Archive for July, 2009

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Marketing Driven SEO Strategy

Posted by PeterD
July 31, 2009

The conventional SEO strategy goes like this:

These days, this strategy isn’t working as well as it used to.

If a site isn’t genuinely interesting and isn’t worth remarking upon, it can be difficult to get links, attention and rankings.

These are essentially marketing problems.

By basing our SEO strategy on fundamental marketing principles, we stand a much better chance of dominating the rankings, no matter what niche we choose to target.

Audience

This document is intended for those who know basic SEO principles, but are new to marketing concepts and theory.

If you’re new to SEO, there are helpful tips throughout the document, and links to further instruction on SEOBook.com.

Principles That Form The Foundation Of This Strategy

Market Analysis

In the past, marketing was a last-minute ad on.

A company knocked out a product, then it was handed over the wall to marketing, whose job it was to get the product out into the market. Marketing put a colorful picture on the box, commissioned a jingle, and bought up millions of dollars worth of media time.

These days, marketing is more integrated. A product or service is designed with a clear audience in mind, although many SEOs might disagree, especially when asked to bolt an SEO strategy onto a Flash site consisting entirely of animation!

The internet offers us the opportunity to design with a clear audience in mind, but with a lot less risk than brick-n-mortar companies.

We can figure out if there is a market, and what that market demands, test that market, and then build a site to cater to that market. We can do this quickly and cheaply, using the power of search marketing.

Find Clear Space & Consumer Demand

Like SEO, marketing is part art, part science. Even if you cover the technical aspects of SEO, there is no guarantee you will rank well. Likewise, if you follow a marketing strategy, there is no guarantee of making money.

The trick is to find a place in the market that has two key aspects: clear space and consumer demand.

How do we find these places in the market?

Let’s start with a basic marketing analysis.

Perform Market Analysis

Ask yourself three questions:

You must fill a genuine need in the market.

Is there demand? It’s no good trying to sell something, be it a good, service or opinion, if there is no demand for it. For example, do you know why most blogs don’t get read? It is because there is a very limited demand for opinions from unknown writers. Demand is spread very thinly across the opinion/news space, and supply is virtually infinite.

How do you find out if there is a demand for your idea?

The SEO has a valuable tool at his/her disposal for determining demand. Keyword research involves mining databases of previously searched for keyword terms to see if there are existing traffic streams (demand) they can tap into. Any volume of keyword searches indicates demand. Generally speaking, the higher the search volume, the greater the demand, although there are traps, which we’ll get to shortly.

For those new to keyword research, here’s a step-by-step, using the SEOBook Keyword Tool

Example Of An SEO Marketing Analysis - Gone Wrong

The SEO aims to build a revenue generating site.

The SEO undertakes keyword research and finds there are a lot of searches for Britney Spears pictures.

It turns out that there are approximately 135,000 searches for Britney Spears pictures each month.

Our first two questions - “What does the consumer need? (Britney pictures)” and “How many consumer need this product/service? (lots!)” - appear to be answered. So the SEO licenses a collection of Britney pictures, sets up a site that charges a small membership fee, and ranks well for Britney related keyword terms.

And fails to make any money.

Why?

There are various reasons, but the main reason is that the SEO failed to ask “what is the buy process?” Conventional SEO-led strategies often fail to include this step, however it is crucial if your site is to succeed.

The buy process is, as the name suggests, the steps a person takes when they are interested in buying something. Had the SEO examined the buy process, she would have realized people don’t pay for Britney pictures online. Granted, this example is a little silly, but this problem occurs often, especially when search traffic is viewed in isolation.

Offline, people may buy gossip and celebrity magazines, but when online, they expect to look at Britney pictures for free. Online, the buy process for Britney Spears images simply doesn’t exist, except in a very narrow B2B market between photographers and publishers.

So what happens next?

Choose Niches With A Commercial Imperative

The SEO, discouraged that his first idea didn’t work, chooses to run ads instead. Where there is traffic there is money, right?

Again, this approach is likely to meet with limited success, especially when compared to other niches she could have targeted.

People looking for Britney pictures don’t tend to be in a buying mode, and so advertising, especially action based advertising such as Adsense, is likely to go unclicked. The activity “looking at Britney pictures” doesn’t have a strong commercial imperative, whereas an activity such as “buying toys”, does. Such sites need a very high number of page views to make much money.

One way to determine if a commercial imperative exists is to examine the bid prices for Adwords. Almost always, the higher the bid price on the keyword, the more transactional the niche.

Think Of It From The Advertisers Perspective

The SEO also needs to understand the buy process in order to choose the areas which will be most effective for advertisers. The most effective Adsense sites, for example, are sites where visitors are looking to buy something. That’s the only reason advertisers use Adwords - they need to sell visitors something*.

In reality, it’s a little more complex than this.

Non-commercial searches can and do result in sales, however searches directly related to commercial activity - such as transactional searches - are most likely to result in higher income for your site and make for more profitable niches. See my article on the three types of searches, navigational, informational, and transactional for more information.

Ask yourself:

What makes someone buy something? Will they buy it online, or offline? Are they even capable of buying something over the internet? If visitors are in a buying mode, then what stage of the buy process are they at? Are they ready to buy right now, or are they looking for information?

Look at demographic details for competing sites and keywords to get inside the mind of the searcher. Don’t just look at search volume, but also consider the intent behind the keyword, how you would monetize that demand, and the visitor value.

*The one caveat is to drive brand awareness, but this also has limited effectiveness. When was the last time you clicked on an adwords ad that focused entirely on building brand? And if people don’t click, you, as the publisher, don’t make money.

I hope I’ve impressed on you the need to evaluate keyword terms within a marketing and business framework.

Competitive Review - Strengths & Weaknesses

Once you’ve decided on a niche to target, you then need to determine the level of competition within that niche.

A SWOT analysis can help you determine how your site compares to those already in the niche. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You perform this analysis on your own site, and the sites of your competitors.

You can can go into incredible detail with a SWOT analysis, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. You simply need to determine what you’re good at relative to the competition. Draw up a chart like this, and complete:

If you can’t find any areas where you are better than the competition, either refine the niche, choose another niche altogether, or figure out a plan that will make you better than the competition. Ranking well doesn’t really help, because a searcher will not stop at the first site they find.

Keep in mind that it is easier to be successful if you already know a lot about a market. Any experience you have lowers the investment needed to research the market and ensures you can write at a higher and more compelling level than people who do not know the market.

By doing a SWOT exercise, you’ll also get a feel for any opportunities your competitors might be missing.

Positioning

What do you think of when someone mentions the name “Google”?

Search, right.

How about IBM? Computers. Hewlett Packard? Printers.

If you aim to be the first in the customers mind when they think of a keyword term, you can easily win the ranking game.

Be First

Who was the first president of the United state.George Washington. Who was second? Who was the first man on the moon? Neil Armstrong. Who was the fourth. It is important to be first. Being first is memorable.

But wait a minute! Google wasn’t the first search engine!

Correct. However, they’ve overcome this by being first in people’s mind when it comes to search. Yahoo was the first search service, and whilst it’s star has faded of late, it is still a very wealthy company. It is no good being the tenth anything. Aim to be first. And if you can’t be first….

If You Can’t Be First, Be First In A New Niche

You’ll face the problem of not being first whenever you enter an existing niche. And on the internet, that’s “most of the time”

Look at the top sites in your chosen niche. If they got in early enough, chances are they enjoy the linking benefit that comes with being first. Typically, Google’s linking algorithm favors long established sites, as opposed to newcomers. To find out why this occurs, check out Mike Grehan’s “Filthy Linking Rich“. Those who are first to occupy a niche have a much easier job of getting links because they are remarkable, simply by virtue of being unique.

So what to do if you arrive late to a niche?

Invent a new niche, and be first in that.

Say you sell holiday rental accommodation in Palm Springs. Unfortunately, there are a lot of holiday rental accommodation services in Palm Springs. So to differentiate yourself, you might decide to focus on “the cheapest rental accommodation services in Palm Springs”. Or “the most upmarket rental accommodation services in Palm Springs”. Or “the best rental accommodation guide for solo travelers in Palm Springs”.

Focus on a new angle that your competitors aren’t targeting. This is called market segmentation.

Make Sure The New Niche Is Worthwhile

One of the traps of market segmentation is that you might segment too finely i.e. there are not enough customers in your newly segmented niche to be worthwhile.

When you do your keyword research, look at the keyword volume for niche keyword terms. Are there any keywords that have good volumes AND cover an angle that you competitors aren’t already targeting? Find a suitable keyword term, and make that your niche. Also, look at demographic details for competing sites and keywords to get inside the mind of the searcher. Remember, there needs to be a commercial intent.

Take Your New Niche For A Test Drive

This strategy has been used in PPC for a while, however it’s outlined really well in the book The Four Hour WorkWeek by Tim Ferris.

Once you’ve decided on a new niche that you can be first in, you need to test the niche to see if it delivers enough revenue to make the effort worthwhile. You can test a niche quickly and easily by using PPC, like Google Adwords.

A lot of SEOs don’t use PPC, but they’re missing out on a tool that can save them a lot of time and effort.

For those new to PPC, check out Aaron’s Guide to PPC.

Run a short Adwords campaign targeting the keyword terms that relate to your new niche. You may only need to run it for a week or two, and it shouldn’t cost you more that a few hundred dollars. The aim is to answer the question: “do people who search on the keywords want to buy what I’m selling?”.

Ensure your site has a clear call to action that will help you measure actual buyer interest. For example, a sign-up form offering more information, a sales inquiry, or an actual purchase. You don’t need to have your site finished to do this. A basic three page site will do.

Monitor the campaign and do split/run testing on the ad-copy. This means you compare one set of wording against another. Helpfully, Google Adwords has this functionality built in, and they provide a free product called Google Optimizer if you want to test you page copy. Check out my article “Tested Advertising Strategies Respun For SEO“.

Again, this exercise can be as simple or complex as you want to make it.

Start off simple, and change the wording to make the offer sound more appealing, and make a note of the wording that works best. You can use this wording in your title tags during your SEO campaign. The wording that receives a click in Adwords is also likely to receive a click in the organic listings.

If visitors are searching for your keyword, clicking on your ad, and moving to desired action, then you’ve found a great niche. Remember, most people will click the organic results rather than Adwords listings, so the fact you’re getting click-through further demonstrates that there is little competition in your chosen niche in the organic results.

If you aren’t getting click thru and/or sign-up/purchase, try the same strategy, but with different keyword terms. Keep going until you find a winner.

It is a lot cheaper in terms of time, effort and money to test keywords at this point, rather than commit to a brand and an SEO strategy that targets the wrong keyword terms, and the wrong niche.

Marketing Within The Niche

Choose a trading name, and domain name, that can be used generically, and, if possible, aligned with your keyword term.

One approach is to take a simple keyword phrase people are familiar with, and will search for, and combine it with something else. For example, SEOBook, AfterMail, FaceBook, HotelFind, etc. This approach works well if you don’t have a large budget for brand building.

Non-descriptive brand names, such as Kellogs, or Mooch, don’t work so well for SEO, especially for low profile companies, because people need to know your name before they search for you.

Become Synonymous With Your Niche

Consider SEOBook.com.

It’s hard for anyone else to sell a book on SEO without people also stumbling across Aaron’s site. Aaron has selected a keyword-loaded brand name that is aligned with the niche. He has also worked hard to dominate this tightly defined niche within the broader SEO market. Whenever someone promotes any book on SEO, Aaron is likely to benefit, because he is #1 in that niche.

If you dominate your niche, and the niche is relatively new, then any promotion of that niche will also benefit you. If you’re a leader in your niche, and become synonymous with that niche, then latecomers and generic copycats will have a very difficult time competing with you. Any promotion of the beverage “Cola” benefits the market leader Coke, because they dominate their niche. Likewise, promotion of PCs will benefit Dell, promotion of smartphones will benefit Apple, and so on.

Position Against The Leader

Let’s assume you’re competing against an entrenched leader. What can you do?

Position yourself against the leader. For example, if the leader is offering “cheap SEO services”, you might position by offering “valuable SEO services”. You could warn people against using cheap SEO services by highlighting the problems and risks, and showing how your price is linked to achieving better value. Figure out what they’re doing, and define yourself against them.

Avis did this against Hertz. They acknowledged they weren’t the top of the rental car niche, but made a virtue out of it. They adopted the phrase “we try harder”. The market dominance of Hertz became a weakness.

Barriers To Entry Are Your Friend

On the web, there are few barriers to entry. Anyone can start a website and copy your idea.

However, not everyone can start a Google. Or an Amazon. Or a Facebook. Those companies have barriers to entry in their markets, mostly to do with the scale of operations. It’s very expensive to do what they do.

Look for areas where there is some difficulty in starting up. Does your idea require capital? Do you have valuable information that no-one else has? Do you have a pre-established reputation or brand? Does you idea require specialist software? Is the service or product unique, or difficult to obtain elsewhere? Such barriers will dissuade a lot of people from entering the niche, which means you’ll face less competitive threat.

The lowest barrier to entry is the affiliate site where the supplier provides a template site. They might even set it up for their affiliates. For free!

See the problem?

If it’s that easy, then there is no barrier to entry, meaning anyone can do it. Even with the best SEO in the world, it would be very difficult to defend such a site from the hundreds of webmasters who arrive tomorrow, the day after that, and so on.

So when you evaluate the competitors in your niche, also consider how difficult it will be for followers to compete with you.

SEO

After six months, you should be ranking well, and your traffic should be climbing.

Need more detail? Join our team :)

*Hat-Tip to Brett Tabke’s “Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone“

Economics & Risk/Reward

Are SEO visitors really free?

They’re only free if you value your time at zero dollars.

Of course, you time is worth money, and this must be factored in. One of the great things about SEO is that unlike conventional adverting, your visitors don’t stop arriving when you stop paying. The downside is that you must spend a lot of time up front, and with no guarantee of success. The search engines could also drop your site, at any time, and without reason.

So it’s a good idea to ask yourself the following questions:

A lot of SEOs will persist with sites that enjoy high rankings, even when the economics of the site don’t make any sense. If this happens to you, bite the bullet and drop these sites, or convert them to another use. There is no value in ranking highly if the visitors aren’t doing what you want them to, and/or they aren’t spending money.

Once your put a value on your SEO efforts, you’ll clearly be able to see how much your site is actually making you.

If the site is making money, that’s great. If not, then try to determine if the problem is to do with marketing. Have you identified the niche correctly? Are you dominate within that niche? Is there sufficient demand?

Summary

SEO works best when it is integrated into your business and marketing strategy. There is no point ranking well for terms that don’t advance your business goals. Find a profitable niche you can make your own, and dominate it.

Follow this strategy and lucrative search traffic will flow you way.

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Whiteboard Friday - Architecture for Commerce with Dr. Pete

Posted by great scott!
July 30, 2009

Posted by great scott!

Dr. Pete Meyers of UserEffect drops by the studio this week to teach us some incredibly valuable tactics for e-commerce site architecture.

E-commerce folks know that once you get up to thousands (or even millions) of products, it can be difficult to make sure the bulk of your juice goes to your most profitable products, while still getting long-tail traffic for the rest of your inventory. Pete shares some great tricks for large-site architecture that will help you focus your traffic and rankings on your top items, while maintaining visibility for your whole catalog.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Architecture for Commerce with Dr. Pete from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Less Than 100 Spots Left

Posted by Aaron Wall
July 30, 2009

Today is the last day to lock in our current price, as tomorrow we increase our prices 50%. It looks like we decided to do the price increase just in time too, as we have added 378 new members this month and we are rapidly approaching our 1,000 member limit.

If you are already a subscriber, thanks a bunch…you make this site possible! If you are not yet a subscriber and were thinking of joining here is the link.

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How to Spam Blogs and Possibly Get Away With It

Posted by jennita
July 30, 2009

Posted by jennita

How to Spam Blogs

Ok, so you’ve all read about The Best Spam Submission Ever which was illustrated ever so eloquently (and if you haven’t read it, please read it now… uhm well ok after you read this - it’s awesomely funny!). As the post mentions, we sift through many YOUmoz entries every day determining which ones to post to the site. Most spam is easily detected; such as the body of the post only consists of 1 or 2 sentences, or the title is obviously nothing related to online marketing (buy gold and silver online!). However every now and then, there is a spark of spam brilliance that makes its way through.

The other day I ran across this entry that had an odd title, but it actually seemed to have real potential. I opened the entry and at first glance, I thought "YAY! I have a good contender." There were multiple paragraphs, headings and even bullet points… this had to be legit, right? Not so much. I found myself reading the entire entry because I was so dumbfounded by the sheer brilliance of the whole thing. If this person had posted to a blog that automatically checks for spam entries, and auto-posts, this one probably would have made it through.

So the idea is quite simple. Take an excerpt of a book (or anything written I suppose), and add keyword rich links throughout! Essentially, make the post look as authentic as possible, without having to spend time writing a blog post. I’ve taken the idea and put together an example for you below. It’s not perfect, but it is damn simple!

<!– Begin Example Spam Post –>

Her name is Esther; she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children. He is an unidentified male, between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, with dark, Mongolian features. The two were last seen in a café on the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. He was reading: Buy Gold jewelry and diamonds direct.

Just the beginning

The police were told that they had met before, although no one knew how often: Esther had always said that the man — who concealed his true identity behind the name Mikhail — was someone very important, although she had never explained whether he was important for her career as a journalist or for her as a woman.

The police began a formal investigation. Various theories were put forward — kidnapping, blackmail, a kidnapping that had ended in murder — none of which were beyond the bounds of possibility given that, in her search for information, her work brought her into frequent contact with people who had links with terrorist cells. They discovered that, women love gold necklaces and jewelry in the weeks prior to her disappearance, regular sums of money had been withdrawn from her bank account: those in charge of the investigation felt that these could have been payments made for information. She had taken no change of clothes with her, but, oddly enough, her passport was nowhere to be found.

Next steps

I immediately come under suspicion and am detained because I refuse to say where I was on the day she disappeared. However, a prison officer has just opened the door of my cell, saying that I’m a free man. A man who reads Silver and Gold Jewelry.

And why am I a free man? Because nowadays, everyone knows everything about everyone; you just have to ask and the information is there: where you’ve used your credit card, where you spend your time, whom you’ve slept with. In my case, it was even easier: a woman, another journalist, a friend of my wife, and divorced — which is why she doesn’t mind revealing that she slept with me — came forward as a witness in my favor when she heard that I had been detained. She provided concrete proof that I was with her and with gold necklaces on the day and the night of Esther’s disappearance.

I talk to the chief inspector, who returns my belongings and offers his apologies, adding that my rapid detention was entirely within the law, and that I have no grounds on which to accuse or sue the state. I say that I haven’t the slightest intention of doing either of those things, that I am perfectly aware that we are all under constant suspicion and under twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when we have committed no crime.

"You’re free to go," he says, echoing the words of the prison officer.

Conclusion

I ask: Isn’t it possible that something buy gold direct and diamonds really has happened to my wife? She had said to me once that — understandably given her vast network of contacts in the terrorist underworld — she occasionally got the feeling she was being followed.

<!– End Example Spam Post –>

Creative! Right? But, just think about this… if these spammers took a few minutes to actually think through and write a relevant post, they would have not only received exposure but they would have some SWEET links from SEOmoz as well. Plus, if the post is well-written and is quickly getting popular (thumbs up), you may even get promoted to the main blog… talk about exposure! I encourage you all to submit well thought out, relevant posts to YOUmoz. Submit entries you will be proud of showing to the rest of the community, and make sure the content is unique.

Every day we receive many spam entries for YOUmoz, which slows down the process of publishing the real, legitimate ones. This is a reminder for all our spammers out there: Real people read and publish these posts! You can stop spamming us, because at least for now, we’re smarter than you are. :) With that, I’d love to hear some of your best spam submissions!


PS. This is my own made up spam example and was not taking from any of the actual spam we’ve received.

I used an excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s "The Zahir" and if you have never read his work, I highly recommend him.

Spam photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barmala/ / CC BY 2.0

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Why Buy The Milk When You Can Get the Cow for Free?

Posted by Aaron Wall
July 30, 2009

Yahoo Had No Leverage…

In case you didn’t look at the stock market today, Bloomberg highlighted what investors think of the Yahoo! / Microsoft deal

“This deal was a big disappointment,” said Moran, an analyst in Boca Raton, Florida. “They needed this deal, and it shows in terms of how the negotiations were concluded.”

…Because Their CEO Did Not Grasp the Importance of Search

In the same article Yahoo!’s CEO justified the Yahoo!/Microsoft search deal as something that clears fog:

“The priority was not to do the deal,” Bartz, 60, said in an interview. “The priority was to get the fog away from the company. Yahoo got pegged as a search company and we’re not a search company. Search is only one aspect of what our customers do.”

To look at the highest margin and highest income piece of a business and call it fog is absurd.

How Search Sets a Baseline

Search is the most direct way to target ads at consumers. It is easy to establish a baseline values and measure change. It allows you to implement (and advertise) new product ideas at no cost.

The other important baseline evolving search sets is the difference between spam and value added content. If you have ever read any of Google’s leaked remote quality rater documents you would see that the search result itself is a lower threshold to force the evolution of media.

Web Search Holds Everything Together

A lot of Yahoo!’s properties are somewhat average, but not remarkable. Some of them succeed ONLY because they are a part of the Yahoo! family of websites. Web search is the glue that holds the pieces together.

Search is the most profitable online ad market and having a big stake of that market allows them to promote their other business interests in a cheap & targeted way. Selling off the search assets does not suddenly put them in a strong competitive position.

It does not suddenly make their thin content sites thicker and more valuable. If anything it will make it harder for their other sites to compete as it will require them to be thicker to stay competitive when they lose the subsidy they were getting from search.

And Microsoft bought Yahoo! Search for $0:

Besides better exposure for its Bing search engine by placement throughout Yahoo!, Ballmer said, Microsoft hopes to improve the quality of its searches by analyzing over a decade of data Yahoo! has on how people search. The data improves search quality for everything from correcting misspelled words to likely patterns of search behavior.

Danny highlighted how much worse this deal is for Yahoo! than the deal offered last year in a side by side comparison and wrote a search eulogy. Yahoo! spent a couple billion dollars acquiring Overture/AltaVista, Inktomi, and AllTheWeb. And they sold it for $0!

Deal Terms

From Microsoft’s press release:

What is not in the deal terms is that Yahoo! will slowly erode search market share to Bing. By the end of the 10 year period Yahoo! could become AOL.

SEO Stuff Up in the Air

As far as SEO goes, a lot of stuff is still up in the air. If this deal goes through, what happens to…

There is a good chance all 4 of them go away.

Increased SEO Costs & Increased Barrier to Entry

For established marketers there would be some major upsides as well…

Bing SEO Tips

If you have not yet read Bing’s SEO Guide for Wembasters [PDF] then now would be a good time to get up to speed on it. When Bing launched we created a thread with a bunch of Bing SEO tips.

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Using ELance to Find Rock Star Employees for Your Business

Posted by Jon Waraas
July 29, 2009

Elance is the one of the hottest spots on the internet where freelance professionals offer their skills and services for businesses to hire. These independent workers are experts in their fields. They work on projects in a timely and professional manner in order to deliver quality. As a business owner, all you [...]

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Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO

Posted by randfish
July 29, 2009

Posted by randfish

The search landscape is changing significantly this morning, and SEOs of all stripes need to pay close attention. I’m going to do my best to summarize the impact of these changes based on what we already know and interpret what’s going to change for the field of search engine optimization and what we, as representatives of our clients and our companies, need to know and do.

Background on the Deal

First off, a few background snippets from several of the sources on this topic - SearchEngineLand’s Live Blogging Coverage; TechCrunch; ReadWriteWeb; and the new MS/Yahoo! website Choice, Value, Innovation.

In case that wasn’t quite clear, the big takeaway is that Bing will now power search on Yahoo! and Yahoo!’s salesforce will sell the premium (non-self service) search advertising for Yahoo!/Bing. Bing also gets access to Yahoo!’s core search technology and can, at its option, leverage that to help create more relevant results.

Search Query Demand Market Share

The search landscape right now looks like something between:

MarketShare Screenshot
Market Share from the thousands of accounts served by their hit counter/referral tracking software
(note: I don’t know why it say 82% on the left and 72% on the right, but 82% appears more accurate when adding up all the other figures)

AND

Comscore Search Market Share June 2009
Based on data from Comscore’s June Release

We’re somewhere between a market where Google dominates 65-82% of all search queries. When it comes to referring queries that point out from the engine’s properties (Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft not searching or linking to their own content), I believe Google’s closer to sending out 80-85% of that traffic.

What’s Changing for SEOs?

Note that some of thse are speculative, while others are direct and actionable. However, until the deal actually goes into effect and is publically accessible (which could take some serious time depending on regulators), my best advice is to be prepared (and take those steps that can ensure maximum benefit once the changes go live). Remember that Yahoo! said full implementation may lag up to 24 months (2 years) behind regulatory approval (which itself could take months), so you’ve got some time.

#1 - SEO for Bing is Worth Your Optimization Effort

Even if the lowest numbers are accurate, 15% of search market share is worth the optimization effort. Bing’s algorithm, while certainly an upgrade from Live.com still has a few noticeable preferences, such as concentration on keyword use in subdomains and root domain names (Google loves exact keyword matches, but Bing really likes any keyword placement in the sub or root). Bing’s core relevancy sometimes suffers from manipulative link patterns more so than Google & Yahoo!, though, they often do a good job surfacing alternative queries and instant answers.

Bing’s results are, by default, "richer" than those of Yahoo! and Google. Although Yahoo! will be controlling the user interface on their end, it’s likely much of that "richness" will make its way into the Bing results inside Yahoo!. Bing also surfaces only the top 5 results for many queries, meaning a higher concentration of clicks on those top results.

Bing’s traffic is, in general, also more likely to convert and click on ads. Whether this is a result of demographics or of how the engine frames information isn’t clear, though we may get more insight on that soon.

We at SEOmoz will certainly be doing more work to provide insight into how Bing ranks results and where it differs substantively from Google. You can go play around with results here or here. I strongly suspect there will be more SEO focus overall on Bing in both R&D and active practice.

#2 - We May Lose Yahoo! Link Data

The largest two providers of link information to SEOs today are Yahoo!’s advanced search queries and Yahoo! Site Explorer. If these go away, which seems likely with Bing, since Microsoft removed the link query operator’s functionality a few years back (and Google torched theirs nearly 5 years ago), we’ll be left with very few sources of link information. Obviously, SEOmoz itself provides Linkscape, but we’ll be likely to offer a slightly deprecated, free version of that tool if/when this happens. Exalead.com still does provide link data, though not as richly as Yahoo!

This change would likely see the rise of more propietary link indices as well as the breaking of a large number of internal and external tools that rely on Yahoo! for their link data. We may not know for sure for some time to come, but it may make have a substantive impact on the link research landscape.

#3 - PPC Consolidation

Right now, many companies and agencies exclusively use Google AdWords. I think both Microsoft and Yahoo! are counting on a lowered complexity and barrier to entry with only two major search engines making a compelling case that one should, at the least, participate in the two leading platforms for search. I suspect more people will buy ads from MSN AdCenter, which is likely to increase ad relevancy, quality and competition. The days of low cost traffic via AdCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing may be nearing an end (unless market share slips so far that they become largely irrelevant, but that seem unlikely, at least in the short term).

#4 - Bing’s Webmaster Tools Are Important

If you don’t have an account with Bing Webmaster Tools, now is the time. Although not yet as robust as Google’s, Bing WMT is working hard to catch up and even surpass their rivals with features that will prove valuable for webmasters on all platforms. The data you get from Bing WMT will also be important for conducting better organic SEO campaigns on that engine and seeing how Google & Bing may view your site differently.

#5 - Yahoo! & Bing Local Become More Essential

We’re still not 100% sure of the status of local search - according the ReadWriteWeb piece, Yahoo! may consider this a "consumer service" and not part of core search. However, if Bing is serving up local listings in the search results (as they do now), Bing’s local registration is going to become very important for local businesses. Check out Bing Local and their local listing center in the near futuer if this impacts you.

#6 - Bing Will Get more Spam

With greater search share comes greater spam attempts. Google’s still a ways out in front in terms of catching and discounting manipulative practices, but Yahoo! has been a close second for some time. I’d expect that Bing will recruit a number of the staff and algorithmic work Yahoo! search has done on this front, but they should also expect serious spammer attention to be focused their way. The loopholes that Google’s closed will still likely be open on Bing for some time to come and spammers will use the chaos that comes from a merger to exploit these.

#7 - Bing Will Get Lots more Data

Bing’s going to know a lot more about you. Perhaps not as much as Google, but with Yahoo! analytics, Yahoo!’s database of profiles, Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting and their own research, Bing’s going to be a close second. This should, conceptually, help improve core search and may pave the way for greater advances on the personalization front, too.

#8 - Important Yahoo! Properties May Dissappear

As Danny Sullivan and ReadWriteWeb noted, we’re in some danger of losing stalwarts like the Yahoo! Directory, Delicious (which has often been seen as an alternative search play), Yahoo! Maps, SearchMonkey & BOSS (two of the best search apps out there). It’s still speculative, but by watching the activities inside Yahoo! over the next 3-6 months, we’ll probably get a lot more insight about who’s headed to the chopping block.

 #9 - Yahoo! Maintains UI Control for their Search Experience

This means that Yahoo!’s results ordering, layout, sidebars and searcher focus may continue to be unique from Bing, thus requiring that SEOs still pay attention to the differences in the two engines and optimize accordingly. It will be tough to know the extent of Bing’s integration until it launches, but there’s a lot of room for variation, which means complexity for SEOs.

#10 - Yahoo! Will Become a More Powerful Content Competitor

With Yahoo! out of the core search business, many people, myself included, expect them to focus even more on the content side of the business. That means properties inside Yahoo! News & Media Group are going to get more attention and more investment. If you’re competing with Yahoo!’s content now, that battle may get tougher in the future.

 

I have no doubt that this quick analysis doesn’t cover every important aspect of the deal for SEOs, and definitely appreciate any comments you have that can help to provide further insight. Once again, the SEO field is proving that if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.

 

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Does Hitwise Read SEO Book?

Posted by Aaron Wall
July 29, 2009

A couple days ago in a blog post we published this image.

And that image recently appeared in a copyright HitWise “advanced SEO” presentation

Whenever we share their data / research / charts on our site we try to attribute them. Not only did they offer no attribution, but they also cleansed our logo from our branded image. In the above image you can see

This sort of activity is from a marketing company that thinks our site is important enough to pitch new releases to.

Who is the guy working for a multi-billion dollar company that markets stolen content from recent blog posts from blogs with 30,000+ subscribers without expecting to get caught? I hope they get fired.

And if this sort of corner cutting speaks for any of Hitwise’s other business practices you are best off avoiding them.

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An Open Letter to Online Ad Networks

Posted by Aaron Wall
July 28, 2009

by Jonah Stein and Jonathan Hochman

The FTC recently announced guidelines for bloggers that requires that they disclose financial interests, freebies and paid reviews.  This decision is seen as a shot across the bow of pay per post networks and bloggers who are monetizing through affiliate programs.    The FTC has decided that compensation is the reason bloggers choose to write about a particular topic and that readers deserve to be informed about the financial relationship.    The FTC logic is simple, “As much as those bloggers who receive these gifts would like to claim this isn’t the case, freebies like free laptops, trips, or gift cards are likely to influence a writer’s opinion of a product.”  

On its face, the policy is defensible.   As crusaders against Virtual Blight, we applaud the intent of this decision.  Anything that raises the barrier to online scams, fraud and abuse even a little bit is a good thing. The FTC provides guidelines for responsible bloggers and theoretically eliminates a couple of the perks for bloggers, but it does virtually nothing to protect against fraud. 

Going after bloggers’ compensation to fight online fraud is reminiscent of the RIAA attacks on individual file sharers and is just as likely to succeed. The absurdity of the power and inertia of a government bureaucracy combating individual bloggers is only matched by the ludicrous assumption the government could ever move fast enough to keep up with professional scammers who jump from domain to domain, host to host and country to country with a few mouse clicks.  Prosecution could only be effective against mainstream bloggers with an established brand that are stationary targets, but these bloggers are not the right target.

Getting a proverbial free lunch in exchange for a presumably positive review may create the appearance that some bloggers are shills who lend their prestige and celebrity to their sponsors.  That perception is not unreasonable, but the same charge could be made against almost every athlete, actor, musician or American Idol runner-up who profits from our celebrity culture. 

Giving items to celebrities or other tastemakers in return for public exposure is a practice older than the printing press.   If the FTC really wants to send a message about compensated endorsements and freebies, the answer is not to go after the mommy bloggers who get a free 42-pack of diapers.  If the FTC were serious, they would begin arresting every actress wearing a designer gown to the Academy Awards and then round up the studio and network executives who rake in cash for product placements in movies and television shows.

Focus On Fraud

The statistics for online fraud are both staggering and predictable.  Instead of being distracted by the sizzling, sensational charges of payola that re-appear every generation, the industry needs to focus on the billions of dollars of online fraud committed each year.  According to the Center for American Progress, Internet-related consumer complaints are among the top ten in consumer complaints in 2008 and the number one complaint in four states.  These complaints run from auction fraud and non-delivery of ecommerce items to reverse billing scams.

By any definition, the perpetrators of online fraud are not bloggers.  If a review constitutes fraud because the reviewer was provided a free product or had some undisclosed relationship with the company who produced the product, then every journalist with a 401k full of mutual funds needs to hire a good lawyer.  Indeed, if bloggers are guilty of anything it is tabloid journalism — writing low quality content with sensational headlines designed to attract visitors to their site in order to collect advertising revenue.  This may not live up to the highest journalistic standards, but the only crimes are against facts and the English language.

Criminals are the people and companies who create pyramid schemes, networks of spam blogs to sell diet products like Hoodia and Acai Berry cleanse, Google money trees and the myriad so called “free” offers that create recurring charges on your cell phone or credit card.

Criminals are the people who target kids’ sites to distribute Trojans, spyware and adware that infects our computers and tricks people into buying phony anti-virus products.  Most of us have either experienced malware nightmares ourselves or heard a friend’s sad story.  When online fraud is so prevalent, predatory and destructive, why are government resources being committed to pursue advertorial content?

Ad Networks Are the Key

The biggest thing these criminals have in common is that they perpetrate their scams by buying advertising through ad networks.  These networks have achieved the scale that makes it efficient for legitimate advertisers to reach millions of consumers and that makes them an ideal vector for scams, abuse and deception. 

In an unregulated auction-based advertising market place, fraudulent offers can often pay the highest bids for keywords. In FTC Going After Bloggers – Epic Fail, Aaron observes that ad networks that syndicate ads based on “maximizing yield efficiency“ are well suited to syndicate fraud. Advertisers of scams can afford to pay top dollar for ads because their profit margins are nearly 100%.

Ad networks are morally responsible as collaborators in interstate and international frauds perpetrated upon hundreds of thousands of victims each year.  Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and many others are far more culpable in consumers being defrauded than any blogger or network of bloggers.

In False and Deceptive Pay-Per-Click Ads, Harvard’s Ben Edelman estimated that as much as 70% of the revenue generated by some online scams actually wind up in the hands of the search engines.   He estimated in 2006 that Google and Yahoo were making over $200,000 a month from advertisements for screensaver software which contained spyware.  As of July 15, 2009, the top paid search results on Google for “screensaver” contain “add-on features” which include spyware, change your default browser settings, ad toolbars and otherwise aim to monetize by deceiving users.  Adding insult to injury, Edelman observes that many of these adware tools monetize by sending traffic through AdSense and DoubleClick, making Google a silent partner for adware companies like WhenU and Smiley Central.

Fight the Problems that Be

Scams and fraud not only harm the consumer, they foster the perception that the internet is not a safe place, hindering the growth of online business and delaying the transfer of marketing dollars from old media.  Instead of waiting for government agencies to step in and create regulations aimed at yesterday’s scams, as an industry we need to become proactive and develop a cooperative framework for mutual self-defense, a neighborhood watch designed to keep consumers safer while helping law enforcement focus resources on the most serious trouble makers.

The war on online fraud is going to be a huge struggle and one we are unlikely to ever declare victory.  The issues are complex, but the industry could significantly reduce the problem by creating a transparent mechanism to collect user feedback about advertisers.  Search engines and ad networks are quick to endorse behavioral targeting and social recommendations to boost earning per exposure.   For some mysterious reason, they have not applied these innovations to getting user feedback about advertisers.  

If the Internet is the cesspool that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google says it is, one way to start cleaning it up would be to create a public reputation system for advertisers.  This would simultaneously reward honest companies while helping consumers protect themselves against the bad guys.   eBay created public reputations for buyers and sellers many years ago.  Why are advertisers free to operate without scrutiny? 

It seems straightforward to build an advertiser rating system to share relevant statistics and user feedback.  Why not provide the tenure of the advertiser, normalized click volume, the percentage of users giving feedback and a ratio of clicks to complaints along with a link to detailed reviews that could surface fraud, misleading advertising and scams?  If comparison shopping engines can do it, why can’t ad networks?

We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we see the problem and its sources. Government agencies need to ask the ad networks why they accept money for promoting fraud.  Ad networks need to grow up and behave like responsible businesses. 

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How Not to Request an SEO Proposal: An Epic Email Fail to 51 Top SEOs

Posted by great scott!
July 28, 2009

Posted by great scott!

Not but a few short days ago I had the distinct pleasure of being included on a list of 51 of the world’s top Search Marketers.  Alas, for this great honor I did not receive an award statue or a shiny plaque, not even an ornate certificate.  What I received was an email. A horribly executed email that would result in one of the most amusing email threads I’ve ever read, from some of the smartest minds in our industry.

What I’m about to share is a lesson in one fundamental rule: if you’re going to send an RFP to elite consultants, DO NOT simply CC them all in the same email…you’re about to see what will happen.  Names and URLs have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. All of the SEO’s are referred to as SEO1-SEO51, just as we were in the To: field of the email (I was SEO8)…those who feel like it can reveal themselves in the comments.

UPDATE: This post originally contained an anonymous version of the RFP solicitation mentioned above, as well as the anonymous replies (mostly comical, some harsh) from a handful of the 51 SEOs included in the spam. 

I have opted to remove this content due to privacy concerns. While nobody was mentioned by name and no email addresses were shown in the post, in hindsight I don’t feel comfortable with my decision to re-publish email content without explicit permission from the authors, even if anonymous.  If any of the involved parties were at all offended by the inclusion of their responses, you have my deepest apologies. I’ve met with several of my mozMates and we’ve decided that this will be a general blog policy: with the exception of clear, unsolicited spam, we will not republish any private email communication without express permission from the correspondents involved.

I am leaving the comment thread intact because, as always, people certainly have the right to support, question, agree or disagree with what we write on the blog.  I’m sorry that the comments may seem a bit out of context to new readers due to the removal of the post content.  For those that did read the content while it was up, I would like to mention that the vast majority of the thread was not sent to the person who mailed the RFP, it was just good-natured joking amongst the community. The original sender only received four direct responses in the thread: two harsh, one comical, and one stern but fair.

Also, for readers who have contacted members of SEOmoz via email or Twitter requesting responses to this post, our responses will be posted within the comment thread.

-Scott

What can be learned from this?  When you’re contacting people you want to work with, whether it’s asking for an RFP, marketing your consulting services, looking to partner, hell, even requesting a link, you need to not only know who you’re talking to, but show some respect.  Few things make people less receptive to you than making them feel like a number; like they have no individual value and that their skills and accomplishments are not appreciated.  Be personable, knowledgeable and respectful and you’ll get a lot further in this industry whether you’re a beginner asking for advice, or a company with a good-sized budget.


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