Google's ad network is large enough that they can afford to kill off portions of their short term income to improve long term network viability. The still sell ads on garbage sites because some advertisers find value there (and others have small accounts or have not researched their spend). Andrew Goodman recently had a great post about how Google is filtering out the profitability of advertising noisy spammy AdWords ads to minimize the number of them appearing on Google. Andrew wrote:

Post pages that don't give adequate access to the crawler - or adequate keyword cues - and you risk facing the wrath of the quality scoring algorithm. It's less of a worry as much if you have an established account - it's new accounts that face the toughest tests with the predictive aspect of the algorithm, intended to weed out specific types of violators, experimenters, and ham-fisted copywriters.

In essence Google is going to require you to build trust and market data over time to gain the ability to even be trusted enough to gain anything near maximal ad distribution (even if you are willing to overpay for exposure).

Jumping from Paid Search to Organic Search

Some people believe that old sites only rank well because of the links they have acquired over time, but I think even just existing for a certain amount of time without being manually or algorithmically tripped up for some spam infraction allows search engines to place more trust on your site.

Plus requiring sites to be a bit older to rank well requires an additional expense and / or level of knowledge that many people lack.

You can bet that if they are taking a lets wait and see approach on paid ads they are also doing the same on organic search results.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs offers a tool for Detecting Online Commercial Intention. It estimates the probability of a web page or search query being information, commercial-informational, or commercial-transactional in nature. I think you have to use IE to use Microsoft's tool. Well at least they are consistant with the stupidity of trying to make it hard for their good ideas to spread.

You can also use Yahoo! Mindset to see how page relevancy scores change as algorithms move from commercial to informational in nature. Google's current search algorithms are heavily biased toward older and informational resources.

AdCenter tool link via WebMetricsGuru

A number of my friends have stated that they have been growing less and less impressed with AdSense as a monetization model, but I think it provides a huge opportunity. The reasons I like using AdSense on a new site are:

• Google has huge reach, so it shouldn't take their advertisers long to pick up on new advertising trends and opportunities

• it requires virtually no effort, thus it allows you to scale without needing to hire ad sales reps
• it makes it easy to establish a baseline earnings potential so you know how much to value your other media sales at
• that also allows you to determine how much effort and investment each channel should get before committing you to spend thousands of dollars on a money losing channel.
• if you track your ad clickthroughs you can also see which advertisers you are sending your leads at. If they keep buying them over an extended period of time and your site grows to be powerful with broad reach you can either partner with the same sources they are using, or perhaps create direct and premium partnerships with similar or better offers and companies in the same field

Of course there are downsides to placing AdSense ads on your site (like having your largest income generator and one of your largest sources of traffic being the same company), but as I have been building a few sites I have found AdSense helpful in determining where to pour resources.

John Scott recently had an AdSense integrated design competition , where he is offering a couple hundred dollars for a site design. Where else could you get a profitable and amazing site design for only a couple hundred dollars? Running a forum or being socially active helps you establish other baselines outside of your company and outside of AdSense, which allow you to be more efficient at finding and using resources. Friendships allow you to scale up and down without having to worry about hiring and firing employees.

Social interaction and the distribution it brings leads to further distribution, which gives you a wide reach of great people who will offer to give you feedback on your errors. So long as you are not defensive and do not try to control language when your ideas spread then nearly unlimited fast and honest feedback are great bonuses for anyone trying to spread ideas.

Which resources do you overvalue? Which resources do you undervalue? What do you use as helpful baselines in looking at the productivity of your business?

Dan Thies is holding a free SEO teleclass Tuesday, May 30, 2006. Well worth a listen if you are new to SEO or you would like to get a holistic overview of how the search market has recently changed and will continue to change going forward.

[Update: Dan's current class is full, but if you give him your email on the above linked page he will notify you when more classes become available.]

SEO Question: Many people say write naturally for SEO, but what does that mean?

SEO Answer: About a month and a half ago the New York Times published an article by Steve Lohr titled This Boring Headline Is Written for Google. The article flits with the idea of writing newspaper articles with Google in mind. That story got a decent amount of buzz because newspapers usually do not put much consideration into search engine marketing.

Old School Search Engine Optimization:

A few years ago you could do SEO like this:

• start your page title with your keyword or keyword phrase
• include that keyword phrase on most every heading or subheading on that page
• link to the page sitewide with that same keyword in the anchor text
• build a ton of links from external locations, with most (or all) of them containing that keyword phrase

Does Old School Still Work?

For MSN (and, to some extent, Yahoo!) you could still use a somewhat similar keyword stuffing philosophy and see outstanding results, but the problem with the stick my core phrase everywhere SEO method! is that Google does not want to show the most optimized content. They want to show the most relevant content.

As noted above in the New York Times article, most news articles (and likely most quality web documents) are not heavily focused on concentrating on optimizing for a keyword. Instead they use the natural language associated with that topic.

If too many of your signals are focused on just one word or phrase and you lack the supporting vocabulary in your document you may get filtered out of the search results for your primary keyword targets. It has happened to me several times, and it is a pretty common occurrence, especially for websites that have few authoritative trustworthy votes and try to make up for it by aggressive use of a phrase in the page content.

Here is an example of a snapshot of a spam page I saw ranking for a long tail keyword

The problem is, that page was ranking for Michigan Smoker's Life Insurance when it targeted a way different phrase. The page will never rank for the main phrase it was targeting, so unless they redirect searchers to a more relevant page it is going to be hard for them to convert any visitors that land on a page like that.

Read a bunch of SEO forums and you eventually come across threads with titles like Non optimized pages higher in SERPS than optimized ones???

How to Optimize for Google:

So if old hat optimization is considered overoptimization and/or is potentially detrimental to your rankings what do you do?

You could

• say screw Google they will eventually rank me if I get this keyword on the page 1 more time ;)
• say screw Google I am pulling in plenty of money from Yahoo! and MSN
• not worry about SEO at all
• evolve SEO to a more productive state

Onward and upward I say. How to mix it up to become Google friendly:

• Start the page title with a modifier or couple non keywords instead of placing your primary keyword phrase as the first word of the page title. Example... instead of search engine marketing company start your title with professional search engine marketing...
• Stemming is your friend. Use plural, singular, and ing versions of your keywords. I have seen pages that used a bunch of the plural version filtered out of Google for the plural version but still ranking for the singular version. If you mix it up you can catch both.
• Mix up the anchor text, subheaders and page content. Use semantically related phrases, and, in some cases, write subheaders that are useful for humans even if some of them do not have any keyword phrases in them.
• Make sure each page is somewhat unique and focused in nature.

Semantically related phrases:

If you think of words as having relationships to one another and you visualize optimizing for a keyword as optimizing for a basket of relevant related keywords it will help you draw in relevant related search traffic while also making your page more relevant for its core keywords.

For example, the acronym SEO would have the following as some semantically related phrases

Now you wouldn't necessarily need to get all of those in your page copy, but if a person was writing naturally about the topic of SEO it would be common for many of those kinds of words to appear on the page.

Where do I Find Semantically Related Phrases?

GoRank offers a free semantic research tool. You can also find semantically related phrases by using a Google ~ search, the Google Keyword Tool, clustering engines, or concept pairing tools like Google Sets.

I link to all those tools on my keyword suggestion tool, and here is a background post on latent semantic indexing.

An Over Abundance of Modifiers:

In addition to using words that are semantically related it makes sense to use words that are common modifiers. For example common buying / shopping searches might include words like

• Free shipping
• Coupons
• Coupon
• Deals
• Deal
• Cheap
• Expensive
• Budget
• Bargain
• Bargains
• Affordable
• Low Cost
• Free
• Find
• Get
• Buy
• Purchase
• Locate
• Compare
• Shop
• Shopping
• Search

I created a keyword modifiers spreadsheet with free keyword modifier ideas for a few different search, transaction, and classification types. I might try to expand it a bit if people find it useful.

If it All Sounds Like a Bit Much...

If it seems complex or complicated then don't focus too heavily on the modifiers or semantic related phrases or even your core keyword that much.

First write your article about your topic without even thinking about the search engines. Then go back and tweak it to include relevant modifiers and semantically related phrases. Make sure that you use multiple versions of your primary keyword phrase if it has multiple versions.

To make the page easy to read and to make it easy to add related phrases and alternate versions of your keywords break up the page using many subheaders. Also add leading questions that lead people from one section to the next. For example, I could say did you find this search engine marketing article helpful in your website promotion quest? Do you think it will help you do a become a better search engine optimizer and more holistic internet marketer?

I am a bit tired and I think this was a bit verbose, but hopefully it helps somebody. If not, arggggg... hehehe.