SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

More and more conventional link building methods, like directory submission are of less and less value, Google does not even recommend high quality paid directories any more. In fact soon we’ll see a situation where all artificial ways of link building will be frowned upon.

On the other hand former SEOptimise writer and renowned UK search marketing blogger Patrick Altoft reported a few days ago about companies which spend thousands on link buying budgets per month. This way of link acquisition is not allowed by Google for a long time by now and many high profile sites have been penalized already.

While the urge of spending money on links comes as no surprise it is met by an often low quality shady part of the SEO industry. Getting links naturally requires also an investment, an allocation of time and resources combined with know how in some Internet industries like web design or development but not solely.

The money gets spend not on the links directly but on a web venture that gets links naturally and sustainably over time. The allure of “free” is in most cases the key to get links but also altruism leads to a direct ROI in terms of links. So think twice before spending money directly on low quality links.

Stop link building artificially and use one or several of the following 30 ways to get links naturally:

1. Create a timeless or regularly updated resource list, example Web developer’s Handbook
2. Program a free tool or software everybody needs in a particular niche but not everybody offers yet (compare the query font tester vs color picker)
3. Develop a high quality theme or template for a well known platform like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla that gets updated along the software
4. Program a WordPress or other popular blog platform plugin, in the best case a platform independent one like Akismet
5. Develop a Firefox plugin for a recurring task or dealing with a widely spread annoyance like BugMeNot
6. Organize a genuine yearly recurring competition like the Web 2.0 awards
7. Organize a Recurring charitable event like the Blog Action Day
8. Forge a lasting partnership with a similar service provider, like a graphic design agency joining forces with a PSD2XHTML provider
9. Build a community like 9Rules where people “proudly” are part of and display on it on their sites
10. Support artists with free or cheaper web hosting (or anything else they need) like MediaTemple does
11. Mirror a high traffic site, for instance an open source software or an activist site
12. Offer a rebate for a particular group, especially students but also workers class families, veterans or whatever disadvantaged group
13. Offer free music or other audio downloads. or at least a way to listen to the audio online, that’s the secret of success of MySpace
14. Offer free ebook or better free ebooks (more than one) like O’Reilly for instance
15. Maintain a business blog updated regularly with high value resources, best example is Inside CRM
16. Get your content translated and republished in multiple languages and countries
17. Join a community and become one of the most valuable members like Maki of DoshDosh did on Sphinn and Digg
18. Offer high quality free icons for download and free use
19. Offer background patterns for free for web designers
20. Offer free wallpapers for download and invite artist to modify them
21. Create a Facebook application and maintain it over time
22. Create a CSS solutions for common tasks or CSS problems or even better are whole set of solutions
23. Offer free scripts and “chunks code” (like CSS as it’s not a script) for webmasters to use freely
24. Create a highly useful and visually appealing Flash application like SimpleViewer
25. Give away images using a creative commons license on your website
26. Publish recipes for healthy, Italian, French, Chinese or any other kind of desirable food not everybody can buy
27. Offer fundamental self improvement advice like hackyourself does
28. Start a green initiative, whatever it might be, there are thousands of ways to do that, carbon free websites is great example
29. Educate children, especially from poor families be it in the West or down in the “global south”, e.g. the 100 Dollar laptop gained huge recognition
30. Help animals and boast about it displaying images of them you don’t have to as obnoxious as PETA

As you see many of these ways of getting links naturally are projects based on market forces or in other words on what many or most people need. The best thing on the Web is additionally that even free things normally not provided by the market can be offered in a profitable way as by gaining links the investment is made profitable at last.

Of course all these ways of getting links also get you reputation and fans and thus traction in social media too. People hate companies and busineses overselling but they love free stuff and those who offer it. When everybody loves you also those who are willing to spend money will find you.

In case you wonder now “how can I achieve that, I’m no programmer, designer, content creator, artist, activist” you don’t need to be, there are plenty out there are they’re short on money especially those from India. Sometimes even 100$ are enough.

Its Friday afternoon, no one’s blogged on here for a while and I’ve been asked to step up to the plate without mentioning SpyFu. I should’ve been thinking of what to post for a few days now but I’m afraid I’ve been a bit distracted…

So, I’m sitting in a bar with a nice cool pint. I lean back in my chair and look around; what do I see?

That guy over there, he’s got one friend opposite him but he’s talking so the whole room can hear.”He’s not targeting his efforts” I think to myself, “expensive strategy but I guess he’s making a lot of impressions. I suppose his CTR can be quite low and he can still have a lot of success.” At this point I realise that AdWords has ruined my life but I can’t stop myself…

Thin skinny guy, black coat, black hair, band t-shirt. Leaning against the bar, nearly finished his drink. Looks like he’s watching the girls in the booth by the window.But he’s too slow, they’re leaving. Hang on, they’re not, some of them are just going to the toilet. But not all of them. Black haired guy finishes his drink and walks nervously over. There are two girls left, one them’s wearing a band t-shirt. I can’t hear what he says but I think “That’s more like it. He’s targeting his market”

Now who’s that? One guy, group of girls. The leggy blond doesn’t look particularly interested but one of her friends is flicking her hair and touching his arm. The guy is slowly ignoring the rest of the group and turning to face her. “Bidding too low” I remark, “he can’t keep his position with blondie.” Then I give him the benefit of the doubt; “placement targeting; he knows what converts best for him.”

Back to the skinny guy. He’s sitting on his own now; “high bounce rate?” I think as he gets up to go to the bar. But maybe not; band girl is coming out of the toilets, she looks at the booth where her friends are and then scans the rest of the bar. “Rookie error, he should’ve 301′d to his new location.” The girl pauses, lonely by the toilet door but not for long; “Are you looking for someone?” I hear. “Is that bidding on a competitors keyword?” I think. Skinny guy comes back around the bar with two drinks, his new friend smiles and walks over. “Brand recognition in action. And he gave her an incentive for a repeat visit.”

I see my own date in the door so I stand up and wave. I’m unusually tall, so my ad copy stands out from the crowd. I know she like this place, one of her friends told me, I hope just being here is good enough landing page optimisation. How forward should I be? Calls to action are good right? Perhaps it is at this point that my analogy breaks down, I don’t want to be too forward. Still, I hope I get a conversion.

WordPress is the most popular blog platform for a while now and thus the main target of hackers just due to this fact. Also vulnerabilities pop up so often that you just can’t keep up with the hackers. Recently one of the many WordPress Blogs I look after got hacked again by an “online pharmacy”. Of course I’m not the only one. It was the second hack with 3 months of this WordPress blog.

This time the hackers (or more aptly crackers) even blocked my access to the WordPress admin so that it took really hours of work to get it clean and running again. Ironically this blog was the one I kept up to date quite diligently, uploading a new WordPress version as often as I could. Sadly you have to do it almost weekly, yes there are plugins now to do that, but nonetheless you have to take a look what changed (sometimes a major overhaul of the admin interface) and whether your plugins still work etc.

In short: It’s work and it’s tedious and it’s annoying but most of all, it’s dangerous!

So I really can’t recommend WordPress blogs to clients anymore unless you know they’d be able to do all that upgrading and fixing.

In case you need a reliable, easy to look after and secure blog platform for corporate or business blogging and if you want to host it yourself (still the best option for SEO etc.) you need a WordPress alternative.

I watch the blogosphere since 2001 and contribute since 2003 so I’ve seen plenty of blog platforms. There are at least 7 great self hosted blog platforms that are good WordPress alternatives: All of them offer clean URLs, semantic markup (h1, h2 etc.) and similar SEO basics.

1. MovableType: One of the most popular blog platforms. It has been bigger than WordPress a few years ago but it wasn’t Open Source and you had to pay for it so it lost market share. Now MT has open sourced and it is marketed aggressively as the secure alternative to WordPress. It certainly is more secure and has less upgrades to be performed. MovableType had some major spam problems traditionally, this might be a drawback though. Akismet on WordPress manages spam almost perfectly by now.
2. Serendipity/S9Y: S9Y was the upstarter when it comes to blog platforms. It’s relatively new as it hasn’t been around in the early day of blogging but has a growing community. Some people in the SEO industry use Serendipity so I’d be glad to hear their opinion.
3. Drupal: Drupal is more than a blog platform but you can set a blog with it comfortably. Also it has been hailed as SEO friendly for ages. Some pretty large sites that are not blogs use Drupal too and to be honest I’ve hear of any problems with Drupal.
4. B2Evolution: This blog platform has been around for ages but never got really popular. It may be name or the lack of character, B2Evolution even attempts to mimic Wordpress looks by using the Kubrick theme, but this might be as well an advantage. anyways, just the fact that it’s around as well as “alive and kicking” for a such long time makes it a viable alternative.
5. Textpattern: Back when I started blogging it was an easy decision, Wordpress o Textpattern. It was a choice like PC vs Mac, the more design oriented bloggers have chosen Textpattern. The community seems a little dormant by now but Textpattern is still a good choice it seems to me. Also there seem to be quite a lot of plugins for SEO.
6. Mephisto: This is a comparably unknown blog platform but if you look at the code, screenshots and and Wordpress-like URLs it looks very promising. Sadly due to lack of funding and only two developers working on it Mephisto is stuck at Version 0.8
7. Typo: In version 5.1 Typo introduced many of the features we’re accustomed to from Wordpress or MovableType. Now it seems to be a really good alternative. Like Mephisto the URL structure follows WordPress defaults and the markup looks great.

In case you want to build a blog on a more stable and less insecure and hackable platform than WordPress try one of the alternatives above. Of course I haven’t tried all of them so I’d like to hear some feedback from you:

• What are the drawbacks and advantages of your blog platform?
• Why is is good for SEO or why not?
• What do you miss or why did you dump WordPress or another blog CMS in favor of it?

I’ve been building quite a lot of sites recently, both personally and client related. In this time I’ve observed quite a few strategies that are key to helping a site grow from scratch. Traffic is usually what the success of a website lies on, so you need to know how to build traffic as effectively as possible. Luckily, over the last 2 months I’ve helped launch over 10 sites and quickly drive them to large amounts of relevant traffic and lots of feed subscribers. With this in mind, I wanted to put together a selection of what I’ve learned; this isn’t going to be ground-breaking and you might know some of it, but putting them all in one place should make for this useful resource.

5 Tactics to Use

1. Utilise MyBlogLog

If you’ve never heard of MyBlogLog (where have you been?) then I’ll give you a quick run down. Basically, MyBlogLog is a Yahoo owned community based around your blog and its readers. When you sign-up you get to fill out your profile¹ and even register your community² which is for readers of your blog to show support. You’ll notice that any fans of your blog who are already on MBL are likely to register as part of your community. MBL also offer blog statistics, I used to use them a while ago but because of a few issues in the service i.e. some people could appear as Shoemoney when visiting sites, so I lost a bit of trust in them. My favourite part of MyBlogLog is that whenever you visit a site with their ‘visitors’ widget’, your profile is going to be shown³. Therefore, it is important to pick a relevant username and a memorable avatar. This is excellent for branding and you’ll also notice a few people checking out your profile on the site.

2. Register on Twitter

About one year ago I wouldn’t have recommended this, even though the service was around. This is mostly due to the fact that Twitter had quite a varied audience and people didn’t really think to use it to promote a website. These days however, Twitter is an excellent way to drive traffic to a site and build your name in a niche, especially with their now huge userbase. After you’ve registered on Twitter¹ make sure you fill out your profile² and use the same avatar as MyBlogLog. This is important for branding purposes and it’s also going to set you out from most users of the site. Note that people are more likely to notice your tweets (status updates) via your picture rather than your username. Once you’re all set-up you need to start adding people to follow³ and interact with from the niche of your site. If you are passionate about your niche then the discussions these people are having should interest you. There are multiple ways to find a relevant audience:

1. Look for links to twitter profiles on your favourite blogs
2. Perform the Google search ’site:twitter.com “niche”‘
3. Import your email contacts when you sign-up
4. Try a service like TwitterTroll, a twitter search engine and look for your main keywords

If you want more people to follow you, make sure you put a link to your profile on your blog.

3. Sign-Up to Gravatar

This one is relatively simple but it is definitely effective for branding and comment traffic. Gravatars are the avatars that show up next to comments on many blogs (this is increasing all the time) and is built by the same team that builds Wordpress. Gravatar works by assigning your email address to a picture, so whenever you post a comment with a certain email, your picture will appear next to it. I’m very big on branding so I keep this the same as the avatar on Twitter and MyBlogLog.

4. Register on StumbleUpon

Once again with StumbleUpon, I like to keep the branding and avatar theme running so whenever I sign-up or recommend others, I tell them to use either a personal name or site name for their username. Secondly, use the same image that has been used elsewhere as your avatar. Now then, there are 2 things you want to do with your StumbleUpon account: 1. Set-up your interests so you can find a lot of relevant content and 2. Stumble the blog posts of fellow niche bloggers and let them know about it in their commentsFor all the bloggers in your niche you find on the site, make sure you add them as a friend. You’ll typically find they link to their profile on their own blog, or they are always reviewing pages from their own website. When you add them make sure that you send a personal message which includes their name and ask them to add you as a friend. This can be time consuming if there are a lot of SU users in this niche but it is definitely worth the effort. Once you have started to build up your network you can help spread the traffic to others in your niche and even make use of the ‘Send-to’ function whenever you write a post of your own. One more thing I do on StumbleUpon is message all the people that thumb-up one of my personal posts. I thank them for taking the time to check out the site and also ask them to do a friend exchange. Once again, this is time consuming but it is a nice personal touch and anything to help increase traffic to your new website is a bonus.

5. Start Leaving Comments

Last but definitely not least in the list is to start leaving comments on other blogs. The follow-up to this post is going to look at all the various ways to find the top sites in a niche, there are more than you would expect. I’ve watched bloggers like Sean, Avani, Alex and Evelyn seriously increase traffic and activity on their sites by being very active on the blogs of others. I recommend commenting on other blogs for a number of reasons:

• Small amount of traffic from the site you comment on
• Increase branding & niche exposure (think: gravatar)
• Site authors are much more likely to link to your posts
• It helps establish a relationship with an author, this can definitely be helpful if you need their assistance in the future

As they always say, you can have the greatest content in the world but if you aren’t active online or promoting your articles in some way then nobody is going to see them. These steps are very simple but can also be very effective to get your brand out there and start promoting your new website.

Effective?

I did say these tactics were going to be effective and I keep to my word, think about how all of this interlinks. Whenever you visit a site to leave a comment, you are instantly shown as a visitor on their MyBlogLog widget, just for visiting. Now whenever you leave a comment, besides the traffic you get your avatar is showing next to it if they had gravatars enabled. All your comments and Stumbles are going to be a great way to build up relationships with others which you can leverage for links or promotion help whenever you write a worthy post. When that worthy post is ready, don’t forget to tweet it ;).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could convince your competitors that they had to spend big in order to keep up with you? If they use SpyFu to estimate your ad spend and CPC then you can. I’ve looked at what SpyFu say about their own algorithm and techniques and then I’ve combined this knowledge with what I observed last week to come up with these ideas about how to turn SpyFu into a double agent.

Firstly let’s look at how SpyFu calculate their Ad Spend and CPC estimates. Then I’ll show you how to use this knowledge to increase SpyFu’s estimates of your Ad Spend and CPC without spending any more money.

How Does SpyFu Estimate Daily Ad Spend?
The onsite help, also available in The SpyFu Instruction Manual says this about calculating Daily Ad Spend:

When we calculate Daily Ad Budget, we start with all the keywords that we have seen a domain advertise on. We eliminate overlapping keywords. For example, “race cars”, “luxury cars”, and “cars” becomes “cars”. Then, we take into account the current and historical positions that we have seen the domain’s ad appear for each given keyword. Based on the position of each ad, we estimate the price that the domain likely pays for the keyword. Basically, we then add up all the custom individual keyword costs per day and we arrive at the Daily Ad Budget.

Let’s add in what we already know about SpyFu to our new knowledge from the above passage:

• SpyFu uses its web scraping database to get a list of all the keywords a site advertises on.
• Overlapping keywords are eliminated.
• A daily cost is estimated for each keyword given its ad position.
• The total can then be easily found.

I’ll look at this step by step:

Web Scraping: Reading the Internet
Velocityscape (who own SpyFu) have a massive web scraped database. If your ad appears on one of the first few SERPs for a term then they will know about it and have a record of it, unless the term is relatively unusual. This is why estimates are better for accounts with a large number of impressions; such accounts either bid on lots of relatively common terms that will be scraped by SpyFu or they bid on a few very general terms which are also covered. Accounts that bid on lots of low traffic, long tail keywords might not get picked up at this stage so SpyFu will not have very good data on them.

Ignoring the Long Tail
The example that SpyFu gives for eliminating overlapping keywords is clearly far too restrictive; I doubt they would lump “race cars” and “luxury cars” into “cars” but you rarely see three word keywords whilst using SpyFu and, personally, I’ve never seen a four word one. Accounts which bid mainly on long tail keywords will have lower impressions and a lower daily ad spend but SpyFu does not take this into account, ignoring the long tail and lumping everything into a more general query.

Counting the Cost
The accuracy of the daily cost estimate for each keyword is a tricky one. If they work it out by considering an average CPC for each keyword multiplied by an estimated number of clicks then their accuracy depends not only on their CPC estimates (see below) but also their estimates of CTR’s. Since all this is done by a computer CTR estimates will depend only on ad position and not on the ad copy which the folks at the Mind Valley Labs tell us can make a massive difference.

What About CPC?
I’ve just said that the Daily Ad Spend estimate depends on the accuracy of the CPC estimate. So if you can manipulate what SpyFu thinks about your CPC then you can manipulate their Daily Ad Spend estimate as well. So how does SpyFu estimate CPC?

If you take the Average Cost per Click of every keyword that a domain advertises on, add them all up, and divide by the total number of keywords, you will have the Avg Cost/Click for a domain. For example, if a domain advertises on 3 keywords with Avg Cost/Clicks of $1, $2, and $3, respectively then the Avg Cost per Click for the domain would be $2.

This is clearly a load of rubbish. The following table shows that SpyFu’s method only gives the correct answer if there is the same number of clicks for each keyword:

Now look at the table if each keyword gets a different number of clicks:

In this case the average CPC is 21/9=2.33 not 2 as SpyFu’s method tells us.

At $70/month for a subscription I hope that SpyFu doesn’t really estimate CPC in this way.

Assuming the SpyFu algorithm does actually estimate CPC in this way then their estimate will be most accurate when the standard deviation in the number of clicks for each keyword in an account is small. As we have seen the method gives the right answer in the case where all keywords receive the same number of clicks, it also wouldn’t be far off if the number of clicks was dominated by a few keywords.

Estimates for Individual Keywords
Of course, all this depends on the accuracy of their estimates of average CPC for each keyword but to say any keyword has an average CPC ignores one of the most fundamental parts of AdWords. No one can accurately predict the CPC for an ad without knowing how the quality score system works. I’m sure SpyFu has the technology and capacity to scrape landing pages as well as search results; they can then apply their own quality score algorithm but I can’t imagine their results are very accurate.

The AdWords API has a service that will estimate CPC for a given keyword but I doubt SpyFu use it: The API service is designed to be accurate when it can access campaign and ad group quality scores for the account it is being used for; this information will not be available for SpyFu.

Get on With It!
Enough waffle. Now we’ve looked at how SpyFu’s estimates are calculated lets look at what you can do to change them, without actually changing you account of course. None of these methods have been tested and some of them require information that I don’t know, but if what SpyFu says about itself is true then at least the first two of these methods should work.

Bid High
SpyFu do not know what your click through rates are. They calculate daily spend on an estimated daily spend for a given keyword which is probably based on an average CTR depending on the ad position. So if you use a high traffic keyword with and bid enough that your ad gets a good position then SpyFu think you are spending a lot of money. But what if your ad text was so bland that the real CTR was incredibly low? Then you’d be spending a lot less than SpyFu thought.

Bid on the Long Tail
Bid on the long tail of a really expensive keyword. SpyFu even published a list of the most expensive keywords to make this easier for you. The idea here is to use the way SpyFu lumps long tail searches together in order to convince them that your CPC is huge. For example top of their top list is “conference calling companies” at $52 a pop. As I’ve said, I’ve never seen a four word keyword in SpyFu so try bidding on something like “free conference calling companies.” The term “free” is common enough that SpyFu will probably scrape for it so their algorithm should record you bidding on “conference calling companies” but your actual CPC will be lower because people will bid less for the word “free.”

Of course the algorithm might decide to cut your keyword down to “free conference calling” instead so you should bid on a variety of “x conference calling companies” to make sure your long tail is shortened to the keywords with the maximum CPC.

Bid at the Right Time
SpyFu’s database is not updated very frequently. Most things I’ve read say it’s only redone every 60-90 days. Spend a lot when SpyFu does its update and you’ll appear to be spending that much for the next three months. Take these update figures with a pinch of salt; I can’t find anything official about this and quite a few blog posts about SpyFu appear quite biased against it.

When is SpyFu’s next database update due? I don’t know. It is also possible that their data gathering goes on all the time but they only do their calculations every three months. If this is the case then this method won’t work. Unfortunately I think this probably is the case.

Bid on the Right Place
SpyFu’s owners, Velocityscape are based in Phoenix, Arizona. Assuming their scraping is all done from there then a high spend ad group targeted at their location will be scraped and analysed by them as if it covers the whole web. Unfortunately things are unlikely to be that simple.

I doubt the whole of Velocityscape’s scraping operations are centralised; SpyFu UK would indicate that they have at least one other location. This is not a big barrier, campaigns can be targeted at more than one location but if they scrape using something like the AdWords Ad Preview Tool this method won’t work at all. Does anyone know anything about this?

Control the Double Agent
Always remember that SpyFu works both ways; while you’re using it to spy on your competitors, they are using it to spy on you. But also remember that you have complete control over what information SpyFu can gather about you and, to a certain extent, you can manipulate that information.

It would be an interesting challenge to see who can get the highest estimated daily ad spend for the lowest actual budget. Let the games begin!

Business blogging is not always easy.

A business blog is subjective but unlike a private blog you still are writing for people interested in your trade, products and services and not necessarily you as a person watching movies and eating out.

You can’t annoy people too much, you can’t be too

• personal
• funny
• outspoken

So you need ideas that are creative while not being too creative as to scare away your business audience.

To assist you I collected a list of 50 blog post ideas for business blogging for any industry. You can apply it in most niches I think. Some of these ideas are the bomb and will bring you publicity and popularity while others focus on highlighting your expertise or are part of a social networking strategy. Some of the post ideas are all of these at once.

1. Envision the future of your industry by extrapolating the current developments
2. Explain why everybody should care for your trade and not only specialists
3. Make a list of famous people who deal or dealt with issues related to your business
4. List 30 or more online resources for business people in your industry
5. Review a publication dealing with your industry
6. Make a list of the top myths in your industry and debunk them
7. Disagree with a high level personality in your business, prove her or him wrong
8. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your niche
9. Report from a trade fair
10. Compare the your national market to markets abroad
11. Collect the best blog postings in your niche and compile a best of-list
12. Expand your focus to a similar area of expertise by comparing
13. Write down a code of ethics for your blog and your business as a whole
14. Explore and depict a niche social media platform for your trade, if there is none use a forum to do that
15. Add a forum to your blog or site if your site has a big enough community to sustain it
16. Break the rules of your trade by remodeling them and adapting to current situation, write about it
17. Go off topic and link a topic from everyday life back to your business “10 Ways SEO is like Base-Jumping”
18. Make a list of WordPress plugins that are most useful for your industry “The 10 Best WordPress plugins for Graphic Designers”
19. Reach out to your clients and fans: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
20. Display attractive images of your products, several of them, in the best case your own products
21. Analyze the current climate in your industry and explain the ramifications
22. Identify leaders in your area and ask them to guest post on your blog or write for their blog instead
23. Show what went wrong in your company, why and how you dealt with it, learning from mistakes is very helpful for others
24. Compare the new vs the old ways of doing your buisness
25. Highlight top female bloggers or experts in your trade
26. Create fictional and visionary product description
27. Satirize a very well known personality, be it of your trade or outside of it
28. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business like “The Bruce Lee Method of Business Blogging”
29. Thank your 10 favorite readers and/or commenters
30. Expose a scam in your industry (make sure to consult a lawyer in advance)
31. Take a big brand (or several) and use it as an example for best practices vs mistakes
32. Use humor to lighten up a boring topic “I Can Haz Pay Per Cat? The Lolcats Way of PPC”
33. Explain the local advantages of your company, do not hide behind modesty: “Oxford: SEO since 1542″
34. Review a book dealing with your topic that really displays thinking outside the box
35. Combine your topic with another one, usually but wrongfully not combined with yours, like SEO and graphic design
36. Express your own personal view an a highly debatable issue and do not just repeat common ground opinions
37. Make a short movie to show on your blog, this can be something funny or just simply you speaking
38. Create a list of indispensable software or web tools for your job
39. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business
40. Introduce a new business model in your trade or better, several of them
41. Be the first to break news, for instance reveal your new product via the blog
42. Check your search engine referers and write postings for those queries that had no matches until now
43. Check in your stats which post is the most popular one and write a follow up
44. Join a trade organization and explain why you did it
45. Make a donation to a good cause and blog about it
46. Introduce the 10 most promising bloggers in your industry
47. Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati to find out what’s most popular right now and find a new angle to it
48. Engage in a discussion on a forum and reprint on your blog
49. Ask people on Twitter a question and blog the best replies
50. Make a list of blogging ideas specifically for your industry

Remember that business blogging is about value. That’s indeed the most crucial difference between private and business blogs. In private blogs people want to express themselves, business bloggers want to create value for others. So while writing a post for a business blog always consider this question: Of what use can this article be to potential clients, people in my industry and the general public?”

I went for a drink with a friend of mine recently and she was telling me about an anti-wrinkle cream she had bought (I will not be naming her, she’d kill me!) which turned out to do nothing for wrinkles.

She had invested in Johnson & Johnson’s Complete Lift cream, only to have the Advertising Standards Agency ban its advertising a few days later for being “misleading”.

The watchdog was responding to complaints by the public that the £17.99 50 ml pot contained small print which stated it offered “no physical lift”.

Despite this, my anonymous friend said she is going to keep using it “just in case” because it can’t hurt to hope.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I spend my spare time obsessing over search engine optimisation (SEO), so let’s say I began thinking about spin, skin and search the next day.

A variety of studies and advertising bans have debunked most of the anti-wrinkle creams on the market as being pretty ineffective when it comes to turning back the clock.

Good for the skin they may be but none can simply smooth away wrinkles yet an astounding number of people buy them anyway.

Now, SEO works. Not for wrinkles, obviously, I mean in its own field it works. As a marketing technique, it increases targeted traffic, raises visibility and enhances the status of brands.

Despite this, optimisation has a terrible reputation.

If the public know about SEO at all, they often think of that terrible word “manipulation”.

SEO is often thought of as entirely black hat, a way of subjugating the usual search engine quality controls in order to present the searcher with marketing copy and nothing useful.

This is so unfair! How come a product which admits on its own packaging that it does not do what you hope it does, continues to sell in the thousands but there are businesses out there which are not investing in search marketing and optimisation?

I think there will always be great spin on some products and enthusiastic consumers to buy them, meaning wrinkle cream will not stop selling.

However, I like to think that SEO will lose its negative reputation and become recognised as the positive, consumer-friendly marketing tactic it is as increasing firms enjoy the great results it offers.

I was doing some keyword maintenance today and noticed something new when I hovered over the magnifying glass tool beside a keyword:

It looks like Google are being more explicit with their quality scores. I haven’t noticed this before but rather than being an accidental leak this time it’s been integrated into Google’s changes to make quality score more transparent.

I’m not sure how much this will change advertiser behaviour. Perhaps knowing that a keyword is nearly “Ok” will encourage people to optimise their landing pages and ad descriptions further, rather than just pausing.

More information is also given for keywords with poor quality scores:

In this case we are told that no ad will be run on broad match, but that the ad can be triggered on a phrase match.

How will this new information affect the way you run your AdWords campaigns?

Earlier today I wrote a blog post over on e-consultancy which looks at how UK supermarkets are ignoring SEO for major keywords, most notably “supermarket”.

In my opinion this is a massive oversight and it appears that the leading supermarket retailers such as Asda, Sainsburys and to a certain extent Tesco are trying to overprotect their brand rather than optimise their website’s for very important keywords.

As outlined in the article, I’m not suggesting that they keyword stuff their h1 and title tags etc. But by emphasising terms such as “supermarket” they are clearly describing the website to users/customers and helping to generate very valuable targeted search engine traffic.

What do you think, are the supermarkets missing a trick when it comes to SEO?

For those of you not in the loop, spyfu.com is a web service that provides information on who is bidding on what keywords as well as further information on competitors’ daily ad spend as well as their average CPC. The startup squad have a great article on what spyfu does and how it does it.

No Mr Bond, I Expect you to Disagree.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on how useful spyfu is, ranging from the standard “it works/doesn’t work for me” to the commonly held belief that it is only really useful for large accounts. People disagreeing on the Internet? It’s time to try science!

The Experiment

I selected 20 of SEOptimise’s clients, discarded two of them for using foreign currencies (spyfu has a UK and US version but I didn’t want the hassle of fiddling with exchange rates) then ignored a further two when spyfu provided no data on them. I then compared the percentage accuracy for SpyFu’s estimates for daily ad spend and CPC with the actual daily spend and average CPC as well as the number of impressions the ad generates. I even drew graphs.

The Perils of Percentages

I decided to work with percentages rather than actual pounds and pence for two reasons; client confidentiality and because there is such a massive variation in budgets and CPC’s across the selected accounts. Considering percentage variations means that a £10 error on an account spending £1000/day counts less than for one on a spend of £10/day. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

One side effect of this is that, particularly on a graph, it looks like the lower estimates are a lot more accurate then the upper estimates. However, this is because the lower estimate is never less than zero so it can never be more than 100% different from the actual value.

Enough writing. Time for some pictures.

Bigger is Better?

With a bigger account, spyfu has more data so its estimates will be more accurate. Right?

This first graph is of the error in spyfu’s ad spend estimates against total ad spend. I expected that the error would be less for big spending accounts.

As you can see, it looks like my hypothesis is correct (at least for the upper estimate, which tends to dominate these charts) but then the error increases again for the account with the largest ad spend. There are three possibilities here:

1. Accuracy is unrelated to ad spend.

2. Accuracy increases with ad spend and the last result is just a freak

3. Spyfu is actually most accurate somewhere in the middle range of ad spends.

To me, option 3 seems the most unrealistic and option 2 the most likely. Let’s check by looking at CPC. . .

O dear, this graph of CPC error against total ad spend shows no correlation of any sort whatsoever.

You’re Using the Wrong Big

Ok, so it might be unfair to say an account is big just because it spends a lot of money. Spyfu uses web scraping so it should be more accurate for account with a large number of impressions.

The following graph shows the percentage error ad spend against the number of impressions the account has generated:

This graph looks very similar to the Ad Spend Error vs. Ad Spend graph, probably because daily ad spend is quite closely linked to the number of impressions an account gets.

The graph of CPC error against number of impressions, below, also doesn’t show any correlations.

The graphs so far, particularly for CPC show that there is not a strong relationship between the size of an account and the accuracy of spyfu.

Assuming our largest account is just an anomalous result I think there is a case for saying that estimates of daily ad spend are more accurate for the larger accounts but that the error in CPC does not improve (or get worse) as account size increases.

Spyfu’s algorithm is a bit of a mystery, perhaps it calculates CPC entirely separately from daily ad spend. Perhaps comparing CPC with the size of the account is like comparing apples and pears.

Comparing Apples and Apples

Now let’s look at graphs for the CPC error against actual CPC:

My goodness, there might even be a trend there. It looks as though the upper estimate gets more accurate as CPC increases. The account with the highest CPC is an anomaly since spyfu has given both a lower and upper estimate of 0; any PPC marketer with common sense would ignore this anyway.

This next graph shows the same information, but with the upper estimate plot removed so that it is easier to spot trends in the lower estimate:

So as CPC increases the lower estimate actually gets worse. This is all very confusing, what does it all mean?

What’s Going On?

So far the results seem to indicate the following:

1. Spyfu’s estimate of ad spend is more accurate for larger accounts whether size is measured by ad spend or number of impressions.

2. The accuracy of the CPC estimate does not depend on the account size.

3. The upper estimate for CPC improves as CPC increase, but…

4. The lower CPC estimate gets worse as CPC increases.

What Does This Tell Me?

Nothing at all. The sample size is small and the correlations are weak; you would be a fool to use this data to decide how accurate spyfu is. Besides, it’s not like the four conclusions written above are even quantitative. It would’ve been much more useful if I’d been able to say “The lower estimate of ad spend for an account is within 50% of the actual value 90% of the time” but as you have seen the results do not support anything like that. The best I can hope for is that someone will be intrigued by what they’ve seen here and decide to test clients from their own MCC. If they have more data, or if lots of people with not much data arrive at the same conclusions then perhaps I can say I was onto something.

So SpyFu is Useless?

Far from it. When it provided information, true ad spend was within spyfu’s estimates 71% of the time (ignoring the accounts for which it returned 0) with CPC being slightly better at 79%. I will continue to advise and act as if true ad spend and CPC lie within spyfu’s estimates because the information it provides is better than no information at all.