Former Bodyguard Exposes SEO Secrets to Exploding Online Business in the New Year (PRWeb)
Franck Silvestre, an ex-bodyguard without an extensive search engine optimization or Internet marketing background, learned enough about SEO to achieve top ten Google rankings for his affiliate marketing site, leading to thousands of dollars in increased sales. He’s sharing his SEO secrets in a new e-book called SEO Seduction Secrets (www.SEOseductionSecrets.com), to show that anyone can …

Optimizing a Web Site`s SEO Ranking
No one has time to surf all the sites listed in a search engine. Most people just click on the sites listed topmost and surf through them. This is the reason sites listed at the top gain huge traffic. This is the reason sites use Search Engine Optimization SEO . Keep reading to find out how to optimize a website s SEO ranking….
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International Keyword Research Tool

I took down my old Overture powered keyword tool and replaced it using Wordtracker data because:

• I like Wordtracker’s data more
• Wordtracker’s API is much more reliable than scraping data from Overture
• the Overture tool seems like it has been down more often than it has been up recently

I primarily focus on the US market and did not realize how popular the international aspects of the old keyword research tool were until I started getting a rash of email complaints after taking the tool down.

So I put the old keyword tool back up, renamed it the international keyword suggestion tool, and defaulted it to using UK values (while still allowing users to grab data from other regional markets). I also zipped it up here, so anyone can install it on their site, and set it to a different default language if they like.

Fathom SEO Announces Search Engine Marketing Partnership with PromiseONE (PRWeb)
Fathom SEO’s management-led recapitalization agreement with PromiseOne helps the search engine marketing leader build on its success in search engine optimization, online PR, link referral building, paid search management, opt-in email marketing and online video production and distribution. (PRWeb Dec 19, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: …

Open Source Software, Semi Porous Brands, & the Blending of Content & Ads

As the web grows users are getting better at tuning out obvious ads. So ads will get more insidious, and more and more businesses will be built off a missing features and shadow brand built on the back of the goodwill from sharing and open source.

One guy got angry at me claiming that I was providing conflicting information, because he read the blogger’s guide to seo and saw that I recommended using Wordpress but also recommended avoiding using Wordpress.com. I am not the one who created that shadow brand, but I do realize that is has the potential to be enormously profitable.

Pligg, an open source software program similar to Digg, recently went up for sale but did not sell. Now Pligg is has some plug ins available from the official Pligg pro store. One of them is a list of known spamming domains.

As software licensing costs fall, the keys to selling software are to:

• create an open source core that does your marketing and builds a large userbase
• have some dynamic updating data service
• lack essential features that people can buy as a bolt on (this is essentially your software licensing fee, but it is cloaked)
• lock in user data (though this is short term - the smartest users will refuse to use it)
• provide an easy to use for dummies version that makes it easier to charge people for easily automated services

SEO Training Still Limited At The University Level (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)
Arizona search engine optimization company Vertical Measures recently released the results of an extensive study into the top SEM and SEO training programs and resources available at the university level today.

SEO Is Not An Option, It’s A Requirement! (Search Engine Land)
Recently, there was a thread in the High Rankings Forum asking whether SEO is an extra skill or a prerequisite for any website designer/developer. It was a great question that spurred a lot of conversation. It goes without saying that the average small-business owner in 2007 knows that they need a website. But do they know that they need SEO, or do they just assume that once they have …

Why Many of the Best SEO Ideas Are Not Found on Popular SEO Blogs

Bad Dated Advice

People who are well established can trade on reputation and attract strong enough clients to not need to perform tests to learn the algorithms intimately well.

Recently another well known marketer put out a video saying domain names were irrelevant to SEO. Then they got feedback from viewers who said they thought that statement was wrong. And then their reply sent to thousands of members on their list included

It’s true that your domain name has no REAL effect on your SERPS.

That answer is intuitive, but it is also incorrect. The only way one would claim that as fact is if one has not done any testing recently.

It is one thing to be wrong, but it is another thing to be wrong, be called out on it, and stand by your incorrect claim. People are spending good money to read incorrect and/or outdated information. Unfortunate really, but if you are already doing well you don’t need to track and test every little thing to keep doing well. Very few gurus openly sharing information have thin affiliate and newly launched test sites that back up their claims. But it is getting harder to succeed with thin affiliate sites as Google becomes creative director of content development.

Share REALLY Good Tips & Die

Most established people are too lazy or too busy to do in depth testing. And if they are doing it, they probably do not want to share it publicly. Share a hole and watch it get plugged. After a search engineer reads your blog and destroys one of your sites you mentioned, it makes it much harder to want to reveal tips and algorithmic holes with hard evidence behind them. Show your proof and watch Google burn it to the ground. Even if you know what you are doing you can’t overcome a hand edit unless it was unjust AND they care enough about your site to let it rank again. You were right, but only until you opened your big mouth.

Much of the game of relevancy is a mind control exercise. The conversation revolves around debates including “should be” or “in an ideal world” rather than “how it is”.

The Endless Sea of Tests & Noise

People newer to the field have less to risk by being aggressive, place a lower value on their time, are generally more excited about the pursuit, are more willing to try things that established people may not, and are more willing to share their results. But many of them have limited exposure, limited confidence, and/or are drowned out by an endless sea of incorrect information. With so many people saturating the SEO market it is getting harder to be the person first with the scoop. Today blogs are a lot like forums were a few years back. There is no way you could ever get any work done if you subscribed to all the SEO blogs, so it is impossible to read all the information.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

If you create a public facing SEO brand, so much of your time goes into brand management and marketing that it is hard to have time to launch many new sites unless you have scaled out a staff. If you have scaled out a staff, you must keep more of your secrets to yourself, because getting a site burned or losing a competitive advantage not only hurts you, but also hurts everyone who works for you. This really hit home after Google killed a site that I had a team working on.

I Was Just Looking At Your Site!

Some of the people who introduced themselves on SEO Book recently mentioned that they were in fields or owned sites that directly competed with some of my sites. If I share all my best ideas with them for free on the blog and they share almost none of their best ideas with me that gets a bit hard to compete with them on my secondary sites, especially if I am competing with them and search engineers decide to pillage my sites.

More Work for Less $ = Bad Trend

The market is getting more competitive. So longer hours are required to achieve similar profits from thin sites. People who see and feel this trend are not only working extra to make up for it, but are also working extra to establish a firmer foothold for the future. 1 hour of work today may be more effective than 2 hours of work next year, or 3 hours of work the following year. But after you get that network effect behind a site the ball is rolling down hill. Gravity is on your side.

SEO as a Subset of Marketing

As it gets harder to fake it people make more legitimate sites offering more value. But as their sites become more embedded in the web doing SEO tests related to links become less and less relevant because it is harder to isolate variables. Dominating the search results becomes a game dominated by the people who are the best at spreading ideas. And so with each passing day SEO for most webmasters is more of a subset of marketing than an independent discipline.

• Screening The Right SEO Service Provider (Turks.US)
Choosing the right Search Engine Optimization — or SEO — service provider is the same as picking out any company you were going to buy a service from. The assessment process is similar in a lot of ways.

Open Q&A Thread for Internet Marketing Questions

Let me know if you have any questions about SEO or internet marketing stuff. I will try to reply to your comment right below it in less than a day, often within minutes, for as long as this thread is open.

Please ask do not ask for in depth site reviews or questions that would be applicable to just one website.

Update: thread closed… I have to start working on a big project. Thanks for the questions everyone.

Volunteer Opportunity Provider Extends Contract with SEO Services Company (PRWeb)
Volunteer opportunity services provider, Global Crossroad LLC, has extended its internet marketing contract with leading SEO services company after reaching visibility milestone. (PRWeb Dec 18, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/VGhpci1JbnNlLVN1bW0tRmFsdS1UaGlyLVplcm8=

We Will Not Make Editorial Judgements, But We Desire to Rank Our Content #1

With the announcement of Knol, Google displayed their desire to become a publisher. Why? To make free information more accessible. It doesn’t hurt that publishers dominate other industries, like music - where in some cases giving artists nothing, while some artist get less than nothing, even if they made millions in sales.

Danny Sullivan had some reservations on Knol, as does Rich Skrenta, and just about every other successful results oriented independent web author.

While claiming Google will not make any editorial judgements of quality, and Google will treat Knols like any other web pages, Google’s Udi Manber had this to say:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.

They desire it to be a starting point for searchers and yet they will not promote it?

Think back to the YouTube purchase. After Google bought the site, did they start blessing / featuring any YouTube content? Yes they did. Google’s Uinversal Search integrated YouTube so tightly in their search results that now people add YouTube to the search query for many music searches . Don’t believe me that they shifted user behavior? Try using Google Suggest for music searches and see where YouTube shows up.

Manber wrote not to worry about spam, as Google has that issue covered:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

Sure they will filter out some of the garbage people submit, but the good stuff will rank better than it should. I am not a betting man, but if I were I would bet that Knols get ranked right at the top, next to Youtube. As John Andrews describes it:

As TrustRank (the Google version, not the Yahoo! version) takes hold as the #1 or #2 ranking factor for SEO, this Knol thing steps in and bingo… who could be more trusted than Google itself?

Wikipedia has amazing momentum in Google, and is poised to rank for everything. How will Google compete?

How can Google come late to the game, offer no pay, desire to throw their ads on it right out of the gate, and expect to win marketshare UNLESS they rank this content better than it deserves to rank on merit? Put another way, what person who gets paid to create content is going to prefer putting it on Google Knol for free UNLESS Google gives Knol preferential treatment? If you are producing content out of passion with no profit motive, why would you put it on Google instead of your own server? If you desire peer review with your name attached to it why not publish it on YourName.com?

Offline media has always been biased and aggressively consolidated, it looks like the web is going to suffer the same fate, but worse, unless you are a Google stakeholder. Or, if Google gets too aggressive with this cross integration maybe they will hurt their relevancy enough that people search elsewhere.

Is Result Diversity Enough? Search Offers a Reflection of What?

Pay Per Post Already Dominates Many Business Models

Search engines toe the company line fighting against spam, but are paid posts any worse than sponsored research? The day before Matt posted about some lowbrow PPP ads used to equate paid post with bogus information on brain tumors, I posted about how some scientific research is polluted by commercial interests, and an SEO Book contributor by the nickname of RFK left this great comment:

I was just going to comment on this issue on Matt’s blog, since he went on a rant about paid posts being bad for personal brain surgery research. Really.

The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it’s become more and more apparent that the “studies” published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline.

This begs the question: what’s more harmful, the illiterate drivel of a $10 Pay Per Poster or a biased supposed medical study published by a respected researcher? Obviously Google can’t control what papers are published, but they shouldn’t be pretending that restricting competing paid advertising practises is about returning better content.

The Copy & Paste Culture

As a joke, years ago I created a rather offensive seedy website (with low quality information on porn, drugs, and gambling), and a professor diametrically opposed to my worldviews sourced that site as a credible source. If he was that intellectually lazy with his own professor profile page, how much intellectual laziness goes into the average web page?

As media empires crumble the recycling effect of online information is only going to get worse. While I may not agree with all of the research, the Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google highlighted how journalists start research using Google, and even have a way to warp Google for other writers:

More and more, initiatives to maintain journalistic quality standards complain that also journalistic stories are increasingly the result of a mere “googlisation of reality”. One drastic example is described by the German journalist Jochen Wegner [Wegner 2005]: A colleague of him did a longer report on a small village in the north of Germany. He reported about a good restaurant with traditional cooking, a region-typical choir doing a rehearsal in the village church and about a friendly farmer selling fresh agricultural products. If you type the name of the small village into Google, the first three hits are the web sites of the restaurant, the farmer and the choir. And if you compare the complete story of the journalist with the texts on the web sites found by Google, you will see: As a journalist of the 21st century, you don’t have to be at a place to write a “personal” story about it. Google can do this for you.

When you think of that publishing trend, think of how well Wikipedia ranks, and how Wikipedia often reflects the public relations campaign of the largest market participant it gets a bit concerning. It gets even uglier if you think about the erosion of publishing based business models, and their increasing reliance on public relations firms to give them stories as they drastically cut staffing levels.

The Race Toward The Edges of Reality

The types of publishing that will dominate the web are

• those selling content as service: the value add of service will allow them to develop relationships with readers which help them market their content while still being able to provide honest value and compete in competitive marketplaces
• those giving away content to push commercial services: if you can gain enough attention, respect, and credibility you can charge well for your work. You can even sell what others give away, see the above category.
• those creating content from passion: they don’t need to be profitable if they are doing it for fun or because they are passionate
• those with extreme bias: a biased article is remarkable and more citation-worthy than a vanilla article
• public relations spin: essentially Pay Per Post, also without disclosure
• those creating thin content: consumer generated content, repackaged ideas as link list linkbaits, and/or copy and paste of one of the above groups
• profitable advertisements: with automated integration or editorial selection causing these to have exposure in the above content types even if they are not well ranked in the organic parts of the web. The ease of tracking these ad results will effectively warp many of the above categories of information.

Biased content is easier to reference, syndicate, and subscribe to than more balanced content because we are more aligned to communications messages that match our worldview. And much of the passion driven content is tied to a strong bias (like hate sites). Which means that search engines can try to display a diverse set of search results, but as time passes they will reflect more biased groups of opinions and far fewer balanced articles.

Your Feedback Needed

Maybe it has always been this way though? Do any reporters read this blog? I would love your comments on concepts similar to result diversity in offline publishing, especially contrasting it before and after the web.

I wonder if my roll as an SEO makes me interested in such issues? Do other SEOs (perhaps you) find macroeconomic and publishing trends interesting? What other topics do you find yourself losing hours to every week?

Open Source Media Strategies

Nice Idea, Google!

About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn’t artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people’s sites, unless you are Google.

I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.

Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.

The Transition From Open to Close

Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.

Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else’s platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.

Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer…Pay: $0

All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas….and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else’s user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else’s product, you are wasting your time.

New SEO Book Keyword Tool…3 Cheers for Wordtracker!!!

I recently talked to the fine folks at Wordtracker about how unreliable the Yahoo! keyword suggestion was, and Wordtracker offered to work with me to power the SEO Book keyword tool using Wordtracker’s robust and reliable API.

The new SEO Book keyword tool operates like the old one, but with the following improvements

• We now have a CSV export option at the top of the results. And it is pretty sweet! It lists keyword, WordTracker count, daily estimates for the big 3 engines, and broad and phrase match versions of each keyword
• Because Wordtracker’s business model relies on selling keyword data, they have a vested interest in keeping it as clean and reliable as possible, and are unlikely to pull a Yahoo
• Wordtracker does not tokenize plural words into their singular versions, so you get to see volumes for both singular and plural to know which is more popular. In fact, if you search for the plural they will still return the singular
• Wordtracker does not arbitrarily alter the word order like the Overture did
• Wordtracker’s API is much more reliable than grabbing the data from Overture was
• Wordtracker’s API allows you to filter out adult keywords.

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers a developer API, but given how rough their transition away from their old keyword tool was, I would much rather use a reliable market leading tool like Wordtracker. Please give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Recommendation: If you don’t mind investing a couple bucks into in-depth keyword research, make sure you try the paid version of Wordtracker with all the added features and benefits they offer.

Fumbles and Features for Search and Social Network Firms
It feels like Thanksgiving was just yesterday but of course that didn t slow down some of our favorite search engines and social networks well except in one case. Here s a quick round up of some of the good bad and ugly news currently breaking about Yahoo Facebook and Google….
Better software development info. Get better choices for software development from the best sources. All in one.

Google`s Environmental Endeavors
If you re one of the few that still doesn t believe in global warming then this article isn t for you. Because even those who refuse to do anything about it can still accept the barrage of facts and scientific data that support climate change. Unfortunately this isn t the time or place to get into such things but I can tell you about the many initiatives sponsored by Google to help combat this worsening issue….
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Re: free backlink from MSN/Live?
[quote author=kewlchat link=topi…

MSN Search Returns Google AdWords Listings in Natural Search Results (Search Engine Roundtable)
Ad: Convert visitors with Google Analytics - free 
 Wow, talk about strange issues with MSN Live. I just performed a search on Live.com and the 3rd and 4th results were Google AdWords ads as pictured below: Actually, I’m not the one to have discovered this. Michael Dorausch spotted it at the Raven SEO blog. Interestingly, this was picked up yesterday and was posted to Sphinn …

• SEO: Earning from Blogs (Turks.US)
You may be surprised that one of the activities you actually enjoy doing can make money. Blogging has become more and more popular because of its useful effects in online marketing, internet company sales and web site traffic.

Is Result Diversity Enough? Search Offers a Reflection of What?

Pay Per Post Already Dominates Many Business Models

Search engines toe the company line fighting against spam, but are paid posts any worse than sponsored research? The day before Matt posted about some lowbrow PPP ads used to equate paid post with bogus information on brain tumors, I posted about how some scientific research is polluted by commercial interests, and an SEO Book contributor by the nickname of RFK left this great comment:

I was just going to comment on this issue on Matt’s blog, since he went on a rant about paid posts being bad for personal brain surgery research. Really.

The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it’s become more and more apparent that the “studies” published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline.

This begs the question: what’s more harmful, the illiterate drivel of a $10 Pay Per Poster or a biased supposed medical study published by a respected researcher? Obviously Google can’t control what papers are published, but they shouldn’t be pretending that restricting competing paid advertising practises is about returning better content.

The Copy & Paste Culture

As a joke, years ago I created a rather offensive seedy website (with low quality information on porn, drugs, and gambling), and a professor diametrically opposed to my worldviews sourced that site as a credible source. If he was that intellectually lazy with his own professor profile page, how much intellectual laziness goes into the average web page?

As media empires crumble the recycling effect of online information is only going to get worse. While I may not agree with all of the research, the Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google highlighted how journalists start research using Google, and even have a way to warp Google for other writers:

More and more, initiatives to maintain journalistic quality standards complain that also journalistic stories are increasingly the result of a mere “googlisation of reality”. One drastic example is described by the German journalist Jochen Wegner [Wegner 2005]: A colleague of him did a longer report on a small village in the north of Germany. He reported about a good restaurant with traditional cooking, a region-typical choir doing a rehearsal in the village church and about a friendly farmer selling fresh agricultural products. If you type the name of the small village into Google, the first three hits are the web sites of the restaurant, the farmer and the choir. And if you compare the complete story of the journalist with the texts on the web sites found by Google, you will see: As a journalist of the 21st century, you don’t have to be at a place to write a “personal” story about it. Google can do this for you.

When you think of that publishing trend, think of how well Wikipedia ranks, and how Wikipedia often reflects the public relations campaign of the largest market participant it gets a bit concerning. It gets even uglier if you think about the erosion of publishing based business models, and their increasing reliance on public relations firms to give them stories as they drastically cut staffing levels.

The Race Toward The Edges of Reality

The types of publishing that will dominate the web are

• those selling content as service: the value add of service will allow them to develop relationships with readers which help them market their content while still being able to provide honest value and compete in competitive marketplaces
• those giving away content to push commercial services: if you can gain enough attention, respect, and credibility you can charge well for your work. You can even sell what others give away, see the above category.
• those creating content from passion: they don’t need to be profitable if they are doing it for fun or because they are passionate
• those with extreme bias: a biased article is remarkable and more citation-worthy than a vanilla article
• public relations spin: essentially Pay Per Post, also without disclosure
• those creating thin content: consumer generated content, repackaged ideas as link list linkbaits, and/or copy and paste of one of the above groups
• profitable advertisements: with automated integration or editorial selection causing these to have exposure in the above content types even if they are not well ranked in the organic parts of the web. The ease of tracking these ad results will effectively warp many of the above categories of information.

Biased content is easier to reference, syndicate, and subscribe to than more balanced content because we are more aligned to communications messages that match our worldview. And much of the passion driven content is tied to a strong bias (like hate sites). Which means that search engines can try to display a diverse set of search results, but as time passes they will reflect more biased groups of opinions and far fewer balanced articles.

Your Feedback Needed

Maybe it has always been this way though? Do any reporters read this blog? I would love your comments on concepts similar to result diversity in offline publishing, especially contrasting it before and after the web.

I wonder if my roll as an SEO makes me interested in such issues? Do other SEOs (perhaps you) find macroeconomic and publishing trends interesting? What other topics do you find yourself losing hours to every week?

Re: I don’t think i did one of these
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Motivational Time Out Blog Post

DN Journal wrote a cover story about Frank Schilling, which is quite motivating to me, especially after meeting Frank in person and getting rum cakes from him today. About 5 years ago Frank got into domaining as a common man, and now his portfolio is worth deep into 9 figures. In the interview Frank said:

Everything on the Internet begins with a name and there are very few people who understand how domain names work or their importance to commerce, branding etc. Even folks who think they understand branding, don’t get the power or importance and versatility of names - they too miss the boat. This is the ultimate niche during the ultimate window in time and it will be for decades.

Most domainers thought Frank was late to the market and now he is the #1 domain investor in the world. And in spite of all the stories of domain success, there are still many steals on the market today. A few months ago I bought a name for $2,500, and since then the same name in a worse extension sold at auction for well over 10x the price I paid.

A few weeks AFTER Scores.com sold for $1,180,000 I bought Scores.org from the BuyDomains marketplace for $2,300. I don’t have a site there yet, but I have a logo and an idea for a site I eventually want to build, if time permits.

I have been on a bit of a domain name binge this year. As I learn more about content and branding and managing people, today’s $1,000 or $10,000 domain name is going to look cheap looking back at it 5 years down the road. My story won’t be as good as Frank’s story, but given how motivated my wife and I are, I think we will do well. A few years ago SeoBook.com was an $8 domain, with a default Movable Type template. Once I could afford spending $99 I bought a logo and color matched the CSS to it. The site has since got enough exposure that I met and married the most wonderful woman in the world through it. And it all started with a domain name.

If you are an SEO and you grasp a bit of what made Frank do well AND know how to make a site part of the organic web, you don’t need to pay .com prices to compete. A .org or .net can work just fine if you have the content quality needed to be remarkable and citation worthy. And you can get a big big name in those extensions for $5,000 or $10,000. Sometimes you can get it for $8!

At Pubcon Las Vegas keynote speaker Richard Rosenblath said that content does your marketing, and content is essentially the next building block on the web as search continues to dominate the web. From the Bruce Clay blog:

The old model is owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don’t care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail.

Market’s are not fair, but they do not need to be if you have great timing. When you look at some of the content sites that are out there in many verticals the competition bar is still quite low. Wikipedia does not dominate because it is great, it dominates because most content is junk. HowStuffWorks is not a great site, but it sold for $250 million dollars. And if you look at the top ranking sites that talk about the deal, most of those pages are not exceptionally compelling either.

It doesn’t matter how ads change or where the future of search lies. The tools and ideas needed to succeed are at your fingertips and you are going to do great.

I feel lucky to be able to write this post in anticipation of the years to come. You and I are lucky enough to be at a place in time where we can write our own luck! Cheers to the future, and thank you for reading.

Results Oriented Thinking & Marketing Advice for SEOs

Focus on Results & Achieve Them

Cygnus offered this quote on Rich Skrenta’s blog post about PageRank:

I like all the traffic types coming in; in order to get that traffic on a couple of sources I have to jump through a few hoops. Big deal. So long as the requirements cost less than the expected revenue from ranking, I’ll meet the requirements.

As long as something works and is within your personal ethical, financial, and risk boundaries then why not give it a try?

Setting Up a Baseline for Risk Tolerance

Bob Massa published a great article casting aside the hats while looking at link buying from a business objectives standpoint:

SHOULD I BUY LINKS? … Most of the people who ask me that question are the people who least need to worry about the risk. The risk motivating the question being whether or not they may be penalized by google instead of the risk being about going broke.

Logic would dictate that anyone concerned about the risk of being penalized by Google, is actually worried about losing something they already have. In this case sales coming from targeted traffic generated from superior organic placements in the SERP’s. …

But far more often than not, when I take a look at the site belonging to the askee, I see a site that looks like a third graders ransom note. … Little traffic to speak of and certainly no sales to lose. There is VERY little visible investment in design, content or anything else. Yet they brag of the #3 spot they have for a keyword with over a million results like that is all they need for proof of their valuable contribution to the world of online commerce.

The biggest risk to most businesses is that they will never be found and never gain any traction. That is why I found the concept of debating the risk of buying links getting you in trouble 5 years from now a bit intellectually dishonest. If in 5 years you built no momentum and someone can just wipe you out that was not a very good business model.

Bob Massa’s article is also a nice summary of why SEO client experiences are bad unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling to the right clients. If you are going to the effort to market thin affiliate sites you may as well keep the all revenue for yourself, and design to at least 4th grade standards!

Why Trust Another Business More Than Yourself?

John Andrews did a fun comparison between AdWords and doorway pages. Considering the cheating wives offers that AdWords promotes I have to agree with him that Google’s moral superiority strategy is a bit thin.

In a post about domain consolidation Michael Gray wanted an opinion from Google. Marisa left this great comment:

The underlying question is, “Why are we seeking permission from Google to do webmaster things when it’s Google’s responsibility to make their search engine work according to our typical practices?”

Just because Google is the most popular SE doesn’t mean that they can now make the rules. They need to go back to coding their SE to be better than the others rather than spending so much time trying to make us code or setup sites to their specifications.

After Google bought YouTube they integrated YouTube directly into their site and their search results.

Many sites and marketers that are considered spammers by Google only use aggressive push marketing off the start to market their sites because the framework for ranking that Google set up require it. If the “spammers” were given the same head start that YouTube pages or Knol pages will get then they would not need to “spam” to rank. They would just produce the best content and watch it rise to the top of the results.

The Value of Exposure & Feedback

I recently spoke with a mentor who told me that starting about 20 years ago he lost 10 years because he was sitting around expecting everyone to figure out how brilliant he was. His tips and advice likely saved me from making that mistake on some fronts - and saved me a couple years of my life. And while he is considered a guru by many today, what more momentum would have have today if he didn’t lose those 10 years? What if someone would have gave him the speech he just gave me? How much richer would he be? Would I have even been able to afford hiring him for a consult?

If I was not a push marketer a few years ago and I avoided link buying without debating the risks, would I have been able to afford that phone call that will likely save years of my life? Probably not.

Everyone starts off as a push marketer, and then moves toward pull marketing as they gain feedback and get more well known, and build a brand they do not want to risk damaging.

Google, Subdomains, and Branding

In the past any large company could use subdomains as an effective reputation management strategy. As eBay and others have aggressively used subdomains to dominate branded AND unbranded search results, and Google has improved their sitelinks technology, any relevancy gain by treating subdomains as a separate site has gone away. Google is going to start treating subdomains like subfolders, and limit the number of results from any site to two.

There is still an upside to using subdomains because they allow you to feature standout content, but that upside relates to how marketable the content on that subdomain is, whereas in the past using lots of subdomains allowed eBay to get 20 of the top 30 listings for some queries, even if the subdomain was recycled garbage.

This move adds value to regionalizing sites and creating niche brands (like MobileCrunch), since currently I believe ebay.ca and ebay.com will be seen as two separate sites. If sites are too aggressive with regionalization or creating niche brands and start double dipping that way then Google might eventually look to devalue that move as well, although that will be more of a challenge because it would create a lot of collateral damage.

Official announcement by Matt Cutts at Pubcon, reported first by Barry.

Optimizing a Web Site`s SEO Ranking (SEO Chat)
No one has time to surf all the sites listed in a search engine. Most people just click on the sites listed topmost and surf through them. This is the reason sites listed at the top gain huge traffic. This is the reason sites use Search Engine Optimization SEO . Keep reading to find out how to optimize a website s SEO ranking…. Automate Software Builds with Visual Build Pro Easily create an …

Bot Herders Use SEO for Massive Search Spam
Less-than-scrupulous SEOs have engaged in black hat practices for years but to date we ve seen nothing to match the massive scale of what hit Google and the other search engines in the last week of November. Security experts insist that this is just the beginning. Keep reading for the details of what happened….
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Google, Subdomains, and Branding

In the past any large company could use subdomains as an effective reputation management strategy. As eBay and others have aggressively used subdomains to dominate branded AND unbranded search results, and Google has improved their sitelinks technology, any relevancy gain by treating subdomains as a separate site has gone away. Google is going to start treating subdomains like subfolders, and limit the number of results from any site to two.

There is still an upside to using subdomains because they allow you to feature standout content, but that upside relates to how marketable the content on that subdomain is, whereas in the past using lots of subdomains allowed eBay to get 20 of the top 30 listings for some queries, even if the subdomain was recycled garbage.

This move adds value to regionalizing sites and creating niche brands (like MobileCrunch), since currently I believe ebay.ca and ebay.com will be seen as two separate sites. If sites are too aggressive with regionalization or creating niche brands and start double dipping that way then Google might eventually look to devalue that move as well, although that will be more of a challenge because it would create a lot of collateral damage.

Official announcement by Matt Cutts at Pubcon, reported first by Barry.

International Keyword Research Tool

I took down my old Overture powered keyword tool and replaced it using Wordtracker data because:

• I like Wordtracker’s data more
• Wordtracker’s API is much more reliable than scraping data from Overture
• the Overture tool seems like it has been down more often than it has been up recently

I primarily focus on the US market and did not realize how popular the international aspects of the old keyword research tool were until I started getting a rash of email complaints after taking the tool down.

So I put the old keyword tool back up, renamed it the international keyword suggestion tool, and defaulted it to using UK values (while still allowing users to grab data from other regional markets). I also zipped it up here, so anyone can install it on their site, and set it to a different default language if they like.

Introduction Thread - Who Are You? What do You do?

With about 4,000 members signed up so far I figured it would be good to have an SEO Book introductions thread. Please use this thread to introduce yourself, and give feedback on how we can make this site better for you.

Google`s Dreams
You re reading the third and final part of The Dilemma of Defining Google series. Finally the time has come to chat about Google s anticipated long-term plans and contributions. We will finish up our search for finding those numerous ways in which they redefine the quality of our lives and make the world a better place….
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Motivational Time Out Blog Post

DN Journal wrote a cover story about Frank Schilling, which is quite motivating to me, especially after meeting Frank in person and getting rum cakes from him today. About 5 years ago Frank got into domaining as a common man, and now his portfolio is worth deep into 9 figures. In the interview Frank said:

Everything on the Internet begins with a name and there are very few people who understand how domain names work or their importance to commerce, branding etc. Even folks who think they understand branding, don’t get the power or importance and versatility of names - they too miss the boat. This is the ultimate niche during the ultimate window in time and it will be for decades.

Most domainers thought Frank was late to the market and now he is the #1 domain investor in the world. And in spite of all the stories of domain success, there are still many steals on the market today. A few months ago I bought a name for $2,500, and since then the same name in a worse extension sold at auction for well over 10x the price I paid.

A few weeks AFTER Scores.com sold for $1,180,000 I bought Scores.org from the BuyDomains marketplace for $2,300. I don’t have a site there yet, but I have a logo and an idea for a site I eventually want to build, if time permits.

I have been on a bit of a domain name binge this year. As I learn more about content and branding and managing people, today’s $1,000 or $10,000 domain name is going to look cheap looking back at it 5 years down the road. My story won’t be as good as Frank’s story, but given how motivated my wife and I are, I think we will do well. A few years ago SeoBook.com was an $8 domain, with a default Movable Type template. Once I could afford spending $99 I bought a logo and color matched the CSS to it. The site has since got enough exposure that I met and married the most wonderful woman in the world through it. And it all started with a domain name.

If you are an SEO and you grasp a bit of what made Frank do well AND know how to make a site part of the organic web, you don’t need to pay .com prices to compete. A .org or .net can work just fine if you have the content quality needed to be remarkable and citation worthy. And you can get a big big name in those extensions for $5,000 or $10,000. Sometimes you can get it for $8!

At Pubcon Las Vegas keynote speaker Richard Rosenblath said that content does your marketing, and content is essentially the next building block on the web as search continues to dominate the web. From the Bruce Clay blog:

The old model is owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don’t care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail.

Market’s are not fair, but they do not need to be if you have great timing. When you look at some of the content sites that are out there in many verticals the competition bar is still quite low. Wikipedia does not dominate because it is great, it dominates because most content is junk. HowStuffWorks is not a great site, but it sold for $250 million dollars. And if you look at the top ranking sites that talk about the deal, most of those pages are not exceptionally compelling either.

It doesn’t matter how ads change or where the future of search lies. The tools and ideas needed to succeed are at your fingertips and you are going to do great.

I feel lucky to be able to write this post in anticipation of the years to come. You and I are lucky enough to be at a place in time where we can write our own luck! Cheers to the future, and thank you for reading.

Results Oriented Thinking & Marketing Advice for SEOs

Focus on Results & Achieve Them

Cygnus offered this quote on Rich Skrenta’s blog post about PageRank:

I like all the traffic types coming in; in order to get that traffic on a couple of sources I have to jump through a few hoops. Big deal. So long as the requirements cost less than the expected revenue from ranking, I’ll meet the requirements.

As long as something works and is within your personal ethical, financial, and risk boundaries then why not give it a try?

Setting Up a Baseline for Risk Tolerance

Bob Massa published a great article casting aside the hats while looking at link buying from a business objectives standpoint:

SHOULD I BUY LINKS? … Most of the people who ask me that question are the people who least need to worry about the risk. The risk motivating the question being whether or not they may be penalized by google instead of the risk being about going broke.

Logic would dictate that anyone concerned about the risk of being penalized by Google, is actually worried about losing something they already have. In this case sales coming from targeted traffic generated from superior organic placements in the SERP’s. …

But far more often than not, when I take a look at the site belonging to the askee, I see a site that looks like a third graders ransom note. … Little traffic to speak of and certainly no sales to lose. There is VERY little visible investment in design, content or anything else. Yet they brag of the #3 spot they have for a keyword with over a million results like that is all they need for proof of their valuable contribution to the world of online commerce.

The biggest risk to most businesses is that they will never be found and never gain any traction. That is why I found the concept of debating the risk of buying links getting you in trouble 5 years from now a bit intellectually dishonest. If in 5 years you built no momentum and someone can just wipe you out that was not a very good business model.

Bob Massa’s article is also a nice summary of why SEO client experiences are bad unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling to the right clients. If you are going to the effort to market thin affiliate sites you may as well keep the all revenue for yourself, and design to at least 4th grade standards!

Why Trust Another Business More Than Yourself?

John Andrews did a fun comparison between AdWords and doorway pages. Considering the cheating wives offers that AdWords promotes I have to agree with him that Google’s moral superiority strategy is a bit thin.

In a post about domain consolidation Michael Gray wanted an opinion from Google. Marisa left this great comment:

The underlying question is, “Why are we seeking permission from Google to do webmaster things when it’s Google’s responsibility to make their search engine work according to our typical practices?”

Just because Google is the most popular SE doesn’t mean that they can now make the rules. They need to go back to coding their SE to be better than the others rather than spending so much time trying to make us code or setup sites to their specifications.

After Google bought YouTube they integrated YouTube directly into their site and their search results.

Many sites and marketers that are considered spammers by Google only use aggressive push marketing off the start to market their sites because the framework for ranking that Google set up require it. If the “spammers” were given the same head start that YouTube pages or Knol pages will get then they would not need to “spam” to rank. They would just produce the best content and watch it rise to the top of the results.

The Value of Exposure & Feedback

I recently spoke with a mentor who told me that starting about 20 years ago he lost 10 years because he was sitting around expecting everyone to figure out how brilliant he was. His tips and advice likely saved me from making that mistake on some fronts - and saved me a couple years of my life. And while he is considered a guru by many today, what more momentum would have have today if he didn’t lose those 10 years? What if someone would have gave him the speech he just gave me? How much richer would he be? Would I have even been able to afford hiring him for a consult?

If I was not a push marketer a few years ago and I avoided link buying without debating the risks, would I have been able to afford that phone call that will likely save years of my life? Probably not.

Everyone starts off as a push marketer, and then moves toward pull marketing as they gain feedback and get more well known, and build a brand they do not want to risk damaging.

Open Source Media Strategies

Nice Idea, Google!

About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn’t artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people’s sites, unless you are Google.

I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.

Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.

The Transition From Open to Close

Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.

Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else’s platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.

Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer…Pay: $0

All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas….and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else’s user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else’s product, you are wasting your time.

11 Steps to Successful SEO for Your Business (Search Engine Journal)
I wrote in November a long article for my website about the necessary steps for a business to successfully engage in organic search engine optimization. The article provides an overview with additional references to go into more detail for each of the steps. Here is a shorter and more compressed version of this article that is […]

International Keyword Research Tool

I took down my old Overture powered keyword tool and replaced it using Wordtracker data because:

• I like Wordtracker’s data more
• Wordtracker’s API is much more reliable than scraping data from Overture
• the Overture tool seems like it has been down more often than it has been up recently

I primarily focus on the US market and did not realize how popular the international aspects of the old keyword research tool were until I started getting a rash of email complaints after taking the tool down.

So I put the old keyword tool back up, renamed it the international keyword suggestion tool, and defaulted it to using UK values (while still allowing users to grab data from other regional markets). I also zipped it up here, so anyone can install it on their site, and set it to a different default language if they like.

[Video] How Aggressive Ad Placement Kills Websites

When I did a recent Q&A thread one of the recurring themes with sites that were struggling was AdSense ads positioned above their content. Many websites are never given the chance to grow because they monetize too aggressively and look to spammy to enjoy the benefits of organic growth and community building.

Mentioned in this video:

• 96% of email is spam
• Corbis gives bloggers ad sponsored images - don’t use them…just use Istockphoto
• Compete.com graph comparing a leading Mustang community to one that has limited exposure
• How Google enforces relevancy and grows profits: focus attention, evolving quality score, advertiser enabled filtering
• how to market viral videos
• Bootstrapping Blog - even good sites can diminish credibility a bit if the ad is not well blended into the content
• get charities to help you market your business, video about marketing techniques you should be using, and video about creating a self reinforcing authority

An Unjust Fear of Link Buying

So Worried that You Forgot to Compete

While on the link buying panel at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon a few people were pushing that you might need to consider how Google will view your current link buys 5 years down the road, and that they may hurt you then for what you do now. Upon hearing that I said something like “less than 5 years ago I bought spammy links and if I did not I probably wouldn’t be speaking here right now”. That got a cheer from the crowd. Who wants to be worried about what Google thinks or does 5 years from now? That is no way to innovate or take marketshare from current market leaders.

Reviewing Result Quality

When engineers view your site they don’t just look at “if you have a few spammy links” but they try to consider the quality of user experience and the ratio of clean links to dirty links. If your site is good and ranks for years then you are going to get many natural links that dwarf any spammy links that were part of your site launch.

Building a Real Business

If your business model is entirely reliant on Google 5 years from now, your user experience is sub-par, and you haven’t built up any brand equity after ranking for 5 years then there was not much effort put into building a legitimate business, and it deserves to fail. But the sites that rank get self reinforcing exposure. If SEO is part of your brand building and site building strategy you simply can not sit around waiting for the rankings to come in.

Inferior Sites Ranking #1

It is easy to lack objectivity when talking of the quality of your site, but in some fields I compete in, many of the top ranked competing sites are ran by people buying a slew of spammy links and pointing them at their (quite obviously) English second language sites. Because they rank, those sites get some number of self reinforcing links. If I did nothing but create great content they would still outrank my site. You have to buy marketshare in one way or another (public relations, AdWords, link buying) if you are trying to gain marketshare and your market is competitive.

Who Buys Links & Uses Push Marketing to Buy Marketshare?

That does not mean that I am an advocate of bad user experience or poor quality content, but if you care about SEO and have a new site in an old market, user experience and content quality are not enough unless you do some push marketing at launch.

• AOL sent out millions of spammy CDs to market their service.
• Google pushes their logo onto ads they distribute all over the web, has the largest push ad network on the web, has some of the dirtiest domain traffic partners (many cybersquatters), recommend infidelity, and bundle Google Checkout usage with lower ad prices and free links.
• Yahoo! has an in house SEO team and a few years ago Yahoo! was one of the leading link buyers.
• IAC buys a ton of links and aggressively cross links their sites.
• Microsoft has got in trouble for launching new products by bundling them with their old products and steals traffic by sending seobook.om traffic to their live search product.
• Monster.com owns a ton of thin lead generation sites.
• eBay pays affiliates to spam Google.
• One of Google’s large ad distribution partners tried setting up a deal with me to rank their ads in Google’s search results using aggressive black hat spammy techniques, in which I declined to participate in.

We Don’t Write the Algorithms (or Hand Edit Search Results)

As an SEO you simply give the engines what they want. Looking at what they rank and how they market their sites gives you better insights for how to rank than blindly trusting the tips they give you to prevent you from ranking and suggesting you buy their ads. All of the web portals you know and love use push marketing to build their businesses. Why shouldn’t you?

Get Fuzzy
When I think of fuzz I think of one of the most annoying things in the world. It gets on your clothes it clings to your body and there s nothing you can do about it. But there s a form of fuzz that affects your web site as well and that s one kind of fuzz you CAN and SHOULD do something about….
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ANOTHER BUMPER YEAR IN THE OFFING FOR S. KOREAN SHIPBUILDERS (Asia Pulse via Yahoo!7 Finance)
Shipping/Ports   Soaring prices of raw materials such as oil and coal have been a huge pain for many companies in South Korea, the world’s fourth-largest oil importer that relies entirely on imports for its oil needs.

Another Bumper Year In The Offing For S. Korean Shipbuilders (Asia Pulse via Yahoo!7 News)
Soaring prices of raw materials such as oil and coal have been a huge pain for many companies in South Korea, the world’s fourth-largest oil importer that relies entirely on imports for its oil needs.