The Thrill of the Chase

Chasing links is the traditional way of building links. This includes things like submitting your site to directories, creating press releases, submitting articles and comments with your site link and anchor text, and other strategies. While it’s the most common way to acquire links, it’s also the most time-consuming, labor-intensive approach. But who is going to disparage a tried and true technique with results?

Step 1: Identifying link targets. First off it’s important to consider and research the links that are most valuable to your site. One way to do this is to scour through search engine results to see the top spots for your keywords, and attempting to acquire links from those sites. Another way is to look at your competitors and see what links they are getting (Yahoo Site Explorer is great for this). Personally, I like the latter method because you know that if your competitor obtained a link, surely you can too.

Step 2: Categorize your targets. There are different kinds of sites and each will require a unique approach, so you should look at where the most valuable links are coming from. Are they from blogs or news items? From link directories or review sites? Membership organizations you might want to join or already belong to? By understanding the kinds of links you’re after, you can hone your approach and employ specific strategies.

Step 3: Approaching the link target. As with any chase, approaching the target deftly and surely is of paramount importance. Press releases, for instance, have a particular format and style. Your success rate will be higher if you follow the guidelines and focus on a specific, newsworthy idea. Link directories also have their own rules and guidelines. Read them carefully and make certain you meet the qualifications before submitting. (Notice that I am assuming that the directory will review your site. That’s because a directory without an editorial board, one that lets every site in, probably isn’t worth your time as it will be demoted by search engines, either now or sometime soon.) Some blogs accept paid reviews, but probably the best ones won’t. Study what authority sites are already linking to so that you have the right idea of what to present them with. Always get the right contact information, an email address or phone number, and do things in an individual, personal, and personable manner. The chase of link building is a refined art!

Pros

Chasing after links allows you to be more selective and gives you greater control over your link structure and link text. It’s going to be naturally high quality and diverse. If you look at my previous post about link mass, you know that I encourage you to go after the hardest ones first because they usually give you the most link juice.

Cons

The obvious con is the time and labor required by you. Chasing after links isn’t something you want to be outsourcing because it requires personal rapport. It necessitates having your own voice and building a connection with representatives of other sites. Clearly it also takes a whole lot of time and patience.

* A Caution About Link Exchanges

Sometimes when you ask for a link, the site owner or blogger wants something in return, including a link back to their site. While this is standard practice, you don’t want to get involved in too many link exchanges because it could create an artificial-looking link profile. This is especially true if you use the same keyword-rich anchor text every time. Search engines are getting better at noticing this. Get your brand name out there first, and then start with keyword anchor texts.

The Pleasure of Being Chased

A less traditional but highly effective way of getting links is doing just the opposite—getting people to link directly to you without asking. Often called link baiting, the idea is to create viral content so powerful that it attracts links. This might come in the form of a useful step-by-step guide, a widget, an online tool, or a really funny viral video. All of these call for a slightly different strategy, but it’s always a similar process. Clearly, it also requires creativity and it involves more risk, but there are experts who can help you take a good idea where it needs to go.

Step 1: Identify the influencers. Instead of link targets, we identify the influencers. These are the “sneezers,” or what Rand Fishkin calls the linkerati. They are the people who will talk about your content, include a link, and by the sheer volume of people who view their sites, you’ll get even more links. Social media sites are probably some of the best sources for influencers (Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, etc.). A lot of journalists and other people interested in news go to these sites. Of course if you make it to the New York Times or Yahoo news, you’ll get lots of exposure and links as well.

Step 2: Choosing your content. You must understand which kinds of content do well on those sites, but the basic idea is quite obvious. I’ve spoken before about creating content that drives emotion—stuff that is often even controversial. That’s what gets people excited and talking. Of course controversial content may not be right for your particular brand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with interesting resources. Often you can look at things that have done well before and decide how you can make something better or go at it from a different angle.

Step 3: Promoting the content. Submit your content to social sites or other places where you can get exposure. Titles are very important in social media because it encourages people to read and some people vote based just on that. It’s also a good idea to begin building relationships with power users, or become one yourself—power users have more of a following on social media sites so they get more votes, increasing your chances for exposure and links. I’d like to be one myself, but I barely have enough time to blog!

Pros

When successful, a good link bait will yield a massive amount of links. Ultimately, it requires less effort and is more cost effective. People will link to you with lots of different kinds of anchor text and from many different kinds of sites, giving you a very natural link profile.

Cons

While the pros are really outstanding and hard to ignore, link baiting is more risky. You’re not guaranteed to be successful and, more than likely, it will take you a few tries to learn the ropes. The results are also unpredictable; you could get just one or two links, or hundreds. Finally, it bears mentioning that you’ll have little control over your link structure and link text. While I’ve stressed that you don’t want an artificial link structure, the point really is about ranking for specific keywords. A bunch of random traffic will get you hits, but not necessarily for the keywords you truly want.

Float Like A Butterfly And Sting Like A Bee

The secret to link building truly rests in finding the proper mix of both chasing links and being chased. I don’t think that link acquisition should be an either/or scenario. I recommend starting with 50/50 investment both in time and money for each type of link acquisition. Diversifying is also a sound strategy for your budget because, after all, link baiting may be cost-effective, but it’s risky. Eventually you may want to shift to something more like 80/20 for what works for you and your site. In my experience, this is inevitably viral content and link baiting, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

I’ll leave you with one last idea that can help you combine the power of link baiting with the focus of anchor texts in traditional link acquisition. Often when you create a tool for others to use you offer them a “place this code” box to use in their web page or blog template. Instead of offering up the same anchor text link back to your site, use software on the backend that has a list of anchor texts that you want to target. Have the software rotate the anchor text each time so that different users copying the code will display varying anchor texts linking back to you.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll work on this idea myself. Otherwise, sound off in the comments about your own experience with link acquisition. Are you a chaser or a chasee?

When you check the backlinks of sites ranking for competitive keywords (terms with many search results) you see that those sites have a large number of links pointing to them. But if you count the links of the top ten (using Yahoo Site Explorer, as the rest of the backlink checkers are not very useful), you notice that the results at the top don’t necessarily have more links than the ones at the bottom. This is the case because each link carries a unique rank-boosting weight (real PageRank and other link-value factors in the case of Google) that contributes to the ranking of the page for that particular term. In order to simplify things, I like to refer to the combinations of positive and negative link value factors of a page as its Link Mass.

Understanding Link Mass

In order to explain link mass better, let me first outline a couple of fundamental concepts: importance and reputation. Importance (or PageRank) is a measure of the visibility of a page. This is regularly represented by the sheer number of incoming links a site has and their respective importance. However, a page can be very important (highly visible), but not necessarily very reputable. For search engines the reputation of a page depends primarily on how much it is associated with spam. Search engines internally label each page in their index as spam or not spam (using a range instead of just black or white). The best way to understand reputation is to think of it like your credit score. The more infractions you commit, the more points are taken from your score. Similarly, the more your site links to sites that are considered spammy, the more it affects your score. There are other factors that can affect your reputation and flag your site as potentially spammy: getting too many links in a short period of time without natural signs to support it, having an artificial (unnatural) pattern in your link structure, evidence of massive link exchanges, or having the majority of links coming from very low-quality sources (already flagged as spam by the search engine). The idea is that your importance improves with the quantity and quality of your incoming links, and your reputation diminishes with any signal that search engines can pick out flagging your site as guilty of link spam.

With these concepts clear, it is simple to explain link mass. The link mass of a page is the sum of the importance (or real PageRank) contributions from incoming links, minus the reductions in the reputation score for the reasons explained above. A few other things to note:

1. The more links you have and the higher their quality, the higher your link mass; the more negative elements in your site or the sites linking to you the less your link mass.

2. Pages with higher link mass contribute more link mass to the pages they link to than pages with less link mass.

3. Links coming from diverse sources contribute more link mass than links coming from affiliated sources.

Calculating Link Mass

Determining link mass requires a careful and thorough analysis of the link structure of a site or page. First you need to extract all the links to a site, as I explained in a previous post (BTW, I still plan to release the tool I promised in that post, I am just not very happy with the performance at the moment), and then you need to measure the importance and reputation of each incoming link. The importance can be as simple as determining the toolbar PageRank. Determining the reputation of a page is difficult because we don’t know for sure which pages Google or other search engines flag as spam. However, I think the technique I described in the link building project article offers a good approximation of the link mass of a page, because any negative factors are factored in when search engines decide to prioritize the crawling and indexing of the site. After all, why would they want to crawl a page often if they believe it is not very reputable?

Identifying link opportunities

On the Web there are content consumers and content producers. It is important to understand this because content producers and content consumers do not regularly speak the same language. Content consumers are the ones who type queries into search engines. Search engine rankings, however, are primarily influenced by the content producers via the links and endorsements they include in their content on a regular basis. I am not going to discuss here the motivations of content producers to give links (paid or editorial), but rather I want to offer a very simple way you can identify link opportunities. When a content producer writes content naturally, it is unlikely that he or she will use the exact same words that somebody (the content consumer) types into the search box. In a previous blog post, I talked about how people type their problems into search engines by expressing the symptoms they have, not necessarily by typing in the solutions. This is why content producers need keyword research to write more successful content. It is also one of my favorite strategies to find keywords with low link mass (and thus require less effort to achieve).

How to determine the effort required and project the ROI

Link mass is therefore an important metric to consider when determining the amount of effort necessary to rank for a particular term. Just counting the sheer number of links for a top-ranking site doesn’t tell us the whole story. We need to consider the importance and reputation of each one of the links, because some links will contribute more link mass (ranking power) than others, and it is usually a good idea to try to get the hardest ones first. The easy ones will be easy.

Different link-building strategies require different amounts of effort, time and budgets. If you are a smart link builder you will try to sync your keyword research with your link-building strategy. Among a group of relevant keywords for your site, you want to focus on the ones that have the same or similar demand (volume of searches or potential clicks) but that require the less effort (lowest link mass) in order to begin seeing results sooner rather than later.

It is best to keep a simple spreadsheet where you can tally those numbers. For example, let’s say that you are trying to get your site to reach a link mass requiring ten links with a PageRank of 7, five links with a PageRank of 4, and twenty links with a PageRank of 3. You also want to make sure that the sites where the links are placed do not have any visible spam signals, such as a very old search engine cache or massive link-exchange directory. Then you measure how much time and effort it takes you to get a PageRank-7 link, a PageRank-5 and a PageRank-3. Please note that I am not talking about buying links, but the effort (e.g. research, write and pitch a guest post to a site with such characteristics, or finding a dofollow blog and leaving a thoughtful comment). Knowing your target link mass along with these numbers will allow you to project the cost and time to reach a particular ranking. You can combine the data from your keyword research to determine the revenue potential of the keywords, and with some simple math calculate the ROI for yourself or your client.

Final Thoughts

The two most fundamental aspects of any SEO project in terms of the return for time spent are keyword research and link building. You need the keyword research to make sure you are getting relevant traffic, but without links you won’t rank for any keyword that is going to send you search traffic, period. I hope this helps you with your own link-building strategies. Let me know in the comments.

If you have read some of my posts, you know that I don’t like to do what everybody else is doing and I think that reflects strongly in the way I designed the software. For instance, if you have used any of the keyword research tools on the market, you know that there is little that differentiates one from the other. Most do the same thing: find the keywords people are actively searching for, measure their competitiveness, assess their value, and so on. RankSense is different.

In this post I would like to go deeper into what I believe is one of the most powerful and useful features of RankSense—a radically different keyword research module.

What Everyone Else Is Doing

I am sure most of you are familiar with rank checking tools. If you search for “rank checking” you will end up with thousands of tools (free and paid) to help you identify and monitor your rankings for the top search engines. A lot of people are extremely obsessed with checking their site rankings and would like to see their sites move up in the hopes of grabbing more traffic and business.

But let me explain a few fundamental problems with the current rank checking approach.

1. You need a prodigious mind. Current rank checking software assumes that you know what keywords people are typing to find your website. In reality, you might be able to know a handful of keywords, but realistically you are not going to come up with all of them.

2. Modern search engines present different results to different geographic locations. As part of search engines’ efforts to improve the relevancy of their results, they use geolocation technology to present results relevant to searchers in different cultures/countries. This is a problem for rank checking tools that, depending upon where they are being run, produce completely different results than expected. For example, I have a customer that used to outsource his SEO to India; when they ran the rank checker software in Asia, the site would not appear in the top ten for important keywords, but when the search was performed in the US, voilà, the site was there.

3. Personalized results. Personalized search is one of the biggest challenges that current rank checking tools face. Millions of users will have completely different profiles and your site might come up in the top ten for some users and not for others. How do these checker find your rankings in such a scenario? The simple answer is they don’t. Now, imagine that Google makes personalized results the default.

4. Sending automated queries to search engines. Search engines have specific terms of service and sending automated queries for rank checking violates them. Problems arise, including your IP address being banned or constantly being asked to provide a captcha.

5. Focus on rankings instead of on useful search traffic. This is a fundamental problem that I see come up when people focus too much on rank checking. Anybody can rank in the top ten for keywords that nobody is searching for. As a business owner, a top-ten ranking doesn’t mean much to me unless the keywords that I am trying to rank for are practical and useful for my business. So just any top-ten ranking is of no value—the real goal is a top-ten ranking for keywords that people are actively searching for and that can potentially help my business achieve its aims.

RankSense and the Keyword Goldmine

In contrast to other popular SEO suites and tools in the market, RankSense is primarily a log analysis tool. Why? I find that traffic logs are a goldmine of information about the activity and performance of the website. RankSense focuses on mining information that is particularly useful for organic search optimization.

The first process you can try once you have set up your site properly in RankSense is the “Discover Rankings” feature. It is like a modern rank checker without any of the problems that I detailed above. It works instead by studying your traffic log files and detecting all the keywords that people are using to find your site. But more important than detecting keywords and search engines, it also detects the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) where the user found your site. This is one feature you won’t find anywhere else and one that I am particularly proud of.

The benefits of this approach are many:

1. The software can produce a list of all the keywords that drive traffic to your site along with their corresponding traffic and ranking. We have tested the software with sites that get search traffic from tens of thousands of keywords (although that appears to be a limit that we are working to optimize in terms of memory usage).

2. The physical location of the user doesn’t matter. If the user saw the search result and clicked on it, our software will include the keyword in the list.

3. Personalized results are no problem either because, as long as a user found the site through a personalized result and clicked on it, the keyword and ranking will be there.

4. Because RankSense uses log files, it doesn’t need to send automated queries to the search engines to identify where your site ranks.

Going Beyond Keywords

A description of RankSense’s keyword research tools would be incomplete if I didn’t mention another important differentiation and powerful feature that you don’t see in other SEO tools/suites. All the tools in RankSense collaborate—that is to say that they share the data and information gathered automatically. This particular feature saves time and simplifies a lot of things.

For example, the keyword research tool transparently extracts the current rankings from the rank checker tool. When you enter Keyword Selection (assuming you ran the Discover Rankings task in Smart Mode) your keyword basket is already populated with a bunch of keywords in blue. These keywords are there because you are already ranking for them, but not coming up in the first page of results. There is no easier way to improve your existing rankings for a whole list of long tail keywords than working on these. All current keyword research tools on the market require that you type in some seed keywords (you can do that in RankSense too, of course) but ours can automatically recommend the keywords that you should be ranking for. It is a feature that you won’t see anywhere else. For good measure, RankSense can also extract keywords by doing an on-page analysis of your site, or even your competitor’s site.

The Real Value of Opportunity

One of the most useful elements of any keyword research tool is the ability to estimate the value and level of competition for any keyword. This allows you to prioritize your content development efforts. Focus on keywords that are actively searched for, that can potentially bring money or positive branding traffic to the table, and you can get good rankings in a reasonable amount of time. If you instead focus on keywords that are too competitive to start with or that don’t bring enough money or branding benefits, you will lose both time and money.

In order to gauge the value of the keywords, RankSense incorporates a metric we call Opportunity. Essentially, it combines the frequency a keyword is searched for or clicked, how much PPC advertisers are bidding on the keyword at the moment, and how many results come up in the organic search results (you can adjust all of these settings in the interface). The idea is this: if PPC advertisers bid high on the keyword consistently, then the keyword must be a valuable enough to at least break even for the revenue it gains you. So, our Opportunity index is directly proportional to the number of searches or clicks the term receives and the PPC bid value of the keyword, and indirectly proportional to the number of sites competing on the search results.

Organization is Key for Keywords

Most keyword research experts will tell you that organization is a very important element of keyword research. You need to organize your keywords into meaningful groups so that you can create relevant content (i.e. landing pages) that include the right keywords in the text and start getting organic traffic. With RankSense, you can group keywords based on the intention of the user: navigational searches, informational or transactional. We chose this default set of groups because it highlights the importance of driving searchers to the pages where they are most likely to find what they are looking for. Although it is tempting to send everybody to your product purchase page, that is not what everybody is looking for. You want to send people searching for information to your marketing articles, for example. Of course the software allows you to create additional groups and organize your research in any way you think is more efficient or appropriate for you or your client.

The way the software is designed means that we focus on highlighting opportunities where you can drastically improve the quality and quantity of your search traffic as opposed to focusing on just getting top rankings. This can be seen very well in the Reports section of the software, which is another interesting feature. As you make progress through your project and you complete each of the tasks, actionable reports are generated from the data you provide and that the tools produce. For instance, I am sure you want to know which keywords are driving the most traffic and also see where you are ranking for such keywords. As I explained in a previous post, by simply creating more attractive search snippets you can improve the click-through rate and get far more conversions.

The Last Word

All right, I’m going to pause here. I can write forever about my software and what it can do, but I think it is better to leave you to test it out and tell me what you think. As usual, I encourage constructive criticism. Leave me a comment about what you think of the software and places where you see a need for improvement.

As I like to do, let me explain my process with an actual example.

Last month there was an interesting post on SEOmoz about session IDs and HTTP cookies. In the post, Rand asserted that search engines don’t support cookies, and it’s therefore another alternative to controlling robot access to a site. Very clever; I don’t know how I didn’t think about that first!

Well, in the comments, King questioned the validity of the original assumption that search engines don’t accept cookies. Here is what he had to say:

I’m not sure its [sic] really true that search engines (Google at least) don’t accept cookies. I recently (well 6 months ago) created a site that checks for cookies before allowing customers access to the shopping cart. If cookies are disabled it sends the user to a[n] info page on the topic Google indexed the actual shopping cart page perfectly well, they totally bypassed the “cookie info” page, and never indexed that at all. Cookie checking was done entirely via PHP code.

For a while I have assumed that Google does not support cookies, but the truth is that search engines are constantly being improved and have evolved over the years. For instance, years ago search engine crawlers did not follow links embedded in JavaScript, but recent experiments have proven that at least Google does follow the less intricate ones.

So, this was a perfect candidate for a simple experiment. Let’s confirm whether search engines accept cookies or not. As best I can, I like to follow the scientific method.

The observation

In order to determine whether or not search engines accept cookies I configured my web server to append cookie information to my visitor log file. If you use Apache as your webserver, this is how you do it. Under your website configuration, change your log format to include HTTP cookie information, like this:

LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\” \”%{Cookie}i\”"

The reason I choose logs for my observation is because search engines do not execute the JavaScript tags commonly used by web-based analytics packages. I need to see the behavior of the robots on the site, so my logs are the most logical option. An alternative would be to use a packet sniffer such as tcpdump, but sniffers spit out far more information than I need and parsing web server logs with regular expressions is very simple and straight forward. There is no need to complicate things.

First, I check the log for regular user visits to the site (especially the pages that return HTTP cookies) and I confirm that the cookies are being logged when the user is accepting (and returning them).

195.62.206.192 - - [01/Mar/2008:03:03:04 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “http://hamletbatista.com/2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; MediaCenter PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; InfoPath.2)” “__utma=205505417.902185886.1204356928.1204356928.1204356928.1; __utmb=205505417; __utmc=205505417; __utmz=205505417.1204356928.1.1.utmccn=(organic)|utmcsr=google|utmctr=link%3Awww.mutinydesign.co.uk|utmcmd=organic; fbbb_=1343817243.1.1204357560473; subscribe_checkbox_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=unchecked; comment_author_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=Webeternity+web+design; comment_author_email_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=goodsite%40webeternity.co.uk; comment_author_url_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webeternity.co.uk”

Here most of the cookies are from Google Analytics (check the ones that start with __utm and utm).

Side note: Here I confirmed my suspicion. My loyal reader David Hopkins is responsible for the large amount of manual comment spam I’m receiving lately. Apparently his competitors want to rank top ten in Google for “web design” too

If search engines support cookies, they should return them back and the server will log them with their visit in an entry.

Now, let see what happened when each one of the top search engines visited the site.

Google - no cookies logged

74.52.123.218 - - [04/Mar/2008:00:20:56 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”

Yahoo - no cookies logged

74.6.28.203 - - [01/Mar/2008:19:18:36 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)” “-”

Msn/Live - no cookies logged

65.55.209.101 - - [02/Mar/2008:06:22:15 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “-” “msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)” “-”

As you can see from the log, none of the top search engines returned the cookies and hence the web server didn’t log them.

Formulation of the hypothesis

From direct observation I can conclude that, as of this moment, top search engines do not support HTTP cookies.

Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena

I can therefore predict that it’s possible to use cookies to control or modify the access of robots to my website. A lot of creative things can be done using this technique.

Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters

Here is my call to you to duplicate these tests on your site and report back whether you get the same results. This is the step that most experimenters miss. You need to share your findings with your peers and the exact procedure you used to arrive at your conclusions, and invite them to test as well and see if they arrive at the same results. “But why do we need to do this?” you might ask. It’s because of human error.

Incorporating Human Error

We are imperfect and we make mistakes. I first learned this lesson years ago in a physics class I took in high school. The teacher taught us to repeat each measurement several times, average the results, and use the lowest and highest values as limits. The idea is that we are must face the fact that we won’t know the exact value, but we can determine a pretty accurate range. The concept of human error in that class was so interesting that I have never forgotten about it (as you can see :-)).

Human error is not limited to just taking measurements. There are many psychological issues as well. Here are four common mistakes that I regularly make and that I see others making when they come up with new SEO theories:

1. Bias. Many times when you are testing a theory you already want it to be true or you want it to be false. It is very hard to start experimenting without some prejudice about what you expect the outcome to be. At the same time, it is just as easy to ignore supporting evidence that is contrary to your desired outcome. Sometimes you want to believe so hard ignore what the data is actually telling you. This is particularly true when you are testing just to prove a point or to prove somebody else wrong.

2. Failing to estimate the errors in the experiment. As I explained above, there will always be a margin of error, and we need to account for it or risk losing the entire value of the experiment.

3. Failing to repeat the experiment under different scenarios and circumstances. I have to admit that this is one mistake I make too often. I guess I am too lazy to repeat my experiments, but nonetheless I know very well the importance of being able to repeat and confirm the conclusions. It is particularly important that the test be duplicated by your peers who will hopefully have different biases than you.

4. Identifying symptoms as diseases. One of the disadvantages that we (SEOs) have is that search engines are black boxes and we don’t know for sure what is going on inside them. We can see the search results and study patterns to arrive at conclusions, but for example, many times observations we make are mistakenly labeled as penalties. It’s easy to jump headlong in the wrong direction. I like to draw this parallel: imagine telling your doctor that you have a headache and he returns with, “Oh, you must have a brain tumor.” There are probably thousands of diseases that share a headache as a symptom and only further tests are going to get at the right diagnosis. The same happens when you observe search results or search engine robot behavior. There are probably hundreds of reasons why a particular result has changed, including something as simple as a random search engine glitch. To be on the safe side, I simply ask myself a common sense question: “What would be the purpose of the search engine doing this? Does this help them do a better job or am I misinterpreting the results?”

Experimenting and testing theories is what separates experts from the pretenders. You need to be highly skeptical of any new concept unless you can see solid proof or you can test it yourself. I’ve witnessed many interesting ideas and concepts unearthed, not because of deep research or deduction, but by observation and trial and error. It’s important to have a receptive mind. Try to avoid these mistakes when you are doing your SEO experiments and I am sure you will become a stellar SEO expert in no time!

The Challenge

Toolbar PageRank was a very important factor in measuring the quality of a link for a long while. But Google has played so much with it that it can hardly be considered reliable these days. I like to see problems like these as challenges and opportunities, so I decided to look hard for alternatives. I know there are several other methods (like using the Yahoo backlink count, number of indexed pages, etc.) but I did not feel these directly reflected how the link was important to Google, or to any other specific search engine. Each search engine has its own evaluation criteria when it comes to links, so using metrics from one to measure another is not a reliable gauge in my opinion.

I knew the answer was out there, and I knew just where to look.

Research: Putting the pieces together

Especially beyond the beginner stage, you need to make it a habit to research and read as much as possible. For advanced SEO knowledge, my favorite sources of research material are search engine–related patents and information retrieval research papers. In order to avoid getting lost while reading such documents, I recommend first reading the excellent tutorials on linear algebra and Information Retrieval from Dr. Garcia. Bill Slawsky also has an excellent blog where he unearths useful patents and provides excellent commentary. In fact Bill unearthed a very relevant patent, which provided a valuable insight for my Toolbar PageRank challenge. It is called: Anchor tag indexing in a web crawler system. Here is part of Bill’s conclusion:

The information about crawling rates, and the possible role of PageRank along with frequency of changes in content, which could influence how frequently a page is crawled is also the most detailed that I can recall seeing in a patent from Google.

From the patent I learned that search engines (at least Google) define their crawler priorities based in part on how important they think the page is and how frequently the page is updated.

So here comes a logical conclusion. If Google (and maybe other search engines) use the real PageRank or importance of the page as a criterion to determine how frequently they should visit the page, then by studying how frequently they visit a page I can indirectly determine the real PageRank or importance of the page to the search engine. Bingo!

Digging Deeper: Your own research

If you want to dig deeper, and you definitely should, you must learn to find valuable sources yourself and come up with your own conclusions. I personally love Google’s patent search. You simply need to use keywords like “pagerank,” “yahoo,” “google,” “anchor text,” and so on; you can order them by date and select “Issued Patents” or “Patent Applications” to come up with a goldmine of information and topics. Many of the ideas are never implemented, but some are—and it is good to be a step ahead of the rest of your competitors. In order to find interesting research papers you can use Google Scholar and type in queries related to search engine research. The patent search usually returns more recent documents, however.

(Another rich source of research material is the bibliography and references of these research papers and patents. Sometimes I follow so many references that I lose track and focus, so be aware.)

Now, the real trick is how you go about reading this information—back to front. There’s no need to read the entire paper from start to finish to find something valuable. Check the title and if it is interesting enough, read the abstract. If the abstract is interesting then you can go straight to the conclusion and learn the most valuable information. Why? Because most papers concentrate on proving their conclusions, but since the authors have already taken great pains to do so, you don’t need to waste your time, too! Of course if you are curious about something you always have the option to go back to the explanation and see how the author came up with it.

Making Something Useful

Now, with my challenge identified, my research bearing valuable fruit, I just needed to put it all together to create a solution. As a technical guy, my job was now to figure out how to determine the crawl rate and update rate of the page. In reality, it didn’t take much research. Google stamps the cache pages with the time of the crawl/download and I was already familiar with the concept of “conditional HTTP GET”(this is explained in the article). It was just a matter of putting all the pieces together. I also included the indexing rate because it is useful in detecting duplicate content issues and hard-to-detect penalization problems, but in reality is not a requirement for the technique to work.

I hope you’ll read the full article to appreciate this new technique to evaluate links and pages.

Final Thoughts

Here’s a schematic to generalize the concepts explained here for your own challenges.

1. Identify a problem/challenge and note the major roadblocks.
2. Research and test alternative solutions to the problem. Each problem can be solved in many different ways. Some are better than others depending on what the goals and constraints are.
3. Put all the pieces of your research and testing together by making logical connections. It is incredible how simple ideas can turn into great ones by combining the right pieces of information.
4. Share and get peer feedback.
5. Adjust your idea based on constructive criticism.
6. Go back to step 1.

This conference was particularly important for me because I wanted to use SMX West to help launch our flagship product, RankSense. We have worked on the software for more than three years (including several months of beta testing) and I think SMX was the just the right place for its debut. The first day I had to work with my team in final preparations for the booth, and the other two days I ended up staying on to answer questions and speak with guests, so I was not able to attend all the conference sessions. But I met a lot of wonderful people with whom I have exchanged emails, phone calls or instant messages, or whose quality work I simply enjoy online. Thanks to all of you, the conference was big success.

Although I was not able to attend the sessions, which from what I heard were extremely helpful, I did learn something very important. While I began by explaining the value of RankSense to people visiting the booth, on many occasions I had to back up and explain the value of SEO. Many folks I spoke with were unfamiliar with organic SEO because they primarily did pay-per-click (PPC) or were completely new to search marketing (some were coming from email marketing or other online marketing disciplines). I learned to perfect a pitch that worked very well, and I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you.

Here is how I explained the business value of SEO…

If there were no SEOs

Let me tell you the hard but honest truth: You don’t need SEO to rank highly in search engines. If you write high-quality content consistently and that content is link-worthy, the content will rank in the search engines. Period. Why? If this weren’t the case, search engines would be broken; it is their job to make sure that good content ranks first.

“So,” asks the conference-goer, “why do I need to hire an SEO or to optimize my site at all?” The short answer is that, without SEO, you have absolutely no control over what terms your content will rank for. Without SEO, you are leaving it up to Google to figure out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in most cases. But if you want more than just visitors—if your aim to have users who take action, buy your product, download your software, sign up for your newsletter—you need to put serious effort into targeting the right keywords, the ones that will send the most qualified visitors to your site.

The longer answer is that there are so many ways to improve search traffic to your site that it is simply impossible to pretend that it can happen automatically with no optimization. Personally, I see SEO as anything you can do to maximize the quality and the quantity of the traffic you get from a search engine using many different strategies. These include:

1. Improving the keyword use in the content so that rankings move up to the first page of search results for non-competitive keywords.
2. Making the page focus on more profitable keywords.
3. Creating new content that contains additional, relevant keywords.
4. Obtaining more links to the site or improving the site structure in order to get more pages into the search engine index (and hence more search referrals from additional long-tail queries).
5. Improving the title and descriptions for higher click-through in the search results.
6. Removing duplicate content issues to get more content indexed.
7. Removing canonicalization issues to improve link juice distribution and help get the crawler to visit more pages.
8. Removing broken links so that search engine robots can find all pages of the site.
9. Fixing bad web server configurations.
10. And so many more, it’s impossible to name them all!

There is no perfect optimization; there is always room for improvement. At the same time, business situations and search engine formulas change, and so do your optimization needs.

For those who already had PPC experience, it was far simpler to explain the value of SEO. I just pointed out that they already have to manage their campaigns and find the best performing keywords, ads and landing pages for a reason. Those same PPC optimization concepts apply to SEO.

How do you explain the value of SEO to your clients? As usual, please let me know what you think in the comments.

Cheers, and thanks again to everyone we met at SMX!

Internet security is a big problem, and it isn’t just for the IT staff anymore. It affects us as SEOs. Don’t believe me? Consider the incident reported at the end of last year by security research firm Sunbelt Software.

…criminals are now combining SEO tactics and booby-trapped Web pages, and doing it systematically. By posting tens of thousands of Web sites simultaneously, criminals can take over all the top spots on a search results page, casting a wide net that’s more likely to catch Web users. Eckelberry described these criminals as “SEO Gods,” saying they can “take any site and get it on the first page of Google results.”

Instead of wasting energy defacing sites and showing them off as trophies to their peers on IRC, hackers are now modifying the code of hacked sites to include (invisible) links to their web properties or link farms. The article talks about virus writers creating tens of thousands of websites and cross-linking them using all sorts of queries as anchor text. They then spam blog comments around the Web to improve the overall PageRank of the link farm.

Hackers already know how to break into sites. Now that they see the profit that can be made from top-ten search rankings, they have adapted their techniques to break to take advantage. Currently, search engines’ quality reviewers can detect most sites utilizing these black-hat techniques because they show up pretty obviously as SPAM. However, this is just the beginning, and I’m willing to predict that this is going to scale with cleverer hacks that are harder to detect. Most break-ins will be highly sophisticated and highly automated. They will “recruit” thousands of computers into their link-farm. If your site is one of those “recruited” without your knowledge, your site will most likely be penalized by the search engine along with the whole group.

How can somebody break into my server if they don’t know my password?

I remember my days working for a big ISP, setting up firewalls, installing the latest patches and hardening servers. It was a constant battle between the hackers and me (crackers is the correct term, but I will use hackers out of habit). One day one of the consultants the company hired to do penetration testing told me that I was not letting him “do his job.” He meant breaking into the servers of course; the only thing left for me to do, he said, was to disconnect the servers from the network. I couldn’t resist laughing out loud.

I had another boss once that would ask me simply to change the passwords each time our sites got hacked. He didn’t even want to buy a firewall, the most basic form of protection. Why changing the password is ineffective may be too obvious for those of you with some security background—but that’s clearly not everyone.

Hackers break into systems by exploiting software vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities exist because most software is tested under “normal” circumstances. Software developers don’t usually expect users to provide input designed to fool the program into doing something it was not designed to do. But that’s exactly what hackers do using buffer overflows, string format attacks, script and SQL injection, default passwords, and other tools of the trade.

Protect your site from hackers now

You can protect your site or blog from such attacks, however. The first order of business is fairly straightforward:

1. Server hardening. Update all software, apply the latest security patches and disable all unneeded services.

2. Install a firewall.

3. Install an Internet security scanner and instruction detection, such as snort.org. Set it up to poll your site every day and address all issues that come up in the reports.

Unfortunately, some setups require a large number of software packages and keeping that list of components up to date can be quite a nightmare. The most common approach to deal with this is to use a multilayer approach—separate servers that do specific functions, such as a web server, database server, application server, etc. It is also common to host the blog, forum, chat rooms, and other elements on separate servers because each requires different applications and poses new security risks. The idea behind all this is to, at the very least, isolate the sensitive parts of your system, like your e-commerce components, customer list, and other delicate information.

Where SEO meets security

When you set up a blog or forum on a separate server, you still want to have it linked from the main site, typically using subdomains like forums.sitename.com or blog.sitename.com. The problem with this approach for SEO purposes is that search engines regularly treat each subdomain as a separate site when counting incoming links. The incoming link juice is therefore split among the domains. Google makes an exception only when displaying search results.

The single domain will benefit from higher rankings if links to the subdomains are funneled to the main one. Luckily, there is a technique to do this—reverse proxies. I have mentioned reverse proxies in the past and they are very useful beasts. In a nutshell, a reverse proxy sits in front of the web server, receives all requests, does some special processing (such as caching) and forwards the requests to the actual servers. A reverse proxy can be used to map URLs to different servers, and this feature comes in very handy for SEO.

We can use Apache’s mod_proxy for this. Here is a sample configuration

ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPass /blog http://blog.sitename.com
ProxyPassReverse /forum http://forum.sitename.com

Instead of directing users to blog.company.com, we write a reverse proxy rule to send requests for company.com/blog to the internal server blog.company.com. We can do the same for forums, chat, e-commerce systems, and so on. It is completely transparent to the user (and search engines) that the website is divided among multiple servers. Note that each web server will need to be isolated completely for the security to work. If someone breaks into the blog because the software hasn’t been updated, for instance, at least he won’t get to the e-commerce system.

Internet security is a very large (and interesting) topic. I will talk about it more in the future if there is enough interest. As usual, please share what you think in the comments.

On the other hand, last year I had more goals that I didn’t quite reach than ones that I did, although I suppose that puts me in the big crowd. I like to start each year by revisiting the unachieved goals, the uncompleted projects, the planned-but-not-executed things I call my missed opportunities. One common one (and I am sure many of my peers experienced the same) is maximizing the number of clicks I get from organic listings. The problem, as many might be asking themselves, is how to measure the organic click-through rate in the first place! Read on to learn how….

It’s not all in the numbers

Every search marketer knows that the higher you rank on the search engine results page (SERP), the more clicks you get to your site. What is not obvious, except perhaps to paid search marketers, is that it is possible for sites ranking slightly lower to be getting more clicks than the ones at the top. Particularly, this happens when the lower-ranking site has a title and description that more closely matches what the searcher is looking for.

Take off your marketing hat and think like a searcher. Most of us do not click blindly on the first link, or even the first few links (unless we hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button). At the very least we scan the descriptions. It is that short snippet of text that tells us whether we should click or not, whether the page is relevant to our search.

Unfortunately, most SEO’d page titles and descriptions are created first for the search engines, and second—if at all—for the searcher. We’ve got to fix that.

Titles for users, Anchor texts for search engines

One of the most challenging aspects of SEO copywriting is trying to craft a message that works for both search engines and users. This is especially true for writing titles and meta descriptions. Often you see titles that are just a list of keywords separated by commas and other not-so-user-friendly messes. While it might help getting a high ranking, it won’t help much enticing users to click.

My approach is to write the titles and descriptions as if I were writing ads inviting users to my site. My focus is on providing a strong incentive to click further. But instead of stuffing my title with all the page’s targeted keywords (I prefer to target very few keywords per page), I save that sort of optimization for the external relevance profile. In other words, my keyword focus is in the anchor text. I like to target multiple keyword combinations and variations via the anchor text for a single page. This seems to work better than modifying the on-page content or the title and meta description.

Of course including a couple of the most relevant keywords in the title and description is good practice as well. Not only is it useful for ranking relevance but for click-through as well. Google and other search engines highlight the searched keywords in their results, and users are more likely to click if the content specifically matches their search.

Measuring click-through success

In order to tell if we have the best titles and descriptions (organic ads) we need a way of measuring the click-through rate of our pages in the SERPs. All major paid platforms provide this for PPC ads, allowing advertisers to change, tweak and split-test multiple ads until the “perfect” ad is found. Unfortunately, we don’t have such a luxury for organic listings. But let me share a couple of tricks that come quite close.

Indirect method. The easiest and most straightforward way to measure click-through is to setup a PPC campaign and split-test multiple ads to identify the best one(s). Then use those ads to create an expanded version for the title and description of our organic landing pages. The logic is that if the ads performed well on PPC, they should perform great on organic listings.

The drawback with this approach is that you don’t actually get the real click-through rate of the organic listing, but rather a good estimate of how the title/description combination will perform as an organic listing.

Semi-direct method. Thanks to some recent improvements with Google Webmaster Tools, we can now see a report showing the most searched terms versus the most clicked terms for a page on our site. The report is called “Top search queries” and is in the Statistics menu.

This is the first tool I know of that can be used to identify the best performing vs. the worst performing pages in the SERPs. The left column shows the rankings based on the most searched terms. And the right column shows the rankings based on which results received the most clicks. Ideally, the search terms should be listed in the same order in both columns, but that is rarely the case. The disparity is often caused by poor click-through rates from less than optimal titles and descriptions. I like to use this report to identify search terms that need improvement.

The search terms that attract a lot of searchers but not a lot of click-through traffic are the ones that I need to focus on this year. Check out your click-through rate and see what you find. And please let me know in the comments what you think about this technique!

For years I had been part of that big group of SEOs and Internet marketers that enjoy great success, but don’t necessarily see the need to risk reducing their share of the pie. So in the spirit of the holidays I want to share what I’ve learned about sharing so far. If you are part of that tight-lipped group that think in the same way I did before, I want to tell you why you need to change and what is in it for you if you do.

The rewards of opening the door

After a few months of blogging and trading ideas for attention, I have achieved something that money and favors could never have bought me: a good deal of respect. It is truly humbling to see my name on the same list as some of the brightest and most talented SEOs in our industry. Amazing individuals that I’ve been reading about for years have offered me their recognition and approval. It’s tremendous, and priceless.

Maintaining and updating this blog at the quality I want to keep it takes time, which I don’t always have because of my current obligations, so I decided to sit back and reflect about the real benefits I am getting from my blogging activities.

1. Improving credibility and trust. This is probably the most important benefit. Trust is something that is really hard to earn. When you share your best stuff, others will expect the best from you, and reward you by spreading your ideas. It requires a lot of work, but it is definitely worth it.

2. Improving original ideas. Multiple minds think better than one. It doesn’t matter how good you think your concept is, others will find ways to improve upon it. I have seen this happen time and time again. My readers provide very insightful comments—angles that I did not initially consider.

3. Meeting on-line rock stars in the industry. When you are an unknown, some of the A-list bloggers may not reply to your comments, let alone your e-mails or pleas for links. But when you raise your profile by blogging high-quality posts consistently, they are more likely to pay attention. (It is a good practice to contribute to their blogs too, of course!)

4. Generating good will. When you give people your treasured stuff, they naturally feel the need to reciprocate. Many of my readers are also bloggers and I regularly find them quoting and linking to my posts. Some share their projects and ideas via comments or e-mails, and others even share improvements to the art on my blog!

5. Generating positive word of mouth. It’s a fact: people don’t trust you because of what you say, but because of what others say about you. Share your best ideas and secrets and your regular readers will become your passionate evangelists.

How to create knowledge worth sharing

Let me share a geeky conversation I had a few years ago with our former Lead System Administrator, Carlos Johnson, who went on to work for Skype in Estonia.

We had some technical problems due to the way we were doing the load balancing of our servers. We were using some monitoring scripts that polled our servers and if one of them went down the scripts would update the DNS entries to direct people only to the live ones. The problem with this monitoring was that it messed up our stats and was very unreliable. After thinking hard about the problem, I came up with a very simple but effective solution. I proposed that instead of doing a DNS round-robin, we should do the fail over at the DNS registrar. (How? I should probably write about this in more detail in a future post!)

When I explained this idea to Carlos, his immediate reaction was: “Where did you read about this?” To his surprise I raised my eyebrows and laughed hysterically. “Do you think that everything has already been written?” I said. “How come I still see people writing things down all the time?”

There’s a lot left to learn—and to share. Of course not everyone has secrets or great ideas to blog about, especially when just starting out. Research is what creates knowledge and if you want to know what nobody else knows (and gain a competitive advantage), you need to make it a habit to research. Study competitors, study search engines, study as much as you can, and then brainstorm. Think about practical uses for your insights, and most importantly, test. Test, test and test.

An idea is just and idea, until it is put into practice. To all my readers, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

P.S. I plan to write a few posts and schedule them for delivery, as I am taking a few weeks off for a long overdue vacation. I’ll be back next year full of energy and, hopefully, will up my post frequency even more. I expect you to raise the bar even higher on commenting too!

The problem, for both Microsoft and Google, is that it rarely works. Let me show you why.

The Old Market Gorilla

Microsoft made and continues to make most of its fortune by selling users an electronic piece of paper (the End User License Agreement) that says what they are allowed to do with its software. Users don’t own the software in the traditional sense; they have simply bought permission to use it. Until now, this has proved an excellent business model because, while it costs a lot to produce software, you can sell an infinite amount of copies and the cost-per-unit becomes minuscule.

Then came the open source software movement and it broke all of Microsoft’s business rules. Software is given away for free, even its source code, and users not only own it in the traditional sense, but they can also modify and adjust it to their needs as long as they understand the programming language. Companies can still make money, but they do so in other ways—by selling support services, value-added packages or even through ads. The open source model has produced a wide variety of successful products and profitable companies: Linux, the Apache web server, Mozilla FireFox to name just a few.

What has Microsoft’s response been against its formidable new adversary? It tries to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Unfortunately for Microsoft, this hasn’t worked so far and is never going to work. It may be a huge market gorilla, but it cannot bully the entire market. In a few years’ time, we’ll see if the gorilla can even keep up.

The New Market Gorilla

Google and most popular search engines are making their fortune by selling clicks. Philosophically, it is not so different than Microsoft. Software is what they produce and using their software is what they sell. The key difference is that they don’t charge users of the software, they charge advertisers: companies that want to tap into their software’s user base.

Of course users are paying indirectly for the use of Google’s software with the most valuable currency in today’s economy: their click stream of intentions. Looking at Google’s valuation and revenue numbers, the model has been extraordinarily successful so far. Its success, however, comes primarily from the premium value of links to web pages. But other people and companies are creeping in to take some of Google’s pie. They are trading, buying, selling or stealing links to profit from Google’s ecosystem themselves.

Just like Microsoft’s loathing of the open source community, Google is similarly peeved that its financial foundation is being attacked. And not surprisingly, the company’s response is just like Microsoft’s: they try to spread FUD, this time among webmasters. Google requests that webmasters adapt to its way of doing business rather than trying to adapt itself by revising its original assumptions about links as votes, or looking for stronger and potentially better solutions.

Again, this is not going to work. One single company, no matter how big, cannot police the whole Web. No matter how hard it tries, people will keep finding ways to exploit link vulnerabilities(via searchenginepeople.com).

Google likes to say that all top search engines are affected by the paid links problem. Well, apparently one Ask.com scientist doesn’t think so:

Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Google competitor Ask.com is equally pessimistic about the search industry’s battles with Webmasters who manipulate results. He says that Ask doesn’t suffer from paid links schemes as much as Google, thanks to an algorithm that only counts links between sites about the same subject. But sites that manipulate search results, he says, plague the entire industry. Google’s public criticism of such tactics won’t make them go away.

“We know better than to say anything,” Gerasoulis says. “The more pressure you put on them, the smarter they become. This war between spam sites and the search engines has no end.”

The evolution of the market and the danger of stagnation

The good thing about this type of attitude is that when big players refuse to adapt, they open the door to more flexible competitors. Look, for example, at how Digg users are giving life to Mixx thanks in part to Digg’s stance on trying to adapt its user base to the company. Perhaps we should start spending more of our ‘click power’ and use alternative search engines such as Ask.com more often. In the end, webmasters provide the content and searchers provide the clicks. Without them, Google’s software is useless, and the gorilla gets left behind again.

What do you think? Should the Web adapt to Google or Google adapt to the Web? Sound off in the comments!

One of the most frustrating aspects for novice pay-per-click (PPC) marketers is the so-called ad quality score—a method search engines use to measure the relevancy of an ad for a particular keyword. The ad quality score affects the minimum bid price, position and display eligibility. Poor ads cost a lot more and are less likely to be displayed than highly relevant ones, giving advertisers a strong incentive to manage their ads responsibly.

Unfortunately, the exact way search engines measure this score has remained a secret. But a few months ago, Bill identified a set of patents that give us a detailed look under the hood at how these numbers might be computed.

Defining Quality

So what is a great ad and how does Google determine your score? Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody—advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too—when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.

So, in order to improve the ad quality score you simply need to do two things: make sure your ad answers the user’s search, and make sure your landing page delivers on your ad’s promise.

This might seem very obvious, but novice PPC marketers are lazy and like to put large groups of loosely related keywords together with little structure or thought behind them. The improper use of broad matches (with no negative disqualifiers), and the misuse of dynamic keyword insertion make the problem a whole lot bigger.

Tips for creating your PPC ads

1. Create ads that include the keyword in the title, description and URL for a higher click-through rate. Split test multiple ads/offers and keep the ones with the higher click-through rate.

2. Create ad groups only with related keywords. Including keywords not directly related to an ad group will reduce its quality score.

3. Don’t mix “broad match” and “exact match” searches in the same ad group. There are many reasons for this. Each matching option requires a different strategy—broad matches require negative disqualifiers for example. Broad matches also tend to generate more impressions than clicks, and exact matches the opposite. It is better to have them in separate groups.

Landing pages: an ad’s promised land

Most of the problems with low ad quality scores are generally due to poor landing pages. A lot has been said and written about what search engines look at on landing pages, but it all comes down to your ability to match the user’s search with the content on your landing page. Including keywords in your ad groups for which you don’t have appropriate content on your site is a waste of time and money. If you want to include such keywords, create content to match those queries first.

The general rule: If the user is happy, the search engine is happy. And so is your wallet!

1. Send searchers to the right landing pages—pages that exactly match their search. Even better, include those keywords on the landing page. One way to make sure your landing pages are matching the search terms is by using Google’s Keyword Tool Site Related option.

2. Avoid duplicate content on your landing pages and include enough original text, not just banners and forms.

3. Make sure your landing page includes (if applicable): about us, terms of service, privacy policy, contact us, and other identifying information. The more credible the page is, the better the quality score and the higher chance it will convert.

4. Measure the bounce rate and average time spent on your landing page. Make any changes you can to reduce the bounce rate and increase the amount of time a user spends on your landing page. Those are indirect signals search engines can use to measure the quality of your landing page.

5. Search engines can optionally use your conversion information to measure your quality score. If you are tracking conversions, make sure you are also doing landing page split testing to increase them.

Paid search marketing is extremely competitive these days. As in any competition, however, what matters is not the number of competitors you are facing, but how many truly savvy competitors there are. Fortunately for us, I think there are still a lot of clueless advertisers out there.

I am sure most of my readers will be able to take these tips to the next level and beat their competitors this coming holiday season. Please feel free to share your own PPC tips on the comments.

Share This ]]> http://hamletbatista.com/2007/11/30/pay-to-play-common-sense-tips-to-help-you-improve-your-google-adwords-quality-score/feed/ http://hamletbatista.com/2007/11/28/a-little-personality-goes-a-long-way/ http://hamletbatista.com/2007/11/28/a-little-personality-goes-a-long-way/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:52:32 +0000 Hamlet Batista http://hamletbatista.com/2007/11/28/a-little-personality-goes-a-long-way/ If you read my last post on advanced keyword research, you probably thought that there was no way you could look deeper into your search visitors’ desires. Well, think again. I want to share a clever technique I’ve been using for several months now to drastically improve the conversion rates of some of my projects.

The technique I am going to present is useful for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. As you will see, you can later leverage the results for your SEO efforts.

From millions of personalities to just 4

Have you ever taken a personality type quiz? I did, and it helped me understand my personality better. I got to know my strengths and my weaknesses and focused on the areas I needed to improve. The assumption behind these tests is that human beings can be classified broadly according to our psychological functions. There are multiple classification systems; a couple of popular ones are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Big Five personality traits.

In essence, these tests try to find answers to at least these four questions:

1. Are you introverted or extroverted?

2. Do you sense or intuit?

3. Do you think or feel?

4. Do you judge or perceive?

Obviously, the answers don’t imply that an individual has one trait or the other. The goal is to define which trait is the prevalent or dominant one.

Imagine that you could apply the test automatically to all your search visitors without them even knowing. Understanding their personality will help you craft a more persuasive message. You will be able to tell them exactly what they want to hear and how they want to hear it, ultimately leading to more conversions.

Appealing PPC to each personality type

Ads are in essence a persuasive offer that you are presenting to searchers. The more enticing the offer, the more likely they are to click. To take advantage of this, we simply need to create ads that appeal to each personality type and see which ones get clicked the most often.

In order to simplify things, let’s create an ad for each of the four personality types described in the excellent book Call to Action – Simple Formulas to Improve Online Results. (If you are ambitious, you can extend the idea by creating ads for the 16 personality types of the MBTI system.)

Type: Methodical

Wants: Accuracy or proof

Ad Strategy: Provide hard evidence and superior service.

Ad copy: Tested by experts. Outstanding results and a 100% money-back guarantee!

Type: Spontaneous

Wants: Acceptance

Ad Strategy: Address immediate needs with relevant, credible options.
Ad copy: Be the first on your block! First 10 customers earn a free gift.

Type: Humanist

Wants: Applause, to be part of something

Ad Strategy: Offer testimonials and far reaching incentives.
Ad copy: Go green! Receive great products, join a community and help others too.

Type: Competitive

Wants: Accomplishment

Ad Strategy: Provide rational options, probabilities and challenges.
Ad copy: Got what it takes? Three easy steps for guaranteed results. Start today.

It’s not possible to give persuasive ads without identifying an actual product, so don’t pay much attention to the actual copy here and only try to grasp the idea. Deliver a message that appeals to a specific personality type and direct the searcher to a landing page that delivers on that specific offer and meets that customer’s needs.

The real benefit comes when you split test the ads and see which ads generate the most click-through. That tells you which is the dominant personality type among your visitors. When you know that, you can set the copy on your default landing page (the page your visitors from organic searches come from) and drastically improve your conversions.

Have you tried something like this? Please let me know in the comments.

Unless your monetization strategy is to sell page views you need to keep hitting the home page of the social media sites on a consistent basis in order to take advantage of them. What works best I find is a balanced approach to building traffic. Let me illustrate this by sharing two recent events that sent notable traffic spikes to this blog, as well as the resulting fallout from that traffic.

The first spike was thanks to power stumbler Andy Beard stumbling my post about PageRank and several of his friends voting the story up. I had 357 RSS subscribers at the time, and the post received 946 views that day (October 30^th). The next day I received 134 page views and Feedburner reported 350 RSS subscribers. Thanks to Feedburner’s inherent inaccuracy that doesn’t mean people unsubscribed from my blog, but it does tell me that I received no new subscribers from that amazing increase in traffic.

The second spike was yesterday and was because I had requested a paid review from the popular blog John Chow dot Com. I received 1,022 page views and had 332 subscribers. Today I am over 480 page views so far and Feedburner reports 427 RSS subscribers—almost 100 new subscribers, a 30% increase! On top of that, I also got additional traffic to my company and my upcoming product site, as well as qualified leads for my private beta program.

Why the big difference in results from similar page views and visits?

The right visitor mindset

When people are stumbling, digging, and doing their social media thing, they are set on doing one particular task: to digg or bury the story; to vote the content up or down; to bookmark or not, and so on. In contrast, when people read reviews or product/service recommendations, they are interested in learning more and potentially buying or trying it out. This is one of the reasons why I love affiliate marketing. The power of affiliate marketing is not just that you can make money without owning a product (as an affiliate marketer), or that you can promote your product with no marketing budget (as an affiliate merchant), the real power is in pre-sales. People trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.

In this particular case, Michael Kwan from John Chow dot Com wrote a well-balanced and very positive review of this blog. He included both praise and critiques that I accepted and immediately acted upon. Few people believe in perfection; there is always something that can be improved, and that is why endorsements that mention both positive and negative things have far more impact than ones that say everything is perfect.

When you read the review it sounds like a solid recommendation providing reasons why his readers would want to read my blog, as well as points where he thought the blog could improve upon. In addition to his review, a mutual reader, David Darey, commented on the story, reinforcing why others should pay a visit to this blog. It is natural to think many people reading that review came here with the mindset of becoming an active reader. If you are one of John’s readers, welcome to my blog and feel free to express yourself in the comments.

Quality First

One of the reasons why I waited 6 months to start marketing the blog seriously is because it is easier to market a good product than it is to market a bad (or incomplete) one. If I only had a handful of low quality posts I am sure the review would not have been as positive, and the results would not have been so stellar. Half a year ago, I decided to take time out from my already busy workday to build a quality blog over time; I’d worry about promoting it later. In the end, it has been a test of patience, but also a rewarding experience.

Traffic spikes for everyone

How can you duplicate this?

1. Focus on building quality content based on your own unique knowledge and experience. I blog mostly about SEO, which is a topic that has been beaten to death, yet I can always find an idea or angle not yet discussed.

2. Encourage people both to praise an