WordStream Keyword Management Blog

Link Building Experts Interview Series: Ben Wills & Garrett French

Elisa Gabbert — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:06:54 +0000

Ben Wills and Garrett French are the cofounders of Ontolo, a link building agency. Check out their link building blog or follow them on Twitter: @benwills and @GarrettFrench.

(Note: Also check out Ari Ozick's SEO Contrarian blog for a similar series of interviews with link building gurus Tuesdays of this month.)

What factors go into a "quality" link?

Garrett:

Backlink profile of prospective linker -- which sites link to the page and the site as a whole
An engaged, relevant audience
Distribution and reach of target site -- are they social media participants? Do they have an email newsletter? How far will your link there take you?

Ben:

Relevance and value
Keywords used on page, etc.
Quantity and quality of backlinks
Relevance of entire site
Relevance of entire site's backlinks

Which link building tools do you use every day, paid and/or free?

Garrett:

Ontolo link prospect data
BuzzStream
Yahoo Site Explorer
SEOBook ToolBar
Spreadsheets
Email
My phone

Ben:

The public and private ones we've made :)
Majestic SEO

If you could build the ultimate link analysis tool, what features would it include?

Garrett: We've built it -- when can we schedule a walkthrough for you? ;)

Ben: A research application that not only gives you data such as PageRank/Authority, titles, etc., like most other apps provide, but makes assessments for how likely the link prospect is to turn into a link.

What are some strategies for brainstorming and creating linkbait?

Garrett:

Identify SERP dominators for your target keywords
Identify media sites that resonate and engage your target market
Run these sites through YSE to identify their most-linkable pages
Note common characteristics of highly linkable content and consider how to work in your company's USPs
Promote your linkbait by emailing potential linkers

Ben: Figure out what people want, and give it to them really, really well. Better than anyone else could and better than they could do on their own with a lot of time on their hands.

Some people claim that traditional links are on their way out, due to the spread of social "sharing" via Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets. Do you think link building will still be important in a year? Five years? How does social media change the link building game?

Garrett: Links remain a core way to share content, no matter what platform you're on. Link building for pure search engine influence may diminish as search engines discover other ways of calculating the value and relevance of content. Link building for market influence -- making sure that your links appear in relevant, offsite content -- will never lose its importance.

Ben: What it comes down to are two factors: Accessing and assessing the value of data quickly (i.e., giving time-value to tweets in the past hour vs. last month), and that the percentage of links and where they appear is constantly shifting.

On the first factor of data access and assessment, right now, no one has access to Facebook's data except for Facebook. Microsoft has Bing; if Microsoft buys Facebook, imagine the new kinds of link algorithms that could be designed by having access to information with timestamps, distribution, comments, "likes," etc. Without a hefty API, Google simply can't access tweets and user relationships fast enough to incorporate time-relevance (imagine tweets appearing in search results similarly to news links). If Google buys Twitter, imagine what they could do with that data.

This leads to the second factor of the "link profile of the internet." What I mean by this is that, currently, X% of links that appear online come from "traditional" means: links pages, articles, directories, blogs, information content, etc. And, let's say that, currently, Y% of links that appear online come from "social networks." (I prefer social networks to social media here, because I consider blogs to be a form of social media, but without user relationships defined, they're not networks. And I think the key question here is about how social networks will impact link valuations.) Obviously, as the use of social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, increases, in order for search engines to continue providing "the most relevant and timely results," they must begin making sense of this data. To answer your question of how it will affect the link building game, I don't think it will change because the nature of link building has always been a constant evolution and change.

Do links to your website from spammy sites or bad neighborhoods negatively impact the your site’s trust or authority with the engines?

Garrett: In my experience, no.

Ben: No. You're only going to be affected by what comes as a result of your actions; i.e., what you link to, etc.

Any tips for marketers embarking on link requests? What tactics get the best response?

Garrett: Know beforehand what motivates the target site owners/operators to link. I wrote an article on link building outreach and linked to 15+ other resources there.

Ben: Offer money. Seriously. That gets the best response. If you're looking to keep on Google's good side, though (we think it's a good idea), you might be inclined to consider other options.

If I’m going to engage in link buying, what steps should I take to keep from being discovered by Google?

Garrett: Avoid leaving a pattern as much as possible. Use a proxy for negotiating. Get very very paranoid about who you discuss your efforts with and how.

Ben: Think of paid links being discovered in two ways. 1: People reporting you. You'll never be able to fully avoid that. And 2: The patterns that demonstrate that a link has been paid for. Does your link appear near the words "paid links"? "Sponsorships"? "Paid Advertisements"? "Sponsored links"? If it does, that's a red flag. This doesn't mean that Google will believe that it's a paid link, but it might look further or add a little bit to a "link buyer score."

Do you use Toolbar PageRank as a metric for link analysis and research, or do you fall into the camp that it’s merely “green pixie dust” and for “entertainment purposes only”?

Garrett: We have used it, though based on the news it looks like we won't in the future :)

Ben: We use it because it's the only score widely available for intrinsic URL value, it's understood by our clients, and it's at least something to use. Without making your own internet link graph, there's no other way to get at that kind of value. Backlink totals aren't enough ... PageRank is, at least, a pointer.

Do forum signature links, followed blog comment profile links or article directory links pass any value at all, or do you think they’re simply a waste of time for link building?

Garrett: If your target market frequents a given forum then you should be there, with links in sig! Same with blog comments, again if that's where your target market is. Please note that I'm suggesting that you participate to add value to the community, not simply to link drop. As far as general-topic article directories, there are a few decent ones out there, but if you're submitting content look for guest publishing opportunities on relevant blogs or other industry media sites first.

Ben: Again, two things: 1, Google knows it comes from a comment, forum post, etc. They can discount it if they want. 2, People seem to forget the relevance factor ... if there's a forum about Apple products and you sell red iPod Nanos, and you only comment on posts about red iPod Nanos, an assumption can be made ... do you see where this is going?

Which link do you think helps your site more and why: a link from an authoritative, totally unrelated website or a link from a pretty authoritative, highly relevant website? Both are anchor text links, and you have to pick just one.

Garrett: High-relevance, medium-authority website: you will get more leads and clicks from a relevant site, as your link's going to fit more naturally with the content and be relevant to the audience. From a search perspective you're sending a clearer message that the page of your site you're linking to is relevant to the context of the page.

Ben: I'll take a "pretty authoritative" backlink from a relevant website rather than a "highly authoritative" backlink from an irrelevant website. Based on our research for the past two years -- especially in troubleshooting lost rankings -- relevance is much more significant in a backlink profile than value.

Tell us a little bit about the difference in your roles at Ontolo: What types of tasks do you each perform, and how do your respective skill sets complement each other?

Garrett: As the Chief Marketer I handle lead generation, link building with content and software alpha testing. In my client-facing work for Ontolo I handle link prospect qualification, outreach and the creation of linkable content.

I focus on solving narrow, individual problems and fine-tuned details.

Ben: From the conception through startup, my focus has been on figuring out how to create a new process for link prospecting and a new process for link outreach that increases the results of link building efforts. That said, I've been the sole developer of our technology as well as positioned myself in a sales role to communicate the value to prospective clients.

I focus on solving problems of scale and making more sense of more data and patterns.

What this polarity does is to never allow the solution to be fully solved, forcing further innovation. In the end, we continue to bring each other new problems to be solved that the other hasn't considered.

Aside from your own Search Engine Land column, who are some good link building bloggers and writers worth following?

Garrett: I recommend looking at Melanie Nathan's round-up of 18 Must Follow Link Building Experts on Twitter. If you follow all those folks there's pretty much no way that anything about link building can slip past you :) In addition to their Twitter addresses, Ms. Nathan also included their blogs and sites for those who prefer RSS over tweets.

Ben: I don't read too many blogs and I definitely don't read blogs on any sort of regular basis. But, when I have some uncommon programming problems, I have often found solutions on the following two sites. I'll also note that they may not be for the whitest-hat of SEOs:

The Week in Search: Even More Ways to Brainstorm Blog Posts

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:57:14 +0000

I'm sort of surprised that I've never linked to Chris Brogan's blog in a Friday roundup before, since I'm a regular reader. Maybe because his posts tend to be short, to the point and difficult to disagree with, and finding something to disagree with is one of my top ways of brainstorming new blog posts.

It's also one of Chris Brogan's! His "How to Think of Blog Posts" post features the good-old-fashioned rant at #8 (see roundups of Fridays past in which I disagree with Seth Godin, David Powazek and Robert Scoble).

I guess I'm feeling agreeable this week because I have no beef with Chris's post; I simply want to add a few more ideas to the list:

1. Expand on a tweet: The next time you start to respond to something or someone on Twitter, hold that thought and see if you can't expand beyond 140 characters. If you're moved enough to share an opinion on Twitter, maybe you can get worked up enough for a full blog post? If you're too impulsive to resist the tweet in real time, you can read back over your Twitter stream and look for thoughts to expand on. For example, earlier this week I tweeted:

if you want to lose faith in human reason, read forum posts by ppl who think their gmail accounts are compromised by extra/lack of dots

I could definitely get a rant out of this topic—I saw a reference in a blog post about Gmail security to the fact that "A search for Gmail+'getting+someone+else's' returns more than 150,000 results." Too bad this says nothing about Gmail's security or lack thereof since the vast, vast majority of these results are people incapable of understanding Gmail's policy of ignoring dots in email addresses.

2. Do a variation on a popular post: Look back at what has worked on your blog in the past and do it again but from a different angle. For example, a while back Ken did some research and compiled a list of the college and university websites leading the pack in SEO. It was so popular, we turned it into a series. (In honor of Halloween he wrote a post on the top SEO candy websites.)

3. Use a keyword tool: You can thank Lee at Blogger's Workshop for this one—he wrote a nice review of our Free Keyword Tool demonstrating how to use it to generate blog post ideas. In doing the keyword research for this here blog post, I entered "blog posts" into our keyword tool and noticed that a ton of the results include Twitter:

update twitter with blog posts
tweet your blog posts
show blog posts on twitter
sending blog posts to twitter

Etc. There's a blog post idea right there! Just write up a how-to. And it's all yours, because this topic sounds boring to me. I much prefer "sexy blog posts" and "really cool stoner blog posts." Thanks, Free Keyword Tool!

4. Look for patterns. Humans are great at pattern recognition. Sort of. Well, we're pretty good at looking at spots on the ceiling and making them into a face. Anyway, we're definitely interested in patterns, so if you notice one, doing some research and teasing it out can make for a great blog post. Bonus points if you include hard data and infographics.

For example you might notice that longer posts get more links. Or that action verbs perform well in title tags. Or that using a question in a title increases click-through … you get the idea.

5. Add to someone else's list: See what I did there? People write list posts all the time and expanding on someone else's list means you don't have to waste time thinking up an idea for a list, you just need to figure out what the author missed. Instead of telling them what they forgot in a comment, write a post and link back and they'll probably find it. (Or go back and add a link to your post in a comment. But, you know, don't be spammy about it.)

The Obligatory Aaron Wall Worship

We have a bit of an SEO crush on Aaron Wall around here, if you couldn't tell. This week, he posted a great interview with Jeremy Shoemaker, widely known as "Shoemoney," covering his secrets for creating awesome linkbait and monetizing websites, his favorite web marketing books and blogs and much more.

Aaron and his wife Giovanna have also launched a new sister site to SEOBook, PPCBlog.com: "While SEOBook.com covers organic search where results are measured over a long period of time," according to the "About" page, the purpose of PPCBlog is to "discuss tips, trends and everything else that may help shape paid search marketing." We're definitely adding it to our feed readers. (Yep, still using them!)

WordStream at PPC Summit

And finally, we made an appearance at PPC Summit in Chicago this week and it was a fantastic conference. Our own Larry Kim spoke at a popular session on advanced keyword research and the long tail. Other highlights included Dennis Yu's session on using Facebook for local advertising; Craig Danuloff's AdWords strategies session; and David Szetela's session on content network advertising. Hello and thanks to everyone we had to chance to meet and chat with in Chicago!

It's #FollowFriday Time

@T_Cardamone Digital Marketing professional interested in reading/responding to tweets about social media/technology/advertising/marketing/whatever sparks my interest
@CarolineDangson Research Analyst, IDC, #socialbiz
@matt_yorke Englishman abroad. Social Media, Marketing & Publishing leader. Working at IDG in high tech publishing space.
@ConorNeu Managing information overload between naps. Blogger, Trader, Techie
@NewSite911 Here with ideas to help new website owners!
@GooglingSEO Social Media Maven / SEO-geek since 1997 / JazzMan / Student-Teacher-partner-friend. Not that smart, just lucky. Diggin' a savvy tribe + 1 amazing wife!
@rickwhittington Entrepreneur (run an internet consulting firm), web designer, marketer, project manager. Wife and 2 kids keep me busy. Avid VT football fan.
@PrarthanaSharma Web Account Manager at Basement Systems
@DKS_Systems DKS Systems is a web design firm based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. DKS looks to satisfy all their clients with unique and quality web services
@ClearSEO Small business internet marketing consultant, specialising in SEO, PPC, Social Media and Conversion Optimisation. Get in touch for a chat.
@ArnieK Business: Social Media, SEO, Search Marketing, Link Building. Personal: Hiking, NFL, NBA, travel. Founder of Vertical Measures & AZIMA.
@SEOaudiore SEOer, marketer, sound engineer, musician (guitar, banjo, vocals), Catholic. Being amongst honorable SEOers, I feel like I'm humbly part of something great. :)

Follow Us on Twitter

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@John_A_Lee Consult on PPC, SEO, Social Media & Blogging. Paid Search Manager with WordStream. Teller of bad jokes, music junkie and aspiring chef.
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Or follow us all in one fell swoop: WordStream now has a Twitter list!

Have a Tip for WordStream's Follow Friday?

Send an email to egabbert@wordstream.com.

5 SEO Myths Busted

Ken Lyons — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:54:09 +0000

SEO is rampant with misinformation, speculation and myths about SEO. But that's the nature of the game, right? Since nobody but Google knows for certain which 200 plus ranking signals comprise the Google secret algorithmic formula, we're left to speculate. However, there's gross misinformation, complete speculation and then there are theories put into practice tested and proven to return results with some degree of reliability.

With that, I've decided to address some of the SEO myths I see or hear from time to time. Most of the following SEO myths I'm attempting to debunk are controversial, meaning the vast majority of SEOs will disagree with my assertions, and I'll probably take a lot of flack. But that's okay. Feel free to lambaste me in the comments. I stand behind everything I'm professing to be true. That's because I've done exhaustive testing, keep a detailed SEO Log and I've seen the results.

Now, should you take my word as gospel? Not at all. As with anything in SEO, you need to test everything yourself and draw your own conclusions, so you too can dispel those nasty SEO myths. When it comes to SEO, I believe what I see with my own eyes. So too should you.

With that, here are my 5 SEO Myths Busted.

1) Google favors old domains

The age of the domain doesn't influence rankings. Sure, Google loves older domains and older domains typically have more trust and authority than newer sites, but that's because older domains house older content. It’s the age of the content, not the age of the domain. There's really nothing more to say about his one. It's a common misnomer that needs to be dispelled.

2) Links from article syndication and press release distribution are worthless

I see this SEO myth spouted at least once a week by SEO gurus. Links from article submissions and press releases are certainly low value and may or may not get filtered out by Google's algorithm, but they're not worthless. Here's an excerpt from my interview on using press releases for SEO (note: the same can be said about article syndication):

"First, press releases allow you to build anchor text links to deeper pages on your site that don’t attract links naturally. And because of syndication and scraper sites, those deep pages will acquire lots of links from a variety of sources."

"Secondly, those pages often see a subsequent boost in the search results because of the flood of signal and the freshness factor of syndication. However, that boost is usually temporary and fades within a few days, but the interim spike in SERP traffic is nice."

An interim spike in rankings, even if it is fleeting, is hardly worthless. And many times depending on the competitiveness of the vertical your targeting, those rankings spikes are permanent or see little retracement.

Now am I saying you can dominate your vertical with these types of low value links? Not at all. In fact, having these links alone won't help you crack the top spots in Google for competitive queries. For that, you need quality links from authority sites. But as I said, syndicated links are particularly effective for pointing links to deeper pages on your website that don't attract links "naturally" and sending contextual ranking signals. Either way, anyone who claims they have zero effect on SEO are regurgitating something they read in a forum or they aren't actively engaging in this practice.

3) Meta tags have no impact on rankings

The meta keywords tag is finally dead. Sigh... Even Yahoo no longer supports it, or at least that's what they say. However, the SEO value of the meta description lives on. My experience is that manipulating the text in your meta description has an impact on rankings. It just does. And I’m not talking about the meta description's impact on CTR or clickability. Yes, having compelling and relevant text in the meta description does facilitate more clicks (which does impact rankings, IMO). But the ranking results I’m talking about are exclusive of and supplemental to CTR and clickability. I've spent the better part of the past six months tweaking and swapping text in and out of the meta description to test this theory, and I've seen a clear impact in where my pages rank in the SERPs because of it.

Now, I’m not sure why the SEO community is so convinced that keywords in the meta description have zero impact on rankings. I mean, logically, why wouldn’t Google use this key contextual element as a ranking signal? The stock answer to this question from SEOs is because you can spam it with keywords? Well, you can also spam your title tag too, and you can spam your page content as well, and you can spam external links pointing to your site, yet those elements influence rankings. Still the SEO myth persists that a prominent piece of content in the SERPs has no bearing on rankings. Sorry, but I see otherwise.

4) Pretty, keyword-specific URLs don’t matter

So I’ve tested both pretty URLs (yoursite.com/pretty-url) vs URLs with query parameters like yoursite.com/?id=3015, and hand’s down pretty URLs have a positive effect on rankings. You hear it time and again: create content for people not engines. Well, the same applies to URLs: create URLs for people. A pretty URL with relevant keywords sends a clear signal to what that page is all about. Pretty URLs are simple and self-explanatory. Searchers prefer them, meaning they’re more likely to click on them and more likely to link to them.

I don't have the resources, but I would love to do a psychological study on this theory and see which URL the average person prefers. Actually, strike that. I'm pretty positive I know which URL the average person prefers. No tests are needed.

5) Toolbar PageRank is Meaningless

I can feel the PageRank Nazis rolling their eyes as I write this.

Okay, let's start with a question for all the SEOs out there: If you had your choice, would you rather get a link from site with a Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) of 10 or 1? I mean, TBPR is "meaningless," so it doesn't matter. Right?

Baloney. Any SEO who said they'd take the link from the TBPR1 site over the TBPR10 site is full of it. You know you'd take the TBPR10 link and so would everyone else. So there you go, SEO Myth busted! TBPR is not "meaningless."

On the flipside, I wouldn't go so far to say that it's meaningful either. Instead, I would defer to Google's description of TBPR:

"Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar's PageRank™ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you're viewing."

The key word here is "importance." I do agree that TBPR gives you a loose idea of a site's "importance." For example, CNN.com recently jumped from a PR 8 to a PR 10. Why is CNN.com a PR 10? Because it's an important site. In contrast, my thin affiliate websites are PR 2s. Why? Because I spend zero time on them, they aren't important websites (well, important for my beer and gas money every month) and the Toolbar PageRank reflects that, and rightly so.

And though there's zero correlation between SERP rankings and TBPR (lower PR sites continually outrank higher PR sites), I do feel it's intrinsic value lies in link building, giving SEOs the ability to evaluate the link health of a website. I routinely use Toolbar PageRank to determine whether or not a site has a healthy link flow and has the potential to funnel link equity to my site. It can also be used to evaluate the link health of your own website. If pages aren't passing incremental PageRank internally and juice isn't flowing freely, something may be wrong with your site architecture.

That said, TBPR clearly is a flawed measurement because it's an outdated snapshot of a site and it's updated very infrequently, with the latest PageRank update happening on October 29. So it's measure of freshness and to-date accuracy is compromised. But again, it's far from "meaningless."

Finally, if Toolbar PageRank is so meaningless, why did Google just update it again? And why do prominent SEO blogs report the update? Pretty confusing, huh? To me, actions speak louder than words. Sure, Google may be phasing TBPR out because they say it's flummoxing Webmasters. But I think that's bull. I think it's purely a move to put the link brokers out of business.

So like or not PR Nazis, Toolbar PageRank lives on! How much longer remains to be seen.

New White Paper: Four Steps to Better Keyword Grouping

Elisa Gabbert — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:02:22 +0000

We're offering a new free white paper for download: 4 Steps to Better Keyword Grouping. This is a focused, tactical white paper offering clear and actionable advice to help you achieve more effective and profitable keyword segmentation for search marketing.

If your keyword grouping strategy could use some polishing—or you're not even sure where to start—this white paper is a must-read. Here's an excerpt from the new paper:

If you only have time for one change to improve the overall performance and value of both your pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization efforts, turn your attention to keyword grouping.

Far from a single, isolated process, keyword grouping represents a paradigm shift for search marketing. Better keyword grouping and organization can transform every aspect of your search campaigns, resulting in greater efficiency, more conversions and higher profits.

Effectively grouping and organizing your keywords improves your PPC and SEO strategies by enabling you to create:

More relevant, Quality Score-friendly ad groups, text ads and landing pages
A prioritized flow of web content, based on customer interest, to drive traffic and conversions
An organized, navigable information architecture favorable to users and search engines

When you segment your keywords, PPC campaigns are more successful and cost-effective from end to end, and organic SEO initiatives provide even more targeted traffic.

The benefits of keyword grouping are clear, but it can be tricky in practice. In this white paper, we’ll lead you through four basic steps to more successful keyword grouping and introduce WordStream, a unique keyword management solution that simplifies and streamlines the keyword grouping process.

Let’s get started!

Click here to get the full paper.

3 Things You Need to Know About Long-Tail Marketing with Advanced Broad Match

Elisa Gabbert — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:44:16 +0000

This is a guest post is by Bob Stanley, WordStream’s Senior Client Services Representative. Bob has extensive experience in paid search, which he now leverages to help our clients solve difficult problems surrounding pay-per click marketing with the WordStream software.

One of my roles as a client services rep for WordStream is to help clients use our software to successfully manage their paid search accounts. I’m finding more and more with our clients that the long tail is getting extremely competitive. I personally blame advanced broad matching options, dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), and just the industry becoming more sophisticated. We all know the advantages of getting more specific with grouping and creating better conversion paths – however, it’s not always so cut and dry.

You have to wonder if our competitors are just jacking up bids, creating generic keyword lists for ad groups, and utilizing DKI for every ad. This can in turn make longer-tail queries more competitive and gives us PPC people more to think about, especially if these tactics are increasing CTR (click-through rates), potentially resulting in higher Quality Scores for these lazy bums.

Since we’re positioned as a keyword management solution, and because we provide solutions around long-tail search queries, clients obviously ask me: “How does WordStream improve my campaigns?” In the face of the information above (prices being driven up on the long tail) it may seem that the value of analyzing more granular query data isn’t as great. But as the long tail gets more competitive, the importance of segmenting and negative keyword research becomes more pronounced. I think there are three key things that fall out of this:

Your infrastructure is crucial - Stronger structure and smarter organization is very important in expanding accounts. Getting into the long tail with your targeted queries still offers you a pricing advantage, even if it’s not as dramatic as it once was, and with bids consistently rising on long-tail queries you want to try to pull your other lever: Quality Score. The best way to do that is with tightly themed groups that help boost click-through rates. We posted a more granular piece on using long-tail PPC keywords back in May.
You need to spend more time on negative keyword discovery - With matching options becoming more aggressive, the value of negative keywords increases. Expanded broad match means more people are bidding on a much wider variety of queries: This leads to more competition in the long tail, and a pronounced increase in the number of irrelevant searches Google and co. are showing your ad against. One cool feature in our software is that our tool can intelligently associate negative terms with each other based on actual search queries – I find myself using this feature more and more! From my experience, using search queries to create negatives is more valuable than generic keyword tools, because they seem to be more focused on a starting point rather than what users are actually typing. WordStream can take new search queries and based on negatives that you’ve already set can suggest more intelligent negatives, thus saving you time and making you smarter.
Your focus may not be on the right data points – Another unfortunate result of the aggressive matching option is advertiser confusion. Even if an advertiser gets past the idea that a keyword has lots of different queries rolled up under it, there’s still the problem of analyzing all of this more granular query data. What do you do with low-volume search queries? Searches that trigger a single visit? Our software handles this by clustering keywords together and by offering workflow tools to help prioritize where your time and attention is best spent.

The moral here is really that as engines change, you have to react and adapt. Every time AdWords or YSM or adCenter make a change, there is a list of tactics that will work better, and a list of tactics that will work worse. Identifying these and consistently honing your strategy is key to paid search success.

Improve Your Paid Search Performance by Addressing These 5 Common PPC Mistakes

jlee — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:55:01 +0000

For many online marketers, pay-per-click advertising is a relatively complicated marketing tool with a lot of moving pieces. Maybe that’s an understatement, but with so many moving pieces, it is commonplace to let certain strategies and best practices fall through the proverbial cracks. Admittedly, a lot has been written on PPC mistakes. But that is just further proof that so many advertisers are leaving money on the table and need to be reminded how they can step up their game and improve their PPC performance. Today I’m going to discuss 5 common mistakes that PPC advertisers make and offer simple solutions to get your campaigns moving in the right direction.

Ignoring Quality Score-Friendly Campaign Structure
Despite the wealth of knowledge found on blogs and in the PPC search engines’ help sections, it amazes me how many advertisers ignore campaign structure best practices. Primarily, I’m referencing ad groups that contain 100s of keywords or worse. This is Quality Score un-friendly. Why? When you have that many keywords in a single ad group, it is impossible for you to write ad copy that actually contains your keywords! Ad texts that contain your targeted keywords garner higher click-through rates and ultimately retain higher Quality Scores. Take a hard look at your keyword list and start segmenting them into small, meaningful groups that will allow you to craft keyword-laden ad copy.

Bidding at the Ad Group Level
This is a mistake that I’m guilty of, and a vast majority of PPC professionals and amateurs are guilty of as well. In all of the PPC search engines, you have the ability to set default maximum cost-per-clicks at the ad group level. When you’re in a rush to complete a campaign optimization or to launch a new series of ad groups, it is easiest just to determine a good “umbrella bid” and launch the ad groups as-is. You (and I) could argue that this is admissible at the on-set of a new campaign. But the mistake that I’m referring to is continuing to manage bids at the ad group level long-term. Tisk, tisk. Keywords are unique entities that must be treated as such with keyword-level bids. Ad group level bidding can leave some keywords below the “first page bid” threshold in Google. And in general ad group bidding can waste money on poor performing keywords and restrict keywords that would benefit from an increased bid.
No Ad Text Testing
Big, big mistake. If you run a PPC campaign and are currently NOT split-testing your ad copy, stop reading this post right now and go write some ads. I’m serious. Do it now. Stop reading and go write some ads. For the rest of you, what I’m about to say should be obvious. All of the PPC search engines have the built-in capability to rotate multiple ad texts so that you can test variations in messaging, benefits, calls-to-action, etc.
Ignoring the Content Network
Google’s Content Network has long been given a bad rap. Advertisers didn’t understand the subtle nuances of contextual advertising and instead of learning how to improve their campaigns, labeled the Content Network as unwieldy and something to be avoided. Not so, I say! Contextual advertising is very powerful and very effective (and as Spiderman says, with great power comes great responsibility). Utilizing the Content Network requires vigilance in reporting, and a dedication to testing different techniques to make it work. Let me tell you, when you find the sweet spot, your payoff in quality conversions can be huge. So if you are currently making the mistake of ignoring the Content Network, please reconsider. Take the time to craft a Content campaign with themed ad groups and make a pact with yourself to perform daily (weekly at least) Placement Performance reporting to eradicate poor performing or irrelevant websites.
Under-Utilizing Negative Keywords
The PPC search engines have given us all a fantastic tool to hone our campaigns and improve our performance with negative keywords. If you’re just joining us from an ad writing sojourn in #3, prepare to leave again. If you aren’t using negative keywords, go to your AdWords account and pull a Search Query report right now (see screenshot below). Look for queries that are irrelevant to your product/service and add them as negative keywords. Like right now! If you already use negatives, good for you. But I bet that you could do better. I’ve seen a lot of PPC campaigns that have a nice, neat little list of negative keywords that was either created when the campaign was launched or was inserted after a well-timed blog post (not unlike this one?). The problem is that negative keyword usage is not a singular event. It is an on-going process that reflects changes in your marketplace and the ebb and flow of search queries. Make it a point to regularly scan your search queries and consistently add to and expand your negative keyword list.

Well, there you have it: 5 common PPC mistakes. Now you know the mistakes, and better yet – you have the tools to turn those mistakes into improved PPC performance!

Share your thoughts! What other PPC mistakes have you found or feel should be addressed?

Link Building Experts Interview Series: Debra Mastaler

Elisa Gabbert — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:21:37 +0000

All this month we'll be interviewing link building experts on the WordStream blog. First up is Debra Mastaler. (Also check out Ari Ozick's interview with Debra on SEO Contrarian.)

Does great content market itself?

Yes and no. This really depends on the reputation of the person/company producing the content. Those with a good rep can publish and have content pushed forward, even if it's not so great. Strong reputations carry tremendous power. Those without a reputation will need to work at pushing content and building their power base.

Do you believe in linkbait? If so, what are some strategies for creating it?

Interesting question, I've never been asked if I "believe" in something link-related before. Let's see ... I use it, I think it's effective and I think it adds diversity to your content mix which is important when trying to tap into new traffic streams so yes, I guess I do believe in link bait. However, I am extremely cautious about launching a negative or controversial campaign unless I'm very sure of my facts and stance; I can't afford to create a reputation management nightmare I'll have to combat with a second link campaign. Not all links are good in this case, so it's best to look at possible repercussions and how to treat them in the event the content goes sour. You can't please everyone but if you're purposely out to ruffle feathers you need to be sure you can weather the storm and/or turn the situation into a positive for your brand.

What factors go into a "quality" link?

For me, all links are quality links as long as they work. I'm not hot for links using nofollow if I'm focused on anchors and SEO but even then, a handful of pink from highly relevant sites won't hurt and may help diversify your backlink mix. With the algorithms using multiple signals to determine authority and link quality it's always a good idea to secure a variety of links from relevant sites. Actually, I think the issue of relevancy is equally important these days, so place as much emphasis on where you get links as the type.

Are certain link-building avenues a waste of time?

They're only a waste of time if they don't produce the result you're looking for. :)

Is it ever okay to buy a link?

To me, paid links and speeding are a lot alike. If you go over the posted speed limit and get caught, you get a ticket, suffer insurance points and maybe a loss of license. Paid links are pretty much the same. Get caught and you are in violation of an engine's TOS, can suffer loss of link juice and maybe get bounced from the index. Is it worth it? Only you can make that decision. Measure what you can stand to lose against the risk and then accelerate.

Some people claim that traditional links are on their way out, due to the spread of social "sharing" via Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets. Do you agree? How does social media change the link building game? How do you leverage social media in your link building campaigns?

No, I don't agree sites like Twitter and Facebook have diminished more traditional link building. On the contrary, I feel social media has made it easier to find and target specific groups of people for linking and promotions. Social media sites provide an outlet where like-minded people congregate, and learning how to work those sites and tap into the collective can be invaluable. For example, using Twitter's search function can help you find people with special interests, and Facebook's advertising program can drive specific groups to targeted landing pages. The opportunities are there, it's up to you to figure out how to tap into them.

Is there a "tipping point" in link building? In other words, is there a point when you're working with a site that everything comes together and the links just flow in? Or is it always a steady climb?

On very rare occasions you'll find a site that doesn't have to put out any effort and nets a lot of links. This usually happens around a launch where offline advertising/an event supports a cause or when something monumental has happened in the news and points to a particular site. The point of commonality in either case is "offline" and it's one of the biggest factors in successful link building. If you can implement an offline campaign to support what you're doing online, your reach will be tenfold. This always results in more media mentions, more traffic and ultimately more links.

Any tips for marketers embarking on link requests? What tactics get the best response?

I don't do a lot of individual email requests; I'm what's known as a content and promotions specialist. I find promotional partners for clients and work to create content strategies that tap into a segment of people/business owners predisposed to like my clients offerings. Even though I don't send a lot of individual link requests (we call, send postcards and/or media kits) there are times I initiate contact through email. When we do this, I've found name dropping and business associations work best.

For example, I'll drop a name in the subject line of the initial email so the person will recognize the name and hopefully open the email. This immediately puts people at ease and makes the rest of the conversation easier. I also like to use associations, clubs and Chambers as openers; people feel more comfortable dealing with someone who belongs to the same association or club.

All that said, the tried and true methods of building links ... directory submissions, content syndication, link requests, forum participation etc. ... all that still works unless you're in the competitive niches. Once you get into competitive industries you need to launch innovative linking tactics and combine on- and offline advertising to keep your links coming.

Which link building tools do you use every day, paid and/or free?

I have four alert services I use, Google Alerts for general non-client information and three others. I use them to bring back about 100 - 150 terms every day. I can't live without my alert services or Diet Coke. :)

I also use SEO Quake as well as SearchStatus (depends on which computer I'm on). If I'm building links for e-commerce sites I use eBay's Pulse tool, Shopzilla's Top Searches and Amazon's Best Sellers. No matter what market you're in, chances are the top web properties in your niche have a trending tool or "what's hot" search box. For example here's one for the world of finance and another in the sports industry. I've always felt that trend watching=job security so I get my money's worth out of the alert services. ;)

About Debra Mastaler

Based in Oak Hill, Virginia, Debra Mastaler is President of Alliance-Link, an interactive marketing company focused on providing custom link building campaigns and link training. In business since 2000, Debra offers a common sense approach to link building by combining traditional sales and promotional strategies with effective online search engine marketing tactics.

In addition to client projects and link training for Fortune 500 companies as well as a number of top SEO firms in the US, UK and Canada, Debra is a featured guest speaker at the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES), Search Marketing Expo (SMX), is a guest blogger for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Guide, has done numerous High Ranking Seminars, Small Business Unleashed Seminars as well as the Link Building Training session for Search Engine Strategies (SES) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

She is also the Link Building Moderator on the Small Business Ideas Forum and the SEOBook Community Forums.

Check Debra out on her blog the Link Spiel, on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

Brush Up on Your Social Skills: The Week in Social Search

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:52:00 +0000

I hope you're not feeling antisocial out there, because today's roundup is all about social search.

There were several big announcements this week in the world of social and real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced agreements with Twitter. Bing's Twitter search is live, but it doesn't seem to work all that well – when I searched for my username, instead of getting a string of my tweets and @replies, I got this:

Um, OK, but why? Why doesn't it just search for my username and return all the results? I can see why the "top links shared in tweets about" thing would be interesting/useful, but why is that the default search behavior? What if that's not what you're looking for?

For its part, Google soft-launched social search in labs. Danny Sullivan goes into some detail about what exactly Google Social Search is—not the same as real-time search. It basically allows you to search for results originating in your social circle, drawn from your Google contacts, people you're following on Twitter, etc. I signed up to participate in this "experiment," but I actually can't think why I'd use it except in very specific use cases, like I was looking for something I read recently on a blog but couldn't remember which one.

David Harry at Search Engine Journal was similarly unwowed by these announcements:

Yes, Bing and Google made announcements about Twitter integration. Yes, Google also broke a story about their upcoming ‘Social Search’ in Google labs … But REALLY … until Google has them out in the wild, it’s a non-story for me. As for Bing’s Twitter search? Well, go try spamming it some … works like a charm! So that’s a FAIL for me at this point as well …

Once Google and Bing announced Twitter search I knew it would only be a matter of time before people were launching "ultimate" guides to optimizing your tweets. Not too far off from that, Patrick Altolf at Blogstorm blogged about optimizing for Google social search: "Take a look at the data points Google is using and make sure you are making attempts to increase your followers, subscribers & friends in each of those areas. It’s not easy for brands to be social but those that manage it are likely to reap the rewards."

Michael Gray also touched on social search, if obliquely, in his post titled "Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions," in which he argues that using the "rel=canonical" tag (for example) is a sloppy development practice: Sure, it appeases Google, but it doesn't get to the root of the problem. And, yes, this has repercussions on social search, because sites like Digg will still see your duplicate URLs as duplicate URLs:

While social search may be in its infancy, and may never overtake traditional search, the easier you make your content to crawl and understand for everyone and not just Google, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

Virginia Nussey asked a question we've been thinking about for a while: "Is Social Media Marketing a New Requirement of SEO?" Surprisingly, perhaps, she says no: SEO and SMO are directed at different audiences and require different tactics. A couple of commenters disagree, including Lisa Barone, who writes:

I think the idea that there are "unique audiences" and "unique goals" aren't really true, at least from my perspective. You have one audience -- your customers and the people likely to become your customers (is that two? I'm lumping them together.). A spider is not an audience. Your site is not designed to satisfy a robot. If it is...trouble. And we're all just trying to get that audience to convert with the site - whatever that conversion is. There's a common goal.

Are you tired of socializing yet?

Too bad! There's more. I want to respond to a post on "scobleizer's posterous" AKA Robert Scoble's blog, "Why I don't use Google Reader anymore."

I see people complain about Google Reader all the time, especially on Twitter. I can see why some people don't like it or just have no use for it. I still find it really useful – I'm not on Facebook and for most of the blogs I read, the bloggers either don't use Twitter at all or don't use it to link to new blog posts; some of them do use it that way, but I don't necessarily want to stop and read the posts in real time, I want to read them later/at my leisure. Also I don't necessarily want to follow those people's tweets just because I read their blogs. Nonetheless, I recognize that it's not for everyone and I'm not trying to defend it here.

I just find Scoble's reasons for using Twitter instead of Google Reader funny. Here are most of them:

1. Google Reader is FREAKING SLOW. It sometimes takes longer than a minute to open it up. "But my Google Reader account is super fast," I can hear you saying. Yeah, but you don't have any friends [emphases mine] and you don't have many things you are subscribed to. Compare to Twitter lists or Twitter itself. I'm following 10,000+ people. More than 100,000 are following me. Yet Twitter opens instantly.

The needless insult aside (you don't know my life!), "Compare to Twitter lists"? That's still rolling out and AFAIK most people don’t have access to it yet. It also doesn't seem all that useful within the Twitter interface yet. And "Twitter opens instantly"? Um, when it works. Also, it doesn't. Twitter loads pretty slow for me most of the time – not my home page so much as older tweets, and lists of followers and people following. Sometimes it's painfully slow. And don't try to blame it on me not having any friends.

2. Google Reader's UI is too confusing. Yeah, I know how to use it, but really, do we need "like" and "share" and "share with note?"

I agree with this.

3. It makes me feel guilty. I have 1,000 unread items. Twitter doesn't tell me that.

I agree with this too.

4. The social network features suck. Managing friends in Google Reader is slow, and hard to do. Not that Twitter or Facebook is perfect but they are a LOT better than Google Reader. I am following more than 10,000 people, brands, objects etc in Twitter. THERE IS NO WAY I could do that efficiently in Google Reader.

You already mentioned all your 10,000 friends, geez. And I'm sorry, but you can't "efficiently" follow over 10,000 people on Twitter! Sure, you're "following" them, but it's not like you're actually reading all the tweets they produce. That would be impossible, or at the very least, inefficient.

5. I see most news faster on Twitter than in Google Reader. Where did Marissa Mayer announce Google's deal with Twitter? On Twitter. It didn't show up on my Google Reader until later after everyone had written blog posts.

That's true.

6. Headline scanning is easier, and more interesting for some reason in Twitter than even in Google Reader's list view.

This makes no sense to me.

7. Did I mention it's many times faster to open Twitter than Google Reader?

Yes, you did (apparently Scoble can't be bothered to read over his own blog posts, much less anyone else's), but I still find it absurd.

His last reason was something about the iPhone so I stopped reading.

I think Scoble must use something like Seesmic or TweetDeck to manage all his thousands of friends, because Twitter itself still just doesn't have all that much functionality. It's not a model of speed or efficiency. I wish he'd proselytize for his app of choice instead because a lot of the above claims just sound like poppycock to me.

And now I too am tired of socializing.

It's #FollowFriday Time

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Google PageRank Update: October 29, 2009

Ken Lyons — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:45:29 +0000

Google updated their Tool Bar PageRank (TBPR) last night, October 29, 2009. I noticed the change around 9 p.m. last night, when I visited CNN.com and saw an all-green PR 10 tool bar, which caught my attention immediately. Previously, I believe they were PR 8.

With the lastest update, the WordStream home page (now PR 5) and many of our top level pages have risen in rank. So too have our blog posts, with many previous unresolved pages resolving and now achieving TBPR.

Also, our take is Google is updating Toolbar PR more frequently in 2009. By my count, this is the fifth update this year, with the last PageRank update occurring on July 29, 2009. Note that in 2008, there were a total of five TBPR updates, so with this latest PageRank update, we've already tied last year's updates and may exceed them with one more update before year's end. If that happens, it will be evidence that Google is updating PR more frequently.

For reference, Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm (named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google), which Google uses to assign a numerical weighting to measure the authority, value or importance of a webpage. Nobody outside of Google knows the actual PageRank of a document.

Toolbar PageRank, on the hand, is the little green pixel bar, which displays on your toolbar. Something Google says is "for entertainment purposes only." Sure Toolbar PageRank may be suspect metric, but it's all we've got to go on because Google's not giving us a peak at real PageRank.

Either way, I'd be very curious to know if anybody else seen evidence of this latest PageRank update?

Please share your comments.

Top SEO Candy Websites

Ken Lyons — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:35:17 +0000

It's Halloween time again. Time for fright flick gore-arathons, Trick-or-Treaters, and...um...oh yah, bucket loads of Halloween CANDY! I'm sure many of you are stocking up on jumbo bags of fruity, chocolately or gummy candy treats for the roving bands of costumed kids that will soon descend upon your doorstep, that is unless you're one of those people who give out bags of chips or boxes of raisins as "treats," which BTW is a great way to get your house egged.

And with Halloween only days away, what better time to roll out some SERP analysis and crown the Top SEO Candy Websites. Let's find out who's doing a killer job at optimizing their on and off page elements for the Web's top candy queries.

So sit back, relax and enjoy, 'cause this edition of our "Top SEO Websites Series" is gonna' be SWEET!

Top SEO Candy Company Websites: SERP Analysis Process

My process for determining which candy websites are doing the best job at SEO involves three steps:

1) Identify Top 20 Searched Keywords - I use the Google Keyword Tool and our Free Keyword Tool to get search volume estimates. I omitted certain results, like "lollipop" (singular) because that vertical was littered with Lil' Wayne lyrics and Lollipop magazine results. I did leave "lollipops" on the list because that vertical was much cleaner and relevant. I also scrubbed the list of branded queries, like Starburst, Lifesavers and Smarties.

Here's the final compilation of the 20 most searched candy-related keywords:

2) Run Individual Queries for Top 20 Keywords - Once I've determined the 20 most searched keywords, I run those queries in Google and save the first 100 results in a CSV file. To do this yourself, you'll need to install the SEO for Firefox plugin. Then run your query, hit the "100" button and click "CSV."

3) Determine Domain Frequency - Finally, it's impossible to evaluate every candy company website on the Internet by doing a deep analytical dive and trying to compare and contrast important SEO factors. So an effective and streamlined method to measure SEO supremacy is through ranking frequency, ie how often a site displays in the SERPs for top keywords. The premise being that the more frequently your site displays for popular queries, the better job you're doing at SEO. To determine domain frequency in the SERPs, I use a great tool developed by our friends over at Ontolo, the Hosthame Occurance Counter.

Top SEO Candy Websites: The Definitive Rankings

The goal of this post is to first identify the top searched and competitive keywords that a candy maker or distributor should be targeting in the search engines, and through query analysis, identify the candy companies that are excelling at SEO, ranking well and outranking competitors in the SERPs. So without further ado, here are the Top SEO Candy Websites.

Top SEO Candy Websites: The Big Winners

So who are the big winners when it comes to ranking for the top candy keywords? Well, any site that frequents the Top 10 results clearly is doing a great job at optimization. But the really big winners would have to be four sites that showed up consistently on each one of the Top 10, Top 20 and Top 100 lists, which were:

Upon closer look, it's pretty impressive what CandyWarehouse is doing in the SERPs, considering this in a vertical dominated by big brands, like Hershey's, Sees and Godiva. So the fact that a candy distributor can slug it out with the Kings of Candy is worth noting. They don't have nearly as many links (20K compared to Hershey.com's 40K) nor the brand equity, but they outrank their competitors consistently. A true David among Goliaths.

With Chocolate.com, you're seeing a website that reaps the rewards of Google's love affair with exact match domains, and more power to them. They also do a fantastic job structuring their information architecture (IA), and letting target candy keywords dictate their category and page titles. And all their critical pages live high in the IA, directly off the root, so link equity flows like water. It's clear that this is a site built for maximum SEO performance. Nice work, guys.

Interesting Side Notes and Honorable Mentions

As for honorable mentions column, I was surprised that Jellybelly.com made it in the Top 10 three times, which is pretty impressive given this is a pretty chocolate heavy keyword study. Sure, they rank #1 for "jelly beans," which you'd expect, but they also rank #9 for "candy" and #2 for "candy company," so they're excelling at site optimization in highly competitive verticals. Smartly, they offer lots of games, flavor guides, wallpaper and a vitrual tours of their jelly bean factories on their site, which are pretty linkable. ;)

Also worth mentioning are two companies I'd never heard of, Lake Champlain Chocolates (four instances in the Top 10) and Vosges Haut-Chocolat (eight instances in the Top 20) who make bacon and chocolate bars, which could be great or gross. Either way, kudos are in order for the SEO efforts.

Finally, a website that's killing it in the SERPs is Candyaddict.com. This site is not a retailer. It's a blog about candy. Yet they have four occurrences in the Top 10 and six in Top 20 for popular candy keywords, and are blowing away companies that should be able to outrank them, like, oh, Ghirardelli (more on them in the next section).

So Whose Candy Keyword Rankings are More Sour than Sweet?

Sadly Hebertcandies.com, a local New England favorite and a staple of my youth, only has one occurrence in the Top 10 and one in the Top 20. Heck even Starbucks is able to squeeze in one listing in the Top 20. C'mon, Hebert Candies. You can do better than that. Here's a quick tip: stop using the same SEO title tag on every page. And here's a nice juicy text link because I like you: Chocolate Gifts. Hope it helps.

But the worst SERP performance goes to Ghirardelli.com, with only three Top 20 listings and a paltry two occurrences in the Top 10. I mean, this is a pretty authoritative brand with nearly 29K links. Yet the best they can muster for one of their core product pages, "chocolate bars," is #82. And because of this ineptitude, they're forced to use PPC to drive traffic.

Maybe if Ghirardelli acquired more than 10 measly inbound links to their chocolate bars page it would grab some traction in the SERPs rather than ranking on page nine of Google's dead zone. Note the candy bar page for Vosges Haut-Chocolat, which has 4,090 external links. No wonder it ranks page one, #6 in Google.

If the marketing folks at Ghirardelli were savvy, they'd bolt on a blog and start creating content around the top chocolate-related SEO keywords on the above list, as well as for sugary long tail keywords (see what Candyaddict.com is doing). Then, at the very least, they'd have a chance of ranking for keywords they should be targeting and should be ranking for given the strength of their website.

They should also get to work building some quality deep links to their link poor pages because a paltry 10 inbound links just isn't going to cut it in the dog-eat-bacon chocolate truffles world of the hard candy vertical.

Attention: Top SEO Candy Websites Winners

Were you named as one of the Top SEO Candy Websites on our lists? Why not show off your SEO prowess and display one of our Top SEO Candy Websites Winner Badges on your website.

Monthly Blog Roundup: WordStream's October Highlights

Elisa Gabbert — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:39:12 +0000

October is winding to a close, and if history has taught us anything, November comes next. And with it, a candy hangover, my birthday, and pervasive Xmas music, in roughly that order—none of which I'm particularly looking forward to. So let's take this opportunity to look back—at our most popular blog posts from the past month, that is:

Advanced Link Building: Clone Your Most Successful Link Profiles – Resident link building expert Ken Lyons explains how to analyze your link profiles step by step and then replicate your best link prospects.

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites – Another installment in the Top SEO Websites Series, Ken looks at which web design firms are practicing what they should be preaching: SEO-friendly design.

20 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Resources – Tom put together this ultimate list of CRO resources, from books to webinars to podcasts to blogs.

Drupal vs. Wordpress: The CMS Showdown – A comparison of two popular open source content management systems along criteria including ease of use, availability of custom templates, and performance. Find out which one came out on top.

Interview with the Experts: Lisa Barone – The always outspoken Lisa Barone talked to us about the consequences of speaking your mind, what it takes to build and manage a brand, who "gets it" when it comes to social media and more.

Pimp Your PPC Ad: 5 Lessons from Lackluster Text Ads – I took a look at five not-so-stellar Google ads and provided some tips on how to make them more persuasive (and better-ranking).

Photo credit: Suzie T

Analyzing Bounce Rate Using Compete Destination Analytics

Tom Demers — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:05:49 +0000

Bounce rate has become a hot topic in the search community. It's a bit of a buzz word, and if you're doing any sort of SEO or even PPC consulting you'll likely have clients concerned about theirs. In analyzing a site's bounce rate, I like to look at three main factors:

Bounce Rate Factor #1: Traffic Source

Often times the place traffic comes from (search, direct, referral) can have a major impact on bounce rate and can be an indication of irrelevant traffic (some perhaps that you may be paying for). There are a variety of ways you can quickly diagnose problems using analytics packages.

Bounce Rate Factor #2: Page Content/Structure

Obviously the way you’re structuring the page or the content therein may cause people to bounce quickly. By carefully syncing your pages' headlines with the messaging people followed to reach your site and by strategically leveraging internal links, you can extend a visitor's stay.

Bounce Rate Factor #3: Exit Destinations

When people leave your site, where are they going? This can give an indication as to the reason people are exiting your site. This is the factor we'll focus on for this post.

Exit Destinations & Bounce Rates: Where are They Going?

An important thing to note about bounce rate is that it is a directionally indicative metric, and not a KPI (key performance indicator) for most businesses. Included in your bounce rate will be people who may be exiting your site to:

Visit a sister site or another Web property you own
Visit your social networking profiles (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Return to a search page (in the event that search sent a visitor for an unrelated query, they may "bounce back")
Jump to a competitor's site

And there are various other possibilities. Obviously the level of concern you'd feel about the above varies pretty wildly, so it's nice to have an idea where the majority of your traffic is actually off to.

Using Compete Pro to Analyze Bounce Rates

I recently had the opportunity to use Compete Pro to analyze a Web site I was working on, and found the exit destination analytics feature pretty handy. It's worth noting that the Compete data, like any competitive data source, is never 100% accurate, but I find it's generally directionally useful.

Since I just watched a great video featuring their founder, let's take a look at the exit destinations from Mint.com:

The Compete interface is really clean and simple, as you can see above. Once we've selected our site we get a nice list of top exits we can then export:

Once we export the data we can pull it together in a more palatable format (for us and for our clients). Here I've grabbed the top 25 exit destinations, for the sake of simplicity:

In the above we can quickly grasp that:

The biggest single exit destination is Google.com, and Yahoo.com is amongst the highest
Much of the exit traffic is going to sites like Digg, Twitter, etc. This likely means that people are sharing content and driving more traffic back to the site.
Many of the exits are to banking sites. Since Mint.com is a major affiliate site, these are actual very positive exits.

From here we'll want to dig much deeper: we'd want to look at the way Mint has set up their analytics to see which of these actions are actually being factored into bounce rate, we'd want to analyze their on-page content and keyword targeting to see if there is any way to reduce the number of people bouncing back to Google, and we'll want to look more closely at how many people are exiting to desired actions. Much of our "bounce rate" may actually be comprised of people sharing content and generating revenue for our business!

What's Missing From This Bounce Rate Analysis?

A lot.

Basically, the above is just a nice way to get a quick, high-level overview of potential issues to investigate. You'll also want to look at traffic sources, the way you're structuring your content, and you'll likely want to do an even more thorough analysis of where people are going and why than the above. Also it's worth noting that bounce rate is directionally indicative. Ultimately the most valuable numbers are the ones that directly make you money (whether those be conversions, sales, impressions, etc.), but bounce rate is often a nice way to unearth issues and help you to identify problems with your site.

Google "Triple SERP Listings" or Double Indented SERP Results on Google.com

Tom Demers — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:17:36 +0000

Not sure if this is getting rolled out everywhere but Larry spotted this last night and we're seeing it in a lot of SERPs:

Pretty interesting. Really I think it's just more emphasis on domain authority. Not unlike site links and the search within search bar, a triple listing allows Google to crowd the SERPs with the single destination they've deemed sufficiently authoritative.

The criteria for attaining a double listing had been that you would need to push both pages into the cluster of ten a searcher was viewing. I haven't done a lot of testing but I find it hard to believe this is still the case, given the frequency with which I'm seeing the triple listing.

What do you think? Is this an extension of the Brand/Vince update? Just a test? How aggresively are you seeing it in your SERPs (if at all)?

Interview with the Experts: Ruud Hein

Elisa Gabbert — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:02:48 +0000

Ruud Hein is a Dutch family man living in Canada. Newsweek-recommended web publisher and blogger in his own right, he works at the SEO company Search Engine People where he's an internal SEO consultant and blog editor. See also: @ruudhein.

Can you describe a typical day in the life of Ruud Hein?

06:50 – Put on coffee, start TweetDeck so it populates, take shower; make breakfast for my youngest daughter and my wife.

07:45 – Open TweetDeck, scan TwitScoop column; check if the world has made it through another night. Decide on which topic I want to track today. Check Cre8asite Forums. Check if blog posts on SEP and SEO Scoop have gone out.

09:00 – One hour of Most Important Task work.

10:00 – Check email. Do short stuff right away. Archive. Put stuff in my Evernote GTD setup. Do Timeboxed work.

11:15 – Make lunch for my daughter. Eat with daughter and/or my wife.

11:45 – Email, Cre8asite Forums or Twitter

12:00 – Timeboxed work

15:15 – Say hi to daughter, see how the day went.

17:00 – Homework with daughter. Make supper. Eat with family. Clean kitchen. Say hi to my mom in the Netherlands.

18:30/19:00 – Sit together. Watch something (Rewatching “Wonder Years” and “Columbo”; newer stuff is “Kidnapped” and “Breaking Bad”) or read together (Steven King, Mary Higgins-Clark, John Grisham, Dana Stabenow, Thomas Perry … and so many others).

21:00/22:00 – Bed time. Laptop with recreational reading. New York Times. Lots of feeds. More book reading. I like to go to bed early, usually with a cup of caramel tea; my wife and I call it our Christmas time in bed – it’s that special to us.

It seems like you wear a lot of different hats in the web publishing world. What takes up most of your time?

I increasingly spend time on the blogs of Search Engine People; about one day a week in total. It’s often work that can’t be batched together so it varies.

Looking at which task I spend the most time on, ManicTime says it’s email.

You've accused Google of creating the illusion that SEO is easy by offering a bunch of "set it and forget it" features in Webmaster Tools, but abusing our trust by changing policies without informing the SEO public. What's your stance now on Google: friendly or hostile to SEOs?

Well … accused … I’m still not sure what happened there. I find it … suspect or odd, so to say, that some at Google wonder out loud how come SEO’s missed this – knowing full well that when you remove links from the matrix, it will change PageRank throughout the site whichever way you (re)distribute the PR or not.

Anyway … Google has made some things easier or more accessible and it’s very tempting, very easy to be lulled into a false sense of comfort and security when you use those solutions as a substantial part of your work.

The no-follow “now you see it, now you don’t” episode was a great wake-up call: Google can pull the rug from under you at any time – and has no qualms doing so at all.

Sudden and seemingly irrational policy changes will become what ranking updates used to be: killing fields.

So when it comes to PageRank sculpting, canonical issues, content duplication, URL rewrites – what are you going to do this time around? Fix it or put a Google duct tape solution on it?

You have compared (I think on Twitter) social media today to the "golden days" of SEO. How are they similar?

These are, for the most, still the days of the Wild West. Things work on social media now that won’t work a bit down the line. SocMed is cheap and easy at the moment *compared to what it will be* 1-2 years down the line.

Also, like the earlier days of SEO, this is ground level. This is get in, do it territory. Already the milk is spoiling and ad agencies and marketing companies are trying to get in.

When we’re kidding around about social media “gurus” and other so-called douchebags – that’s the Wild West.

Do you think you can still purport to do "SEO" without some degree of social promotion and without the use of media? Are the lines between SEO and SMO starting to blur?

Yes and yes of course.

SEO in essence is not equal to promotion, marketing, branding. Those 3 can benefit SEO and thus a good SEO will look at them as SEO tools.

So yes, you can perform search engine optimization in the classic, technical model without using outside forces.

As for SEO and SMO – this goes back to a good SEO being a sort of junkie. A good SEO has an SEO fixation. Where webdev’s freak out over how cool HTML5-ish Google Wave is made, SEO’s think “now, like wow, how do I fold this back into our sites?!” Where a domainer hears “dot com” behind good phrases or ideas, a good SEO reads them as targeted anchor text. Where normal folks query Google like crazy to figure out if Michael Jackson died or not, a good SEO is thinking “is there *any* feasible, semi-sane way at all to use this to increase links to our faucets client?”

So yes, the lines between SEO and SMO aren’t starting to blur; they *are* blurred. As are the ones between SEO and PR, marketing, branding, religion, racing, politics and popsicles.

I like this quote about "information overload" from your blog: "If someone is clutching his stomach complaining about 'food overload' caused by there being too much food to digest, you'd ask 'but why in the world do you try to eat it all at the same time?!'" Do you have any tips for avoiding "overeating" information, or distinguishing signal from noise?

Yup: get a life <smiles> Seriously, go on vacation for a week or two, spend time with your family and yourself – then see what you “missed,” right? Nothing.

Read what you like. Enjoy your feeds, enjoy your browsing.

When it comes to *work* rely on aggregators and news filters you trust. Search Engine Roundtable is a good example.

Plug your Google Reader feeds into FeedDemon so you can use keyword watches to filter for specific pieces of information.

And of course (still work-related): search, don’t read.

You're a self-professed "Wordpress geek." What's so great about Wordpress, particularly for SEO?

I used Grey Matter before coming to B2, what later became WordPress. Thus I sort of “grew up” with it and I know it like an old friend.

WordPress’ strength is that it has an elegant balance between features and possibilities, between options and what could be done. It has kept its setup, both user and developer facing, clean and simple enough that going from “wouldn’t it be cool” to “wow, that’s cool” is simple enough to draw both code hacks and super disciplined MVC developers.

SEO-wise it’s no longer the magic bullet it once was, of course; Google got wise to blogging. But it still provides a super simple way to get a site started, separate content and design, get nice clean URL’s and automate so much more of what would otherwise have been a lot of static HTML work “back then.”

When you're tasked with optimizing a big mess of a site, what goes through your head? Where do you start? Is it harder to get a site ranking on the tenth page to the first or from the tenth spot on the first page to #1? Which is more fun?

What’s the optimal structure. That’s usually what I think – also because team mates at Search Engine People focus on other parts like link building. People like Paul Teitelman and a whole bunch of others more “behind the scenes” take care of that.

Essentially I’m looking at the site as if links are stripped away or devalued; how can we maximize what this site does when that’s not there?

As for ranking … I learned from Ammon Johns on Cre8asite Forums that a) no matter how large the competition, you’re always with just 10 sites – the ones on page 1, and b) that ranking is meaningless … that it’s all about the dollar.

Between increasing conversions and increasing pot of fool’s gold ranking, I know where my money is.

You've contributed a lot of very helpful, in-depth posts on forums, particularly Cre8asite. That level of contribution has to be time-consuming—what motivates you to engage in that sort of participation in a community rather than starting your own forum or turning your advice into blog content on your own domain?

I’ve started to make more time for that again, recently. Changes in my family life in the past 2 years have seen me … participate less, or differently.

Blog posts are very one-way initially. Forum participation feeds on an expressed need; someone asks a specific question and you chime in. That’s fun and utterly practical. As you spend more time, certain faces become familiar and you feel part of a bigger whole.

And yes, ruudhein.com could have had super deep insight SEO posts but I rather keep the lines clean and keep SEO posts for the Search Engine People blog. On my own site I want to be free to post about “whatever.” It’s a site where I only post when I have something I want or need to say. There’s no “every Xth day” schedule.

What tools and apps do you use every day and consider indispensable to doing your job and/or living your life?

The essentials?

I can’t really imagine email anymore outside of Gmail. It strikes me as odd when I see a “regular” email client – and there’s no conversation view. That’s like … weird.

Evernote is one of the first programs I install. Although I make frequent trips to other note/database software, Evernote is the one I’ve kept coming back to since 2005. The “results while you type” search is a killer feature. I’m unhappy to observe the ongoing degradation of features in each release but for now, this is my ultimate information app.

AutoHotkey is one of the best text expanders/power shortcut makers. I’ve used Perfect Keyboard and ActiveWords before but AH combines the best of those two – and then some. A lot of tasks go smoother using my custom shortcuts and in some cases I have to think a split second to remember how to do it the “normal” way when I’m on another computer.

Other stuff: Picasa for photo management, FlashFXP for FTP, UltraEdit for almost anything. MediaMoneky for music throughout the day. MindManager which I use for keyword research, brainstorming, mapping a site’s structures, keeping notes during conference calls, etc.

One program I should mention is DietPower. I have to keep a close watch on what I eat and this program has been a lifesaver for that. Other applications, like FitDay, can more or less do and track the same but DietPower tracks the right nutrients *and* foods you add to the database show up for all users. Very, very handy.

You have conducted a lot of SEO industry interviews yourself. How does it feel when the tables are turned? Do you prefer doing the asking or the answering?

I’ve never done interviews; I just ask some questions that interest me <smile>

The answering is flattering; it sorta feels like “wow, look at me, they want to interview me” but the asking is very special. You never know what will come back; it’s a very addictive experience.

The Future of Content Creation: Keyword Research on Steroids

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:07:12 +0000

Wired this week published a fascinating profile piece on a company called Demand Media: "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell." The company's approach to content generation almost sounds like science fiction or satire, but it's real, and it works. It's a purely algorithmic, data-driven method of prioritizing content designed to rank on the first page of the Google SERPs: basically keyword research in hyperdrive. And like it or not, this may be where we're all headed.

Keyword-research-driven content production is nothing new; we practice this ourselves (to an extent). Workflow is based on the keyword groups that are currently driving traffic and conversions. If tons of people are finding our site after searching on "keyword organization tools" and we don't have dedicated content for that keyword, we write a page. It's just good SEO. Naturally, we want to be writing content that speaks to what our prospective customers are actually looking for.

Demand Media, however, has taken this process to another level:

Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.

The algorithm, created by Byron Reese, works like so:

To determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three chunks of information. First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to advertise against.) Third, the formula checks to see how many Web pages already include those terms. It doesn’t make sense to commission an article that will be buried on the fifth page of Google results.

Content is then assigned to freelancers who work fast and on the cheap. Content quality takes a backseat to content targeting: According to Reese, "the most valuable topic in Demand’s arsenal" is "Where can I donate a car in Dallas?" That just happens to be their most profitable keyword—no expert could guess that based on intuition or even figure it out with less sophisticated data analysis.

This is super-long-tail targeting—and the effectiveness of Demand's approach should make us all stop and think. Originally, the company was driving content creation through a combination of algorithmic keyword research and editorial insight:

But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.

Kind of creepy, huh? What's that clanging sound? Just the sound of robots coming to take your job.

Speaking of creepy, the article also gives us a peek into the life of Richard Rosenblatt, the cofounder, chairman, and CEO of Demand Media. His email signature includes the phrase "Go big or go home." He's friends with Lance Armstrong (You might be a douchebag if…). Check out his bio page: He looks like the Rob Lowe character in Wayne's World!

To be fair, the guy supposedly only seems sleazy:

Numerous executives told me that when they first met Rosenblatt, they were immediately repulsed: He was too slick and seemed to be missing the geek edge. “Then in five minutes you’re like, ‘Holy cow, this guy has it all to back it up,’” says Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive.

I love that: the geek edge. Give me geek edge over Rob Lowe hair any day.

Bringing it back to search … I recommend reading the piece, and giving some thought to your own content creation priorities and practices. If you think you know what your readers want without digging into the hard data, think again. I.e., watch your back (for robots).

It's #FollowFriday Time

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Advanced Link Building: Clone Your Most Successful Link Profiles

Ken Lyons — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:42:32 +0000

Link builders often talk about competitive link analysis and exploring your competitors' link profiles to find link opportunities. The logic here is a link profile that works for one site may work for a similar site. And executed properly, this can be an effective link strategy.

But I'd like to share a link building tactic you've probably never read about. It's very effective and based on the same approach and logic as competitive link analysis. Besides analyzing links on competitor sites, you should also be examining your own link profiles for link opportunities, specifically the profiles of your best performing pages. The objective here is to replicate the success of your strongest ranking page on your weaker ranking pages.

Why is this link building tactic successful?

If it's working for one page on your site, it may work for another
It’s exponentially easier to replicate your own link strategy than a competitors
You have proprietary access to replicate your own site internal link structure that competitors will never be able to clone

So let’s take a look at how you can analyze the link profiles for your site’s best ranking pages and clone those profiles for other pages.

Methods for Link Analysis

The method I use to analyze the link profiles of the top performing pages on my own websites involves three steps.

Step One: Identify Top Performing Pages

First, if you're not already doing so, find the top performing pages on your website. Rather than running individual search queries for your target keywords in Google, you can use one of these rank tracking tools.

Rank Checker - Export keyword rankings to Excel (free)
Google Webmaster Tools - Look under “top search queries” (free)
Advanced Web Rankings - Automated rank tracking and reporting software ($200 flat)

Step Two: Create External Link Analysis Report

Once you have your top performing keywords/pages, it's time to do some link analysis and create an external link profile report.

Yahoo Link Domain - I conduct most my link reporting and link analysis using Yahoo Link Domain. This is some of the most extensive, comprehensive and up-to-date link data available and it's and free. I'd recommend accessing it through the SEO Toolbar from SEO Book, so you can perform page level analysis.

How to Create Your Link Analysis Report:

Run Yahoo Link Domain on your strongest ranking pages (individually, of course) and export the link data to Excel. Your link report data points should include Toolbar PageRank (TBPR), "domain links," "page links," ".edu links," ".gov" links, all of which you can access with SEO for Firefox.
To further qualify links, check the linking site's domain in the SERPs to see if Google has awarded site links to that site (demonstrating trust and authority), and add that field to your report.

Sort by TBPR to get an idea of "relative value" of the inbound links pointing to that page.
Scrub the list and purge low value links (scraper sites, syndicated article submission links, social links, forum signatures, blog comments, nofollow), as it's unlikely they're passing enough juice if any to impact rank. Even if they are, they're easy enough to replicate. And if you’re doing it for one page, you’re likely doing it for others. So don't dwell on these links.
Leave only high and/or medium value links on the sheet from trusted sites with strong, authoritative link signals. Point is, you’re looking for links that are unique and passing enough link equity to float it in the results.

So now you should have a solid external links report, which will look something like this:

Step Three: Create Internal Link Analysis Report

It's not just external links that pass link equity to your Web pages. Internal link building also flows juice throughout a site. That's why I preach an aggressive internal linking system, so you can funnel link equity from those "link rich" pages to your "link poor pages." Creating an internal link report will help identify the where the top performing pages are getting their internal link juice.

Webmaster Tools - Gives you a list of all pages on your site that link to your top performing pages, which you can export into Excel.

Yahoo Link Domain - Use the link command "link:yoursite.com/your-deep-page.html site:yoursite.com" to get the entire list of internal links pointing to your top performing pages.

With this data, you will create a spreadsheet like the one you created for the external link analysis report above, again organizing the list by TBPR and purging the list of any low value internal links. This will give you a crystal clear picture of internal link profiles for your top performing pages, which you can then act on.

Now, Clone Your Link Profile

External Links Prospects

With your handy link analysis report in hand, your goal now is to try and acquire more inbound links from the same sources that pass link equity to your top performing pages. Easier said than done, right? Sure, some links may be difficult to duplicate, but many aren't. Point is, if they linked to you before, odds are in your favor that they'll link to you again. This is especially true when replicating links from, say, a trusted directory. With editorial links, you'll need to reach out those sources and inquire about additional link opportunties to other pages on your site.

What's also great about this process is the link intelligence you gain. The practice of analyzing and determining which links are passing equity and trust will give you tremendous insight into what it takes to replicate top SERP performance.

Internal Links Prospects

Replicating your internal link profiles is obviously much easier, yet potentially just as effective. You want to use the results of your internal link analysis report to identify potential targets on your site for additional internal linking.

A word of caution though: realize that if you continually siphon the link juice from a feeder page by adding more internal links, you run the risk of:

Diluting the existing equity passing to the internal links already living on that page
Killing that page's ability to pass meaningful link equity to any future links

BTW, to monitor your internal link equity and how much link juice each internal page is passing, you can use a free SEO tool like Foxyrank.

So keep that in mind when you're tapping these internal pages for juice. I recommend taking precautions by noting all other internal links on page, documenting their existing rankings and monitoring their position in the SERPs closely over the subsequent weeks to make sure you haven’t hurt them by diluting the juice they were receiving from those top performing pages on your site.

Using Google Analytics Advanced Segments for Keyword Research

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:51:16 +0000

The following is a guest post by Marshall Sponder of WebMetricsGuru.

Google Analytics has some very powerful capabilities for keyword research that are often overlooked. Using advanced keyword segments, you can find and isolate buckets of keyword traffic (organic, paid, or both) and their destination landing pages, in mass – and that can be very useful for your optimization efforts.

Take one of my blogs, ArtNewYorkCity.com – I’ve written about shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art quite a lot over the years. Taking all of my keyword traffic that contains the word “Metropolitan,” I can create an advanced keyword segment in Google Analytics.

Below is a list of all those keywords.

Creating an advanced segment just to home in on “Metropolitan” keywords effectively gives me the same keyword list.

You may be wondering why I would bother creating an advanced segment when I had the same information by filtering the list of keywords coming to my site. The reason is that it would be impossible to look at the keywords en masse without bucketing them together into a segment.

For example, it would be impossible for me to look at all the pages that got traffic from the keyword “metropolitan” at one time (see below).

More than half of the traffic I got on “metropolitan” came from one post I wrote early in 2008 that provided 131 visits (out of 257 total visits) – that might be valuable for me to know in order to find out how I could write more posts that build on the success I had with that particular blog post.

I also found that most of the people searching for information about the Metropolitan were, predictably, local. But had my keyword been more general, it might have revealed something quite different. Say I created a keyword segment on “Cezanne”, my favorite artist – where would that traffic have come from, predominantly?

While the largest chunk of traffic was local (I live in Brooklyn, New York), much of it wasn’t (it was long-tail traffic from all over the world).

Going back to Figure 3, I found that the landing page getting the most traffic for “metropolitan” was http://www.artnewyorkcity.com/2008/01/27/friday-night-visit-to-the-metropolitan-provides-insight/, which appears to have a lot more contextual links, surrounded by text, than other posts I’ve written about the Metropolitan, and perhaps this style of writing is more rewarded by search engines.

Looking at it another way, I’m linking to paintings at a highly respected site – the Metropolitan Museum website has a PageRank of 7, and while many of the paintings I’m linking to in my post don’t appear to have PageRank (perhaps due to redirects or the way the content management system generates the website), we know they have a high trust rank and probably do pass PageRank, even if that isn’t shown by the Google Toolbar.

Using Google Analytics advanced segments for keyword research is an effective way to gain insights that you might not ordinarily be able to get without such a tool.

Feel free to try this approach and let us know how it’s working for you.

What, Exactly, Determines Your PPC Keyword Price?

jlee — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:59:49 +0000

It's a question that's asked more often then you might think. "What determines my pay-per-click keyword price?" The answer is most certainly not "Google" or another PPC search engine. Truth be told, this question is aptly answered by a quick lesson in PPC fundamentals. Your keyword price, or cost-per-click (CPC), is determined by a combination of your bidding strategy, competition, Quality Score and a handful of other factors.

TIP: PPC terminology 101. While keyword price is a seemingly accurate descriptor, the more appropriate (and widely accepted) term is actually cost-per-click - aka CPC.

Your Keyword Bids: The most obvious determinant of your keywords' cost-per-click is in fact your actual bid! Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter all utilize a maximum CPC bid model for calculating ad position and ultimately your final cost-per-click. If you bid low, your keyword price will be low. If you bid high, your keyword price will potentially increase. Which brings me to...
Quality Score: What's a conversation about PPC without mention of the 800 lbs. gorilla in the proverbial paid search room. Quality Score is primarily a factor when advertising in Google AdWords, though both YSM and adCenter have their own similar quality initiatives. This post is about keyword price, so I'll save the nitty gritty on Quality Score for another post. A great Quality Score can allow you to rank your ads higher at lower CPC, and inversely a poor Quality Score will force you to increase bids to achieve higher ad position. Suffice it to say, Quality Score plays a *major* role in determining your keywords' price by influencing actual CPCs, estimating the first page bid thresholds you see in your AdWords account and affecting how high your ad will be ranked. (See also my post on the subject at Website Magazine.) Which brings me to...
- Click-through Rate (CTR): Click-through Rate, and by association the relevance of your ad copy, affects your cost-per-click by directly affecting your Quality Score. Of all the variables that factor into Quality Score, CTR is hands down the strongest influencer. How does this tie back into your keyword price? Follow along with me if you will... Improve CTR and you'll improve Quality Score which will improve Ad Rank which eventually will lower your actual cost-per-click. Which brings me to...
- Ad Rank/Ad Position: The core formula for Ad Rank is generally as follows: Quality Score X Maximum CPC Bid = Ad Rank. Ad Rank is technically a raw number that is used to calculate your actual ad position (other factors like Quality Score thresholds, etc., determine actual order). Your ad position will greatly affect your CTR. And as we already determined, CTR plays a big role in determining your actual cost-per-click! Did I mention that fluctuations in competition can affect your ad position? Which brings me to...
Competition: Competitors are like belly buttons - we've all got 'em. Recognize this fact and realize that the ever changing presence of competitors will greatly affect your bidding strategy, ad position, CTR and you guessed it - CPCs. The addition (or better yet, subtraction) of a strong competitor can be attributed to a myriad of variables, but most of us recognize the holiday shopping season as a major instigator of competitive fluctuations in PPC. Which brings me to...
Other Factors: Seasonality is huge in paid search advertising - and is something I feel doesn't get as much attention as it should. Regardless, seasonality will greatly affect your keyword price. Whether that be due to a new competitor entering your keyword market for the holiday's or an old foe increasing their bids for Christmas as expected - these changes will force you to make your own bid and ad changes to remain competitive. All of which circles back to your actual cost-per-click. Akin to seasonality, the general ebb and flow of pay-per-click (yes folks, it's true PPC traffic changes day to day) will also change your strategies affecting your cost-per-click.

Which brings me to... the conclusion of today's post! (OK, I promise I won't use a gimic like that next time I write.) My goal for today's post is that the next time you hear someone ask, "What determines my pay-per-click keyword price?" you'll have some informed answers to share. Your keyword bids, Quality Score, click-through rates and even your competitors all play a role in determining your actual CPC - aka your keyword price.

SEO Dojo Launches Private SEO Community & Forum

Tom Demers — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:44:42 +0000

Our friend David Harry recently launched a new SEO community called the SEO Dojo. I've been a member through the community's "beta" period, and it is packed with a ton of great information and there are numerous "hardcore" SEOs offering up their expertise to answer questions and help drive discussions. Some highlights:

Ask the Experts & Dojo Chat - I haven't had a chance to be as active in the chat as I'd like but from browsing transcripts its obvious that there is a lot of activity and that there will be numerous SEOs eager to interact, answer questions and offer feedback.
Knowledge Exchange - The forum area allows you to have your site reviewed, offer or shop for services, and more.
Study Hall - This area is home to a lot of great SEO guides authored by David and the Dojo members. The site audit framework is a particularly valuable resource for SEO consultants.

If you're an SEO or looking to learn the subject, private communities like the Dojo and SEO Book are outstanding places to sift through the noise and find more signal: beyond the static guide-style resources available, these communities are home to an expert-rich collection of search marketers, and tend to discourage the less motivated forum members you often see cluttering free forums with a nominal monthly price point.

I'd definitely recommend anyone that serious about SEO check out the SEO Dojo today.

David was kind enough to answer a few questions about the SEO Dojo community and what it can offer SEOs:

Can you tell us a bit about SEO Dojo? What's the impetus behind it? What are you hoping it will accomplish?

Well, the whole thing started in late 2008 when some mates in the SEO world had been talking about how there weren’t any quality SEO communities out there. Most of the public ones tend to be overrun by spammers and noobs (nothing against them, but sometimes we don’t want to talk about the same basic stuff). By early 2009, we started to plan a community for SEOs, by SEOs.

Around that time, I had been tweeting lots of uber-geeky search stuff and followers had asked why I didn’t put out a newsletter. Originally, I didn’t think there was really a market for the geekier side of search; I relented and the SEO Geeks Newsletter was born (now 6 months and more than 1k peeps later).

From there it simply evolved. The framework of the original community vision evolved with patent and paper DB, a collection of SEO-related videos, training tracks (including a geek’s guide to understanding search engines) and deeper community elements. It has simply grown like mad and we’re adding new things all the time (we have some webinars in the works as we speak).

As far as what we’re trying to accomplish, that’s simple. We wanted to create a haven where professional SEOs (and even webmasters) could congregate to exchange knowledge, interact and even take their knowledge to the next level. A family, a community and a land of higher learning.

What distinguishes SEO Dojo from other SEO communities, like SEO Book and SEOmoz?

One thing that became obvious when we decided to offer the training center to the masses (instead of keeping it to ourselves) was the two-headed dragon that are those fine fellas you mentioned (and even other great training courses like the ones from Bruce Clay, SEMPO and SEO College). To that end I talked to a large number of folks that had used their offerings (SEO Book and SEOmoz) to see what they liked, didn’t like and thought could be improved … some informal qualitative research if you will. We also looked at the demographic in hopes of reaching a market that wasn’t being actively serviced.

The first thing we decided was that those guys already had some great tools and there was no need to re-invent the wheel. As such, we decided to stay away from that, and partner with some companies that were already established in the tool world (see our sponsor list for more).

The next thing we wanted to do was try and appeal more to the experienced SEO practitioners and offer a community where they can interact and exchange knowledge, have co-op opportunities and encourage members to work together. There is strength in numbers you know. All that being said, we have added some training sections for those not entirely up to speed with the world of SEO. Our main focuses though, are professional SEOs and webmasters.

Does SEO Dojo offer something for every level of SEO?

Well, as I mentioned, originally the goal was to go after the more experienced practitioners and not so much the noob market. We’ve relented somewhat and included some goodies for them, but it really isn’t the main focus.

I would say the main focus is for the intermediate and above skill level people. You’d be surprised though how many people don’t actually have a strong grasp of the technical side of search engines. Considering this is one of my main areas of study, there is a strong emphasis in teaching not only SEO, but information retrieval concepts to increase a member’s ability to understand the data and testing that they may be doing. The term SEO has "Search Engine" right in there and I believe ALL SEOs should have a greater understanding of how they actually work.

That’s why we like to think of it as "SEO training" more so than an "SEO school." We’re not as focused on teaching the SEO basics, but providing somewhere for those more experienced people to interact and expand on their knowledge.

Out of curiosity, why "Dojo"? Are you into martial arts as well as the art of SEO?

Oh most certainly. People often ask why I have such a screwed up domain name, and well, it’s because of that. Originally just a personal site for ranting, it just kept getting more popular and I was kind of stuck with the domain. Sure, I could change it and 301 everything, but I enjoy the challenge of succeeding with such a branding headache ... lol.

Huo Mah = Fire Horse (in Chinese) which is simply my astrological sign. I spent more than 25 years in martial arts (as well as studying Qigong and Buddhism). One of the last areas I studied was called Jeet Kune Do. This essentially advocates cross training and finding what works for YOU … not an enforced learning of a style and techniques that aren’t suited to everyone. As such, when I started teaching self defense, and students would say, “What do we call what we are learning?” – I’d jokingly say, “Huo Mah Fa” (the way of the fire horse). The main point was that they are learning their own way of fighting.

Considering my blog has maintained that eastern flavor, and given my background, it seemed an obvious choice to call it the SEO Dojo. I like to think we’ve extended the concept of the dojo as well. A dojo is about community, training and support. The mantra “We’re all students – we’re all teachers" is a carryover from that. A practitioner with 2 years' experience can teach one with 1 year … and those with 3 can teach those with 2. Essentially, it is the community that makes strong warriors. I hope to emulate that with our little family.

Besides, "SEO training for Search Warriors" just sounds cool … right?

The price point seems low considering some of the names and expertise accessible there – why not charge more?

That part all plays back into my days in the world of martial arts actually. Back 10 years ago I used to have a martial arts school that I ran after hours. At first I offered the lessons free, as "passing on the art" is a large part of one’s responsibilities as a martial artist. Problem was, that many students didn’t seem to take it seriously unless there was at least a nominal fee in place.

With the SEO Dojo, we struggled with this originally as we didn’t want to be elitist, but at the same time make sure that those joining us took the place seriously. We looked at the various communities and courses being offered in the space and decided to price it so that it was accessible, but not FREE.

Upon launch we’re setting a reasonable $30/month price point that is likely less than most people spend on coffee each month. If accessing the information and people we have involved isn’t worth that – then I think it keeps out people we’d likely not want anyway.

Will the prices change? Sure, as we continue to add more elements (such as some upcoming webinars) and the community grows, the prices will surely rise. Watching Aaron build his community over the last year or so, I’ve taken notes as far as not becoming too large that we can’t service all the members. I whole-heartedly agree with his decision to keep it manageable … and want to emulate that.

What sort of content is available in the series of guides available to members?

Wow, where to start with that one? We’ve had 100 or so beta-testers in there playing in the space for nearly 10 months now. Over that period we’ve removed some sections, added others and it’s always a work in progress. Some of the highlights include:

The knowledge exchange member's forum
Learn search and SEO (from 30 plus sections) in the Study Hall
Exclusive, actionable content (and worksheets)
Participate in our weekly Live Chats
Start tests and get help in the Testing Zone
Work together with other members in the Co-op Marketplace
Access the top minds in SEO with "Ask the Experts"
Free downloads: SEO Handbook & Link builders guide, Google Analytics for SEO and more

In the reading/training sections, we cover SEO basics, geeks' guide to search engines and ranking factors, a link builder’s handbook (and spreadsheets), a community-created SEO site audit framework and more (we’re adding new content each week). Upcoming tracks include content programs, advanced keyword research and more.

One area that we’ve been working on lately are some webinars. It started as a weekly chat session for the members and grew from there. Interactions are HUGE as far as I am concerned and the core of taking ones SEO knowledge to the next level. That and actionable items such as the spreadsheets we’ve developed.

Special Offer!

David is offering the first 25 readers of this post a 25% discount at SEO Dojo. Just use the coupon code WSRocks.

Another Week, Another Battle in the War on SEO

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:04:47 +0000

If you've been working in the search marketing industry for long, you know that every so often some scheming troll (or major news corporation) comes along and delivers a rant against SEO, usually including most if not all of the following sentiments:

Search engine optimizers are snake oil salesmen (Would that those fighting the war on SEO were also familiar with the war against cliché)
SEO is just common sense; it's obvious
Most of what SEOs do is smoke and mirrors
SEOs are scam artists
Information on optimizing a site is freely available on the web, so why pay for it?

This week, that troll was a Derek "Powa-jerk" Powezek (hat tip to Ken for the wrestling name), who I guess is a designer (his actual job titles include Creative Director and "Chief of Awesome"). Powazek's rant about how SEO is "poisoning the web" brings very little that's new to the table: a snake oil here, a scam artist there. He makes the classic specious argument about there being no reason to pay for SEO:

Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you'll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It's so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.

Among the "obvious" holes in this argument: Time is money, dogg. A lot of business owners don't want to spend their time educating themselves about how to do SEO—even if there's a lot of free information on the web—when they have so many other demands on their time. It's actually way more cost-effective for them to pay someone else to do it. Same reason why lawyers don't wallpaper their own offices just because there's an eHow page about it.

Furthermore, however obvious SEO may seem to Powazek, a lot of people still don't get it—even the very basic stuff he thinks (or pretends to think) SEO is limited to. You can tell an old-school journalist, for example, that headlines need to include keywords, and first up, they'll balk and scoff; next they'll pick an arbitrary phrase and call it the keyword. It doesn't help to know that the headline should include keywords if you don't know how to do keyword research and probably don't want to.

Powazek's arguments would only be convincing to people who already agree with him (kind of like a Michael Moore movie—watching some guy be mean to Charlton Heston isn't going to turn my Republican father into a supporter of gun control); his audience, clearly, is other web designers who seem resentful/fearful of SEOs encroaching on their territory and poaching their work. He's preaching to the (willfully ignorant) choir. Take this commenter on the post:

Right on the money, Derek. There is no real world value in SEO. It’s smoke and mirrors to make it look like you’re doing something for your client when you’re actually sitting around getting paid to ruin the internet [emphases mine]. Thanks, douchebags.

Where does this inane idea that SEO is "ruining the internet" come from?? Powazek says: "It’s not your job to create content for Google. It’s their job to find the best of the web for their results." Well, clearly, Google isn't doing the best job of that if they're turning up spam for your (vanity) searches and raining all over your internet parade. Spam is created by spammers, not SEOs. The point of SEO is make damn sure that Google finds you, and many of the principles are actually ways to avoid looking like (or being) spam.

SEO isn't about "tricking people into visiting your site" any more than web design is about tricking them into looking at it. SEO is about making yourself as accessible as possible to the people who can benefit from what you offer. Powazek's advice for "getting your name out there" is to forget about SEO, just build something great and "Then tell people about it. Start with your friends." Sorry, but telling your friends isn't a business model—your friends aren't usually your customer base.

Per usual, a number of people in the SEO community leaped to the defense of SEO and poked holes in Powazek's argument. The responses include:

Danny Sullivan's open letter to Powazek: "The stuff that you think isn’t rocket science — that anyone knows — is indeed a mystery to others. They want help, and sometimes they can’t find that web developer who also understands SEO issues. In the same way, you sometimes don’t find web developers who are also designers. Or designers who understand conversion issues. Or conversion experts who understand web development."
Peter Da Vanzo on SEOBook: "The problem with 'making something great' is that the search engine may not think it is great. This is because a search engine is stupid. It's a machine. And like any stupid machine, it may not recognize greatness, especially if it can't crawl it, or if that greatness doesn't exist in a form it finds palatable. SEOs help make sure the search engines don't miss greatness."
Virginia Nussey of Bruce Clay Inc.: "Sure, it's obvious common sense. Once you know what, why and how. Too bad few business owners know the what, why and how yet. Most business owners have never heard of SEO, or thought in-depth about the opportunity afforded in search, or considered how navigable their Web site is for people (let alone for the most important traffic referrer at their disposal: the search engine)."
SEO by the Sea's Bill Slawski: "The practice of SEO isn’t spamming the Web […] it’s helping people make intelligent and creative decisions that help them reach an audience that is interested in what they have to offer." Bill also offers 10 good, thoughtful questions "that search engine optimizers might come across, that I wouldn’t expect most developers to have spent much time thinking about."
Greg Jarboe on Search Engine Watch: "Apparently, Powazek missed the 2005 post by Gord Hotchkiss, who retold the story of my dinner with a black hat SEO. In between the courses, a confession came out that stopped me in my tracks: 'Black hat stuff is getting too hard. I'm actually thinking about turning legit.'"

Sadly, I don't expect any of these calm, rational responses to sway the angry anti-SEO crowd. We too are preaching to the choir.

It's #FollowFriday Time

@juliepower social media marketing mom, journalist, editor, consultant, also jp @momstowork and jap @hrtraining
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@k_lee Typical first born, Capricorn to a T; lover of photography and busting out the Elaine dance move from Seinfeld any chance I get; PR specialist
@eliteSEM Interactive Marketing Agency Specializing in Search, Display, Lead Gen, and Web Design
@wordwrangler I write the words that make the whole world sing--um, buy stuff, actually. Veteran copywriter, neophyte Internet marketer
@BenV196 Freelance copywriter, in Australia, specialising in quality web content.
@FutureBlogging Currently working as a freelance copywriter across the south-east region.
@ericervin Search marketer, social media strategist, GIS'er, and marketing analyst for the City of Littleton’s Economic Gardening program
@XurxoVidal PPC / SEM Expert @ www.makeitbloom.com
@JuniorAS09 Curious by nature
@reidsarah Copywriter / PPC Management / Google Adwords Certified / Advertising and Marketing Nerd

Follow Us on Twitter

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@SMRichardson Trivia, SEM, Red Sox, animals, travel and music
@Boston_SEO SEO genius, former rockstar, 2 adorable daughters
@EGabbert Writer, poet, editor, SEO, SEM, foodist, aesthete/rationalist
@John_A_Lee Consult on PPC, SEO, Social Media & Blogging. Paid Search Manager with WordStream. Teller of bad jokes, music junkie and aspiring chef.
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Have a Tip for WordStream's Follow Friday?

Send an email to egabbert@wordstream.com.

We've Moved!

Ken Lyons — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:31:00 +0000

There's big news in WordStream World. We've moved to shnazzy new digs! It's pretty exciting and we all love the new space in Boston's Back Bay, just across for the Prudential Center. We're on the 16th floor of the Christian Science Monitor building and the views are incredible. What's more, our new space is a big step up from the last place. See that "WordStream is that-a-way" sign above. Yes, that was the actual sign that greeted visitors at our previous office, so you can imagine what the rest of the place looked like.

Actually, you don't have to imagine. I've taken some pics of the new WordStream office and I've also got some photos of the old space (evidence is what the police are calling them now), that way you can witness our ascent from outhouse to penthouse. So sit back, relax and enjoy this photo montage of WordStream through the years...or should I say "year" since we're only 12 months old.

WordStream: The Early Months

When WordStream was launched a little over a year ago (mind you it was a soft launch, a veeeeery soft launch), Founder Larry Kim and one of WordStream's first official hires Tom Demers were headquartered out of a pretty unorthodox space. Here's the first WordStream location. Pretty sweet, huh?

That's right, Larry and Tom first set up shop in this local Panera. It's actually kind of a dream space if you think about it: ready access to snacks, drinks, toilets and FREE Wi-Fi access. Plus, they didn't spend a dime on rent. Little did the Panera people know that there was an exciting, new search marketing software company blossoming right in their midst. Actually, I'm sure they were more concerned with figuring out how to oust the two strange dudes who were freeloading in the corner booth all day, every day and bothering everybody with dorky SEO and PPC debates.

But once Larry secured some VC funding, it was on to greater things. Tom and Larry left cozy confines of the Panera Office and moved to a space in Needham, Ma. Note: I didn't work in Needham and have no photos of Needham, so we'll have to skip that chapter and mosey along to pics of the first Boston office.

WordStream Federal St. Office

Even though WordStream had funding, it's not fiscally prudent to go out and blow your seed money on fancy digs. Not right away anyway. So WordStream moved into an affordable, modest, "lived-in" space in the Financial District of Boston. Here's a glimpse of what WordStream Federal St. looked like.

We made sure to save all our empty boxes. Being a startup, you never know when you'll be living out of one.

Those aren't exposed, decaying, leaky pipes above your head. That's "architectural flair," kids.

Quick! There's an emergency. The elevator will take us to safety. Uh, maybe not.

At Federal St., we were great at drinking soda. Not so great at cleaning up after ourselves.

And no one embodied that better than Tom Demers. Note the bottle of Tums and the pain meds that compliment a day's worth of soda at Tom's workstation. That right there is your recipe for search marketing success, folks. And yes, that's one day's worth of soda for Tom. He drinks 12 cans per day, no joke. All of Boston is shocked and concerned.

Foul, stinky DNA-stained carpets were just part of the charm over at our Federal St office.

Heck, even the employees didn't want to be seen working there. Don't worry, Ryan...your secret it safe with me.

BTW, if it looks like these pics were taken at night, they weren't. They were taken at 9:30 a.m. This is as light as it got in our dreary little office space. But contrast that to our gleaming, magnificent new offices on Huntington Ave. We've risen from the darkness and into the light; a true transformation literally and metaphorically.

WordStream's New Back Bay Office

Last week, we moved into our new space on Huntington Ave and it's pretty sweet. The place is so swanky and views so spectacular I even brought my kids up to see my office, something I never did at the Federal St. building for fear they'd be carried off by cockroaches.

That's us on the 16th floor.

Like I said, the views are spectacular, inspirational even. I can see Fenway Park from my perch.

Here's a bird's-eye-view of the Christian Science Plaza from our office.

Check out the inside of our Back Bay office: plush, luxurious and no black mold!

Our kitchen is immaculate, but give it time. Soon it will look like a can recycling center again. With the amount of diet soda we drink, it's inevitable.

The view from CEO Rob Adler's side of the office is pretty nice too. This is the rooftop pool at the Greenhouse Apartments, which I hear is a favorite sunbathing destination for hot models, if you're into that sort of thing...

And look: four elevators that all work. Imagine that!

So that's a quick look at our new digs in Boston's Back Bay. Sorry there's only one instance of an actual WordStream employee in the pictures. Each time I tried to take a candid shot of someone from WordStream, they threatened me with violence or they ran and hid in their cubes. Search marketers aren't exactly renowned for being an extroverted, photogenic bunch. Anyway, we're pretty proud of how far we've come in less than a year, and wanted to share our progress with everyone.

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites

Ken Lyons — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:58:29 +0000

Continuing with the Top SEO Websites Series, I decided to turn the spotlight on Web design companies to find out which ones are excelling at SEO. Sure, these Web design firms may be able to create really slick websites, but how good are they are ranking organically in highly-competitive verticals in their industry? My previous post in this series "Top SEO College Websites" made the case that most universities get an "F" when it comes to SEO. Here's hoping the top Web design firms in the country fare better in the search engine results pages (SERPs) than most colleges did.

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites: My Process

My process for determining which sites are doing the best at SEO involves three steps:

1) Identify Top 20 Searched Keywords - I used the Google Keyword Tool and our Free Keyword Tool to get search volume estimates. I ommited certain results, like "web design jobs" and "web design software" and "web design hosting" because they're not relevant to this study. I also left off "affordable web design" because I felt that excludes sites that don't offer or promote "affordable" services. Basically, I'm trying to keep the playing field even with only core keywords. Think of it as SERP communism.

Here's the list I compiled of the 20 most searched Web design-related keywords:

2) Run Individual Queries for Top 20 Keywords - Once I determine the 20 most searched keywords, I ran those queries in Google and saved the top 100 results in a CSV file. If you'd like to do this yourself, you'll need to install the SEO for Firefox plugin. Then run your query, hit the "100" button and click "CSV."

3) Determine Domain Frequency - Finally, it's impossible to evaluate every Web design company on the Internet by doing a deep dive on each individual website and comparing and contrasting important on-page and off-page SEO factors. So a way to measure effective SEO is ranking frequency, ie how often a site displays in the SERPs for the top industry queries. The premise being that the more frequently your site displays for popular keywords, the better a job you're doing at SEO. To determine domain frequency for Top 10, Top 20 and Top 100 SERPs, I use the Ontolo Hosthame Occurance Counter.

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites: The Definitive Rankings

The goal of this post is to first identify the top competitive terms and keywords that a Web design company should be targeting in the search engines, and through query analysis, identify those Web design companies that are excelling at SEO in the SERPs. So without further ado, here are the Best SEO Web Design Company Websites.

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites: The Big Winners

So who are the winners when it comes to ranking well for the top Web design keywords? Well, any site in the Top 10 results clearly is doing a great job at SEO. But the big winners would have to be three sites that showed up consistenly on each of the Top 10, Top 20 and Top 100 lists, which were:

Hoover Web Design appears to be killing it in the SERPs, with five organic listings in the top ten, and eight in the top 20 for some pretty competitive keywords. Without doing a deep dive into their site, it's hard to say why exactly they're dominating the Web design query space. But I'd presume much of their ranking prowess can be attributed to 98K inbound links, of which 154 are from .edu and .govs.

Plus, the fact that they have a mature domain and aged content (registered in 2000) and Google has awarded them site links in the SERPs demonstrates that they're an authoritative website, which only contributes to their power ranking ability.

Interesting Side Notes from the Study

Aside from discovering who's ranking the best for top SEO keywords, these query analysis studies reveal some interesting side notes. Also ranking well in these organic "Web design" verticals are companies that aren't Web design firms.

Network Solutions - Known for Web hosting and Whois lookups, Network Solutions have four instances in the original Top 10 based on their "Web Solutions" packages for designers.
Adobe - The software maker has three ranking instances in the Top 10 because they offer designers Web design software like Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop.
Useit.com - Usability expert Jakob Nielsen also has three listings in the Top 10, which sort of makes sense since Nielsen writes about design-related issues with respect to improving usability.

Clearly companies like Network Solutions and Adobe see the value in SEO keyword rankings for Web design-related queries to drive traffic to their product pages. And frankly, they do a better job than then the vast majority of national design firms at SEO, which may be due to their site trust. These are olddomains with tons of links, authority and brand strength, so I'm not surprised.

What Can Other Web Design Firms Take Away from This?

So what does this mean if you've got a Web design firm site that isn't ranking well or you've got a new site and you're trying to compete with these Web design companies that are killing it at SEO?

Follow the leaders - Pay attention to the top Web design companies on this list, find out what they're doing for SEO and emulate their efforts. Clearly, these companies are succeeding at SEO and it would be in your company's best interest to sit up and take notes.
Make your flash SEO-friendly - While researching for this post, I saw so many Web design firms destroying their SEO potential with Flash. It doesn't have to be this way. You can optimize Flash for SEO by embedding within a Flash file and layering your Flash files over an HTML content structure. Read more about it here: 2009 Google Flash SEO.
If you can't beat 'em. join 'em - Much of the Top 10 results are littered with Web design directories, like webdesigners-directory.com, freelancedesigners.com and webdesignfinders.net. If your design firm site is unable to outrank these directories, the next best thing would be to get your site listed in their directory, so at least you have some SERP presence in the Top 10.

Pimp Your PPC Ad: 5 Lessons from Lackluster Text Ads

Elisa Gabbert — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:01:48 +0000

Remember MTV's Pimp Your Ride? Well today I'm going to pimp your PPC ad. Roll in with your Chevy Cavalier and I'll send you home with a Cadillac. Of pay-per-click ads.

OK, these advertisers didn't ask me to revamp their ads, but I'm doing it anyway (for free!) and I think we'll all learn some valuable PPC ad writing lessons in the process.

Lesson #1: You have limited space. Don't waste it.

Below are the first-page sponsored links for a search on "web design firms."

This ad is redundant. The URL tells us the name of your company, so use the headline to say something more—tell us a little about what you offer and what sets you apart. (And one or the other could include the keyword to increase relevancy.) Notice how the competing ads have included useful information about price and location.

Lesson #2: Don't be generic.

Here are some ads that display for the keyword "heart monitor."

I think the second ad is pretty good—it doesn't beat around the bush, just tells you exactly what kinds of heart monitors the company offers and how much they cost. The easiest way to make it stronger would be to use a display URL that includes the keyword. The destination URL actually does include the keyword, but the ad implies that clicking will take you to the site's home page.

The real mess is the Amazon ad. I guess Big Daddy Amazon can get away with this because people will click based on name recognition and trust alone. But you PPC advertisers out there who are less than Amazonian should really avoid being so blatantly generic. Clearly they're using dynamic keyword insertion since the first line doesn't even make grammatical sense. They might have at least extended DKI to the URL. Thumbs down.

Lesson #3: If your ad is relevant to the keyword, prove it!

Once again, I present multiple ads (sponsored links for "Boston restaurants") for context and contrast. To me, the Ruth's Chris ad sticks out as a winner. I think bold assertions ("The greatest steak you've ever had") are more effective than generic marketing mumbo-jumbo like "Try our steaks today!"—especially if you're targeting a high-end customer—and I like the specificity of the call to action.

The loser for me is the Hyatt ad. I can't even tell why they'd be bidding on this keyword. AFAIK Hyatt is a hotel chain, and if they have restaurants, the ad doesn't tell me that. It just tells me this is the "official site" of the Hyatt Regency Cambridge (thank God it's not one of those silly Hyatt Regency fan sites!) and that I can "book online"—"book" is the language of the hotel, not the restaurant. I just don't see why anyone would click on this ad after performing this search. Hyatt must really be paying out the nose for a first-page listing.

Lesson #4: Consider the customer's intent.

Now a search for "personalized water bottles":

This is a mid-tail, if not long-tail, keyword that definitely reveals some purchasing intent—anyone searching on this phrase is probably looking to buy promotional products for a business or event. As such their primary concerns are probably cost and quality of service—not the way the water tastes.

There's also a significant difference between "water bottles" and "bottled water." Both can be personalized, but the phrasing does matter, so this might be a good case for using phrase match vs. broad match. Someone looking for "water bottles" is probably in the market for refillable drinking bottles, making the "tastes great" claim even more irrelevant.

P.S. "Personalized water" does not make sense. Maybe "Make sense" should have been one of my lessons.

Lesson #5: Don't repeat yourself. Did I already say that?

I think so, but it bears repeating. (God I'm hilarious.) Consider these results for the keyword "men's skinny jeans." (BTW, if you're a man considering taking the plunge into skinny jeans, I recommend this tale of woe.)

This last ad could not be more dullsville. Men's skinny jeans. Men's skinny jeans. Men's skinny jeans! I'm all for including the exact keyword to increase relevance, but this bludgeoning approach is essentially keyword stuffing and does nothing to distinguish itself. You also need to make your ad compelling (to humans, not just algorithms).

The top two ads are so much more appealing—the first offers a promotion code, which will certainly grab a lot of shoppers' attention, and the second makes an attempt at humor with the "getting pantsed" reference. Being clever won't necessarily work with every audience, but it just might get you somewhere with the hipster skinny-jeans-wearing crowd.

I hope we've all learned something today, or at least got a kick out of pointing and laughing at some bad PPC ad writing. Until next time!

Meet John Lee, the Newest Member of WordStream

Ken Lyons — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:19:31 +0000

We’re excited to announce that PPC specialist John Lee has joined WordStream to help manage our internal PPC accounts. Many in the industry may know John from his frequent article contributions to PPC Hero. John brings a wealth of pay-per-click knowledge to WordStream and will also be a regular contributor to our blog. We wanted to take this opportunity to welcome John to WordStream and get to know more about him with an introductory post. Welcome aboard, John!

Can you tell us a bit about your background? I read that your original career objective was to become a choir director. How did you make the switch to get involved with search marketing?

You read that correctly! I love music both as a listener and as a performer, and there was a time I thought I could teach music to others, too. More to the point, how did I go from teaching to SEM? At the core of my story is this fact: I took what started as a semi-unhealthy addiction to the internet and landed a job where I could leverage that addiction to earn a living. Seriously though, I had the good fortune of working for a self-publishing company where I had hands-on training in press release distribution, domain registrations and a wide variety of marketing practices online and off. After the birth of my daughter, I began half-heartedly seeking a new, higher-paying job. When I read the ad for Hanapin Marketing, I instantly knew I was on to something. While I had no direct experience with PPC or SEO, I already knew what they were and that I was the man for the job. The rest, as they say, is history.

What is it about PPC marketing, specifically, that appeals to you?

Testing and tracking – in that order. Yes, other internet marketing disciplines have testing opportunities and can be tracked. But PPC is the perfect tool for testing keyword effectiveness, ad copy and messaging, landing page design and conversion optimization. Add in the fact that I’m a stats junkie, and it’s a match made in heaven. Some of my favorite experiences as a PPC account manager have been developing and proving out the success of simple changes in an ad text or landing page.

You’ve done a fair amount of PPC, blogging, and SEO. What’s your favorite search-related discipline?

Is this a trick question? I like ‘em all! For the most part, PPC would have to be my favorite. I’m most at home with PPC and I get a certain sense of security within the rule-based environment that pay-per-click advertising provides. Now that being said, there are elements of SEO, blogging and social media marketing that I really enjoy. The one piece that ties all of these disciplines together for me is the creative aspect of it all. This is a 2 fold adjective. On one hand, I’m in love with writing (though I have been caught complaining once or twice!). Blogging, PPC ad texts, landing page copy, SEO/website copy – you name it, I’ll write it. And then there is also the fact that Internet marketing as a whole requires a creative mind.

Do you think there’s a certain personality type that thrives as a PPC marketer? How does that differ for SEO or blogging?

The best PPC marketers are those individuals who can at one minute be whole-heartedly immersed in statistics and analysis, but can quickly shift gears and write top-notch ad or landing page copy. In other words, you need to have relative balance between your left and right brain sensibilities. If you hate numbers and data analysis – run the other way! If you hate writing – run the other way! You get the idea…

When you take over an existing PPC account, what are some of the most common mistakes you see people making with their accounts (WordStream being the exception, of course)?

I’ll just start rattling off a few – inattention to Quality Score friendly campaign structure, no ad testing (lazy or didn’t know any better?) and inattention to ad distribution settings. It can’t be said enough how important campaign structure, i.e. keyword organization, are to PPC success. I’m still amazed at how many advertisers don’t yet understand this concept. Ad testing is so easy there is no excuse for running only one ad text per ad group. When I refer to ad distribution settings, I’m primarily concerned about how AdWords or adCenter (in this example) are “maximizing” your budget. If you’re a small-time advertiser, maybe you can get by letting Google spread your $5 budget over a 24 hour period. Bigger advertisers should not be leaving their fate to chance.

What can people do to correct these common mistakes?

Easiest question of the day! First, review your campaign structure and break your ad groups down into tightly themed groups. Benefits? Increased CTR, increased Quality Score and ultimately more conversions. Second, take a few minutes and write a new ad in each of your ad groups. The PPC systems are designed for A/B split testing of ads – use it! And finally, take a look at your campaign settings in AdWords and adCenter. Google should be set to “Delivery Method: Accelerated” and “Budget Settings, Spend Settings: Spend budget until depleted” in adCenter. Manage your budgets and bids more accurately and take back control of your account!

Seth Godin Is Wrong (Except When He's Right)

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:53:14 +0000

Disagreeing with Seth Godin is basically a cliché now, but I'm going to do it anyway—or quibble with him, at least. I like this chart on Seth's blog (who doesn't like charts?) that plots some broad cultural phenomena against two axes, the sophisticated/tacky axis and the techie/tech-phobic axis. The challenge, he says,

is in designing structures and transparency that will attract the good guys while burying or repelling those that seek the new technology (because they can't find anywhere else to go). In other words, you either need to move the top left to the top right (not easy, but possible*), or educate the bottom left of the grid in how to contribute to the culture (really difficult indeed). The best new media (like blogs and possibly twitter) open doors to people who didn't used to have a voice. The worst ones (like blogs and possibly twitter) merely create new venues for scams and senseless yelling.

He points out that Gourmet being shut down is "what happens when the top left refuses to move right." Well, sort of. Quibble #1: Conde Nast moved right when it made all the recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appetit available online through the very popular interactive site Epicurious.com, launched in 1995. The problem, it would seem, is not that the publisher rejected technology but embraced it so fully, it pushed the print channel of Gourmet (and, quite possibly, the need for brand separation between Gourmet and Bon Appetit) into obsolescence.

I think Seth is right that the cultural capital of "sophistication" isn't enough for long-term, widespread success if you don't embrace change and technological advances. Only die-hard devotees and practicing artists themselves pay attention to the most high-culture arts like orchestral music, ballet and poetry.

Which brings me to my next quibble: Seth lists "novelists […] musicians […] chefs, artists, fashion designers, movie stars [???]" as exemplars of the top left quadrant (sophisticated but non-techie) but notably leaves out poets. As a poet, I may be biased, but since when are movie stars considered high-brow?

Which brings me to my next quibble: In the right quadrant (both sophisticated and techie) he gives us the Huffington Post. Who's in the what now? Do people really consider the HuffPo sophisticated??

Here is a sampling of current headlines from the Huffington Post (all from the "Most Popular" section, no less):

Jessica Simpson Dons See-Through Jumpsuit, Muumuu (PHOTOS)
ESPN's 'Body Issue' Of Naked Athletes: Serena Williams, Dwight Howard, Adrian Peterson, More Pose Nude (PHOTOS)
Guy Ritchie: Madonna Is Retarded
5 Ways to Age Naturally

Here's the first paragraph of that last story:

Although 50% of the population in the United States will be over 65 by the year 2025, aging does not have to mean lower productivity and quality of life. In order to stay healthier longer, many people are seeking out the time-tested wisdom of Chinese Longevity Medicine. AGING MAY BE INEVITABLE, BUT POOR HEALTH IS NOT!

I take it back. The HuffPo is totally sophisticated. If tabloids had better websites, they'd be "leading the culture" too.

I modified Seth's chart so the examples are a bit more to my liking. He may be the idea man, but I know what's classy.

This Week's Search Marketing Gems

SMX East 2009 was this week, so there was plenty of live blogging from the usual live-blogging suspects. I don't always enjoy reading this kind of post (it's kind of like looking at pictures of a party you didn't attend, no?) but I did find a few of them quite interesting and helpful, including:

Ask the Linkbuilders: Virginia Nussey covers this roundtable discussion with Rae Hoffman, Debra Mastaler, and Eric Ward, who tackle the tough questions about paid links, nofollow and link-sculpting, directory links and more.
Twitter Marketing Tactics: Lisa Barone blogs a session on marketing through Twitter, featuring Michael Gray, Chris Winfield, and Tamar Weinberg. They talk about Twitter spam, hashtags, real-time search, customer service, Twitter tools, how to get more followers, how to get retweets, and how to automate without going overboard (i.e. how to do the robot without being a robot). Great tips!

And a couple of stand-out, non-SMX-related resources for you:

How Keywords Help Determine Site Architecture: This article from Search Engine Watch explains how to apply your keyword research to your information architecture for a natural, user-friendly organization. We are big proponents of this tactic.
SEO Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of a URL: Who doesn't like charts? Oh wait, I already said that. SEOmoz consistently delivers useful and attractive graphics, and this breakdown of both SEO-friendly and old-school dynamic URLs is no exception.

It's #FollowFriday Time

@matthewdiehl Search Engine Marketing Professional (SEO & PPC). Social Media Marketing Adventurer. UAlbany and Bentley University Alum. Avid Golfer.
@TheWriteWoman Freelance writer, editor, and all-round good gal with an MFA in Creative Writing. Working on my first novel--and a bunch of other writing projects, too.
@daynev Marketer. Blogger. Writer. Shares well with others. Online anything, Web 2.0 (whatever that is), SEO, gadgets.
@AnkitaSahni Paid Search Marketing Specialist at Purple Trout
@jamilbroom Internet Marketing Strategist in Pittsburgh, PA. Tweeting all things personal, professional, and somewhere in between. I'm interesting as all heck.
@mccordweb SEM Marketing, Professional Blogger, Web Design, Web Diva, Taco Lover
@kim_cre8pc Usability Consultant, SEO, Accessibility, Cre8asiteforums founder, Owner UsabilityEffect., Cre8pc.com, Akesana.com
@Eloi_Casali Bilingual PPC Specialist Consultant, Internet Marketer, SEM Blogger, Quality Score Chaser, ROI Hunter, Poker Player (ROI 12)

Follow Us on Twitter

@WordStream Best Keyword Management Platform ever!
@WordStream_PPC WordStream is a dynamic PPC productivity tool that helps search marketers research, organize and act on PPC keyword data.
@LarryKim Avid search marketer, newlywed
@TomDemers New father, PPC wiz, has a great laugh
@SMRichardson Trivia, SEM, Red Sox, animals, travel and music
@Boston_SEO SEO genius, former rockstar, 2 adorable daughters
@EGabbert Writer, poet, editor, SEO, SEM, foodist, aesthete/rationalist
@John_A_Lee Consult on PPC, SEO, Social Media & Blogging. Paid Search Manager with WordStream. Teller of bad jokes, music junkie and aspiring chef.
@Quality_Score PPC pundit (identity unknown), mysterious dispenser of sage Quality Score advice

Have a Tip for WordStream's Follow Friday?

Send an email to egabbert@wordstream.com.

20 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Resources - Learn how to Convert More of Your Traffic

Tom Demers — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:39:41 +0000

Not unlike a lot of marketers who enter the discipline through the SEO door, my initial fascination with search marketing was the idea that you could promote and optimize a piece of content and generate large volumes of really specific search traffic.

And, also not unlike a lot of marketers, I quickly realized that traffic is only a directionally significant metric: people visiting your site is financially meaningless if you can’t turn their visit into a business-driving activity once they get there (even if you're monetizing based on CPM, you still want visitors to go deeper into your site, create a relationship and return, etc.).

The following is a collection of resources surrounding conversion rate optimization. There’s a lot of great content out there on the subject, but there’s also a lot of sub-standard information as well, so this aims to be a good jumping off point for anyone looking to come up to speed on tweaking and tuning web content for conversions.

Getting the Lay of the Land: Four Books You Should Read First

When I dive into a subject, I like to start with a handful of nice end-to-end resources. I love blogs, but the problem is that reading a blog is often like flipping to a page in a book at random. The author might be assuming you know things about the subject that you don’t, or you might run into a lot of redundant content rehashed on multiple blogs that are all writing about a similar topic or process for the first time (the first time on their blog, anyway).

Meaty blog articles or series can be a nice way to learn something, but typically I find I get the best feel for a subject by taking a look at a comprehensive, authoritative resource like a book or eBook. Here are four great ones on the subject of conversion rate optimization:

1. Web Design For ROI

I’d recommend everyone start here. This is an excellent look at how you can incorporate a conversion-centric mindset into every design element. Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus created a very digestible, visual, easy-to-understand resource with a lot of actionable advice. A new-age, conversion focused Don’t Make Me Think.

2. Always Be Testing

Before you run off and implement all of those great design ideas offered by Web Design for ROI, you’ll want to have a really strong testing infrastructure in place to make sure you’re reacting to actual data rather than hunches and best-guesses. This is a great manual on setting up tests, executing them, and making sense of the data. The book focuses on Google Website Optimizer (an excellent free resource in and of itself) but the tips and best practices are universally applicable.

3. Honest Seduction

Ion Interactive offers a lot of excellent educational materials surrounding “post-click marketing”. The premise is basically that generating conversions is more complex than landing visitors on a page. The book will get you to start thinking about the conversion process as a customizable funnel: the number and contents of pages you show a visitor should vary based on who they are, where they came from, and what you’re trying to do.

4. Landing Page Optimization

This is a very thorough look at all things landing pages. One of the strengths of the book is that it goes into great detail on the subject of predicting and measuring the impact of conversion rate optimization. Setting and accomplishing specific ROI targets is obviously a crucial piece of optimizing for conversions.

Moving Beyond the Basics: Webinars, Articles, & Pod Casts

Beyond full-length books, I find cornerstone articles and webinars to be a great way to absorb information from multiple authoritative sources in a more easily digestible fashion. Here are some great examples as it relates to conversion rate optimization:

5. 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design - Tim Ash, author of the afore mentioned Landing Page Optimization book, hosts this webinar on common landing page pitfalls. It’s a nice overview with a lot of valuable information and suggestions.
6. Ion Interactive Webinars - Scott Brinker and co. produce a lot of great webinars on the subject of conversion rate optimization. These are great because tweaking web design and even web copy is such a visual task that webinars are often excellent vehicles for conveying information about landing page best practices.
7. PPC Hero Podcasts - Towards the same end, taking a look at real-life examples of businesses trying to generate more leads and sales is a powerful way to learn how best to convert visitors. The PPC Hero team offers a series of great podcasts where they review the landing page of a blog reader in real time, so you get to listen to a room full of PPC practitioners dissect the pros and cons of a given landing page.
8. 101 Google Website Optimizer Tips - This is a nice list of different elements you can look at to help boost conversions.
9. 14 Free Tools that Reveal Why People Abandon Your Site - A very useful list of free tools that will help you to better understand how people are interacting with your site.

And Finally: Keep Up to Date By Subscribing to Some Great Blogs

Once you have a firm foundation in various aspects of optimizing for conversion, you can turn to a number of really strong blogs to get specific tips and to stay on top of evolving trends and new data points.

Here are some great blogs and frequently updated resources:

10. Ion Interactive Blog – Again the team at Ion offers a lot of great advice
11. The Future Now Blog – The team at Future Now (two of whom authored Always Be Testing) provides a ton of great data and a lot of tips around copywriting and “persuasion architecture”.
12. Bryan Eisenberg.Com – Co-founder of Future Now, Bryan is one of the most well-respected conversion experts around, and his recently launched blog is certain to have some valuable information about turning browsers into buyers.
13. Marketing Experiments– Marketing experiments has a lot of great course material and a series of free studies, webinars, and reports surrounding conversion.
14. Closed Loop Marketing Blog – The blog of the agency responsible for Web Design for ROI – the postings are infrequent but they’re always quality.
15. Web Design for ROI Resources – Excellent collection of resources having to do with usability, conversion optimization, and even data visualization! Probably the second-best resource page on the subject out there J.
16. Jacob Nielson’s Blog – Probably the most well respected and often referenced author on the subject of usability, Jacob Nielson publishes a lot of content that is the product of extensive and expert usability testing.
17. Marketing Sherpa Landing Page Resources– Nice collection of studies and tests surrounding landing page optimization.
18. The Invesp Blog – Khaled Saleh and his team create a lot of excellent landing page content. Also check out their free landing page templates.
19. The SEO Book SEO Community Forum – Another great way to become expert about a topic is interactive forums. While the SEO Book community doesn’t focus solely on conversion optimization, there are a number of people in the community with tremendous experience in the topic – having live access to industry thought leaders to bounce ideas off of and even to get feedback from regarding specific landing pages and design implementations is invaluable. SEO Book is a paid, subscription based service and is currently closed off to new membership, but you can get on the list for when they reopen to new members you can register for a free account here.

20. The Best Way to Learn What Works?

Test, Test, Test! Of course every site, company, and offering is different. The best resource in attempting to optimize conversions on your site is the knowledge you’ll gain from actually testing and documenting what works. Perusing the above resources before you start and as you proceed, however, can help you save some money while you figure out what truly works best for you and your site.

Drupal vs Wordpress: The CMS Showdown

Ken Lyons — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:19:14 +0000

Drupal and Wordpress are two of the most popular, open source content management systems (CMS). Many websites and blogs run either Wordpress of Drupal chiefly because they are flexible platforms with large user support communities, and they're free. I use both Drupal and Wordpress in my day-to-day activities: WordStream runs on Drupal, while my personal websites and blogs run on Wordpress. So I have a pretty good handle on the advantages and disadvantages of both CMS platforms.

In this post, I'm going to offer my opinions on Drupal VS Wordpress with respect to:

Ease of use
Custom templates and free themes
SEO plugins or modules
CMS performance

So let's dive into the Drupal vs Wordpress debate and see which CMS emerges victorious.

Ease of Use

Out of the box, Wordpress has a cleaner, simpler user interface (UI) than Drupal. The Wordpress interface offers users fewer page formatting tools than Drupal, so it makes it pretty easy for the average Joe or Jane to dive right into blogging with little to no previous experience.

Drupal User Interface

Wordpress User Interface

Even though you're given fewer formatting presets in Wordpress, you're certainly not limited to those options. You can still expand the Wordpress UI to the "kitchen sink," which features another row of formatting tools. But for the budding blogger, this extra row of tools is hidden so newbies aren't overwhelmed initially. Now, I'm not saying that the Drupal user interface is complex by any means. It's just that, relatively speaking, Drupal is not as user-friendly as Wordpress.

Note: One of my favorite Wordpress "kitchen sink" tools is the very basic "Paste as Plain Text," which lets me copy content from a Word doc and strip out the Word formatting to paste cleanly into Wordpress.

Also, with respect to installation and modification, Wordpress is easier to set up and get running than Drupal and it's easier to modify code on the backend, if you're so inclined. If you don't have background in PHP and/or programming, getting your Drupal system up and running effectively can be a slow slog. And the vast modular system can be complex for some.

Verdict: Wordpress offers better ease of use, with a more user-friendly UI. Also, it's easier to install, especially for the novice.

Custom Templates and Free Themes

Both Drupal and Wordpress are supported by a ton of fantastic free themes and templates, from basic one-column skins to the more advanced, "newsy" themes with multiple dashboards for various content feeds. But which CMS offers the most choices for free themes and templates? Well, my gut told me that Wordpress had more overall theme support on the Web, but I wanted to run a quick test to see if my instincts were correct. So as is often the case, I turned to search for answers.

Here are the results from some quick and dirty Google searches for theme and template queries:

Template Search Results

"Wordpress templates": 275 million results
"Drupal templates": 1 million results

Free Theme Search Results

"Free Wordpress themes": 44 million results
"Free Drupal themes": 550K results

Verdict: Worpress is the winner here when it comes to the breadth, depth and popularity of free skins available for your site. Moral of the story, if you’re short on cash and looking for a free theme for your blog or website, you should have more options and better luck finding a CMS template that fits your style using Wordpress.

SEO Plugins or Modules

Both Drupal and Wordpress offer a product that's very SEO-friendly right off-the-shelf. However, if you really want to enhance your SEO efforts, from writing "pretty" URLs to creating alternative page titles and title tags, you'll need to install some dedicated plugins to soup-up your CMS.

So which community offers more SEO plugins or modules (Drupal calls them modules) for CMS users, Drupal or Wordpress? Once again, I went to the engines to run some queries and find a favorite.

SEO Plugin and Module Search Results

Drupal SEO modules: 344K
Wordpress SEO plugins: 7 million

BTW, if you're looking for some extensive lists of SEO plugins for Wordpress and SEO modules for Drupal, here are two great resources:

Note: The Mashable list is awesome, but the writer did leave out one critical SEO plugin for Wordpress: Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. Point being, SEO without data analysis is basically useless.

Verdict: While search results aren't a definitive gauge of the quality of plugins, Wordpress bests Drupal for the sheer number of community supported SEO plugin/module options.

CMS Performance

Now, I'm no developer, so I won't embarrass myself and try to expound on backend PHP programming and SQL requests for Wordpress vs Drupal. But I can speak to the overarching capabilities of each CMS. Drupal is a far more robust CMS and better for running large sites that need more thrust and capacity to run dynamic forms, ecommerce shopping carts, and bolt on community functions like forums, chat, etc. Wordpress, however, is better suited for smaller sites or the casual blogger whose site doesn't require a lot of horsepower and complex functionality.

For example, I host some of my modest affiliate sites and blogs on Wordpress while WordStream’s 1000+ pages of content, forms, info gathering tools and platform extensions needs to run on a powerful CMS like Drupal.

If you're looking for more in-depth analysis of Drupal vs Wordpress for CMS performance, check out these articles:

Verdict: If you require a CMS powerhouse for your website and have a developer at your disposal or some inherent programming aptitude, then Drupal is the clear and only choice here. Wordpress simply can not handle full-featured sites effectively like Drupal can. However, if you’re a low-tech, one-man show with a smallish site or blog, go with Wordpress for greater simplicity.

WordStream Believes: Search Marketing Success Depends on Actionable Analytics

Elisa Gabbert — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:32:33 +0000

This is Part 6 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

Part of the power of web marketing is the abundance of data it creates. Web analytics put you in the control room—with so much to measure and analyze, you can take control of optimizing your paid and organic search marketing campaigns.

However, analytics are only valuable insofar as you put them to work. Unless you take action on that data, data is all it is. In order to actually benefit from analytic data—to see the right numbers go up (traffic, clicks, conversions) and the right numbers go down (bounce rate, cost per action)—you have to act on it.

That's why, at WordStream, we believe that analytics should be actionable. Most analytics applications create bottlenecks between analysis and action. You have to leave the dashboard to access your search marketing workbench, an impediment to workflow.

There's immense value in an analytics application that enables you to act directly on the insights it provides. It means you can take immediate action to change your data for the better, scratching tasks off your list such as:

Grouping related keywords into segments for more targeted, strategic web content and text ads
Organizing keywords and creating smart relationships between data sets
Writing compelling ad copy around traffic- and conversion-driving keywords
Setting rules to filter out negative keywords

Actionable web and keyword analytics improve your productivity and help you make informed, data-driven decisions for pay-per-click and natural search engine optimization efforts.

Interview with the Experts: Lisa Barone, Outspoken as Ever

Elisa Gabbert — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:58:53 +0000

Lisa Barone is a co-founder and Chief Branding Officer of Outpoken Media. Read her blog or follow her on Twitter.

You're kind of famous on Twitter. When I first started working at WordStream, I signed up for Twitter and you were one of the first people I followed, because my coworker referred to you as her "girl crush." :) How long have you been on Twitter and what do you say to detractors and people who just "don't get it"? How can businesses use Twitter to their advantage?

No one is famous on Twitter. Let’s just get that out of the way. :) As far as how long I’ve been a member, the experts say I joined Oct 18, 2007. That sounds about right.

I do think Twitter is something you either “get” or you don’t. And if you don’t get it, it’s because you have forgotten how to talk to people. And if that’s the case … please don’t spend your time tweeting about how stupid Twitter is. That just makes me want to kick you. I think Twitter is awesome for business, especially if you’re a small business owner. It’s such a great way to find the people having conversations about you and to talk to them. Whether the conversation is positive, negative or they’re just namedropping, it’s a point of contact that you didn’t have before. It’s a great CRM tool. It’s probably the most powerful outlet a small business owner has right now.

I've seen you tweet that your family doesn't understand your job. (I sympathize—when people ask what I do, I'm like, "Well, uhh, you know Google?...") Let's set the record straight once and for all. What does Outspoken Media do and what does your role as Chief Branding Officer entail?

My mother thinks I’m unemployed, my father thinks I’m a secretary at Google and my little brother tells them both I’m a pirate. So, yeah, there is some confusion which makes family gatherings fun.

Outspoken Media is a full-scale Internet marketing company. We do everything from SEO to affiliate marketing to social media to online reputation management. If it’s about promoting and making money off your site on the Web, we do it and we do it well.

As for myself, on the client side I’m responsible for managing all content creation, helping to create social strategies, building communities on sites, and working with clients to set and establish their voice. For Outspoken, I’m obviously responsible for our own blog, as well as building our company brand and making sure people know we exist and what we’re about. I, essentially, build and manage brands – ours and those of our clients.

As a brand evangelist, do you think the average Joe/Jane should develop a personal branding strategy? If so, how should they go about it?

Yes. Your personal brand is your image on the Web. You need to be responsible about building that out in a way that helps you get where you want to go. I’d start by creating a home base at yourname.com and using that URL to identify you everywhere else you go on the Web. From there, you need to determine what you want your brand to be about and then decide what content you want ranking to help represent that. Once you know, you can create your game plan around that to determine whether it includes building social accounts, creating media, promoting news articles and blog posts, etc.

What are the elements of Lisa Barone's personal brand? Is it everything you want it to be?

Ha, wow. I think my personal brand is that I stand up for things that I feel are important and I don’t mince words. Is it everything I wanted it to be? I don’t know what I ever “wanted” it to be anything. I didn’t realize four years ago when I started blogging about SEO that I was building a brand. I thought I was doing my job. I didn’t realize people were really reading or that it’d be the best job I could ever ask for. I think the “brand” I have online reflects me on most days, though it’s an exaggerated version. I’m opinionated and I have a quick mouth, but I’m not typically shouting at people or talking all the time. I “won” Most Introverted in college and I’m still that girl on most days.

Which companies or brands do you feel are doing an excellent job at building and maintaining their brand? On the flipside, which brands are doing a bad job?

Obviously there are all the standard social media success examples – JetBlue, Comcast, Dell, Zappos – but you don’t need me to recite all those (and I hate when others do). Really, I think small businesses in general are doing an excellent job with social media. I look at someone like the Cardonas Market in Albany, NY and see how they’ve used Twitter with @cardonasmarket to get people excited about them. They’re Follow Friday’ing local people in the area, they’re tweeting when food is right out of the oven and fresh, they’re announcing sales, they’re telling you about the cheese of the week. They don’t have thousands of followers, but they don’t need them either. They’re going after the people in their area who can benefit from what they offer. That kind of stuff gets me excited.

I’m not going to out anyone mucking it up … but there a lot of people mucking it up. Mostly because they’re not listening or because they think they’re above their audience. Without your audience, you’re nothing.

Say I work for one of those companies that's not so hot at brand management. What are some of the steps I can take right away (the low-hanging fruit) to salvage my brand?

Start listening. That’s where everything has to start. Creating your listening station and getting plugged in. You need to hear what people are saying about you, even if it hurts, and then look for ways to change the conversation if you’re not happy with it. Usually that means shutting up first and then reaching out second or third.

You recently got a lot of attention for publicly taking Seth Godin to task for his Brands in Public business model. The response to his announcement on blogs and Twitter seems largely responsible for him changing the model. Is this vindication that social media—and being outspoken!—can really change things?

Yeah, that was crazy, wasn’t it? I can’t lie; reading that Seth had listened to the community feedback and changed his model for Brands in Public … it was emotional. It was one of those moments where you remember that voices do matter. Using your voice to right a wrong is the coolest thing in the world to me. That’s what gets me excited. And it’s exactly what social media is about. It’s about getting involved, tuning in and listening to your customers. And good on Seth for engaging in the outcry and listening to what people were saying. It was a great testament to the power of social media. If Seth Godin can listen to concerns of the community and act, then so can any business. You just lost your excuse.

Writing on emotion can have its hazards. Do you try to weigh the consequences and potential repercussions that a call-out post may have in the future (or on your future) before you write it? Or do you just let it fly and let the chips fall where they may? Have you written anything you regret?

I pick my battles and make an effort to be responsible with my words. You do have to weigh the consequences. If I’m going to call something out, I try to make it about the product or company, not the person behind it. I’ve had a lot of people take some hard personal shots at me, so I do try and keep that in mind when I’m writing. I broke that rule with the Seth Godin post because I really felt he was taking advantage. It was just as much about him as it was the product.

Writing on emotional is difficult. Both in finding the line and also in putting so much of yourself out there. Someone joked with me once that I should receive “combat pay” for the stances I take. I don’t think people realize the toll that letting it all hang out there can take on you. As much of a win as the Seth post was in terms of getting him to change his stance, I took a lot of heat, too. My skin’s a lot tougher than it used to be but I’m still human. I can’t simply turn away from the community and stop feeling when things get hard. My job is the community.

Has there ever been a post I’ve regretted writing? I don’t think so. I think in the beginning I was a bit more careless than I should have been. I just didn’t know any better. But I’ve taken all my slaps and I’ve tried to learn from them and handle myself better next time.

How much do you think about SEO when writing for your blog? Do you do keyword research, optimize your title tags and so on, or do you rely on other ways of finding an audience?

I really don’t, probably much to Rae and Rhea’s dismay. I’m not an SEO. I don’t pretend to be an SEO. I try to use terms and phrases that I know people are searching for but that’s just good usability. There are times where Rae will go into a post a tweak a title tag or something but that’s about as far as we go with it. I probably use Twitter to find an audience far more than I do SEO.

What software/apps/tools do you depend on to do your job (and live your life)?

If you were to ask Rhea, she’d compile you an itemized Excel document that would blow your mind. I’m a pretty simple girl. My life consists of FireFox, Twitter Search and Google Docs. And then iTunes or Pandora to tune out the world. I spend my day writing so I don’t need much more than that.

Are you addicted to social media and if so, do you care?

I’m addicted to being connected and the conversations. I absolutely am. So much of my job is about reaching out and being accessible to people that when I’m not … it’s a completely absurd feeling for me. Unless I’m in flight, my BlackBerry is always on and within reach. Even if I’m out with friends, I like sharing what I’m doing with my Internet world. I think that’s really it – I like to share things. Whether it’s content, an experience, an emotion, a viewpoint, I like connecting with other people. I was probably a real hit in kindergarten.

What effect does the continued growth of Twitter and Facebook, which favor quick updates and social "sharing" over long-form writing and hard linking, have on "traditional" blogs? Is blogging on its way out?

I want to say that I answered the previous question without reading this one so I really did just use “sharing” all on my own. :p

I think Twitter is somewhat killing the links to my blog posts and I don’t really appreciate it. :) Honestly, I don’t think Twitter and Facebook have had the drastic effect on blogging a lot of people like to talk about. And blogs definitely aren’t on their way out. I can’t express myself through Twitter the way I can through a blog post. Twitter is great for quick bursts and points of contact, but it doesn’t have the same power as long-form content. I obviously can’t explain/expose/evaluate something on Twitter like I can in a blog post. I think blogs are going to evolve to be a bit more real-time. Things like RSSCloud will mean that you’re notified as soon as a post goes up. You don’t have that hour or so feed reader delay. That’s what I’m excited about.

What blogs do you read every day? Who should we follow on Twitter?

I get asked the “what blogs do you read” question a lot. I think it’s time to create a post on the topic. Look for it in the next few weeks. :)

Thanks so much Lisa!

Everyone Wants to Ride the Google Wave! P.S. "Everyone" Is Relative

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:32:30 +0000

Google this week began sending out invitations for the beta version of Google Wave. Demand for these invites has been pretty high—Matt Cutts tweeted that he's already out of invites (Really Matt Cutts? Can't you like, snap and someone rollerskates up with more invites on a tray?) and one invite sold on eBay for over $150.

Aside from this crazed desperation for invites reminiscent of the search for golden tickets in Willy Wonka (that's right, I compared you to Augustus Gloop), most of the conversation has revolved around the question of success: Will Google Wave be a game changer?

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal lands squarely on the fence: "Could be yes or could be no. It depends on how good it will [be] and how much users will actually use it in their daily online activities." Certainly, if it's slow or user-unfriendly, that will be an impediment to adoption. But even if it works as advertised, do people really want/need this functionality? Or is it kind of like email feature creep?

Ben Parr at Mashable outlines some doubts and questions about Google Wave—it doesn't work well in Internet Explorer and the interface is rather complex, for starters—but his feeling is that the product will probably succeed in the end. He lists four reasons, not all of which I find particularly compelling:

"It's Google. The company has a very good track record, even in established markets. Just look at Gmail." Well, yes … but look at all the products Google has launched that didn't take off … not every Google brainstorm turns out to be a Gmail.
"The anticipation is unmatched." Hmmm. Unmatched? I don't think Google Wave is nearly as anticipated as the iPhone, especially among "regular people" as opposed to tech geeks.
"Its features really are revolutionary." This may in fact be true. I know a developer who did some early testing and we tried it out for chat; we actually found some of the features distracting, if not annoying, if not creepy (e.g., being able to see what your interlocutor is typing in real time; so much for having second thoughts). My guess is, you need to throw a crowd into the mix before the majority of the features become useful or awesome.
"It’s open-source." This one I definitely find compelling. Firefox is the obvious precedent for an open source product that's gone mainstream (and is evidently better than its closed-source rival).

I'm not exactly a luddite, but I remain skeptical about widespread adoption at this point. Email is an outdated technology, no doubt—Generation Z, or whatever letter they're on, find it slow and useless, preferring texting and Facebook.

I assume that the Wave is meant to attract attention back to email by making it less like email and more like chat and social networking. But don't people need to be dissatisfied with their current solutions before they'll turn to something new (especially if it's more complicated)? I'm referring to regular people again, not early adopters—the tipping point where grandmas are signing up seems very far off.

For me, the burden of the learning curve sort of outweighs the novelty value … I still get that sinking feeling when I get a new phone, having to learn how to do everything all over again. OK, so maybe I am kind of a luddite. Or kind of a grandma. Someone send me an invite and change my mind!

Fitcorp: Reputation Management Win!

As a followup to last week's post on rep management nightmares, this week I offer a true story from the files of successful reputation management.

Wednesday I tweeted a complaint about my gym, Fitcorp. Long story short(ish), I signed a year-long contract in April, and subsequently found out our office is moving (we're packing everything up by EOD), so I'm trying to switch my membership to a location closer to the new office space. For some silly reason they said I can't start using the new location until November, because my credit card had already been charged for October at the other location. Um, what? Aren't you all one company? Can't you just transfer the funds? What?

Yesterday morning, I got an email from the president of Fitcorp himself; he said he'd seen my tweet, that "delivering great customer service is [their] ultimate goal," and he offered to resolve any issues I'm having. I wrote back and explained the problem, and the manager at the new location wrote back to say I can start using that facility immediately. Yay! Great example of a company monitoring brand mentions and reaching out where necessary to smooth over customer wrinkles.

Not-So-Terrible SEO Advice

Among the worthwhile SEO posts I read this week:

Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines: In this post Rand argues that most of the work involved in SEO is for search engines, not users. If you ignore all that work (XML sitemaps, URL canonicalization, accessible link structures, etc.) you will certainly pay the price in your rankings. I think this is very good advice (note: the opposite of terrible), as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking this is a binary, mutually exclusive choice. Optimizing your site means making information accessible to users and search engines.
Think Search Before You Name Your Next Product: Great advice from Marty Weintraub on what to check before you settle on a product (or company) brand name, from basic keyword research to avoiding ambiguity to checking out the competition in YouTube. (I've noticed design firms are especially prone to choosing ambiguous, single-word brands that are virtually unsearchable on their own, like "Hype" or "Millennium." They are also addicted to Flash. Ugh.)
SEO: Where Is It Going? More analysis than advice, but very interesting stuff: SEOBook's Peter Da Vanzo takes a long view on search, touching on the "unraveling" of the page as a unit, Google vs. content producers, disintermediation and more.

It's #FollowFriday Time

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WordStream Believes: Negative Keywords Are Vital for High Search Marketing ROI

Elisa Gabbert — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:48:11 +0000

This is Part 5 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

Ongoing negative keyword discovery is an important part of optimizing your keyword research, keeping it "clean" and high-quality.

From a pay-per-click perspective, negative keywords are terms that might match your ad but which you don't want to bid on. For example, if you're running a PPC campaign for a stationery store, you might have an ad group for the keyword "notebooks." If you're using the broad match option to catch long-tail variations like "bulk reporter's notebooks" and "back to school sale notebook paper," you run the risk of matching for unrelated search queries like "notebook computers."

To ensure that your ad doesn't display for such irrelevant searches, you need to designate "computer" as a negative keyword (in addition to "laptop," "PC" and other computer-related terms). Otherwise, you could blow your budget on useless impressions that will drag down your click-through rate (CTR)—and won't convert. This has a detrimental effect on your Quality Score and return on investment for your whole campaign.

We believe that monitoring the search queries that trigger your PPC ads and regularly scrubbing your keyword lists of those irrelevant keywords is crucial for maximizing ROI on online advertising spend.

Negative keyword discovery and expansion is also beneficial for SEO. While you're cleansing your ad groups of unwanted keywords, you might as well eliminate them from your SEO research as well. This will ensure you're only targeting relevant keywords that will drive qualified traffic from both organic and paid search.

Monthly Blog Roundup: WordStream's September Highlights

Elisa Gabbert — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:57:28 +0000

Believe it or not, September is over. The aisles of your local CVS are probably already clogged with Halloween candy and plastic pumpkins, if not Xmas decorations. Damn you, time's winged chariot!

Point being, it's time for a monthly roundup of highlights from the WordStream blog. In case you missed them the first time:

Top SEO College Websites 2009 – In this popular post, Ken looked at several ranking factors to determine which university websites get A's for search engine optimization. Perhaps not surprisingly, he found that colleges with an online learning presence often came out on top. Read the full post to see how your college measures up, and if it's not on the list, check out his two-part guide to SEO for colleges.

2009 Search Marketing and Social Media Salary Survey – Check out the results of our survey to find out how your pay compares to that of other SEO, PPC, and social media professionals in your area. We found that most respondents had been in the industry for three years or less and were working in the Northeast. Are you making more or less than your peers?

Over 1 Trillion Served: The Ultimate FREE Keyword Tool for PPC and SEO – Larry penned this post introducing our new Free Keyword Tool. He explains some of the advantages of our tool over other keyword suggestion options, how and why we developed it, and our beliefs about where keyword suggestion tools should fit into your overall search marketing strategy. Also check out all the great reviews the Free Keyword Tool has gotten so far.

Reputation Management Just Got Harder (And More Expensive) – Here I provided an overview of all the reactions (largely negative) to two recent product launches that threaten to complicate the already difficult process of reputation management. Lisa Barone, Gab Goldenberg and lots of others jump in to call out Seth Godin's Brands in Public venture and Google's Sidewiki add-on.

Maslow's Hierarchy for SEOs and Other SEO Advice We Agree With – Find out where link development and keyword research fit into an SEO's hierarchy of needs (before or after a steady caffeine source?) and learn a little about SEO while you're at it.

Happy reading, and happy October!

Using WordStream to Improve your Content Creation and SEO Ranking

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:20:34 +0000

The following is a guest post by Marshall Sponder of WebMetricsGuru.

I was thinking about several keyword tools out there offering basic analysis of what’s popular, including WordStream’s own free keyword tool, but none of them approaches WordStream's keyword management solution in its sophistication and prompting to help us make the right choices for our search marketing campaigns. I don’t run any paid campaigns, so I don’t use WordStream in the same way many users do, nor is that the focus of this article (you can learn about using WordStream's solutions for PPC in this video).

Sometimes, it’s not what a tool or platform does, but the way it does it – the interface that stimulates creativity and gets us to make associations we might not otherwise make. I could have pulled my keywords over the last week from Google Analytics and gotten much the same information about my search traffic – but Google Analytics is an analytics platform, and it’s not designed to council me on better search choices, while WordStream's purpose is to help me make better choices for paid and organic search and to automate the creation of PPC campaigns. It also integrates with Google Analytics via AdWords (but I don’t know yet how it supports other analytics packages).

With that in mind, I looked at the keywords I collected over the last week using WordStream’s JavaScript tracker, which was very easy to install, to track keyword traffic to WebMetricsGuru (my analytics blog). I saw that most of the traffic doesn’t originate from organic search but from Twitter, Facebook and RSS readers, and much of it wasn’t really about Web analytics. Rather, it was from the variety of subjects I had touched on since I founded WebMetricsGuru almost four years ago.

Using WordStream, I looked at my keyword list and saw phrases I don’t recall writing a post about, yet searchers were looking for just that information and came to my blog – from search engines – and I wondered if my content actually answered their questions. I used Google Analytics to extend my questioning from the stream of thought that WordStream started me on.

For the term “conversational quotient,” my site search returns this post about Twitter Friends I wrote early this year – but who was this individual and did they land on that page? Google Analytics told me the visitor came from Yahoo and bounced after reading my post – they did not go to another page (so we don’t know how long they actually stayed on the site – a problem with most analytics packages that only have a single page view during a session or visit).

Google Analytics also told me this was a new visitor who was in San Diego, using Windows at 1024x768 resolution at the time the search was performed this week. Based on what I found, I assume I didn’t answer that person’s question. A search on Google shows that “conversational quotient” should be an easy keyword to rank on since there aren’t that many pages showing up for it (3,880,000 pages at the time of this writing), and the top result is an ADWEEK article by Brian Morrissey that talks about social media metrics and search engine advertising.

Actually, that ranking by Brian Morrissey gives me a clue as to what Google thinks the “conversational quotient” is about – and how I’d write my post (which I will write, by the way) using WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool to help me.

I got several ideas using WordStream’s keyword tool, but the gist is to combine what Google tells us about what it thinks people want when they type in “conversational quotient” and WordStream’s data on what keyword phrases are in demand (relative volume is high) that match.

I’ll let you know how that post at WebMetricsGuru I write on the conversational quotient does in Google’s ranking in a few weeks.

Interested in WordStream's keyword management solution?

SEO Guide for College Websites, Part Two

Ken Lyons — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:11:49 +0000

Once again, this SEO for College Websites post comes on the heels of my popular yet somewhat contentious post on top seo college websites. I'm writing a follow up to share advice to colleges that are struggling with search engine optimization (SEO). These SEO tips should give colleges some ideas on how best to optimize their websites to rank better in higher education search verticals and attract more students though search engine marketing.

In SEO for College Websites, Part One, I covered how to conduct effective keyword research and how to create killer degree page title tags for SEO. In this post, I'll discuss how to optimize your degree page content and how to acquire some quality inbound links.

Step Three: Optimize Your On-Page Content

When optimizing your content for search, there are a number of tried and true best practices I'll share with you to format your degree pages for maximum SEO effectiveness.

1) Include Target Keywords

Now, this may seem like a no-brainer to some, but many in higher ed still don't realize that including target keywords in your content creates topical relevancy. And the more relevant your content is to a searcher's query, the more likely it is to rank higher and get found.

Riffing off the target keywords tip, be sure to include variations of your keywords in degree page content, like:

Phrase swapping (nursing degree, degree in nursing), and
Keyword stemming (using plurals, varied tenses and gerunds)

By incorporating keyword variations, your content can rank on a wider variety of queries for your target keywords, as well as capturing long tail keyword searches.

2) Lead with Your Target Keywords

Boom! Right out of the gate, start your first sentence with your keywords, like so "The Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Program at X University is designed for students who..." Leading with your target keywords sets the tone and further reinforces that this page is about your topic.

3) Use Headlines and Sub Heads, Include Target Keywords

I recommend including your target keywords in every page title and subtitle (and adding titles and subs if you don't have them already). For example, if I were creating a degree page for a bachelor's degree program in mechanical engineering, hypothetically I'd structure the page something like this:

Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Program (title)
[content]
Curriculum Overview for the Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree (sub head)
[content]
Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree: Course of Study (sub head)
[content]
Additional Information on the Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree (sub head)
[content, links to pages of topical relevance]

Now, you may feel this approach is repetitious (which it is), but that's the point. Frequently mentioning your target keywords and keyword variations (without being spammy: make sure it still "reads" well), especially in prominent text regions (headers and sub heads) reinforces your page's topical relevancy.

How frequently should you mention your keywords, you ask? Good question. There's really no magical one-size-fits-all "keyword density" ratio. My suggestion would be to tinker with the content for a single degree page over the course of a few months, test different versions and see which ranks better and try applying the same strategy site-wide.

4) Add Images, Use Keywords in the File Names

To further bolster topical relevancy, add images. Even if you don't feel you need them, add them anyway. This gives you even more opportunities to create thematically relevant degree pages, by including:

File Names: Use keywords in the image file names. For example, mechanical-engineering-degree.gif.
Alt Tags: Add alt tags with target keywords. For example, add a picture of some students and say, "Our mechanical engineering program graduate students."
Captions: You can even add a caption to the image with the target keywords

By doing this, you're once again hammering home your point that this is a degree page about my target keywords.

Step Four: Get Links for Your Degree Pages

The biggest hurdle I see for the many college websites is an inability to acquire links. Besides having relevant, topical content, the most important ranking signal search engines use to determine your pages popularity in the SERPs are the quantity and quality of inbound links pointing to your page.

Given that it's better to show than tell, here's an example of how important links are to ranking your degree pages. I ran the basic query "MBA" and these are the first page results in Google.

Here, I'm using Yahoo Link Domain through SEO for Firefox (read more about Yahoo Link Domain functions and SEO for Firefox add-on in my post Free SEO Tools We Use Every Day) to identify the number of links pointing to a specific page from other websites (link totals are in the red boxes). Notice the ranking order correlates perfectly with how many links each site has pointing to their degree page:

Harvard MBA: 5,210 links
Wharton MBA: 1,070 links
University of Illinois MBA: 350 links

Now, mind you, this is a very quick and dirty explanation of links and ranking (factors such as the quality of links pointing to your site play a large role and will trump quantity) and it doesn't always work out this perfectly, but the message to remember here is more, quality links = better rankings.

Linking Strategies for Colleges and Universities

Because of the prominence, trust, goodwill, newsworthiness, community relations, partnerships, etc. that surrounds most universities, a .edu is probably one of the easiest domains to build links for. I mean, most colleges attract links without even trying, just by virtue of being institutes of higher learning. Imagine if they actually put some effort into it.

Where to Get Inbound Links

So where can colleges and universities get links? Well, to get the ball rolling, here are some ideas where you can aquire easy links:

Ask other universities to link to you.
Ask all your partner/sister schools to link to you.
Give testimonials to your vendors. "X university says this is a great product/service." Get a link in the testimonial.
Actively promote your research studies, scholarship programs, noteworthy campus news, etc to every local and major news outlet and be sure to get links.
Create a speakers list of internal experts on topical subjects. Promote your list to reporters. Get quoted in a story, get a link.
Most universities engage in some form of community outreach. Ask community partners for a link.
Donate money, get a link.
University professors get mentioned on websites all the time for writing books, speaking engagements, research efforts, etc. Find these mentions, ask the site owners for links.
Shoot a blast email to everyone on campus: faculty, staff, students. Ask them to link to you if they have a website.

I could go on for days. Most SEOs would love to link build for a college website. It's such a lay up. I mean, this isn't rocket science. Point being, sit down with everyone who touches your website, brainstorm ways to get links, and take action.

Now, given the natural linking order of the Web, people customarily and more frequently link to a site's home page. So you may have some difficulty getting people to "naturally" link to your deeper degree pages with specific keyword anchor text. How do you solve this issue?

Internal links - linking to your degree pages from other pages across your own site using target keywords in your anchor text (for more on the importance of internal linking, read my post on aggressive inline linking).

By implementing an aggressive internal linking strategy, you can flow and direct the juice from the "link-rich" pages (home page, top level pages) throughout your site to the deeper "link-poor" pages, like the degree, program and certificate pages. Aggressive internal linking also allows you to control and manipulate the link anchor text.

SEO University: Final Thoughts on SEO for College Websites

Okay, so go and implement these best practices and be sure to test (and re-test) your efforts. Also, when testing, I'd advise you to keep a detailed record of your actions, so you can see what's working and what's not. I explain this in greater detail in my post about creating an SEO Log.

Now, the SEO tips I'm giving out are free and are actually pretty darn valuable. Everything in this SEO Guide for Colleges an SEO company would come in and do for thousands of dollars, along with other things that I didn't really delve into, like site architecture, hierarchical navigation for keyword mapping, fixing canonical issues, etc.

Point being, when I worked for a local state university, they hired an outside SEO consulting firm (much to my objection...long story...) to come in and give a fraction of the advice I'm handing out. The consultants charged the university $15,000 for a spreadsheet of title tags for various degree pages (that didn't include implementation, mind you). For a full site audit, link building, on and on-page SEO implementation, pricing started at $90,000.

So consider this my $90,000 endowment to all of higher education. And who knows. If some university does implement these changes and sees wild success in the SERPs, maybe they'll feel compelled to name a gymnasium of something after me. Or at least give a nice link to this post.

PPC Advertising Project for Non-Profits

Ken Lyons — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:30:17 +0000

We got an interesting email the other day from our friend Jim Jansen, assistant professor at the College of Information Science and Technology at Penn State. If you haven't heard of Jim yet or aren't familiar with his research in search marketing and searcher behavior, read our recent interview with him here: Jim Jansen on Click Behavior and SERP integration.

Jim told me about a really cool project he and his students are doing in his PPC advertising course (BTW, how cool is a class on PPC advertising?). He and 55 of his technology and advertising students at Penn State are creating keyword advertising campaigns for eleven non-profit organizations. Apparently, the students will be implementing paid search campaigns for these eleven non-profits, as well as doing some SEO work and optimizing landing pages for their websites.

Jim says that he's really excited about this project because doing work this sort of work really helps students realize the challenges that not-for-profits face with limited resources, marketing, and technology. The PPC advertising project was funded by a $30,000 grant from Google.

What's very cool too is that Jim said he and his students used The FREE Keyword Tool to conduct keyword research for the paid search campaigns.

You can read more about this project and see the list of 11 non-profits Jim and his class are working with over at Jim Jansen's Web Search Blog. You can also follow Jim on Twitter: @JimJansen.

Reputation Management Just Got Harder (And More Expensive)

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:00:47 +0000

This was a big week in the blogo- and Twittersphere for poorly received product launches: Two new products from Google and Squidoo threaten to become reputation management nightmares, if they manage to catch on. Ironically, the products also threaten to (further) tarnish the reputations of their creators.

Brands in Public: A Big Misstep from Seth Godin?

Seth Godin this week announced a new product/service from Squidoo called Brands in Public:

If your brand has any traction at all, people are talking about you. Of course, they've always talked about you, but now they're doing it in writing, in video and in public.

Today, Squidoo (a company I founded) is launching Brands in Public. It's a neat idea and I wanted to give you an overview and a first look.

You can't control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff.

Indeed, you can’t control what people are saying about you, including if you’re Seth Godin. A lot of people out there don’t think this is such a “neat idea.”

Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm was one of the first to react, calling it a “reputation management timebomb.” Altoft writes, “I’m all for brands having an outlet for things but the outlet should be something that is 100% under their control such as a blog or social media account. Answering back on a Squidoo page where they have very little control of the content is a terrible idea.”

The issue isn’t just one of control and in whose hands it lies—Squidoo is setting up unofficial pages for big brands like Guinness and then charging $400 a month if the company wants ownership of that page. Otherwise, the conversation goes on without them. According to Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, “the $400 or more fee Godin’s company plans to charge is, in a way, blackmail.”

Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media also disapproves (to put it lightly), calling this tactic “brandjacking”:

If you’re a large brand like Guinness, Home Depot or All State, you don’t want Brands in Public. You’d be much better suited creating your own internal dashboard to track mentions or investing in a program like Radian 6. Brands in Public isn’t nearly as powerful as you’d need it to be. To be honest, Brands in Public is nothing more than a 5k a year public Google Alert. And it’s the “public” part that Seth says makes these pages so valuable. It allows you to do your monitoring in full of view of everyone on the Internet. Personally, I’m not sure why the thought of that is so exciting. I tend to look at brand monitoring like showering. They’re things I like to do in private. Or at least only with people I really, really like.

(Lisa's post has a very lively comment thread.) Meghan Keane of Econsultancy further plays up the threatening aspect of this service in a post titled “Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it”:

Squidoo is providing a forum for brands to monitor, control and influence their reputation online. But rather than letting brands set up their own pages, Squidoo is doing it for them and dangling control over the site for the $400 monthly fee. If that price sounds like a threat, it is. […] Of course, companies can do any of this on their own site or blog or platform. But the info gathered at Squidoo will continue on with or without their input. And if they care at least $400 a month about what people on Squidoo think about them, they'll fork over to control how it is shown.

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch is also skeptical about the value of the new service:

I’m not sure I like the fact that Squidoo takes the lead in creating pages for brands only to ‘unlock’ them for a monthly fee afterwards. Sure, there’s some truth to its claim that conversations are happening around the web anyway and they’re merely aggregating them, but I’m sure many will claim that the company is doing this for obvious SEO reasons. Get Satisfaction follows a similar strategy of holding company profile pages ‘hostage’, and has in the past been criticized for that behavior. I also think a $400/month price point is extremely high for something that can easily be built internally.

I have to agree with the detractors; this sounds sketchy. Any business model based on extortion is unlikely to gain fans and followers among marketers. Companies find reputation management difficult enough without dragging ransom fees into it.

Google Claims Yet More Web Real Estate with Sidewiki

In a similar move to limit the power of web properties and brands (oddly contrary to recent algorithm updates that place more trust in brands?), Google announced Sidewiki, an app that allows universal commenting on any website. Anyone who installs the app can see and add comments, which appear in the sidebar on the left-hand side of the screen, hence the name (though AboutUs points out that Google is confused about what a “wiki” actually is).

Gab Goldenberg sees this as its own form of extortion. While webmasters and site owners don’t have to pay Google to participate in this side conversation, they can’t opt out:

Google continues making moves toward establishing a monopoly on the web […] This gives Google expanded presence on ALL websites its toolbar users visit and will open up all kinds of online reputation management issues for businesses. […] Google is telling site owners that they can either participate in SideWiki or else see competitors’ nasty comments dominate the discussion about their site(s). Worst of all, you can’t block Google’s SideWiki from appearing alongside your website so as to opt-out. It’s also unclear whether webmasters will even know when their site is being displayed with SideWiki.

It sounds kinda good in theory—putting power in the hands of consumers. (Matt Cutts, in Sidewiki’s defense, brings up the use case of “Make thousands of dollars working from home!” scam sites.) But we have to remember the rule of wikis (or comment threads): 1% of users are responsible for 90% of the content. So Sidewiki comments aren’t necessarily going to be representative of the general public opinion about a site; they might just represent the loudest (and most obnoxious) opinions.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine senses “danger.”

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. […] So this goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the center. […] Somebody should have asked the “is it evil?” question. That’s why it’s there. I sense no one did.

This echoes Gab’s sentiment about monopoly—Google seems to have its paws in every damn pot on the web. (In fact, when Google launched its Monopoly game, I kept seeing "Google Monopoly" in my Twitter stream and finding it rather apropos.) As one commenter on Jarvis’s post put it, “The Googely Monster has too many arms.”

Michael Gray’s Twitter stream was also a fount of complaints about Sidewiki this week (I really wanted to type "this weeky"). Some highlights:

hey @mattcutts what the reasoning behind no opt-out on sidewiki ... not ever site owner wants to moderate a forum ya know
any of you corndogs naive enough to think there wont be adsense ads for your competition on sidewiki in less than 12 months
HEY YOU CAN DROP LINKS IN SIDEWIKI COMMENTS ....http://bit.ly/2D1WVy
google doesnt have a policy for governing the sale of sidewiki votes seize the moment and claim your internet riches
I need to go lay down between whuffie, sidewiki, and squidoo brand pages internet stupidity is overwhelming today
I swear I feel like charlton heston at the end of planet of the apes yelling at ppl who cant hear me

(If you don’t already follow him, @graywolf consistently brings it in the day-long rant department.)

Two Great Launches That Taste Great Together

Sidewiki and Brands in Public meet (Oh, hello. I didn't see you there) on Seth Godin's blog, where Danny Sullivan and others have used the Google add-on to comment on Seth's announcement, since he doesn't allow comments. Maybe it has some value after all? I just love the symmetry here.

What do you all think? Do these launches make you feel empowered as a consumer? Or, as someone with a reputation to manage/protect, are you vacillating between anger and fear?

It's #FollowFriday Time

@Pete_de_badger I'm a passionate Internet marketer, an old school SEO from back in the day!
@whatwhywho Digital marketer, social media geek, band manager, lover, hater, friend, foe and all round opinionated chap from Scotland. Come talk!
@theGypsy SEO Consultant and IR geek
@ClickValue performance marketing specialist with a passion for food preparation and consumption
@hugogill Search engine optimisation (SEO), ecommerce and web accessibility consultant and solutions provider.
@anduro Anduro Marketing: Online Marketing Specialists
@lyceum I am a rational egoist and an American in spirit.
@bgtheory Brad 'eWhisper' Geddes - PPC Geek & Official AdWords Seminar Leader

Follow Us on Twitter

@WordStream Best Keyword Management Platform ever!
@LarryKim Avid search marketer, newlywed
@TomDemers New father, PPC wiz, has a great laugh
@SMRichardson Trivia, SEM, Red Sox, animals, travel and music
@Boston_SEO SEO genius, former rockstar, 2 adorable daughters
@EGabbert Writer, poet, editor, SEO, SEM, foodist, aesthete/rationalist
@RBeale Internet marketing, business development, golf, Boston sports
@Quality_Score PPC pundit (identity unknown), mysterious dispenser of sage Quality Score advice

Have a Tip for WordStream's Follow Friday?

Send an email to egabbert@wordstream.com.

You Asked For It: Free Keyword Tool Serves Over 100 Million Keywords in First Week

Elisa Gabbert — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:13:27 +0000

Despite billions of searches month in and month out (more than 9 billion in July alone), Google continues to report that nearly 20% of all search queries each month are unique—that is, they have never been searched on before. To help address this challenge, we launched a free keyword suggestion tool last week for specialists and agencies providing pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) services.

Initial market adoption and feedback have been overwhelming. In the first week we have provided more than 100 million keyword ideas to early adopters of the tool. The Free Keyword Tool’s database of over a trillion search queries, the tool’s ease and speed of use, and advanced features such as related keywords and filters have search experts favorably comparing the Free Keyword Tool to paid, subscription-based products. Within days of the tool’s release, two reviews said WordStream’s new keyword tool was “better” and “broader” than the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, while a third review (from Ann Smarty of Search Engine Journal) called it an “awesome alternative” to paid keyword tools from Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

Our VP and founder Larry Kim is excited about the early results: “We wanted to build the Free Keyword Tool to offer something useful to the search marketing community. The early feedback and usage is really confirmation that we’ve built a better free tool than what others are charging for. Because our keyword management software is such a powerful tool for acting on keyword suggestions, more people have access to better keyword ideas. This is a good thing for search marketers and a good thing for WordStream.”

Last week we rounded up some of the great early reviews of the tool, including posts by Aaron Wall, Dana Lookadoo and many others. Since then even more reviews have surfaced. Here's what people are saying about the Free Keyword Tool by WordStream this week (emphases ours throughout):

Web Strategy Workshop called it "extremely simple to use": "This is one of the most self-explanatory keyword research tools out there and is simple enough for a n00b to jump into." The author also noted that high relative volume isn't necessarily a good thing: "with high volume searches comes more competition in both organic rankings and PPC bidding = bad." We agree!
Small Business CEO concurs on the ease of use: Our "new tool is easy to use and best of all it’s free," they wrote.
Another vote for "simple and easy" from Jaypee Online, who also writes: "With the help of a keyword tool like the Free Keyword Tool, you can look for and find the deep, mid- and long-tail variations of different keywords which are both very important when conducting keyword research. It also helps you find related terms and synonyms for your keywords."
SEMple Ideas says "The UI is clean and simple to figure out, which makes it a quick, user-friendly addition to the task of keyword generation." Author Suzanne Blair includes a list of the advantages of WordStream's keyword tool, including "extensive keyword suggestions," the related keywords feature that "helps narrow down my initial list and gives me more targeted keyphrases," and the "Email keywords feature is very nice – allows me to quickly save and share keywords from any computer without having to worry about losing my work."
SEO PPC Plus Blog writes that WordStream's tool "is extremely user-friendly and generates an abundance of keywords and phrases – much more than I have seen in other free and paid keyword tools I have used over the years."
WebMetricsGuru said, "What I like the most about Wordstream’s keyword tool is the related keyword sections on the right," adding, "I almost have to wonder why anyone bothers with WordTracker anymore – I’m not sure that paid keyword tools are really worth it – esp with so many free tools." Hear hear.
Design Marketing Advertising Free Tips calls the tool "an awesome and free keyword generator tool to assist all with pay-per-click advertising, as well as SEO."

Sage Lewis even made a video:

And David Harry was nice enough to help us out with some promotion as well.

A BIG thank you to everyone who took the time to write or talk about the tool!

Want to see the evidence for yourself? Try the Free Keyword Tool by WordStream right now.

Find the Unfindable: 12 Ways to Find Anyone's Personal Email Address

Ken Lyons — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:00:13 +0000

Give me someone's name, and I'll find their personal email address. Sure, it may take some extensive digging and sleuthing, but I'll find you eventually. And I'm not paying to root you out or buying your private info from a lead gen company (though sometimes that would be easier). This is just good old fashioned, organic searching, scanning and scouring the Internet like a Web gumshoe. And not stopping until I ferret out that personal email.

Why is it important to obtain someone's personal email address?

If you're sending out an important email that you really want to be taken seriously and improve your chances of getting an actual response, you need to go directly to the source. Sending an important, personal email to the info[at]companyX.com, or dumping it into a "Contact Us" form is a virtual black hole.

This is especially true if you're trying to get in touch with someone you don't know or you've never contacted before. Primary examples of this include:

Applying for a job
Any form of outreach, like a link request, interview request for your blog, if you're seeking media coverage for a story, etc.

What's more, by taking this extra step and getting directly to the source, you show real initiative and will distinguish yourself from the candidates applying for that same job or requesting that same link.

12 Tips and Tricks to Hunt Down Personal Email Addresses

Now, when I say "personal" email address, I'm not talking about a Gmail, Hotmail or AOL account exclusively. I'm also referring to their personal company email address, Web hosting domain email, blogger mail account, or any Web property email address I can find. Because of the depth and breadth and ubiquity of content sources on the Web, you can find contact information for pretty much anyone who has an email address, even if they don't actively promote in their website. All you have to do is search and keep refining your searches until you strike pay dirt.

Let the Hunt Begin

1) Basic Name Queries

You can start your sleuthing by running a generic search query for someone's name. But understand that this approach probably won't get you very far, unless the person you're seeking has a unique name, like say Jets WR Jerricho Cotchery. However, if that person's name is at all common, you'll need to add some distinguishing modifiers. Think of it as engaging in the long tail of name searching.

Some initial modifiers you should incorporate to narrow and refine your search are:

[name] + email (or) email address
[name] + contact (or) contact information (or) contact me

2) Name Queries with Personal Modifiers

Now, if that doesn't work, get even more granular and add any personal information you may have already or uncovered about this person in your initial search, such as

[name] + "home town"
[name] + "company they work for"

You can even mix and match all the above modifiers. If you succeed here, terrific. Mission accomplished. But all too often, this is only the initial stage of your research, as this method yields results less than 10 % of the time. To really find who you're looking for, you'll need to go corporate.

Hunting for Company Email Addresses

3) Business Networking Search Queries

One of the best resources for finding direct contact information is through a company email network. Anyone working for an organization has an in-house email. Now, typically if you're searching for someone's direct email for a job interview, link outreach or media coverage, you likely know where they work or conduct business already. But if you're still in the dark, ZoomInfo and LinkedIn are pretty fertile grounds for harvesting personal information.

You can either search the websites internal engine or run queries in Google, like so:

[name] + LinkedIn
[name] + ZoomInfo

Notice the quick success I had with a probe of ZoomInfo.

4) Basic Company Name Queries

Now, once you get a place of business from their profile, you should visit the company website and start running queries, using the person's name in the hope that you'll find any indexed document with their email address. Most times, generic name searches yield citations (like so-and-so pitched a gem for the company softball team), not actual email addresses. So again, get more specific with modifiers.

[name] + email
[name] + contact

Adding these modifiers will really boost your chances of finding your target.

5) Basic Company Search Operators

However, if you're still coming up short, you'll need to roll up your sleeves. This is when I break out my super sleuth hat and get creative with Google search operators. In majority of cases, Google information retrieval yields more results than a company's internal search. If you're not familiar with search operators, read this.

So what you'll do now is search Google, using the Google Search Operator Query "site:companywebsite.com" as your root and sprinkle in modifiers, like so:

site:companywebsite.com + [name] + email
site:companywebsite.com + [name] + contact

6) Advanced Company Search Operators

Pretty much every organization has a unique, yet uniform company email addresses structure, which you can leverage in your search efforts, using advanced search operators. For example, at WordStream our email structure is “first initial + lastname@wordstream.com." But since each company has their own format, you'll need to play around with a host of possible email address structures using the root search operator.

Note: Use the standard format here "@," I'm using [at] so as not to active hyperlinks.

site:companywebsite.com + ken.lyons [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + kenlyons [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + klyons [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + ken [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + ken_lyons [at] companyname.com

It's important to mention here that the information you're seeking with these queries will be bolded in the meta description, like so:

I'd say this method yeilds results 80% of the time for me.

7) Random Kitchen Sink Queries

However, if you're still coming up short, you can drop the company search operator root and pound away with random combinations of the above suggestions. 99% of the time, this is very effective. For example, here's a random query I ran for an administrator at Drexel University I wanted to reach out to (note: name is blurred for privacy):

Notice my query: "drexel Dr. [person's name] @drexel." It's kind of nonsensical, but nevertheless this query combination succeeded where the other techniques failed, yielding not only this person's email address, but also their direct phone number. Double bonus! Point being, at this stage, I throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Even More Options in the Hunt for Email Addresses

8) Social Networking Profile Queries

Another avenue you can explore for personal information are social media profiles. I've had the most success with social sites like Twitter and Naymz. And chances are that employing the original basic queries that I mentioned above will display if this person has a social networking profile at either of these websites.

[name] + Twitter
[name] + Naymz

Notice how my probe of the Naymz uncovers a place of business and my hometown. Leverage these data points in your email address hunting.

9) Personal Website or Blog Search Operators

Very often, my Web sleuthing reveals a personal website that I didn't know existed. Also, people include their personal websites or their blogs on their Twitter, LinkedIn or Naymz profiles. This provides you a whole new channel to explore to find contact info for them. If you do find a personal site or blog, there's often have a contact page or even their email address listed right on the site somewhere. Even still, I prefer a direct line to that person. So if you've explored the site and come up short, navigate back out to Google and run some advanced search operators.

site:personalblog.com + [name] + email
site:personalblog.com + [name] + contact
site:personalblog.com + ken.lyons [at] personalblog.com
site:personalblog.com + kenlyons [at] personalblog.com
site:personalblog.com + klyons [at] personalblog.com
site:personalblog.com + ken [at] personalblog.com
site:personalblog.com + ken_lyons [at] personalblog.com

10) Whois Search

If you're still coming up empty after a deep dive of their personal website or blog, go to Network Solutions and run a Whois search for their domain registration data for an email address. 60% of the time, you'll find a personal email address here.

11) 123 People

Another great resource for finding personal contact information is 123 People. I've had great luck using this free people search to locate the hard to find and it allows you to search up to seven different countries for personal contact info. This site pulls together email addresses, Facebook images, phone numbers, blog mentions, etc all in a nice, comprehensive interface.

12) If All Else Fails

Okay, if all else fails, you may have to resort to alternative, less "direct" methods like emailing your target through LinkedIn, or @-ting them on Twitter and asking them to follow you back so you can DM them and ask for contact information (if they're willing). For me, these are usually last ditch efforts, which I've resorted to only a handful of times after if I've exhausted all of the other options I detailed in this post. But even though I prefer to send an email to someone's personal account, shooting them an unsolicited LinkedIn message to me is still far better than an info[at]companyX.com black hole.

Point being, 99% of the time if you're dogged, persistent, relentless and love the thrill of the chase like me, then ain't nothing gonna' stop you from finding the personal contact information you seek.

Happy email hunting!

WordStream Believes: PPC and SEO Are Continuous, Iterative Tasks

Elisa Gabbert — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:08:12 +0000

This is Part 4 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

One of the most powerful aspects of search as a marketing channel is the abundance of data you can measure and respond to. Web analytics applications provide a wealth of information about your website, your audience and how they interact. Specific to search, they tell you exactly how people are finding your site: What key words and phrases are users typing into search boxes to discover what you offer?

If you look at this data but don't respond to it, you're throwing away potential gains in traffic and revenue. Search marketing, if it's going to offer strong ROI over the long term, requires dedication and commitment.

The SEO and PPC related tasks you need to commit to performing on an ongoing basis include:

Keyword Research and Expansion: You can seed your keyword list using a keyword suggestion tool (like our free keyword tool), but you really can't stop there. Expand your list with private, personalized data from your web analytics keywords report; refactor this new data into your keyword database continuously.
Keyword Grouping and Organization: As your keyword list grows, it becomes even more important to segment your terms into small, manageable groups by relevance. As you add new keywords, group them appropriately and then create subgroups when a keyword group gets too large and too broad.
Negative Keyword Discovery: We'll go into the importance of designating negative keywords in more detail next week. In a nutshell, negative keywords enable you to reduce wasteful PPC spending.
PPC Account Optimization: You'll need to continually revisit your account and your campaign structure, adjusting ad groups and ad text as necessary to maximize click-through rate, improve your Quality Scores, and lower your cost per action.

Acting on your analytics to create and publish new web content and PPC campaigns gives you more data to analyze, creating a cycle of compounding returns.

Yes, search marketing is a lot of work—a full-time job, not an afterthought. That's why it's so important to invest in finding software tools that make the above tasks easier (and more effective).

Identifying the Right Niche Keywords - Huomah (SEO Dojo) Guest Post

Tom Demers — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:51:00 +0000

David Harry was nice enough to put up a guest post I wrote today: How to Identify the Best Keywords for Your Niche. In it I talk about:

Finding Keywords
Refining Your Keyword List
Evaluating the Difficulty of Ranking
Making Your Keyword Research Efforts an Iterative Process

Please check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!

Incidentally if you haven't checked them out, David's blog is excellent, his SEO newsletter is great, and he maintains an active community of very smart SEO/SEM folks.

Did We Mention Keywords? Did We Mention Free?

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:56:25 +0000

OK, what happened this week on the World Wide Web? A couple of important things: Kanye West made a jackass of himself, and we launched a new free keyword tool!

Larry blogged about the tool on Wednesday, covering why and how we developed it, what it offers that other tools don't, and why, as awesome as it is, you still need keyword management to really get somewhere in SEM. You can read yet more about the tool in our Free Keyword Tool FAQ.

Today I want to point to some of the other conversations going on around the newly launched tool, and thank everyone who took the time to mention us on blogs and on Twitter.

First up, Aaron Wall over at SEOBook mentioned the keyword tool ("The coolest feature it offers is that it allows you to download thousands of keywords at once") and our keyword management software ("where it really sings is in decent sized pay per click accounts") in his post on computer algorithms vs. human creativity: "What Parts of Marketing Can't be Automated?" The main point of the post is that there are parts of marketing so "abstract + complex" (things like branding and social networking) that people don't even understand them that well, so we can't hope to automate them with software yet, if ever. Fundamentally, we agree: Our software is designed to help search marketers, not replace them.

As long as we're on the topic of SEOBook, I just want to say that I also found a lot to agree with in "Broken Reward Circuitry: Money vs Happiness." This post is really about work and management philosophies and life balance more than search marketing per se, but I urge you to read it. I especially like this part:

If a person who is gifted but lazy is praised they will just become more lazy and arrogant and worthless, feeling they deserve the world even if they did nothing to earn it.
If a person is doing their best and you keep telling them it is never good enough (like the Navy ORSE testing regime) you are just going to make them miserable, shut them down, beat them into submission, and kill their happiness. Such policies kill motivation and drive away talent.

Food for thought, no?

Now back to us!

Dana Lookadoo wrote up a fantastic review of WordStream's Free Keyword Tool on her blog, thanking us for providing a new tool that's "fast [as] lightning" with an "easy-to-use interface," giving marketers "the ability to make better decisions with more information." Thank YOU Dana!

Another excellent WordStream review on Myseoblog from Kirin Knapp: "I've discussed keywords in the past and mentioned a couple tools you might use to help you along. These are still good tools to use, however there is a new tool that combines pretty much every aspect you'd need. WordStream has released a new free keyword management tool called 'The Free Keyword Tool'. It's in its Beta version currently, but it is fantastic."

Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal also reviewed the tool: "WordStream (we have previously published a solid review on WordStream on SEJ) is launching a new cool free keyword research tool generating the list related keywords and keyword phrases that could be an awesome alternative to paid Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery."

Frank Watson at SearchEngineWatch and Alexandre Brabant at eMarketing101 also wrote about the launch, with the former saying "from my use during its beta [the tool] is better than Google's limited one," and the latter claiming it is "better than Wordtracker." In a post titled "WordStream Finally Launches Free Keyword Research Tool!" the PageTraffic blog writes that the tool "will help marketers better manage their time, achieve higher Quality Score results for PPC and better search engine rankings for SEO" and "unlike Google's tool, it allows you to get all the keywords emailed to you."

RSS Ray wrote that "WordStream’s new keyword tool is a budget-friendly (free!) application that can greatly improve pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization efforts ... Unlike many other keyword tools, WordStream does not limit the number of keyword suggestions."

We also got a nod from the Ristvin Marketing Blog. They write that WordStream's Free Keyword Tool is great for affiliate marketers since it returns thousands of keywords (which you can have sent to you in a spreadsheet) including what they call "buyer keywords" (transactional keywords):

…when I used it to search for “fly fishing reels” related keywords, approximately two thirds of the phrases it returned were for brands and models. You’ve got to love that when it’s those phrases you’re looking for to build your affiliate niche website.

Jody at Marketing Jive highlighted the WordStream tool and said the coolest things about it are:

It's free!
You can get your keyword list emailed to you
You can copy the keywords with one simple click

Bart Wilson, Chief Marketing Officer and "SEO Rockstar," recommended WordStream's keyword research tool to readers of the ActiveRain real estate blog: "You've heard me talk about WordTracker.com before. Well, this is a good place to go but it's another $49.95 a month. If you like the word: FREE -- then go here my fellow ActiveRainers. This is where you can go to test drive your own key words for free. …for 90% of us who just don't have a clue how to research keywords and get them into your website, this is a wonderful tool that can help you eliminate the guesswork."

A big thanks to everyone who tried the Free Keyword Tool and provided feedback!

If You Can Pull Yourself Away from the Keywords, Look at This Other Stuff

Thank you for allowing us to indulge in a round of backpatting. What can I say, we're proud of our little tool, all growed up. (Well, technically still in beta, but out of the womb at least.)

Next a few pointers that have nothing, if you can believe it, to do with our Free Keyword Tool: just good old-fashioned reading:

Get control of yourself, man! Dana Lookadoo offers some great tips for time management so you can get control of your social media life if you're feeling overwhelmed or maybe a little addicted. (I realize that closing down email and Twitter from time to time would be good for me but … I'm just not ready yet.) Dana also has an AWESOME slide deck on social media networking I'd encourage everyone to check out.
It's the little things: And I don't mean telling your girlfriend her hair smells nice every once in a while. SearchInsider's Steve Baldwin makes a case for frequent tweaking and testing in SEM, since tiny, almost subliminal changes in ad copy, landing page design and so forth can make significant differences in terms of CTR and conversions.
Come on, get with it, everybody's doing it: Local favorite Chris Brogan lists five things small business owners should be doing online. #1? Blogging, baby! Starting a blog is a no-brainer first step in reaching out and connecting with an audience as well as gaining traction in organic search.

It's a #FollowFridayPalooza

This is just a slice of the many folks that mentioned or linked to us via Twitter this week. We appreciate each and every tweet and are still blushing from all the attention!

@jordankettner SEO, SEM, Analytics and Social Networking. Online Marketer at Enquiro
@BrianHawkins Boston SEO, Affiliate, Internet Marketing Manager
@steph_woods Internet marketing specialist (SEO, SEM, PPC) that loves fashion, art, snowboarding, red wine, rock climbing and travelling the world.
@beebow SEO/SMO blogger trying to be social in cyberspace. Social media specialist @hudsonhorizons. Likes: good music, good movies, good wine, and gummy worms.
@AdamPieniazek Co-founder of The 42nd Estate, a web media firm. We design/dev/write/host. When I'm not working I'm biking around Boston or reminiscing about BSG. 617 418 1055
@DerekEdmond Director of SEM and Managing Partner: KoMarketing Associates, B2B SEO, PPC and Social Media. Blog at Cape Cod SEO
@DonnaAntoniadis COO of Social Media Marketing Agency ShesConnected Multimedia Corp. who also own and operate www.sheconnected.com a Social Network for women
@dannomatic Newly minted father and internet marketing specialist with 10 years exp. on such sites as bodog.com, betus.com and crestock.com
@writemindedllc Mother, Wife, Avid Reader, Skilled and Experienced Web Marketer, Conversational and SEO oriented writer, Learner by nature, Looking forward to meeting you!
@mhill Like to make good things happen. Joining the conversation on marketing, communications, social media and anything else.
@tomsmith1984 full time agency work, part time attempting affiliate work
@TheGrok Website Conversion, Persuasion Architecture expert, speaker and best selling author of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, Call to Action and Always Be Testing.
@mlvalentine Author, game designer and stealth nerd. I may not follow you, but I'm vigilant about Q's and replies.
@FilippoToso Persuasive Web Marketing Expert
@bigalittlea Agency-side interactive marketer for retail (PPC, affiliate, email, social), golf/hockey player/fan, beer/food/music snob. Bad MTBer.
@kiasuchick half-english, half american geeky chick, trying to make sense of it all.

Follow Us on Twitter

@WordStream Best Keyword Management Platform ever!
@LarryKim Avid search marketer, newlywed
@TomDemers New father, PPC wiz, has a great laugh
@SMRichardson Trivia, SEM, Red Sox, animals, travel and music
@Boston_SEO SEO genius, former rockstar, 2 adorable daughters
@EGabbert Writer, poet, editor, SEO, SEM, foodist, aesthete/rationalist
@RBeale Internet marketing, business development, golf, Boston sports
@Quality_Score PPC pundit (identity unknown), mysterious dispenser of sage Quality Score advice

Have a Tip for WordStream's Follow Friday?

Send an email to egabbert@wordstream.com.

Over 1 Trillion Served: The Ultimate FREE Keyword Tool for PPC and SEO

Larry Kim — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:12:56 +0000

Today WordStream released what I and numerous other industry experts believe to be the most comprehensive and accurate keyword tool ever. The best part is that we're giving it away for free – no strings attached!

WordStream's Free Keyword Tool is quite different from other keyword tools – we've partnered with ISPs, search engines and other data providers to aggregate and weight over one billion unique keywords, representing well over a trillion search queries, and hundreds of millions of related terms from diverse keyword sources. This video shows how it works:

And this Keyword Tool FAQ explains how we've made it more comprehensive, accurate and faster than other keyword tools out there.

But you can see for yourself by trying it out now – type some test queries into the keyword box. If you can't think of anything to search on, try these examples:

Now, compare those results to the results of the free or paid keyword tool you were previously using. Most other companies provide far fewer keywords and many actually charge for them. WordStream gives you the entire keyword list - thousands of keyword opportunities, free of charge, because we fundamentally believe that keywords should be free – why?

A few years back when I was in the trenches, doing SEO and PPC for my agency clients, I found that keyword tools offered a starting point for search marketing work, but had many shortcomings:

Not Actionable: A huge list of keywords isn't actionable by itself. I spent the vast majority of my time and effort analyzing, researching, grouping and organizing that keyword data so I could turn it into profitable SEO and PPC campaigns
Not Proprietary: Since everyone had access to the same keyword suggestions, it wasn’t possible to gain a competitive advantage. I found that the most valuable keyword opportunities were the keywords derived from a client’s own customers. Customers were converting to sales using particular keywords on the client's site, but keyword tools ignored this data. I found the key to success was to develop my own proprietary keyword research, which aggregated both the raw data from public keyword tools with the proprietary data available only to me.
Not Personalized: Keyword suggestion tools by design favor popular keywords. But don't mistake popularity with relevancy. It was up to me to determine keyword relevance by crafting search campaigns and iteratively measuring actual results rather than relying on dubious, generalized estimates.
Not Iterative: Keyword lists are static, like cement. Effective keyword research has to be fluid and continuous – unless you’re satisfied with static results. I needed software that could take my initial research and continuously re-factor new insights derived from actual clicks and conversions to improve accuracy and relevancy. I could then further leverage those insights to optimize and expand my SEO and PPC campaigns.

I came to the realization that it's not keywords themselves that are valuable, but rather what you do with those keywords – your ability to understand and manage how your keywords perform on your site to drive sales and profits.

You may think I'm contradicting myself. On one hand, I'm announcing the release of this awesome new free keyword tool, but on the other hand I'm essentially saying that keyword suggestion tools have little lasting value.

At WordStream, we make the following distinction between our Free Keyword Tool and our subscription-based keyword management solution:

The Free Keyword Tool is better than anything else out there. If you're currently paying for a keyword discovery tool, there's really no longer any reason to do so. We'll give you more relevant keyword suggestions (over a billion of them), and it's also faster and free. Save your money, and pay it forward by giving it to charity or something.
If you're interested in doing more with your keywords, try out our keyword management solution that allows search marketers to efficiently and profitably understand, organize and act on their own keywords and analytics, the most precise and valuable data source an advertiser or optimizer has.

As for what's next, the Free Keyword Tool marks an important milestone in our overall product strategy and company vision to improve SEM productivity through innovation. So please, give it a try, spread the word, click the Sphinn button at the top of the page, and most importantly, send us your feedback so that we can continue to improve and enhance this free product offering!

SEO Guide for College Websites, Part One

Ken Lyons — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:05:40 +0000

On the heels of my popular yet somewhat contentious post last week on the Top College Websites for SEO, I thought I'd do a follow up to give advice to those colleges that are struggling with search engine optimization (SEO). These SEO tips should give colleges some insight into how best to optimize their websites to rank well in higher education search verticals and attract more students though search engine marketing.

NOTE: This SEO for College Websites is the first in a two-part series.

SEO University: Best practices for optimizing college degree pages

Most college websites publish a bunch of content under a variety of topics: from administrative pages, to course catalogs, to campus news, to research lab micro sites, and so on. But the real bread and butter for universities are their degree and certificate programs. Universities are in the business of selling education and degrees are their product offerings.

Now, whether you're trying to rank your personal blog or the Organic Baby Onesie page for your local children's clothing store, the fundamentals of SEO are virtually the same. Put simply, you need content and links. The same holds true for college degree Web pages. So here's a detailed guide to help college's better optimize their existing degree pages for SEO.

Step One: Do Your Keyword Research Homework

It's been said before, but it bears repeating: keywords are the foundation of all your search marketing efforts. Do a bad job here selecting your keywords and everything else will fail, from your title tag strategy, to content creation, to your link building efforts.

Now, there are few different approaches you can take to performing effective keyword research:

Keyword suggestion tools (good): Using third party keyword generator tools to suggest keyword ideas
Competitor site analysis (better): Finding which keywords work for your competitors is another tactic, is another common approach, but it's somewhat flawed. Just because keywords are working for your competitors, doesn't mean they'll also work for you.
Actual keyword or query data (best!): Mining your keyword analytics or your server log files for proven results

Now, the reason I advocate using keywords from your actual data is because we at WordStream believe that "keyword research should be personalized and based on real data." Rather than guesstimating which searches may or may not drive prospective students to your website, your private search data gives you the actual searches that brought users to your site. That way you can optimize your existing college degree pages to better reflect the traffic driving keywords. Or you can use it to prompt the creation of additional, topically relevant content.

Now, to back up for a second, I'm not totally disparaging keyword suggestion tools. They do have their place, including helping with:

Initial keyword research - for a new site with no search history
Keyword discovery - for keyword stemming or keyword modifiers for content creation, title tags or link building, all of which I'll cover in the following sections.

With that in mind, we've created The FREE Keyword Tool, so feel free to bang on it for some new keyword ideas for your own keyword research.

For more on best keyword research practices, check out these articles and videos:

Step Two: Set Up Your Title Tags

Title tags are a critical component of good, effective SEO. Having your keywords positioned in your degree page HTML title tags without a doubt will give your pages a huge boost in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

One example of a college using title tags for SEO pretty effectively is the program page for the Stanford University MBA program page. Let's take a look at how they're structuring their title tags.

Now, the reason I say "pretty effectively" is because Stanford's approach is good, not great. There's certainly some wasted real estate here and missed opportunity. For example, repeating "MBA Program" twice is pointless. Duplicating keywords offers no ranking benefit. In fact, keyword duplication hogs up valuable space that could be used for additional keywords prospective students may be searching on.

My title tag suggestion for Stanford's MBA degree page would look something like this:

So why is this title tag better than Stanford's current tag? Because this title tag format (which removes duplicates and adds two new related terms) creates more ranking opportunities for additional MBA program-related queries while still being able to rank for the primary query "Stanford MBA Program," including:

Two-word queries: MBA degree, business degree, graduate degree
Three-word queries: MBA degree program, MBA program Stanford, MBA graduate program, MBA graduate degree, graduate business degree

In short, my recommendation for universities is to develop and test a variety of SEO title tag formulas, choose a winner (one that boosts rankings and traffic on a variety of queries) and apply it to all site-wide degree pages. For more on this approach, read my blog post on HTML title tag formulas for SEO.

Obviously, each page should have it's own unique title tag that reflects the page content theme/topic, be it a Ph.D. degree or associates program. For colleges specifically, my SEO title tag formula suggestion would be:

[Degree]: [Secondary keywords, keyword variations] | [University name]

Now, many in academia will disagree with back loading the brand here (ie, the school's name). But I contend if your goal is to rank well in the SERPs, it's much more effective to lead with your primary keywords. Also, if your school name is too long to fit within Google's 70 character limit, I'd suggest front loading it in the meta description (like Stanford does in the example below), so you still get that element of branding, which can be of particular importance for popular universities.

And though Google truncates title tags after 70 characters with an ellipses, up to 95 characters will get indexed for searching. So even if it gets clipped, your brand will still get factored into the ranking signals and subsequent query algorithm.

But again, the best advice I can give is to experiment and test. If you're adamant about keeping your school name first (like Stanford), don't just do it because you're self important. Have some evidence to back up your stance. Try testing pages with brand in front and brand in back. See if it changes your ranking and/or click through rate. That's the only way to be certain which formula works for your particular degree pages.

Final Tip: Add Geo Modifiers to Degree Page Title Tags

If you're a state school, a community college or local commuter school, be sure to use geo-targeted keyword modifiers in your titles to capture local queries. For example, I've added the geo modifier "Boston" to this Regis College listing:

Now, that's not the current title tag for the Regis College undergraduate nursing program page. It's this:

So rather than using a more useful and frequently searched geo modifier like "Boston," Regis mistakenly opts to include the college's physical location "Weston, MA" in the title tag, which nobody is searching on and is a waste of real estate. "Boston nursing degree" is a much more popular query, as evidenced by the fact that Regis is willing to pay to rank for it:

Note to Regis: It would be a whole lot cheaper to just include "Boston" in your title tag, sprinkle mentions of "Boston" in your page content, build some links to your page with "Boston nursing degree" as the anchor text (which I discuss in detail in part two), so that way you can stop paying for clicks. Whether or not you're physically located in Boston is irrelevant because geographically you're close enough.

And besides, this isn't about where you're located on a map, it's about where you're located in the search results.

SEO Guide for College Websites, Part Two: Get the lowdown on optimizing your college degree page content for search and learn more about the importance of inbound links and where to get them.

Linkbait Formulas: X Things You Can Learn About Y from Z

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:16:16 +0000

Following in the footsteps of Ken's very popular post on title tag formulas, I've noticed that search marketing and social media marketing gurus (AKA bloggers) love to write linkbait in the form of "X Things You Can Learn About Y from Z." You can do it too—plug some numbers and concepts into the formula and the post practically writes itself! For best results, follow this handy guide:

X should be an integer, preferably between 5 and 10. Save lists longer than 10 items for your Facebook meme.
Y should be a broad, Web 2.0-ish concept like "SEO," "PPC" or "social media." Don't veer too far off course from your job description; that's what Z is for.
Z should be a pop culture reference, the geekier the better. Old standbys include Star Wars, The Matrix, The Princess Bride, Monty Python, Trekkies, etc. Remember, 7 out of 10 people in the search marketing industry are geeks; pretty sure that was a question on yesterday's survey.

For example, your linkbait could be titled "9 Things You Can Learn About Twitter from True Blood" or "5 Things You Can Learn About Conversion Rate Optimization from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." The title is the most important thing; you can figure out the "things" later.

Which brings me to my point: I like that in her linkbaiterrific 10e20 blog post "What You Can Learn About Social Media from MC Hammer," Rebecca Kelley deviates from the geek formula to reference a '90s hip-hop artist instead of a sci-fi/fantasy movie/series. I also like her choice of MC Hammer, whom we too find inspiring—believe it or not, Larry's recent MarketingProfs article ("Your Keywords: The PPC and SEO Gold Mine in Your Own Backyard") was partially inspired by this wildly effective ad:

Ed McMahon & MC Hammer In Superbowl Career Comeback @ Yahoo! Video

Gold. Keywords. See the connection? So do we.

Anyway, takeaways from Rebecca (and MC) include:

Success comes from authenticity
It requires dedication
Messaging is permanent

Search Without Keywords? That's Like Hip-Hop Without Bling

Speaking of keywords (weren't we?) I was intrigued by a post on Search Engine Land suggesting that "soon" we'll have paid search without keywords. This is according to Nick Fox, Google AdWords' business product management director, who claims keywords for paid search may be going the way of the dodo.

Why no more keywords? Because, Fox says, search queries are getting longer, up to 25% of queries are totally new, never-been-seen-before queries, searchers are getting more sophisticated, etc. And all this makes it difficult for advertisers to predict what keywords their customers will be using.

Before you throw your keyword research out the door, note that Fox says this keyword-free lifestyle is still 5 to 10 years away. In search marketing time, that doesn't really sound very "soon" to me. In a few years we might all be using Bing! (Yowza!) In the meantime, it looks like keywords are still our bread and butter for PPC.

The way to get around these longer, more sophisticated queries, of course, is to do long-tail keyword research. Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm posted a tip this week for finding long-tail opportunities in the new AdWords interface. We also advocate looking at your referring search queries to uncover long-tail keywords for both SEO and PPC.

In other non-news...

Google increased the size of its search box and corresponding font this week. It kind of reminds me of the large-print Reader's Digests in the waiting room at the ophthamologist after you get your eyes dilated. I kind of hate it. Does anyone think this makes search "easier" or "more fun"? I don't really buy that it "symbolizes" their "focus on search" either ... it was always pretty much the only thing on the page.

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2009 Search Marketing and Social Media Salary Survey

Ken Lyons — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:25:53 +0000

Search engine and social media marketing are industries that continue to grow even in the face of one of the worst economies since the Great Depression. Talented and skilled SEO, PPC, SEM and SMO professionals are still in hot demand, despite the grim economic backdrop.

Recently, we conducted a survey of search engine marketers and social media marketers to get an idea of the current state of SEM and SMO. More than 100 SEO, PPC and SMM professionals participated in our survey, giving us a window into their experience level, primary fields of expertise, and more to the point how much inbound marketing professionals are earning, given the global recession.

The results of our survey may surprise you.

2009 Search Engine Marketers and Social Media Marketers Salary Survey

Interpreting the SEM, SMO Survey Results

So to recap the results of our survey:

The majority of participants have been involved in search engine marketing or social media for 1 to 3 years, so are relatively junior in the industry
The vast majority reside in the Northeastern United States
More marketers specialize in organic search engine optimization (SEO) than PPC or social media marketing
It's close, but more SEMs and SMOs in our survey work for an agency, though the number of in-house marketers isn't far behind
Most search and social marketers earn between $25,000 to $50,000 followed closely by those earning $50,000 to $75,000

To me, the most intriguing stats are in fact the salary figures, which seem low. But that certainly could be a byproduct of the economy, where workers are earning less (forced to take pay cuts) and underemployed (forced to work fewer hours), as well as the fact that the majority of people taking our survey have 3 years or less experience and aren't in their prime earning years yet. I suspect it's a combination of both.

In any case, this survey helps to illustrate that search marketing and social media are both still young industries, so the majority of the workforce is relatively inexperienced. The results may also indicate that even search engine marketing and social media salaries aren't immune from the recession.

Final Thoughts on Our Search Marketing, Social Media Salary Survey

There are a few more points of interest I gleaned from the data that are worth noting:

If you have 1 to 3 years of experience, live in the Northeast, do SEO for an agency and make less than $25,000, then you, my friend, deserve a raise because comparatively you're underpaid. So email your manager this survey, casually drop it on his/her desk or save it for your next review. ;)
It appears that the Southwest has a shortage of search marketers and social media professionals. Meaning that maybe it's an underserved area and ripe for the picking. So if you can't find work in the Northeast, maybe you should pack your bags and head to Texas and stake your claim.

Special thanks to everyone who participated in our survey. It gave us some great insight into the current state and makeup of the professionals who engage in social media marketing and search engine optimization.

Web Analytics World Guest Post - Diagnosing Problems (& Successes) In Analytics

Tom Demers — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:55:58 +0000

I had a chance to write a guest post for Web Analytics World last week. In it I talked about quickly diagnosing quick jumps or dips in traffic or conversions, and oulined three steps for getting to the bottom of a shift in traffic:

Consider the Source
Analyze Your Overall Mix
Identify Who or What is Sending You Traffic

To learn more about each step and how you can accomplish the above in Google Analytics, check out the post.

WordStream Believes: Keyword Grouping & Organization Are Critical to Success

Elisa Gabbert — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:09:30 +0000

This is Part 3 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

Whether you're conducting keyword research primarily for search engine optimization (SEO) efforts or primarily for pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns, we believe that effective keyword grouping and organization techniques are crucial to long-term success.

Why is keyword grouping so important? Let's walk through the process. The point of doing keyword research is to inform your site's content creation as well as its information architecture (how content is topically organized), in addition to your campaign and ad group structure in Google AdWords (or other PPC platform).

Even small companies can amass thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of keywords over time as they expand their keyword research to leverage the long tail of search. With so many keywords at your disposal, it would be impossible to create a unique page on your site for each keyword (without resorting to automated, programmatic methods which aren't generally successful when it comes to satisfying human users). Nor could you create a unique PPC ad for each.

At the same time, you can't just keep cramming more keywords onto the same pages and into the same ad groups that you've already created. If you do, those pages and ad groups will become more and more scattered and general, attempting to cover topics that have little relation to each other. When you lose relevance, you tend to lose your audience.

The compromise between these two untenable scenarios is keyword grouping. By dividing your keywords into small, manageable groups according to semantic relevance, you accomplish two things:

You cut your workload significantly: Now you can create dedicated, specific landing pages for each small group of related terms, rather than each term individually.
You increase the relevance of your content: By focusing on small groups of related keywords, you maintain a high degree of relevance between the keyword and its corresponding landing page, text ad and ad group. This is good for your Quality Score as well as your natural search rankings.

For maximum effectiveness, we advocate dividing keywords into high-level groups and then smaller and smaller subgroups, creating a logical, organized hierarchy that, ideally, corresponds to your site architecture and PPC campaign structure.

Small, low-level groups represent your long-tail keywords—these are less competitive in search, less expensive for PPC and often more successful (leading to more clicks and conversions).

In short, finding an efficient, systematic way to organize your keywords for both paid and organic search is key for maximizing search ROI.

Maslow's Hierarchy for SEOs and Other SEO Advice We Agree With

Elisa Gabbert — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:51:22 +0000

This Week in Search: SEO Needs You to Need It

I saw a lot of links and tweets this week pointing to Virginia Nussey's excellent post on the SEO hierarchy of needs, based on Maslow's hierarchy, a psychological theory that says physiological and safety needs have to come before stuff like love and belonging (I almost typed "blogging").

I've created a handy (and tall) illustration to show where the SEO hierarchy fits into Maslow's hierarchy. An SEO's basic needs for Diet Dr. Pepper and a paycheck must be met before he/she can move up the hierarchy. It goes without saying that for search marketers, link-building is more basic than "intimacy" or "sense of connection," and self-esteem and self-actualization are impossible without proper website optimization. Conveniently these latter two goals can be measured in common SEO reporting metrics such as PageRank and bounce rate.

I KID, I kid—really I bring this up because there is so much to agree with in Virginia's post. She writes:

It happens a lot.

A company calls Bruce Clay, Inc. to find out what can be done to help them build links / launch a social media campaign / [insert Internet marketing service here]. But after looking at the site it becomes apparent that the SEO foundation is just too weak to support quality search engine rankings, let alone a link building campaign.

Yes! We too are all about the foundation. In fact, the need to build both paid and organic search campaigns on a solid foundation was the crux of Larry's presentation at SES last month.

Without data that tracks visitor engagement on the site, there's no baseline from which to measure the effect of SEO efforts.

And without analytics data, it's nearly impossible to understand if your site and online campaigns resonate with your target audience.

Double yes. One of the great things about online marketing is the wealth of stuff to track. At WordStream we are firm believers in keyword analytics—not just tracking your data but actually acting on it.

And I especially, extra-much, to-the-max agree with Virginia's choice for the bottom level of the pyramid: keywords.

Content is how a search engine and a human user know what your site is about, what they can expect to get from it, and where its expertise lies…

Competitive analysis and keyword research are important steps in developing site content. Be sure you're targeting the relevant and trafficked keywords that relate to your site's goals. Then develop interesting and compelling content that revolve around those keywords and goals.

I'll go a step further: Content isn't just how humans and search engines know what your site is about. Content is your site. So you need to invest in that content. We advocate ongoing keyword research that incorporates your private website data for maximum relevance and accuracy. And excellent writers don't hurt—informative content that doesn't sound like it was written by robots, for robots keeps real people coming back.

Once you have solid keyword management and content creation strategies and processes in place, you can worry about everything else: meta tags, anchor text, image optimization, landing page optimization, social media optimization, etc. Then you can finally move on to love optimization and maximizing return on self-respect.

The Big Title Tag/H1 Controversy

Another post we liked was Aaron Wall's post titled "Why Real Professional SEOs Advocate Page Title + On Page Heading Variation." Actually, that's the H1 tag—the on-page title is "Cleansing Misinformation, One Blog Post at a Time!" Wink, wink!

Though he doesn't explicitly say so, Aaron's post sure seems to be a response to Rand Fishkin's "5 Common Pieces of SEO Advice I Disagree With," one piece of which is to vary title and H1 tags. Rand claims he's never seen any benefit from this practice, and postulates that it might even be detrimental, since search engine users might land on your site, see a different title, feel confused and angry, and bounce back to the SERP.

OK, Rand doesn't actually imply that visitors will display early signs of Alzheimer's, but he does say they might find it a "very off-putting experience." I don't think people necessarily expect the on-page headline to match what they saw in Google word for word, or that they memorize that version in the first place. One can vary these tags without making them so wildly different that users feel tricked.

For his part, Aaron argues that duplication is a bad thing, and duplicating the same text in both those fields is a wasted opportunity. Why wouldn't you take every chance you can get to include another variation of the keyword? As believers in the long tail, we think this argument makes a lot of sense.

Of course everyone knows the first rule of search marketing is there are no rules. YMMV, etc. But around here, we use the Drupal plugin Aaron mentions to create separate H1 and title tags.

P.S. There was a slightly, er, more controversial controversy between Aaron and Rand this week, but I'm staying out of that one ... and now,

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WordStream's Top 5 Whiteboard Fridays From SEOmoz

Susannah Richardson — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:32:47 +0000

A lot of good things happen on Fridays: payday, a more casual office environment, the start of the weekend, and of course, a helpful lesson from Rand Fishkin and the crew at SEOmoz. For over two years now, SEOmoz has posted quick tutorial videos every Friday, also known as Whiteboard Friday.

Below are five of our favorites--cue the techno music!

PPC Basics: 10 Minute Rundown of PPC Strategies Everyone Should Know

An oldie but goodie, this video staring Tom Critchlow breaks down the most important aspects of search engine marketing and PPC.

The Future of SEO: Rand's Take on Where Search is Going

How important will content be going forward? How will Twitter affect SEO tactics? Find out what Rand thinks is coming next for search engine optimization.

Domain Trust and Authority: Google's Algorithm Changes Again

Google certainly keeps us on our toes by continuously altering their algorithm to affect SERPs and SEM strategies. This video from April gives an overall view of how Google calgulates trust and authority and suggests ways to improve your own website's rating.

How to Get Awesome Links: What Makes a Link Awesome And How to Get Them

When Rand mentioned "awesome links" in a previous Whiteboard Friday, readers wanted to know more. In this video, he goes into detail about how to evaluate and get high-quality (awesome) links.

Architecture for Commerce: Information Architecture Tips & Tricks

Do you sell something on your website? If so, this video is helpful on ways to organize your website to keep customer confusion down and sales up. Though it focuses on large commerce sites, there's still plenty to learn for even the smallest commerce website.

We hope you enjoyed our selections! With so many to choose from, it's hard to identify just 5 to highlight here (almost as difficult as picking your favorite Seinfeld episode). What's your favorite Whiteboard Friday? Let us know in the comments below!

WordStream Believes: Keyword Research Should Be Personalized and Data-Driven

Elisa Gabbert — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:43:08 +0000

This is Part 2 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

We firmly believe that the best source of keyword data is your own customers. Too often, search marketers over-rely on third-party keyword suggestion tools and neglect their own website data (server log files and keyword analytics), a completely private, self-renewing source of keyword data.

Keyword suggestion tools are fine as a jumping-off point for keyword research, but then you need to go beyond that. Build on public keyword data by refactoring insights from private data into your list for an extensive, expanding keyword research database. We believe your own website data has a number of advantages over typical keyword tools:

Personalized keyword research based on real data empowers you to make more strategic search marketing decisions. Your content for both organic and paid search campaigns is more relevant, better targeted to your audience and achieves higher rankings (in the case of PPC, for lower costs).

At WordStream, our keyword research efforts are ongoing and always incorporate this invaluable private data from our customers and readers.

WordStream Keyword Management Blog

Link Building Experts Interview Series: Ben Wills & Garrett French

The Week in Search: Even More Ways to Brainstorm Blog Posts

The Obligatory Aaron Wall Worship

WordStream at PPC Summit

It's #FollowFriday Time

Follow Us on Twitter

Have a Tip for WordStream's Follow Friday?

5 SEO Myths Busted

1) Google favors old domains

2) Links from article syndication and press release distribution are worthless

3) Meta tags have no impact on rankings

4) Pretty, keyword-specific URLs don’t matter

5) Toolbar PageRank is Meaningless

New White Paper: Four Steps to Better Keyword Grouping

3 Things You Need to Know About Long-Tail Marketing with Advanced Broad Match

Improve Your Paid Search Performance by Addressing These 5 Common PPC Mistakes

Ignoring Quality Score-Friendly Campaign Structure

Bidding at the Ad Group Level

No Ad Text Testing

Ignoring the Content Network

Under-Utilizing Negative Keywords

Link Building Experts Interview Series: Debra Mastaler

About Debra Mastaler

Brush Up on Your Social Skills: The Week in Social Search

Are you tired of socializing yet?

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Google PageRank Update: October 29, 2009

Top SEO Candy Websites

Top SEO Candy Company Websites: SERP Analysis Process

Top SEO Candy Websites: The Definitive Rankings

Top SEO Candy Websites: The Big Winners

Interesting Side Notes and Honorable Mentions

So Whose Candy Keyword Rankings are More Sour than Sweet?

Attention: Top SEO Candy Websites Winners

Monthly Blog Roundup: WordStream's October Highlights

Analyzing Bounce Rate Using Compete Destination Analytics

Bounce Rate Factor #1: Traffic Source

Bounce Rate Factor #2: Page Content/Structure

Bounce Rate Factor #3: Exit Destinations

Exit Destinations & Bounce Rates: Where are They Going?

Using Compete Pro to Analyze Bounce Rates

What's Missing From This Bounce Rate Analysis?

Google "Triple SERP Listings" or Double Indented SERP Results on Google.com

Interview with the Experts: Ruud Hein

The Future of Content Creation: Keyword Research on Steroids

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Advanced Link Building: Clone Your Most Successful Link Profiles

Methods for Link Analysis

Step One: Identify Top Performing Pages

Step Two: Create External Link Analysis Report

Step Three: Create Internal Link Analysis Report

Now, Clone Your Link Profile

Using Google Analytics Advanced Segments for Keyword Research

What, Exactly, Determines Your PPC Keyword Price?

SEO Dojo Launches Private SEO Community & Forum

Special Offer!

Another Week, Another Battle in the War on SEO

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We've Moved!

WordStream: The Early Months

WordStream Federal St. Office

WordStream's New Back Bay Office

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites: My Process

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites: The Definitive Rankings

Top SEO Web Design Company Websites: The Big Winners

Interesting Side Notes from the Study

What Can Other Web Design Firms Take Away from This?

Pimp Your PPC Ad: 5 Lessons from Lackluster Text Ads

Lesson #1: You have limited space. Don't waste it.

Lesson #2: Don't be generic.

Lesson #3: If your ad is relevant to the keyword, prove it!

Lesson #4: Consider the customer's intent.