Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

These are questions I recently got in fielding a proposal for search marketing services. For others who might have the same question, here’s the answer, and an explanation.

PPC is necessary when you’re just entering a market.

At that point, you have no idea what keywords will or won’t convert. By buying ads on those keywords, you can tell what does and doesn’t convert. This is essential to keyword research; you can’t perform SEO that delivers a positive ROI without knowing whether you can make money with traffic from a particular keyword.

Additionally, pay per click ads are extremely valuable to compare the value of keywords before you start your SEO campaign. When you’re just entering a market, you may know that two keywords you’re targeting are commercial, but not which will deliver higher conversion rates, average order sizes, or bottom line value per visitor. PPC can tell you that in a few weeks, whereas SEO would take several months.

Arguably, if you need to compare the relative value of keywords that you know will convert, you can skip PPC. If you’re going to make some money, and that’s enough for you, then you can go straight to SEO.

But if you want to prioritize more lucrative keywords to make the most money – which you MUST do if you’re in a competitive market – then PPC will be necessary.

Why is testing with PPC a MUST for competitive markets?

It’s a must because competitive markets are driven by ROI. Testing keywords, copy and landing paths is the way to generate a higher value per visitor.

In competitive markets, most players are using such testing to maximize their value per visitor and thus their ROI. This means that they can afford to spend more to attract those visitors in the first place.

It’s like a lemonade stand and a Ferrari dealership competing to buy ads in the local paper. Guess who’s going to get the ad inventory? The Ferrari dealership will get to buy the ad space, because it makes more money from the ads, so it can spend more on the ads.

Well, what about if two Ferrari dealerships are competing to buy the same ad space? In that case, it still boils down to whoever can make the most money from the ad. It comes down to better ad design, having salesmen who close a greater percentage of sales, selling more expensive Ferraris or leases etc.

The same thing happens online. Whoever makes more from a given piece of ad space will buy it instead of their competitors. If you content yourself with whatever ROI you can get, competitors who are more serious about maximizing their ROI will eventually price you out of the market. Over time, this means you won’t get any traffic at all.

This is equally true of SEO. If you can only afford some crummy directory submission service, and I can afford advanced link building tactics like linkbait, guess who’s going to rank first?

My backlink research (see also backlink research part 2) shows that in most commercial markets (not just the most competitive ones), you need to build links constantly – just to keep up!  Let alone surpassing others in the rankings.

Testing with PPC makes your business more efficient and grows profit margins. That means you can to spend more on link building and have a chance to succeed with SEO.

When is PPC not at all necessary?

If you’ve already worked in a market and know what keywords convert and what their relative value is, you can skip buying PPC traffic.

Well, kinda. While PPC is great for getting data on the value of a given keyword, it’s also valuable for testing ad copy and landing paths. And if you’re in a competitive market, your competitors are buying PPC traffic to maximize their value per visitor.

And furthermore, the organic search results get more competitive daily. So if you want to be able to afford the SEO services it takes to rank, you need to test with PPC.

To summarize:

• PPC is necessary when you’re new to a market, because PPC lets you test keywords out. This tells you which keywords are worth more money.
• PPC is also valuable to maximize your value per visitor, by testing different messages and landing paths to find out what ads and versions of the website make the most money.
• Competitive markets require PPC. Otherwise, you’ll get priced out of buying any ads or buying seo services to get organic traffic.
• If you already know what keywords are most valuable, you have a lesser need for PPC.
• You probably still need it to be able to test and maximize your profitability, however.
• Update: Josh Sciarrino, of Tampa internet marketing company Refuge Design, highlights that PPC can also be more valuable when bidding on brand, by driving additional marginal sales (be prepared for some cannibalization of your SEO-driven brand sales.

p.s. If you found this interesting, you may want to check out my buddies at Wordstream, who offer keyword research and organization software.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

If all goes well, there should be some feature length, deeply researched stuff for you SEO pros later this week.)

Question: Does it matter for my site’s SEO in Google or other search engines if I use www in the domain name? For example, do I need to use http://www.example.com or can i use http://example.com ?

Answer: It doesn’t matter at all to your SEO in Google, Bing or Yahoo whether you use www in your domain name or not.

Search engines most likely don’t consider that as a ranking factor, because it has no value in improving the relevance of their search results or improving the user experience. There is one exceptional point, however. You don’t want to use both a www version of the site and a non-www version.

If you do use both www and non-www, then you’ll have duplicate content problems, also known as “canonicalization” problems.

(The word “canon” is used in religious terms to mean the “official set of holy writings.” That’s been adapted to other fields. So you can have the canonical set of Harry Potter books, which are the official books, and you can have the “canonical” version of a web page, which is the official one you want search engines to rank in their search results.)

What I mean is that if you have two identical versions of a page, one found at http://www.example.com and another found at http://example.com, and both show up fine to search engine spiders, you will have duplicate content.

This is problematic because a) It confuses search engines as to what is the canonical, or official, page. b) You will sometimes get links to one version and sometimes to another, such that you compete with yourself.

How do you do SEO successfully then, if you currently have such www vs non-www duplicate content problems?

You have two options.

1) Redirect either version to the other one using “301 permanent” redirects. There are numerous tutorials on this online, for DIY people, but you can also get a decent freelance programmer to do it for you. Personally, I get my hosting from Dreamhost and they give you an option to 301 redirect one version to the other.

I have a $50 off discount code at Dreamhost off any annual hosting package (or a $25 off discount on a monthly hosting package) if you need to set up a new site: Just enter GabSavesYou50 when you sign up for Dreamhost hosting.

(Full disclosure: It’s an affiliate link, but I’d endorse Dreamhost personally anyways, as I have in the past. Their tech support is super responsive and they have numerous tools to make things very easy, like one-click Wordpress installs.)

2) Use the “canonical” tag to indicate to search engines which version is the official one. For those of you using Wordpress, Yoast has a plugin to automate some canonicalization, but I’m not sure it’s applicable to this situation.

(3) Update: Malcolm Coles has a related article with examples of www vs non www that’s a valuable read on this topic.

If you liked this post, you might want to get my latest posts sent to you regularly, for free, by rss or by email.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Note: If you like this post, please link to this page from your blog or share it on StumbleUpon by clicking this button:

Here’s how to project the ROI you can expect on SEO. This way, when your boss asks you to predict next quarter’s SEO numbers to help him with his forecast to analysts, you predictive task will be easy. Better yet, the ROI forecast you make will be defendable.

The detailed explanation on making your forecasts follows after the flow chart.

1) Pick some short-tail or mid-tail keywords. There’s no point picking long tail keywords, because the ROI on them individually is small in absolute terms.

2) Check the keyword for commercial intent.

- Microsoft offers a keyword commercial intent estimator tool. Caveat emptor: The tool’s estimates can vary significantly by day, so just take it as another data point, another road sign along the way.

- Correlate that by asking people to do word associations with the given keyword. You can use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for that. The associations will show the intent behind a given search.

- Compare the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) estimates Google provides you with for each keyword (set on exact match). The higher the CPC, the likelier there is to be commercial value.

Note: For CPCs under $1, this isn’t very meaningful.

3) Find search volume for your target keywords.

Use Google’s KW tool on exact match to find the exact volumes on target keywords.

It’s crucial to use exact match, and not broad match data, because rankings will result in getting you traffic for your exact match keywords and maybe a few variants. It’s best to be conservative.

3.5) Don’t just accept those search volume projections at face value. Double check.

- Run a PPC campaign.

- If you’re not going to run a PPC campaign (eg if the CPCs are too high), you MUST at least correlate the data to other people’s numbers:

• Use Wikirank, if you see Wikipedia in the top 10.

• Compare with Aaron’s tool.

• Ask friends who’ve been in the same vertical about the search volume. Apparently the accuracy of Google’s numbers varies by vertical, so friends who’ve been there can provide valuable insights. (It’s not too difficult to find such friends once you’ve been in this business for a few years.)

• Also, check against competitors’ keywords. Are you on the right track or really, really clueless?

4) Find out whether you can rank. Scope out the competition:

• Look for backlink numbers and quality,

• Consider backlink growth rates,

• Calculate backlinks/referring domains to find out if there are big brands you need to be aware of,

• Look at their anchor text,

• Consider their own domain name – an indicator of anchor text past, present and future, as well as financial backing for marketing.

5) Estimate your costs including domain, hosting, site design + development, links, man hours.

Note: As pointed out by professional search marketer Simon Serrano in the comments below, certain costs are fixed regardless of whether you do SEO or not. So if you’re doing this with an existing site, then you can exclude those costs. But you’ll probably compensate with the man hours etc.

My perspective in suggesting that the domain and hosting costs be included was that of someone starting a new site from scratch, with the mentality, “I’ll rank and sell to search traffic.” For them, the exact match domain might be a big cost that wouldn’t be incurred otherwise, for example.

6) Estimate the traffic attainable from various positions. See Aaron’s big resource page on the topic and scroll down about 1/3 of the way for the breakdown of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentage by position.

Hat tip to my friend Henry Shih of online jeweler Ice.com for coming up with the idea to “make a range of projections, from conservative to optimistic” last summer. Todd Friesen has also suggested this.

Update: Given Universal search results with maps, news, videos, images etc., you may want to review these results downwards to be conservative. As Simon points out in the comments, the CTR data has changed significantly since the time AOL leaked its numbers.

7) Calculate your potential revenue.

If you’re an affiliate: i) Multiply those attainable traffic numbers by your CTR. ii) Multiply again by the merchant’s conversion rate. iii) Finally, multiply by your average commission. Take multiple values for both your own CTR and the merchant’s conversion rate, so you have a range of estimates from conservative to optimistic.

To simplify, if you know what your earnings per click will be (eg recently work in the niche), you can multiply traffic by EPC.

7b) If you’re an adcents publisher: Multiply that by your CTR and EPC if you’re selling CPC ads.

7c) If you’re a retailer / lead buyer: Multiply that by your conversion rate and then by your average if you’re the merchant.

Finally, divide your potential revenue by costs. This gives you your SEO ROI – the return on investment for each dollar you put into SEO.

I do this in a spreadsheet for convenience. If you add my rss feed to your reader, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet for your own use.

This has literally saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours by helping me avoid niches that offered a lower ROI for the same time and money investment…

p.s. If you want to know how to prove SEO ROI on past activities, that’s easy. Open your web analytics, and see how many organic visitors on non-brand keywords turned into leads or sales. Alternately, show your rankings increase if you’re not yet in the top 10, and thus not driving traffic just yet.

Found this post useful? Add my feed to your reader for more advanced SEO tips for inhouse SEOs, consultantts and independent webmasters and affiliates! If you want a price estimate for SEO services, you can get one quickly here.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

“This is something that can go both ways. On a graphics-heavy site where it was the design idiom to go non-underlined until you hovered over a link, I wouldn’t foresee that being an issue.

If we thought that people would doing it in a deceptive way though, that could be higher risk. I documented a good example of this here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/ “

On that post, Matt addresses spammy links. In particular, he highlights the use of javascript to hide the fact that links are links. The javascript prevents the cursor from changing to the “this-is-clickable-hand-icon.” Simultaneously, the link had CSS applied to make it look like ordinary text…

So if it’s just a style element, Google probably doesn’t care. If it’s being used to deceive users, particularly in conjunction with other code that will make it impossible to discern a link short of viewing the source code, then you’re taking risks.

As an aside, it’s better usability (see Conversion Dr’s test),  to make links underlined, since that is what users expect. If you MUST go non-standard, tedster and other WMW users have some worthwhile comments. And the dean of usability himself, Jakob Nielsen, has this Alertbox with particular detail for intranets etc.

P.s. It’s worth repeating that at the end of the day, the ranking paradigm at Google is user experience, though brand building is also key, so why not check out my brand building guide for SEOs and Internet Marketers?

If you liked this seo faq, why not add my rss feed to your reader? Or if you want to read more right now, check out this related tip to sexify your SEO and please both SEOs/web designers.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Good question. The answer is that people want measurable results so that they can try to improve (aka testing) and then see if their effort was succesful. If you can’t measure, you’re wasting your money investing into search marketing, because you’ll

a – Never know if search is working or not.
b – Never know what technique, keywords, or campaign is providing a positive ROI and what is providing a negative ROI.
c – Never be able to improve your efforts/results nor duplicate them. My dad did a very succesful direct mail campaign, had no offline analytics to measure why it worked and has since been unable to replicate the same level of success.

As a starting point, you should try out Conversion Ruler, Sitemeter and Google Analytics – they’re all cheap or free web analytics solutions that can get you started measuring your efforts.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

How does Googlebot treat session IDs?

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22sessionID%3D%22

Found while looking for folks using Blue Martini, which seems to output some nasty long URLs featuring BM user IDs and “J sessionIDs”: http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22bmuid%3D%22

Like this post on session IDs? Get my RSS feed.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Other titles I was considering for this post were:

Why Matt Cutts’ “Make Content For Users” Was Very Insightful

How Googlers Measure SERP Quality – Relevance Is No Longer King

Sorry Rand, But The Googlers Were Very Expressive, IMHO.

They are aiming not just for relevance, but overall positive user experience.

That’s what’s behind labelling of cracked sites in SERPs. That’s the reason for Universal search. That’s why AdWords integrates with GA, and GA with Feedburner. That’s why Quality Score counts loading times.
That’s probably what’s behind Knols (remember, Wiki + AdSense is good user experience .) For the inspiration to this post, lookie : what google wants/researching the territory.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

“Do we credit the first click or the last click for this conversion?”

Answer: You credit them both and the ones in the middle too. They all played a role. If it turns out your cost-per-action (CPA) is higher than projected now, that’s tough luck – factor it into your measurements and budgeting. You can’t count a single 50 cent click for the conversion when there were 3 other dollars that also made an impact on this new client…

Also, if one or more of those impressions came from the organic side of things, you can either measure the value at PPC cost. E.g. if you’d have to pay a dollar to buy the click, that’s how it factors into the CPA calculation. An alternative is to measure the value of labour/other expenses to rank divided by total traffic pulled on the keyword to get the cost. Obviously this is more complicated, so PPC replacement might be simpler to measure.

This answer to the source attribution question also affects how you structure affiliate commissions and payouts. Out of the 7 repeat visits prior to purchase, how many did the affiliate send? 1? 2? 4? 7? Sure you don’t want to tick off affiliates, but you need to credit your own inhous work too. Also, keep in mind some people will purchase on visit 1 and others will purchase on visits 3, 5, 8 or 11. You might need to get more sophisticated with your analytics…

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

What follows is an editorial / research article showing that SEO is valuable – but not explaining how to calculate it.

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer).

According to a SEMPO report, the North American Search Marketing industry grew to $12 Billion in 2007. (Worldwide numbers are unavailable, but presumably much larger.)

According to the same report, 88% of search marketing dollars were spent on PPC while only 10.5% of that went to SEO. Various miscellaneous categories, including an amorphous “technology investment” (Analytics? Content management systems? Web design? Servers? …) capture the remaining handful of percentage points.

An older study from 2004, by Internet Retailer, showed respondents saying that the conversion rate of organic traffic (i.e. the traffic gained from SEO) was greater than that of PPC.

“Nearly one-half—46.1%—maintain that natural search delivers better sales conversions vs. 37.3% who cite pay-per-click as a better conversion generator and 16.6% who say paid and natural search perform equally as well.”

Conversion rate, for those of you who may be newer to the search marketing business, is the percentage of visitors who buy. If 3 out of 100 visitors buy your blue rattle, your conversion rate is 3%. So what the majority of the retailers above are saying, in other words, is that the ROI on SEO is better than that on PPC. This old SEO Chat case study also shares a higher conversion rate on organic results.

But wait, there’s more. Consider the fact that a majority of clicks on a page of search results go to the organic listings. I’ve just spent an hour and can’t figure out the keywords to unlock the studies to “prove” this, but since it’s so commonly known, I’ll ask you to take my word for now. If you do have a study to share on the CTR for SEO vs PPC, I’d be happy to see it.

Update: In the comments, Antonio of Marketing de Busca shared the following great post with data straight from the horse’s mouth: Avinash Kaushik (consultant at Google) cites 86% of clicks as going to the organic results and 14% going to the sponsored listings.

So, to summarize, here’s the situation in the search marketing industry.

• A landslide majority of the money spent on search marketing
• Is going to attract a minority of the search engine traffic,
• Which paid traffic provides a lower ROI than SEO.

Let’s be clear. PPC is a great way to build business and gain sales, and it should be a key part of any balanced search campaign. There’s no doubt about it; only doing SEO can have you waste months optimizing for keywords that convert less well than others you could have targeted!

But there’s also no doubt that there’s a huge ROI opportunity in SEO because such a relatively small percentage of search budgets is going to deliver organic results, not to mention that those results deliver a better ROI than PPC results. I look forward to hearing and responding to your comments, and suggest that if you liked this post, you subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed. You may also care to read this related guest post I wrote entitled, “What Every SEO Needs to Know about Branded Search ROI” and this on the three types of SEO consultant: Good, Rad, and Sexy.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Blogging on the main corporate domain

Pros include:

• Traffic can transit over to the blog from the main company site and quickly build up the blog’s authority, share its posts and ideas, and connect to the company through its blogger(s). This assumes you don’t ignore your blog, like Facebook.
• Links go to the main domain that you’re trying to rank, which is key given the importance Google places on authoritative domains.
• If your blog links to inner FAQ pages or other things on the same site, the look and feel will be the same; the traffic is less likely to bounce upon arrival to the pages you linked to.
• Centralization if you have multiple company blogs (they can all go on one domain), as opposed to spreading them out over a disparate number of domains.

Cons include:

• You could get an extra source of “external links” by putting the new blog on a separate domain (and hosting on a different C block of IPs, at least for Google’s algorithms; hat tip Wiep’s link roundup).
• People may be reluctant to link to a “corporate” blog.
• If the bloggers become popular enough, they can just leave and blog independently.

Blogging on a new domain

Pros include:

• An extra source of links to your new site. I say source and note just ‘more links’ because my own experience with my old Montreal SEO site and this one is that after the first couple of links, additional ones aren’t very helpful, unless they’re deeplinks.
• It’ll be easier to attract links to the blog, though if the blog itself doesn’t convert visitors (either from the links or from the search engines), the value of this may be questionable.
• You might have a more relaxed graphic design, like being in the company lounge as opposed to the company press conference. This could, in turn, attract links and positive attention from CSS galleries and help enhance your company’s “cool factor” with web designers.

Cons include:

• More traffic will bounce when it hits the company’s official domain.
• Traffic won’t transit over from the main site as easily (plus you’ll have more bounces there too), so you won’t have as easy a time spreading the word at first.
• Links don’t go to the corporate domain, so you won’t build up its authority as easily.
• Doesn’t scale as well, inherently.

At the end of the day, the domain authority/strength issue is the big differentiator where I’m concerned. If you check out Wiep’s piece on how he had Matt Cutts’ site (about search marketing) rank for one of the most competitive phrases around, you’ll understand what I mean. Matt’s page had a single inbound link whereas players in that space usually have a pyramid of tens of thousands of links backing them up; the ranking was mostly due to his site itself having so many links and being such a trust authority.

Update: Romela of Business Solutions has a good addition in the comments. So does Dave, of Zoekmachine Optimalisatie SEO.

So keep those corporate / company / business blogs on the main company website. If you liked this, subcribe to my RSS feed.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

If you want tools, then check out the tools listed at the end of this article. Unfortunately, the best they can currently do is just measure brand mentions and track them; that only solves part of the problem as we’ll see.
(Soon to be wed by Simoty77/SLloydBottom)

Social media is a suite of tools for … socializing.

Therefore, the best measure of success in social media is how many relationships you have and how strong your relationships are.

Personally, I really enjoy linking to other people and/or submitting their stuff to Sphinn because I know it strengthens my relationships with them.

To reprise Sean Covey Jr.’s metaphor from his highly succesful 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens (reprised from his dad’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective people?), you’re putting a deposit into your relationship bank account. The more deposits, the richer you are.

The reason regular analytics aren’t suited to measuring this is because they collect clickstream data (word kudos to Avinash Kaushik). Whether we’re talking about logs or about javascript tags or sniffer packets, the data is what occurs in your visitors’ browsers. Social media analytics need to track what goes on in your acquaintances and friends’ minds. (Like the thought police, only different . )

That’s only a slight exaggeration. What I’m getting at is that you want to measure your network of friends and contacts. Since I’ve been getting more active and having more success on StumbleUpon, I know that my network is growing in size, and as I submit more content and thumb more up, in strength as well. Is your network a sturdy jungle gym or a flimsy spiderweb? (Jungle Gym by bazzmc.) If you’re going to measure your social media results for now, the best you can do is sit down with a spreadsheet, write up your friends’ names and what you’ve done for them recently. Have you:

• Connected them with useful contacts?
• Sent business their way?
• Linked to them?
• Interviewed them for something?
• Answered some questions they had?
• Gotten them a ahead in some way, shape or form?

I emphasize the recency bit. To quote the Japanese , “A kind word can warm three cold winter months.” (Which means that if you’ll see a higher ROI in Canada.) More seriously, this will help you assess where you stand, because people forget favours quickly remember injuries extensively. I still remember which kids stole my hockey cards in grade school, and that was over a decade ago! Ask me who gave me a compliment, and I’d be hardpressed to tell. (Though that may be because I was a bit of a loner back then.)

Another advantage of this approach to tracking is that it’s more actionable than clickstream data. Compare “I haven’t been in touch with Sylvain in a while…” vs “We got 348 visitors today.”

On that same note, I’d like to highlight that I’m far from being the only one discussing this issue. Get some further reading from the following folks, who address social media, ROI and measurement, though none of them quite in these words, afaik.

Note: While Ann and Maki are pretty close to my thinking, I believe this post adds to the discussion (especially in terms of specifics, and pointing out the obvious which for some reason hasn’t been addressed yet) rather than just rehashing it.

1. Maki – social-media-networking-and-roi/
2. MindValley Labs – whats-a-friend-worth-to-you/394/
3. Ignite (ft. Brian) – social-media-metrics-coming-to-an-algorithm-near-you-part-1/
4. Huomah – social-media-marketing-is-it-for-you.html
5. Huomah – the-Value-of-Social-Media-Marketing-Part-II.html
6. SEOmoz in part – whiteboard-friday-tracking-nontraditional-conversions
7. Annie at SEOmoz – creative-rss-button-could-it-work
8. Annie @ home – http://www.seosmarty.com/social-media-marketing-think-long-term/
9. Ann’s touched on it elsewhere (or was that just PMs?) but I can’t find it. You get the point though, the gal’s smart.
10. Yours truly – seo-roi-tops-200-subscribers-case-study-on-feed-analytics-and-poll/ (update: tops 300 )

To conclude, consider this illustration of the ROI you can get from social media.

Guy Kawasaki, when explaining how he was able to launch a site that got 200,000 pageviews its first day, said, “I spent 24 years schmoozing and paying it forward.”

And that, ladies and gents, was my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. Like this person said: Measure relationships, their strength and their growth.

On a related note, you may care to read this post on the measures and value of attention equity: How do you measure attention and what is it worth to you? If you think you’re likely to visit again why not just add my rss feed to your rss-feedreader ?

Existing social media analytics tools are as follows. Note that they’re mostly quantitative, rather than qualitative.

To analyze Digg, Mashable lists 5 tools.

What are people talking about? Try Facebook Lexicon.

Marty has a great item on building a reputation monitoring dashboard. He also has buzz pocket mining tools for those interested in mining social media for keywords.

Some other miscellaneous ones include Keotag – for tracking tag use ; Boardtracker – for forum conversations in particular ; Google Blogsearch, which lets you track blogs that mentions your desired keywods (e.g. Brands, products etc.); Copernic.com – for changes on a site ; and Radian 6, which Ben has reviewed.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

(Bucket testing image by mil8.)

A/B testing is defined as testing different values for the same variable. For example, suppose you have three landing pages, called A, B, and C. You can carry out A/B testing by changing the titles on each landing page. The variable there would be the title, and each the A’s title, B’s title and C’s title would each be a value for that variable.

It isn’t about having only two versions and comparing one to the other. You can do A/B/C testing or even go super deep and do A/B/[...]/Z testing! A/B testing is also sometimes referred to as split testing or A/B split testing because you split your traffic (or your “sample,” if you’re testing something offline, like in-store displays)

Multivariate testing is defined as testing multiple values for multiple variables, simultaneously (hence the name “multivariate”). Let’s say we’re still working with pages A, B and C. Instead of just testing different titles, we’d also try different colour ‘buy now’ buttons, emphasizing different benefits in the copy and displaying different testimonials.

This is all done at the same time. If you tested each of these variables separately, you’d really just be carrying out A/B testing!

To give a human analogy, A/B testing is like having two brothers growing up side-by-side. They’re raised exactly the same way and are identical in every way, except that they play different sports. You’d be testing for the result of being enrolled in each of those sports and see who got a better job, or earned more money, for example.

Multivariate testing would take those brothers’ children, and have them being raised very differently. The variables there would be the brothers’ different wives, the ways they were being raised, their environments etc. You could still test to see who got better jobs and/or earned more money.

As this example shows, there’s a big difference in what you can learn from the results of these two types of testing.

With the two brothers, we know that since everything else was the same, any difference in job quality or salary is directly attributable to the sports they played. If the soccer-playing one got a better job, then you know that raising a kid to play soccer is better for the child than raising him on say, baseball. (Statistical significance is another issue for another day.)

With the various cousins, we can make educated guesses about what caused the differences in job quality and salary. Perhaps brother A’s wife worked in the recruitment industry and helped her kids more than her sister-in-law could help her kids. Perhaps the neighbourhood where brother B and his wife raised their kids didn’t have as good schools. You can make good guesses about why you got a particular result, but you can’t be certain.

Note: To my more advanced readers, I’m vaguely aware that depending on your sample size and how you play with the numbers, you can get a very high degree of certainty (if not 100%) with multivariate testing. My point above is made at a basic level, and is the main distinction between A/B testing and multivariate testing.

Update 1: Sphinn button is broken, but you can [should? ] sphinn the story here. Also, I forgot to point it out, but if analytics are your bag, check out these 3 new metrics for measuring social media and this post on messing with competitors’ analytics.

Update 2: Tim from Convert Offline gets our first dofollow of the day . He’s a local hound apparently. Me too! Miriam’s going to interview him too, so keep your eyes peeled! (No, that doesn’t mean that you should put a sharp metal implement near your cornea. )

Update 3: More link love abounds! The very succesful Brian Chappell gets his and Hannah Smith gets some for the Gravy Train and her post on rogue Adwords due to personalization.

Please let me know in the comments whether this helped clear up to you what A/B testing is vs multivariate testing. Also, please do comment about how you’re using A/B testing and/or multivariate testing and any case studies/experience you might have in the matter! Testing is a fascinating topic and while I know a little bit about it, I’m sure many of you could teach me more! Good comments get dofollow links, as usual.
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Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Aside: Several people who’ve read this have written to ask me questions regarding directories. While I’m glad to lend a hand, you should also consider buying an hour of my time. You’ll get to ask me as many questions as you can fit in to the hour, and I’ll give you the answers you need to improve your SEO.

Directories that manually review submissions before including them are the perfect example of this theory. Human editors ensure that only those sites that meet certain standards are included, and thus vote, vouch, or whatever other term you like, for the website.

Google engineer Matt Cutts recently suggested criteria by which to judge a directory’s quality.

“When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm)
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask ‘Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?’ you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

Second, submit to directories from which you expect to get quality traffic that might buy your products or services. Generally speaking, this means the biggest general directories as well as the smaller industry-specific directories. Some directories are combined with vertical search engines, and these should also be considered. For example, Business.com is both a vertical search engine (i.e. for business websites) and a directory.

Some good directories to submit to are the Yahoo directory (dir.yahoo.com), Business.com, Best of the Web (BOTW.org), and JoeAnt. Depending on the nature of your business, internet yellow pages and online local directories might be a good idea too.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Aside: Several people who’ve read this have written to ask me questions regarding directories. While I’m glad to lend a hand, you should also consider buying an hour of my time. You’ll get to ask me as many questions as you can fit in to the hour, and I’ll give you the answers you need to improve your SEO.

For example, if you’re unsure of the quality of some directories you’re considering submitting to, we can talk it over and analyze their quality. You also get a transscript of our conversation or mp3 recording so that you can review what we said at a later date and apply the advice when you’re ready. And to top it off, I guarantee your satisfaction. If you aren’t satisfied, just say so and I’ll refund your money, no questions asked. Now, back to our regular programming…

Text links from outside sites indicate to the search engines that your website is a quality one. It’s as if the owner/administrator of the other website says, “I know this site and am vouching for it.” Additionally, the anchor text will help indicate to search engines what the site is about. In other words, the blue underlined words determine what keywords your site (or page being linked to) is relevant for.

Second, if you sign up with well-maintained and professional directories like Yahoo, you’ll find that some visitors will come to your site through those links. It won’t be much, typically, but if you can get some extra traffic and perhaps a few leads or sales, then why complain, right?

For more information, consider reading which directories are worth submitting to.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

No, you can’t automate it.

First of all, search engine optimization’s foundation and core is about building links. Take the example of Google-bombing, where many people link to a certain webpage with the same anchor text, in a concerted attempt to have that page rank for the words in the anchor text, even though that page is not trying to rank for those keywords. This technique was succesfully used on several occasions and serves to demonstrate the power of link-building.

Now consider how you go about building those links. You contact webmasters and other people with websites and ask them to link to you. It helps a lot to be friendly and give them feedback on their own site, mentioning broken links or forms and other things that could be improved. And to a large extent, you want to go on to develop and maintain relationships with as many of those webmasters as you can, because that’ll get you other links in addition to that first one. Just consider what Marketing Sherpa’s Wisdom 2007 publication quoted me on (look at #27). You need to network to build links.

No matter how advanced spam-email software gets, it won’t network with other webmasters for you. It might let you include the url of the webmaster’s site in your email, but you’re still not getting a link. First of all, because these things show you don’t care about the webmaster you want a favour from. So why should they care about you? The reaction goes something like: “Generic spam email? Delete. ”

So that’s why you’re never getting anything to automate link-building. Right there, you’ve just lost your chance at ranking for anything mildly competitive.

The second reason SEO can’t be automated is because the software that’s around is just plain garbage. I tried using one of these things just to do a site analysis of my own blog. I figured it couldn’t go wrong just reading code and telling me what was done well and what was done wrong. But this totally inept piece of software came back to me and told me it couldn’t find my keywords once on the page (I wish I remembered the name to help you steer clear but this was a looooong time ago – probably a year or more. Edit: I just saw more people asking this question on a forum I read. The software I tried was WebCEO.) . This was on my Montreal SEO blog, which, wouldn’t you know it, ranks for Montreal SEO!

Well, what about keyword research, you say? Keyword research is perhaps a minor exception to the rule here. You’ve got tools that will help you discover new keywords to try and rank for. But these are mostly for preliminary keyword research aimed at search engine marketing, or SEM. The distinction is important because if you just try and rank for the highest (or lowest) volume keyword in your niche, without having run an SEM campaign beforehand, you might end up ranking and waisting your bandwidth on unproductive traffic.

Imagine getting 10,000 visitors a day to your sports equipment website from people who are lazy and hate sports. Not only did you waste your time, effort and money achieving that ranking, but you’ve actually got hosting costs accumulating on top of it all!

Bottom line: SEO can’t be automated.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

A: Robots.txt is a text file that tells search engine spiders (what are search engine spiders?), also known as search engine robots, which parts of your website they can enter and which parts they can’t. You can think of it as a nightclub’s bouncer or doorman, whose job it is to keep certain people (in our case the search engine robots) out of a certain VIP section of the club.

Now you may be thinking, I thought SEO was supposed to get my website fully crawled and indexed by the search engines! Why in the world would I want to keep their robots away from some of my pages? It’s a good question, and the simple answer is that most websites don’t want any of their pages being hidden from the search engine spiders.

The main reason why robots.txt would be used is to keep sensitive information private.

For example, if an ecommerce site uses a database with clients’ personal information stored on it, and this information is accessible through the website, robots.txt would be used to tell search engine spiders not to crawl (and therefore not to index) the access pages. If Yahoo’s Slurp robot collected the site’s clients’ credit card information, then anyone searching Yahoo could access those numbers! To avoid this PR and legal nightmare, robots.txt would be used to hide the database from Yahoo.

Another case for using robots.txt would be the situation where expensive research was being posted online. For example, imagine that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer had its research department using a wiki (a sort of collaborative website to which anyone can easily contribute and post updates) through Pfizer.com to share ideas and discoveries. It could use Robots.txt to make the wiki off-limits to search engine spiders.

Important Note: Password protection, firewalls, encryption and other security devices should be used in conjunction with robots.txt. Search engines are only one of many ways people come to visit a site, and so the security of sensitive data needs to be considered in light of human surfing behaviour, not just robots. Besides which, malicious spammers also use spiders and robots, and the first part of a website they’ll go to is often what’s been marked “Do not enter” in the robots.txt file. They know that’s where the “valuables” are kept.

At the time of this writing, Mcdonalds.com’s robots.txt excluded robots from crawling a directory called tools. If you were to try to visit Mcdonalds.com/tools, you would get an Error: file not found page (both by trying http://mcdonalds.com/tools and http://www.mcdonalds.com/tools ; see discussion below about canonicalization problems). Other companies simply redirect such queries to the homepage. Both approaches are valid, and worth implementing.

Robots.txt is also used to avoid what is known as “canonicalization” problems or having multiple “canonical” URLs. This problem is sometimes referred to incorrectly as a “duplicate content” problem.

Canonicalization problems occur where multiple pages on a website contain the same information. For example, a product page might also have a “Print” version to make it easier to print out the specs and details on the product. This can pose a problem to search engines who then have to figure out which version of the page (i.e. site.com/product-a.html or site.com/product-a-print.html) is the canonical one. Robots.txt would be used to keep the secondary version(s) from being indexed.

However, this solution isn’t ideal, because some people will link to a secondary page. If robots have been told to keep out, then the SEO benefit conferred to the from the inbound link may be lost. A better alternative may be to redirect search engines from all the secondary pages to the primary page, that way all links will certainly be counted. In addition the links will be counted towards the benefit of one specific page (as opposed to two or more), making it easier to achieve high rankings and pull in traffic.

(In case you’re wondering, “canonicalization” and its related words come from the world of religious writing. There, books or theories and other ideas may develop for a certain time until they are “canonized” – declared the best – and may no longer be edited. It is then part of the “Canon” or official doctrine.

As to the problem being referred to as a “duplicate content” issue, this is incorrect because duplicate content refers to a situation where more than two or more websites share the same content. Obviously, robots.txt can’t disallow pages on someone else’s website and is therefore useless in a duplicate content situation. Here the duplicate versions of the content are all on the same website. The difference is like that of a big company’s IT department and marketing department both publishing separate but identical press releases (the canonicalization issue) as opposed to two rival companies both claiming a new discovery as their own.)

How to write robots.txt and implement it on your website

The first thing you need to do is write a robots.txt file (i.e. create one).
Open Notepad (Mac users use a text editor that can output “.txt” format files) by clicking Start -> Accessories -> Notepad.

Now, type (or copy-paste) the following two lines into Notepad.

User-agent:
Disallow:

Next, save your file as “robots.txt”. The .txt extension should be on by default if you’re using Notepad. You just need to save the file as “robots” (without the quotation marks). Be sure to use lower-case, because some technologies may not work well with a “Robots.txt”, for example.

The fourth step is to customize the robots.txt file by writing out which robots you want to exclude (by altering the User-Agent line) and from what files or folders you want to exclude them. Below are some examples from the official robots.txt site. Once you’re done customizing your robots.txt file, you just upload it to the root directory of your website (it won’t work if you upload it anywhere else, such as a subdirectory).

What to put into the robots.txt file

The “/robots.txt” file usually contains a record looking like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /~joe/

In this example, three directories are excluded. [Namely the cgi-bin, tmp and~joe directories. A directory in server jargon is a file folder: it's a place where other files are kept and from which they may be accessed. By disallowing an entire directory, you block all the files it contains from search engine robots. These directories should not be confused with yellow-page style directories that list websites, such as Joe Ant.]

Note that you need a separate “Disallow” line for every URL prefix you want to exclude — you cannot say “Disallow: /cgi-bin/ /tmp/”. Also, you may not have blank lines in a record, as they are used to delimit multiple records.

Note also that regular expression are not supported in either the User-agent or Disallow lines. The ‘*’ in the User-agent field is a special value meaning “any robot”. Specifically, you cannot have lines like “Disallow: /tmp/*” or “Disallow: *.gif”.

What you want to exclude depends on your server. Everything not explicitly disallowed is considered fair game to retrieve. Here follow some examples:

To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To allow all robots complete access
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Or create an empty “/robots.txt” file.

To exclude all robots from part of the server
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

To exclude a single robot
User-agent: BadBot
Disallow: /

To allow a single robot
User-agent: WebCrawler
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To exclude all files except one
This is currently a bit awkward, as there is no “Allow” field. The easy way is to put all files to be disallowed into a separate directory, say “docs”, and leave the one file in the level above this directory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /~joe/docs/

Alternatively you can explicitly disallow all disallowed pages:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /~joe/private.html
Disallow: /~joe/foo.html
Disallow: /~joe/bar.html

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Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Luckily for you, you don’t need to go through the drudgery of reading through the whole, long technical paper. Various SEOs (Bill Slawski) and other good folk (Alister Cameron) have analyzed the patent and published this analysis for the public benefit. What follows is my comprehensive summary that aggregates and simplifies the patent and its analysis.

Three umbrella factors emerge from reading the patent’s abstract.

1) Document Relevance
2) Blog Post Quality (read assessing authority in the blog world…); possibly also Blog Quality generally, as per Bill Slawski
3) “The blog search engine may also provide information regarding the group of blog documents based on the determined scores.” – Patent abstract. Suggests that the display will not only list results, but potentially also offer ratings and reviews or other “information” about the blog.

Bill Slawski’s analysis jumps right to the blog and blog post quality assessment part of the patent, since the relevance factors are essentially the algorithm running Google’s main search engine. He writes, roughly quoting the patent:

The next step [after deciding what info to use for the sake of analysis] is to identify positive indicators of quality:

* Popularity of the blog,
* Implied popularity of the blog,
* Inclusion of the blog in blogrolls,
* Existence of the blog in high quality blogrolls,
* Tagging of the blog,
* References to the blog by other sources,
* A pagerank of the blog, and;
* Other indicators could also be used.

Popularity, both our analysts concur, will be based on RSS feed readership. In the world of blogging, instead of subscribing to an email newsletter, readers subscribe to an “RSS feed.” The distinction between email technology and RSS feed technology is unimportant for our purposes. The point is that the more people subscribing, the more popular a blog is considered.

The data on subscriptions would be obtained through Google Reader, Google’s RSS feed reader, as well as through Feedburner, one of the web’s most popular RSS services. Google recently bought Feedburner. Which somewhat reinforces what I’ve said before about Google knowing too much about the average person (and so have others – scroll down a bit). But I digress.

Implied popularity is a fancy name for Click Through Ratio (CTR). In fact, the idea isn’t very original, and was proposed by Claria a while ago. In layman’s terms, the more people click through to your site from the search results, the more your popularity is implied.

Inclusion in blogrolls and high quality blogrolls will be treated the way PageRank originally intended to treat links, before the system became known and abused. That is, each [blogroll] link to another blog will count as a vote for that blog. If it comes from a high quality blogroll, additional “trust” points will be earned (the points analogy is my own).

Tagging of the document might help give an indication of secondary keywords the blog is relevant for. Essentially, this would function the way anchor text does in the main Google algorithm, describing the content. Additionally, this might be an indication of a clustering-style algorithm in Teoma style. A clustering algorithm puts websites together by subject “neighbourhood”. Links from within the neighbourhood are worth more, the same way links from high quality blogrolls are worth more. If Google’s blog search also integrates Teoma style “refine search” and “related resources” options, there could be additional targets and real estate for SEOs to rank their clients for.

Alister Cameron at Problogger, one of the analysts whose work I’m summarizing, suggests that this emphasis on tagging will make Social Media Optimization a necessary skill for SEO. I’m inclined to agree.

Outside references to a blog could also be important. Alister suggests that Google might be reading your mail (or its robots, anyways). As far as SEO goes, Alister draws yet another intelligent conclusion: aim to get your post and blog mentioned in email. Which can mean word of mouth marketing (those jokes that get email forwarded for years) and also “email this post” buttons on your blog, as well as other initiatives.

PageRank is the name for the original Google algorithm, laid out in Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s landmark paper, Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. (The same one I mentioned above.) To make a long story short, all websites (including blogs) have their pages rated on a scale of 0-10 (10 being the best) in terms of relevancy to a particular query. This is dependent on the text found on the page, and the links to that page from other webpages, be they on the same website or on others.

Bill Slawski continues his analysis a little further than Alister Cameron and also considers the factors that can negatively impact a ranking. These factors are mostly aimed at fighting spam. For those of you who want the most comprehensive understanding of blog search you can get, read on. Otherwise, feel free to ignore what’s below, as there’s nothing that will help you rank higher – you’ll just figure out how to avoid being labelled as spam. Skip ahead to the last paragraph for more tips.

* Frequency of new posts,
* Content of the posts,
* Size of the posts,
* Link distribution of the blog,
* The presence of ads in the blog, and;
* Other indicators may also be used.

Frequency of posts will be used in combination with Google’s knowledge of spam blogs, or splogs, in order to fight spam. The blog search patent refers to patterns in the frequency of updates that are highly correlated with spam blogs; when these patterns are noticed, the blog will see its ranking negatively affected.

Where content is concerned, the blog search patent suggests that a disconnect between RSS feeds and what is actually on the blog tends to occur on spammy sites. The feed in such a scenario shows one form of content, in order to get ranked well, while the site shows a different content to visitors (e.g. ads).

For those technically inclined, the explanation for how this works is that Google’s blog search indexes blogs through their feeds. This indexing-by-proxy means that spammers can disguise the proxy (the RSS feed) as on-topic material while showing irrelevant, yet profitable ads on the real site. It’s cloaking spam brought to the blog world.

Other points relating to content: a) Duplicate content will also serve as a flag to Google that a site is spammy. b) Keyword stuffing, and specifically stuffing of keywords related to the generic pharmaceutical/gambling/other spammy industries will serve to flag spam.

Post size is really straightforward. Splogs auto-generate content that tends to be about the same length. If all posts are around 500 words, the blog will set off spam alerts at Google HQ.

Link distribution refers to the percentage of outgoing links in a post that go to any particular site. If there are many links, all of which send visitors to one site – a PageRank manipulation technique – the blog will be marked as spam.

The advertising factor refers to the location of ads, in Bill’s opinion, and specifically to the attempt to hide them in content. This measure would likely be aimed at text link ad sellers in other words. But that isn’t necessarily so, based on the text of the patent alone, which simply reads:

The presence of ads in the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. If a blog document contains a large number of ads, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

In other words, the judgement may simply be made based on how much advertising the blog has on it. Having made a blog through Google’s blogger service that had many ads on it, and having been subsequently required to prove I wasn’t an automated spambot, I know that this is already being done and probably having some success.

The flip side is that if you have a popular blog and then add lots of advertising, you probably won’t get flagged as spam. But starting out, you’re best off waiting before you put up ads (the trickle of traffic and handful of clicks probably won’t get you rich off them anyways, so you may as well wait). You may want to see more on Google’s TrustRank and indexing.

Finally, I’d like to discuss the whole “other” indicators may be used, which was mentioned in both the positive and negative factors sections. What Bill and Alister seem to have overlooked is a line in the abstract that refers to providing more information to Blog search users.

While the patent doesn’t provide any detail on what the other factors/information provided might be, I’d guess that we can expect something similar to the OneBox results in Google’s main search results, whereby there’s ratings information (0-5 stars) and the like. Thus if/when the search results are presented with this additional information, search marketers will need to figure out how to modify it to get their message out and bring visitors in. This could easily be the “other” factor being used in Google’s Blogsearch ranking algorithm.

Before I wrap this up, I want to share one more tip: Use your keywords in the blog’s name. Blogs that have their keywords in the name will get listed at the top of Blogsearch in a sort of Onebox area, ahead of all the blogposts that are returned. I say this from experience. A blog of mine had its keywords in the name – not even the URL, I just rebranded it to include the keywords – and it routinely showed up in Google’s Blogsearch Onebox.

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Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data