Search Traffic Growth Profile for New Websites

There is no universal right or wrong to the overall SEO process and strategy. There are many ways to get to the end destination of ranking. This flowchart aims to show some of the stages new sites go through, and to help visualize the process of ranking.

Hope you like it! Feedback welcome. :)

Here is a larger image, and a PDF version.

My First SEO Conference - Guest Post by Falko Luedtke

Falko Luedtke has been a member of our online training program and community forums since the day we opened up nearly a year ago. He has done in house SEO for some fortune 500 clients and recently branched out to start his own consultancy. As a Search Engine Strategies media partner I figured it would be more beneficial to many readers of the blog to see what Falko thought of going to his first SEO related conference, rather than hearing my take on it. Without further ado, here is his review...

My First SEO Conference

My first SES, way to cold and bad coffee but the greatest working week I ever had.

6 days in Chicago, the first time for me being in the windy city, the first time that I went to a big SEO conference, the first time that I freeze my butt off anywhere I go.

I love to go to conversions and conferences, when I was younger I spend almost every second weekend on the road to attended eSport events. So even so it was my first time to go to a SES it was nothing new for me.

Overall I need to say that I enjoyed the week in Chicago a lot and I can’t wait to go to the next conference. Everybody interested in SEO should at least attend to one in his life. It is the second best way to meet other SEO experts and exchange knowledge with them, best way is signing up for the SEO Book Community. I don’t know who came up with the idea to put the December SES to Chicago but I guess it is the same person who decided to put it into the Chicago Hilton Hotel. I talked to so many people on this conference and everybody was saying the same 5 things:

  • I’m freezing my B’s off.
  • Godverdomme my phone is not working.
  • Does anybody have a steady internet connection? I don’t.
  • Where is the coffee? No I’m not talking about that weird black water over there.
  • The music is so loud I can’t hear what you say. What did you say?

When I arrived on Sunday evening from Vancouver I already had meet one other SEO and as soon we said down in the shuttle bus we realized we are not alone. 7 out 10 people in the shuttle where on their way to the conference. I thought, good start as more people around as more possibilities to talk. After settling down in my room and get myself organized I went to Kitty O'Sheas in the Hilton. I didn’t stay in the Hilton by the way, I said right next door in the Essex Inn, paid a third of the price and had less to complain about my room than anybody else I meet on the conference. Kitty is an Irish bar not a bad one but they really need to learn to turn down the music. I meet more people in the first night then I could have expected. And at 5 am I went happily to bed thinking about what to attend to on Monday.

Monday Summary

Monday morning the black water that the Hilton called Coffee didn’t really help, the breakfast was average low and way to overpriced so I could really enjoy me being hang over on this morning :) That didn’t stop me to go to the panels. I could spend a 100 blog posts talking about the panels and all the great things that I learned but I don’t want to make this post to long. I think there are some panels I would like to urge you to try to get your hands on the presentations, if you can.

Orion Panel: The State of Integration – Yes we are SEO’s, yes we are great but yes there are others. Use traditional marketing to funnel your branding efforts into high converting search. Instead of fighting your traditional marketing colleges work with them.

Search & Packaged Goods Moderated by Mark Jackson – One of the best panels I attended on the conference. You could have really learnt something about were large consumer-packaged-goods companies work and think. More and more Shopper Moms are going online to research their products online or looking for coupons. Also how a crisis in a industry can a good way to created brand trust. I just say large number of searches, big marketing budgets but old companies with no sense for new technology. Huge opportunities for every marketer who stops and thinks for a moment about it.

Why Does Search get all the Credit? – Pretty simple, search converts better and is much easier to click then to walk somewhere. But how do you get people to search for your brand terms? There is a life beyond the internet and we all living in it.

Take away from the first day was clearly, look outside the search box, with the prices for traditional marketing down there are huge opportunities to drive more searches. Don’t forget to optimize your site for conversions first :) A very good book to read about this topic is “Landing Page Optimization” from Tim Ash.

Tuesday Summary

Tuesday morning the breakfast was not much better in the Hilton and coffee in the press area was the same as the day before. I spend quite a bit of time at the Expo and talk to a lot of Marketers and Product Managers. Some of the products are just amazing. Everybody who works with content should take a look at the new version of WordVision, very cool.

The panel for Tuesday that I thought was most interesting, since most people don’t get it right, was Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues moderated by Eric Enge. Even so I didn’t agree with all the presentation the insides that Sharad Verma from Y! Search provided were gold worth. Hint different language can’t be duplicated content. Use Aarons Duplicated Content Checker to make sure you don’t have any problems with it on your site.

The evening was even better then the day before. A little tip for you, just stick around till the Gurus are drunk and then ask all your questions you will get the best answers.

Wednesday Summary

This time I left the Breakfast out in Hilton, just not worth it. For this day I would like you to look at Social Media Optimization as a panel. Even so Web 2.0 was yesterday and we are not quite at Web 3.0 yet Social Media is a constant in the internet that you can’t forget about anymore if you want to run a successful online business. A lot of old school companies are still hesitant to invest in such a market but they could find solutions for their biggest problems here. Interacting with a community can created not only brand awareness but it can also help you to created new content for your company. If you have a great product and created value for your clients it will help your online efforts even more. Pauline Ores at IBM mention that if they get a bad feedback in the community it takes sometimes too long for them to react on it but the community on its own does it instantly. And often more human then IBM could.

At this point I need to thank Mike Grehan and all the great people for the great dinner this evening. And after talking to Mike about his new book I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I hope after reading the book people stop riding the “Rank matters most” trip.

Thursday Summary

Since I went to bed at 6.30 am on Thursday morning it took me a bit longer to come back on track. At least I can say I enjoyed the most awesome Jazz club in Chicago and I now know what company I would invest money in if I would have any :) You want to know? Send me a mail.

There are two panels I want to mention for this day, first is “How to speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with your IT department to get stuff done” Chris Boggs is a great guy and he is so right, we are living in the 21th century, nerds rule the world and they will do that more and more, Management language does not help you anymore. The world changed people want to cut the BS and come to the point. So start speaking Geek it will help you at work, with your friends and maybe even you can finally connect to your kids again.

The highlight of the conference was “Black Hat, Whit Hat & the Best kept secrets to Search” With Todd Friesen, Eric Enge, Doug Heil and David Naylor in the panel. Some people expected that somebody would start a bar fight but David Naylor just stole the show. If somebody did a video of the D..k head parody please send me the link over. We didn’t have the changes to see a bar fight but it was almost an hour long discussion about all the nice things what you can do to make yourself disappear in the search results.

Not only was this the funniest panel of the conference, but it also had a ton of information in it like how Google will not allow tons of results in there SERP that are leading all to the same upstream end point. You can mask a lot of things but you can’t mask the upstream end point. If all the search results send their traffic to the same end point Google will eliminate the ranking of your affiliates to created more diversity in their results. With creating multiple end points for your affiliates you are able to create this diversity.

But I need to repeat the warning from Todd and Doug from last night, be aware of the risks and only do things that are relevant. To quote David Naylor on this "If a user clicks on a link that says 'Buy Viagra', they're going to land on a page that's selling Viagra." If the user clicks on ‘Buy Viagra’ and lands on the page of Al Gore the user is properly not very happy. With staying relevant you can’t do much wrong. I really hope somebody did a video of this panel. If not too bad you were not here.

Conference Summery

Before I bore you guys to death, I guess I already did here are some recommendations if you ever plan to attend a SEO conference.

  • If you come for just one day, save the money for the conference get a Expo only ticked, take the money that you saved and go to the bar.
  • Look for the Geek with the most people around him and by him drinks till he can’t stand anymore. You learn more in the bar and with being social then you could ever learn from the panels.

To summarise the conference, it was a great week, thank you so much for the opportunity Aaron. I had so much fun and even so that I would say SES should move this event ether to a different city for December or to a different hotel all the complains are gone as soon you get in the Bar and be social. I can’t wait to attend the next conference even if it is in the cold again, the information and knowledge you gain in one night is worth a lot more than the cost of coming to the conference. I almost wish that the conference would have not ended but my lever hurts, I’m tiered and I had the most fun week working ever. I hope to see you around on the next events maybe the SEO Community conference?

Worth Sharing...

Andrew Goodman offers a free 40 page guide to Google AdWords.

Dave Winer and Paul Graham published articles about how complexity and corporate thinking increase the cost of doing business and stifle innovation. Worth reading both of them.

Michael Gray offers great tips on how to do SEO for video content, and recently published a guest article by Gab Goldenberg on how to be creative.

Weip offers some great link building tips.

Vanessa Fox offers a ton of great Geotargeting tips, and highlighted Nathan Buggia's great post on issues associated with URL referrer tracking.

Allegedly searching stimulates the brain. Smashing Magazine offers tips on search box design. And Yahoo! is testing ways to make search ads pop by using graphics.

Paypal modernized allowance by making it automated, and giving you the option to send extra on demand.

Editorial Integrity & Publisher Control of Ads

Chris Brogan and John Andrews both wrote great posts about how you do not lose your editorial integrity just because you exercise editorial control of your ads.

Lets look at the flip side of the equation. Most networks do not want full transparency because it would harm their profit potential. Google claims to want to police the cesspool that is the web, and yet it shows ads for black hat SEO and deceptive ads that contain misleading prices which hide the true cost of a transaction. Automation promotes whatever makes the most per impression. In many cases that means promoting fraud (legal, or otherwise).

In time web users may become blind of most text ads the same way they became banner blind. And then publishers will have to fight harder to make a living. Free buys distribution, but it doesn't put food on the table. Our other sites (which take much less time and effort than this site) earn way more money. If this site didn't have a revenue engine on it, do you think I would have worked 70 hours a week on it for over 5 years? I don't.

My point is not that ad networks are bad, but if bloggers and independent webmasters want to make a living online we are going to need to get better at mixing ads and editorial...and one of the lowest risk and highest value ways to do that is to promote the things we really believe in - either create your own product or promote affiliate offers for products that save you time and money.

People that promote garbage should be policed by their peers, like Jerry West did to The Arbitrage Conspiracy:

Don’t Buy The Arbitrage Conspiracy

Don’t get sucked into the hype. It isn’t real. I was there and I walked out after 40 minutes because the material was very basic. I even talked to many people (other solid CPA marketers) who stayed for the entire presentation and they said there wasn’t anything new, it was all recycled material from past systems.

People promoting hyped up junk should be rightfully flamed, but we shouldn't consider it a crime to share good relevant offers. What would be a crime is if many of the best sites went offline because they didn't pay for themselves.

Google Chrome Adds Search Pre-roll Ads

Google Chrome's biggest change from an SEO perspective are that it...

  • combines the address bar and search box into 1 box
  • that search box shows search suggestion results before searchers see the organic search results

The combination of those 2 means that if Google gains significant browser share SEOs will need to optimize for search suggest.

Chrome recently came out of beta, so Google can begin buying marketshare from OEMs. With the product only a few months removed from its announcement they are adding advertising to it, as highlighted by Danny Sullivan:

If Google can buy significant browser marketshare then such ad positions might add a lot of curiosity clicks for the top ranked advertiser, lower the ROI for the top advertiser.

If this gains traction most brand advertisers should not bid on their brand (unless perhaps they do so using an embedded match - which allows them to block advertising on the exact match but show up for other brand searches). Bidding on your brand's exact match and appearing in such ad positions for brand related search queries would be paying Google for adding zero value to the process.

Keyword Research Strategy Flowchart

PeterD and I recently put together the Keyword Research Flowchart. Interactive image below, with a larger image here and a downloadable PDF also available.

We hope you find it as valuable as we found it fun to make, and your feedback is appreciated. :)

 

Subscribers may also access our new AdSense and SEO analytics flowcharts.

YourYoutubeMillions.biz - Make Easy Money on YouTube, Guaranteed

Remember seeing all those ads about making easy money with AdSense? Pretty soon those hucksters will be displaying ads on how to make easy money on YouTube, based in part on this NYT article about how a couple YouTube video creators are making $20,000 a month. As Cory Williams said "I didn’t start it to make money, but what a lovely surprise."

When evaluating such "opportunities" one must remember that there are mathematical outliers on every large social network. Generally it is a fools game to chase such a position, because many who are at the top accidentally ended up in the position (see above quote), and your odds of being 1 in 1,000,000 are precisely 1 in 1,000,000.

Many more people chasing that "opportunity" will only pollute the medium and force their relevancy algorithms to show less diversity, making it even harder to get noticed in a noisy market. Google encourages cut throat competition to create diversity, and then filters out the bottom 95% to 99% to maintain quality. Pet rocks may be fun (for a while), but nobody wants to be a pet rock ;)

The NYT article mentions that one of the two people they profiled openly admitted to using product placement in his videos to generate half of his income. Google believes that buying/renting links that get your site placed well in the search results is evil, but it also believes that selling links by the click and unmarked product placements in videos are fine business strategies.

Google Expanding in All Directions

As both an SEO and a Google shareholder, I have a love hate relationship with the company. More recently I have been feeling love when buying up shares of their stock, especially seeing how they are still buying marketshare while competitors are downsizing.

Increased Monetization

Google has been showing more ads on search results, and accidentally leaked some AdWords click volume numbers for Cyber Monday.

Google paid click volume was also up, year over year, in categories like Department Stores (39%), Books & Magazines (28%), Comparison shopping (25%) and Sports & Fitness (24%). Even categories like Apparel (9%) and Home Furnishings (14%) were up.

They recently announced they are accepting ads promoting hard alcohol, have started running credit card arbitrage ads on their own network, and created an additional chunk of targeted inventory by allowing advertisers to target ads to the iPhone and G1.

New Distribution Channels

Google is buying marketshare for their browser, which is soon to leave beta (so Google can start doing bundling deals). I recently saw this ad on the New York Times

How many more Chrome ads will we see across the AdSense network in the coming months, especially when considering that the Google brand is still cherished AND most brand ad rates have dropped sharply over the past couple months.

And some Google computers have the OS stripped off their user agent string, leading to some speculation that they might be working on creating an operating system or a more advanced infrastructure to build network applications on. The also released their native client, aiming to allow web browsers to interact with client computer resources.

Google just created a ton more inventory on YouTube by placing a search box on syndicated videos. And they just made their database deeper and more valuable by indexing a lot of archived magazine content.

Replacing the Media

Web Growth

President elect Obama is looking to push web growth hard:

It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption,” Mr. Obama said. “Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online.

But many of the leading media companies may not be around to see that growth.

Bankruptcy

The Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times is expecting that 2009 digital ad revenues might be below 2008 revenues.

Advertisers Becoming the Media

As the debt laden media companies die off, some advertisers are finding it cheaper to become the media rather than advertise on it and support its bloat:

one day cosmetics companies will perhaps start beefing up their own Web sites — with makeup videos and click-to-buy options — just as kraftfoods.com has done with its hugely trafficked recipe site and walmart.com has done with its popular blogs by mothers. When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and finally drop off newsstands.

Advertisers are also investing in analyzing the potential for media to go viral. When they own their own distribution channels and build a large audience, the cost of real-time testing drops to zero.

Media Unbound

Some content creators are testing technologies that allow DVD watchers to chat with friends while watching the movie, perhaps creating yet another gathering spot for fans - like Buddy TV.

As Google brings archived magazine content online it seems the form of content containers is dying, and the media is becoming more aware of the link economy:

That currency is the hyperlink, a pointer to somewhere on the internet that holds some information that someone else might find useful. Like any currency, it can be debased, and lose its value. You've heard of the dollar/yen/pound/euro exchange rate, of course (and watched in amazement as they gyrate, and yet the price of American hardware and software never alters from a $1 = £1 translation). But in the link economy, when everyone's passing around links, every person is their own central bank, determining the value of their own currency.

The Blend

In an attempt to increase revenues some media sites (like CNN Money) are blending ads so aggressively that they look editorial. To me this ad looks more like editorial than an advertisement.

Many of the mainstream media sites will need to become much more like eHow.com, Mahalo.com, and About.com if they want to weather the storm...use the brand to attract readers, but have a lot of cheap backfill content monetized by affiliate ads and contextual ads to subsidize the editorial that builds the brand.

Recent Media Successes

Not all media based business models are in the hurt locker.

As many traditional media companies head toward bankruptcy they will have their staffs cut, making it easier to influence them through public relations.

uTest has built a functional business model out of crowd sourcing by selling pay for performance bug testing.

Andy Hagans explained how they grew Tip'd by hiring a well known star to run the brand, partnering with leading independent editorial sites, and pushing most of the value out to the editorially featured sites. As a result of those actions it looks like Kiplinger's might syndicate the Tip'd widget, which will offer Andy's site a lot of great brand exposure. Start small and keep building momentum...using each point of growth and each partnership as validation to reach the next level.

Is JupiterMedia a Cheap Domain Play?

Years ago JupiterMedia owned Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies, but sold them off (along with ClickZ) for $43 million to raise funds to binge on buying stock image companies. Why? According to Alan Meckler, JupiterMedia's CEO:

Why the sale? The simple reason is that Jupitermedia has evolved from being a media company with images into an Image company with media. A good part of the evolution came from the acquisition of 7 image companies since June 2003. Over a 25 month period we have spent close to $200 million making the above referenced acquisitions along with dozens of photo library collections. Most of these deals were done with cash. The cash came from our treasury and from bank borrowings. We plan to make more acquisitions and we plan to continue using cash. So how do we get more cash? Simple, we either go to the public market and offer our stock for cash or we sell assets such as the Search Engine trade shows and ClickZ network in order to raise more funds for acquisitions.

Recently I would have been prone to go to the public market and sell equity to raise cash. But even with our stock closing price yesterday of $22.80, I think Jupitermedia was undervalued based on what I believe the company will be worth over the coming years. So I chose asset sales and additional borrowing based on the fact that I think Jupitermedia should be more valuable tomorrow.

After spending a couple hundred million dollars buying image companies, JupiterMedia built up too much debt to service in this credit crisis and was forced to sell off their images division to Getty for $96 million - up to $40 to $45 million less than they were offered in August.

That image sale should allow JupiterMedia to pay off all their debts, but the company is off about 99% from when they were "under-priced." They are trading at 27 cents a share, and have a market value under $10 million. They own a ton of great domains like Internet.com, InternetNews.com, Javascript.com, Developer.com, WebDeveloper.com, Jumbo.com, MediaBistro.com, and dozens of other valuable domain names and websites.

Will they start selling themselves off in chunks? Will a private equity investor try to take them private? Or will they go to $0?

* As a disclaimer, I bought a few thousand shares recently...though it was a bet more than an investment with conviction.

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