There’s a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight:

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

OK. So companies in the US spent $10 Billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO?

SEO: $1.3 Billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

According to SEMPO’s data, it’s 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM Technologies and <1% for Paid Inclusion). Here’s where I get confused:

That looks to me like most of the eyeballs are on the organic listings - the ones you can only influence with organic SEO… Huh? Maybe we should get more data on this subject. Let’s turn to Enquiro:

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Side sponsored ad visibility

(shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)

1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%

Fascinating. So visibility is considerably higher for the organic results. What about clicks?

Thanks to Comscore, we can see that clicks on paid search results has gone down over time, and is now ~22%.

Conclusions: SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

Questions:

• Why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollars?
• What can SEOs and the SEO industry do to help bring parity to this equation?
• Does a down economy mean SEO will be given greater opportunity to perform?

I’ll save my opinions for later, but would love to hear yours.

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A few days after new content shows up in Google, it will sometimes flicker out of the SERPS for a few hours.  Apparently, this is common knowledge to some SEOs.  This is not common knowledge to programmers like me, and I nearly made a tin foil hat in preparation for the googlicopters when I learned the project (Linkscape) that I’d worked on for months had disappeared from all SERPs on the Friday evening of the week it launched.  Fortunately, Rand responded to the internal email thread and, just as he predicted, 12 hours later, Linkscape was back in Google’s SERPs like nothing had happened.

This raised the question, "why would the engines drop new content out of the search results for a few hours after it is been in the results for a few days?"  I don’t know, but let me make an educated guess - sometimes there is a brief gap between pages falling out of a smaller (but quicker to build) index and when a larger (but slower to build) index is finished getting rebuilt with those pages in it.

Not having worked at Google I have no solid evidence they have multiple indices, but let me make the case that they probably do. Linkscape currently takes over a month to move something being crawled to it appearing in the results.  There is some low hanging fruit to reduce this to more like a couple weeks, but for the foreseeable future we aren’t going to have turn around time on the order of hours like the engines do because our index is large enough that it just takes a lot of computers and lot of hours to compute it.  So… how do the engines get around this issue?  They could make their indices support random inserts, but this would make them more complex and less efficient.  The other option is to have two indices.  That way they can have one index that is small and quick to update, and another that is large and slow to update.  The small index would try to have the difference between what is crawled and what is in the big index.  At query time, they would then need to check both.  Of course they could have more sizes of indices besides just two, but that doesn’t affect the basic point that presumably Google has more than one.

Google could remove a page from the small index only after it is in the big index, but then it would be in both indices for a while until the small index was rebuilt.  This overlap means the small index is larger than necessary, so can’t rebuild as quick as is possible, and so won’t be as fresh as is possible.  So perhaps they try to time it perfectly so their isn’t any overlap and isn’t any gap.  The problem comes that as they crawl faster, grow their indices, add complexity to their indexing or let the intern check in his summer project, it is easy for a small gap to form. So maybe it is just hard to ensure that there is never any gap unless one is willing to waste resources by letting them overlap.

Chas (the developer who sits next to me) manages some indices with a large+small model that, for the record, never has gaps.  And he contributes the fact that his large index starts rebuilding at midnight on Friday because load is lighter on the weekend.  However, his computers are set to GMT which means it starts Friday 5PM PST.  Well, it was a bit after 5PM on a Friday when Jane first noticed Linkscape dropped from Google’s SERPS (I received her email at 5:28PM).  Google has less CPU constraints than Chas, but they do have bandwidth constraints which is what’s needed to push new indices out to lots of computers.

So the theory is that Google had two indices that were suppose to go live in the first seconds of the weekend GMT.  First was the new large index that added our page.  Second was the new small index that dropped our page.  Only the small index was on time.

Or, at least, that is the best theory I can come up with.  What do you guys think?

p.s. from Rand - This post is Ben Hendrickson’s first on SEOmoz. He’s been with us nearly a year, working on Linkscape, and before that with Microsoft & his own technology startup project. I’m thrilled to have him contributing to the blog. Hopefully, he’ll get a photo up sometime soon

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Next weekend, I will be deployed to Detroit, MI  to attend 2008’s PRSA International Conference titled “The Point of Connection” and will be sharing thoughts on several sessions, in addition to general overviews of the event itself, on behalf of Online Marketing Blog readers. So what am I looking forward to most about the PRSA International conference?

Visiting Detroit, of course!  When most think of Detroit, they will no doubt reflect on the history of Motown, past flawed baseball greats such as Ty Cobb and Denny McClain, or “Detroit Rock City”.  My nerdom leads me elsewhere, however.

For me, Detroit will always be immortalized as the city that hosted the monumental world premiere of  “Night of the Demons” in Halloween of 1988.  Per IMDB’s invaluable trivia feature, had this filmed opened nationwide with the numbers posted in Detroit, it would have ranked among the top grossing horror films of the decade.

The reason I begin the post with this story is not simply that this conference is being held just before Halloween, but rather the conference itself is populated with excellent sessions with a true bend towards social media and ROI – two oceans I navigate through seemingly daily in my work at TopRank Online Marketing.

The pre-conference workshop, “Optimizing Content for Optimum Search Results: Search Engine Optimization for News” run by TopRank’s CEO Lee Odden promises to shed light on (and in the process dispelling any zombie like myths) the intersection of search engine optimization and news content. Journalists and bloggers use search and the social web for more efficient research and this workshop will show PR professionals how they can leverage SEO to faciliate both “PULL PR” and increased online news distribution.

In the session “The Changed PR Landscape: What Works, What Doesn’t” (including a panel of digital PR experts including moderator Peter Himler, principal, Flatiron Communications LLC, Rob Key, founder & CEO, Converseon, David Bradfield, senior vice president and partner at FH Digital and TopRankMarketing.com CEO Lee Odden) social media channels and tactics such as wikis, Twitter, Facebook, etc, will be discussed at length – and the question posed will be – with the advent of social media, should PR professionals throw out traditional PR techniques in favor of increased focus on these new channels?

This session will help with this critical question, which is one I have to answer on behalf of many of my clients whose objectives we achieve by harnessing the streams of new marketing techniques and PR.

Will the future see distributing press releases to traditional media outlets as our highest impact tactic towards our clients end goals, or will creating a Twitter account where CEOs can express their innermost interests (favorite horror movies, as I did above, for instance?) in an effort to humanize themselves be most effective?

The answer is dependent on ROI – another major focus of this conference, particularly relevant in our tougher economic times.

Going back to Night of the Demons, imagine if the producers would have had the foresight to spend the extra distribution costs to distribute nationally, rather than just geographically.  On the other side of that coin, imagine if other horror producers learned from this film that their latest budget conscious opuses could turn a tidy profit with a geographic focus.

Sessions like “True Tales From the Social Media Measurement Trenches — Using Research to Learn and Improve Your Programs” (featuring Shonali Burke, vice president, media and communications, ASPCA and Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO, KDPaine & Partners) will illustrate how a measurement system tied to public relations will help to further overall marketing results, while  “What’s the ROI of Your Press Release” (featuring Laura Sturaitis, senior vice president, media & product services, Business Wire and Greg Jarboe, president, SEO-PR) will describe how to get the most out of traditional press releases in our web 2.0 world – again, with the objective of increasing overall marketing results.

Other sessions I look forward to attending include:

• Media Myths & Realities with Nicholas Scibetta, global director, global media, Ketchum
• Word of Mouth Online v. Offline with Jeffrey Graham, executive director,customer insight, The New York Times
• How to Leverage Current Consumer Trends and Most Effectively Communicate With Green Media, with Annie Longsworth, president, San Francisco office, Cohn & Wolfe

I look forward to this conference and to checking in with TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog readers starting next week!

If you’re attending PRSA International in Detroit next week, be sure to register for the half day pre-conference session on SEO for PR and News Content” Saturday, October 25, 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Sponsored By: Blogwell San Jose Oct 28 How Big Companies Use Social Media

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Original Post

Furthermore, from the earliest days of the web people have created links pages. You link to me and I’ll link to you activities, later called reciprocal linking, were pursued with a passion by traffic hungry websites. In those days links meant traffic, not search engine results.

So we are bound to links from both an historical point of view and by the algorithms of the modern search giants such as Google and others.

Today all web platforms are being exploited for links. So called social platforms are used more for link building and traffic generation than simply as a way of sharing good resources. Anyone who runs a blog will also be plagued by people making pointless posts in the hope of securing a links to their own website.

Forum posts are often lost among a sea of keyword loaded signature links and directories promising search engine benefits sell links in their databases where the only visitors are search engine spiders.

Metaphorically speaking we’ve got to the point where link builders sit in virtual high streets holding out their begging bowls for links like real world beggars asking for loose change and the chattering classes pedal the latest link building scam.

Where on earth will this end and what impact is the link frenzy having on the quality of material available online? Even the web’s glitterati are decrying the Internet as a cesspool!

Sadly I have no clue as to a better way forward and that, it seems, is the view of people who know more abut these things than I ever will.

TTFN

d

Original Post

• You should be researching your market and understanding what it searches for
• You should be building a site that’s search engine friendly
• You should be creating relevant content
• You should be making friends

On the flip side….

• You shouldn’t expect overnight success
• You shouldn’t expect page 1 results without a lot of effort
• You shouldn’t guess, the information you need is out there!

TTFN

d

Original Post

So how has it all gone so wrong?

Well, Google’s job is to index the web and serve up relevant results to it’s search engine users. A web site owners job is to create relevant content. On the face of it these two things should work in perfect harmony. However they don’t.

They don’t work because instead of website owners doing their bit they prefer to game the search engines and blag their way to the top of the search rankings. This approach simply adds to the spam-o-sphere.

The problem for website owners who choose to take the spam route instead of the road less travelled is they are not building a brand and this could be a huge mistake in the long run.

I’ve long argued that quality matters. To me it just felt intrinsically like the right thing to do, but I was missing the real reason it matters. If you concentrate on quality, creating something useful, building something people need you are, in fact, starting on the long road to developing a brand. But why do brands matter?

Brands matter because people trust brands and building trust online may become the defining filter that separates the good stuff from the the rest, the cesspool.

TTFN

d

Original Post

It makes me glad that I run the company, it makes me glad I took the plunge, it makes me glad I do what I do.

You know who you are and I’d like to say thanks

TTFN

d

Original Post

But it got me thinking about the whole web and SEO industry. It seems to me that fear and insecurity reign supreme and cause people to back themselves into corners. With the credit crunch starting to bite and people becoming even more nervous about their prosperity I suppose it’s only going to get worse.

Is the web and SEO industry more or less prone to this kind of behaviour than other industries? I’m not sure but it’s upsetting to be on the receiving end of such vitriol.

In my experience people who attack others in forums etc are usually professionally inadequate. They are perhaps in possession of some of the facts and some of the skills they should have, but sufficiently insecure and lacking in ability that they attack others when their expertise is called into question.

For my own part I’m not immune to becoming excitable but I’m sufficiently comfortable in my skin and expertise to know when I’ve been wrong or misguided. Others prefer to just keep digging.

Perhaps the lack of standards in the web and SEO industries is to blame. Where there is no benchmark it’s hard to measure things and people take a stance based on some spurious assumptions or worse.

I think the web and SEO industries are overly excitable and wonder where it’s going to end.

There, that’s better

TTFN

d

Original Post

Since I’ve caught the awesome cold that’s been running rampant through our office, I was unable to publish the roundup yesterday. As such, I’m publishing it today as a temporary "Pre-Weekend Roundup." Now you’ll have something fun to read on your lazy Saturday morning! Aren’t I thoughtful…

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• TechRadar has a list of 20 websites that changed the world and revolutionized the way we lead our lives. The first ever website went online August 6, 1991, which was my 8th birthday. That’s one hell of a birthday gift!
• The SEO Review identify 5 spheres of social media. I’m surprised he left off the sixth sphere, which one could argue is the most important one of all…
• MakeUseOf.com brings us the best 3 tools to search for images by color. Fun fact: if you search for red, gold and green you’ll pull up images of a karma chameleon…unfortunately, the search results come and go. They come and go-o-o-oooooo…
• JustDisplays.co.uk wonders how well sex sells in the SEO and technology industry and examines the efficacy of booth babes at industry conferences and tradeshows. Jane and I, along with several other SEOs, contribute our opinions to the article.
• Here’s a little nerd humor for all of you geeks out there: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.
• SEOmoz members Arena Flowers gave a presentation on SEO at the Small Business 2.0 Conference over the weekend. We thought we’d give them a little roundup love and link to their presentation (which included a shout out to SEOmoz!). Great job, guys!
• Vanessa Fox wrote a post about how to increase search indexing coverage with an XML sitemap. Her post was inspired by Jeff Atwood’s article about his experience with sitemaps at Stack Overflow.
• Richard Baxter wrote a nice "SEO career kickstart guide" on how to get a job in SEO. It’s good information for beginners who are looking to break into the SEO industry.
• Siegfried Jongsma has uploaded some videos from SMX East to his Vimeo account. He interviewed Rand about social media and Linkscape, so if you want to stare at my boss’s bearded mug for a few minutes, then check them out.
• Greg Linden discusses some large scale computing challenges at Google.
• Bill Slawski has reported that Microsoft is exploring an algorithm that will increase PageRank for pages linked to by blogs, thus ensuring that LOLCats will be the highest ranked site on the Internet.
• Matt McGee shares five burning questions he has. If you can answer them, he’ll introduce you to Bono (well, a cardboard cutout of him, anyway).
• Well, this is kind of creepy: Spokeo searches through 40 major social networks to find information about any person you specify. Maybe the site should have been called TheUltimateStalkersResource.com instead.
• Paul Graham argues why you should start a new company in a bad economy. I guess when you start at the bottom you can only go up, right?
• Apparently diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of "high-ability" problem solvers. This sounds like the premise to the nerdiest version of "You’ve Got Served" ever.
• The New Yorker wonders why we equate genius to creativity. Because boring geniuses are wedgie magnets, that’s why.
• Trackur, an online media monitoring service, has announced that they’ve added influence measurement tools. Check out the new additions for all your tracking needs.

• So this is how Google builds such an effective team…
• Our friends at Distilled have blogged about how Google has relaxed their ban on gambling advertising in the UK. This is huge news for gambling websites. Let the competition begin!
• Distilled (and SEOmoz) also received mentions in the Telegraph’s "top 10 tips for encouraging more website traffic." #11: Don’t misspell your title tags (cough Telegraph cough).
• Google’s Webmaster Central Tools now show which of your URLs are causing crawl errors so you can effectively manhandle them into submission. They’ve also announced the rollout of "First Click Free," which protects your content while still allowing it to be included in their index.
• Matt Cutts shows us how to convert existing links to your site into high-quality links for the low-low cost of FREE. Hey, that’s a pretty cool tip! Sorry for calling you a turd last week, Matt.
• Aaron Wall asks how much is that linky in the window, (aka how much is a link worth to your business). He goes over the risks of renting links and also highlights affiliate sites and link marketing strategies. It’s a good article that’s well worth the read.

• Six Revisions put together a list of 15 tools for monitoring a website’s popularity. It’s a great accumulation of resources, and the comments offer up even more tools (including Linkscape!).

YOUmoz entries:

• Just ‘Cause I’m Nofollow Don’t Mean I Ain’t Got No Link Love to Give. Carfeu talks about how nofollowed links are still beneficial because they bring traffic to your site.
• Implications on Mozilla Geode on SEO/M and Privacy. Marty Martin talks about the Mozilla Geode project and how it affects SEOs and marketers alike.
• Search Engine Optimization is All About the Way a Naive Visitor Thinks… Dharmayu says to forget about keyword density and instead focus on strategic keyword placement in order to attract your users based on how they read and view content on a screen.
• Why Do Good SEO Services Cost So Much? Kenneth Dreyer discusses why nobody can guarantee top results in Google and provides tips on how to justify your prices to a concerned customer.
• In Response to ‘Google’s Advice: Godsend or Gimmick?’ Amoore shares with us some difficulties he had with advertising on Google’s Content Network.
• No Qualifications? Then Love It and Live It! Paz shares the story of how he got into SEO.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Content, Design, and Engagement: Three Examples from the New Media. Buybigtires examines three New Media sites and identifies how each of them successfully engage their users. It’s a well-thought post that provides good examples of how to provide compelling content to draw in readers.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO executive for Latitude in Warrington, Cheshire, UK
• SEO apprentice for our partners in crime, Distilled, in London, UK. Our friends at Distilled are looking for a "creative genius" to join their team. In my extremely biased opinion, working with Distilled has been great and they have a wonderful team, so I highly recommend applying for this position.
• Internet marketing specialist for Powder Blue Productions in Irvine, CA
• Contracted PPC expert for Vortx in Ashland, OR. Vortx is one of Distilled’s clients, and since they took our British friends whitewater rafting and made sure they didn’t drown, I felt obligated to highlight Vortx’s job opening and urge you apply if you’re looking for some PPC work.
• Contracted SEO who can help an online training portal improve its rankings in Google.
• Search marketing specialist for Sesame Communications in Renton, WA
• SEO specialist, web programmer, and web designer for TopSpot Internet Marketing Solutions in Houston, TX
• SEO specialist for SEOmoz in Seattle, WA. For more information about this position, see our job posting.

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• Travel Strategy Business in New York, NY
• HiRank in San Francisco, CA
• TopSpot Internet Marketing Solutions in Houston, TX
• IdeaOverTen in Pennsylvania
• Koves Technologies in Virginia
• Mountain View SEO in the US
• HFB Advertising in the US
• Newpath WEB in the US as well as the UK and Australia
• Interweb Marketing Group in Toronto, ON, Canada

UK / Europe:

• SEOgadget.co.uk in London, UK
• The On Connection in Faringdon, UK
• Iconvert AB in Stockholm, Sweden
• Access Point in Iasi, Romania

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Andrea Moro has over 9 years of experience in the IT field. She operates a small web agency and offers website design and Internet marketing services.
• Gunjan Pandya has almost 3 years of experience in the SEO/SEM field. He served as an SEO executive and possesses a variety of SEO and technical skills.
• Son Wanari in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, has experience with web marketing, search engine optimization, internet marketing strategies and information architecture with a focus on increasing targeted web site traffic, enhancing and simplifying the user experience, and increasing online sales and web traffic.
• Miles Price in Buffalo, NY, has built his own ad agency and has implemented over 40 partner relationships. He’s currently working with partners in establishing sales and doing SEO and SEM.

Happily Employed:

• Mariusz Szatkowski is a web designer and SEO specialist located in Gdynia and Gdańsk, Poland.

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Original Post

Often times people understand the process of Keyword Research, but don’t quite know what to do with that beautiful, targeted, nicely-ordered list of lucrative keywords once they have it.

This week Rand goes through the process of what you should consider to actually put your keyword research and targeting into action. We’ll look at things like how to order work by site hierarchy and keyword demand, assign tasks to different key members of your team, and evaluate the timeframe you’ll need to see results in the rankings.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Implementing Keyword Research from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

New PRO Video Tip! I’ve also just added a new PRO Video Tip about using Badges to gain links. Badges and widgets can be incredibly effective tactics to gain valuable, editorial links from your fans, users, and customers.  Check it out and learn what you need to know to begin a badge campaign of your own.

Not a PRO Member? Subscribe to SEOmoz PRO and you’ll get access to all of our PRO Video Tips and tons more!

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Original Post