The Value of a Unique Data Source in SEO

The more closed off a data source is the greater potential value you can exploit from understanding it.

General Keyword Research Tools:

Many people use the Google AdWords tool and Overture Selector Tool, thus if you are in a competitive marketplace the odds of you finding high value under-priced keywords is going to be lower than if you track data from less used sources.

Paid Keyword Research Tools:

Tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery may help you find a few more valuable rare keyword phrases. Since accessing them costs money, less people will use them.

Follow Clever Competitors:

If you come across high ranking spammy sites you can let them do your keyword research for you. If you find one smart competitor that keeps showing up for keyword phrases that few other people are bidding on you can see what types of keywords they are buying by using tools like KeyCompete or SpyFu.

Both of those techniques were covered in Using Profitable Spam & Thin Content Sites for Keyword Research.

Your Own Website Research Data:

The highest value market research data you can collect is collecting how the market is already reacting to your site. If you listen to your site you are not only going to find unique keyword phrases that do not show up on other tools, but you also know that

  • real people are already searching for them

  • those phrases convert (if you track conversions)
  • you are already trusted in some search engines for those phrases

It is typically easier to bump a number 6 ranking up to number 3 than it is to go from nowhere to top 10.

Use some keyword phrases to help you think of related topics and use rankings in one engine to help you find content ideas for others. If you use your own logs and tools like HitTail you can uncover entire categories and keyword baskets where there is little to no competition. Write semantically sound legitimate content targeted at those keywords and those articles should be able to rank for keywords related to other phrases you are already ranking for.

Also giving your visitors a site level search box will give you another source of data for related terms that you should be covering but may not be.

If a market is saturated and you operate in nearby markets with limited competition you can keep growing your revenue base until you have enough brand and authority to take on the established competition.

Apply This to Anything:

And while it is easy to use keywords as an example, you can apply this to anything. The more unique data you can collect the broader you can make your sales funnel and more efficient you can make your sales copy. And if you write timely news dong things like being opinionated, tracking a few persistent searches, or using Google news alerts can be the difference between having a complete story and getting all the links or just being one of 1,000 people writing about the same thing, watching Techcrunch get all the links.

In the information age unique data sources = profit.

Review of Gord Hotchkiss's Enquiro Eye Tracking Report II: Google, MSN and Yahoo! Compared

I recently read Gord Hotchkiss's second eye tracking study, and it rocks. It is quite meaty in nature, and well worth a read for any serious search marketer. It costs $149, but is a great value if you are a lover of search or a professional search marketer.

On to a few interesting highlights ...

  • Google is perceived to have better relevancy than other search engines, and is able to help concentrate attention at the top of the search results due to being primarily branded as a search site (instead of a portal), starting from a clean page full of white space, better use of real estate (by doing things like showing fewer ads on non-commercial queries, or showing them less prominently), better SERP formatting (including whitespace and perhaps even formatting using the phi ratio), and better ad targeting.

  • On average for Google and Yahoo the ads are viewed as more relevant than the organic results.
  • Interaction with search results is quick (roughly 10 seconds). We scan for information scent rather than fully analyzing, with a bias toward a semantic map that matches our goals.
  • Many top ranked search results guide toward a specific bias (say shopping) even when that makes them somewhat irrelevant for the user intent based on the search query. For generic queries we are biased toward research. Brand specific queries are more commonly biased toward purchasing. This biased intent may be fully decided before we even enter a query, and make us prone to ignore or specifically look for certain sites, or types of sites. Using strong emotional words (such as scam) or words that indicate research purposes (such as compare or reviews) may evoke a better CTR.
  • There is a direct connection to the thalmus to the amygdala which allows the amygdala to emotionally react to a sensory impulse before the neocortex can evaluate the input, thus when the neocortex does logically evaluate something you may already have that emotional bias worked into the equation, and thus try to justify it as being right...I think this was also mentioned in Blink, but is an interesting point.
  • The psychological noise of portal pages and the sensationalism associated with traditional headline news may erode emotional confidence when searching from a portal page, as compared to Google, which may be viewed as a way to escape the real world and do what you want.
  • We like to scan things in groups of 3s.
  • When text is placed inside an image it is easy to ignore it due to the feeling of images as low value or low information spaces likely with noise.
  • Google AdWords discounting for click relevancy ends up creating a self reinforcing market where the top ads are the best in many markets, especially in competitive marketplaces with high search volumes. Low volume keywords easier for bids to organize position...higher volume keywords primarily driven by ad CTR.

Those were just a few points from an information dense report which was refreshingly well put together. And in a market where so many people talk about getting top rankings it is great to see someone writing about how people interact with search results, and how to leverage them for their full value.

Gord has his head wrapped around search. When Greg Boser recently called out Did It

I also didn’t really consider David’s comments newsworthy. After all, he certainly isn’t the first PPC zealot to write a shitty article telling the world that SEO consultants were a high-risk waste of precious marketing dollars, or that organic SEO is as simple as hiring a monkey and giving them the URL to Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Gord added further context to the debate by talking about search from the perspective of the searcher, which is a topic oddly lacking in nature in discussions in our industry, given how much we talk about rumors of everything else.

Hidden Costs - Do You Have Ads on Your Business Cards?

Where ads look like content, or people are willing to pay for ads as content you can make a lot of money, but if your website is about marketing, and you heavily place ads on it there is no way to know how much that is going to cost you.

Your Blog is Your Business Card:

I disagree with Jason Calacanis about many things on many levels, but I think this quote is spot on

I make money building profitable businesses, not selling ads on my business card (and that's what I consider my blog to be).

Selling Yourself Short:

Good select targeted advertising can be interesting and add value, but most back-fill advertising networks do not provide enough context to add as much value as they take away. AdSense now lets you place their ads alongside competing ones, but should you?

One of my recent AdSense campaigns matched some blog related keywords, and the ad was getting over 5,000,000 impressions a day for under $40.00. And Google is getting a cut on that too!
Adsense on Blogs.

Does Your Optimization Factor in Invisible Costs?

What is one quality link worth? What is one reader worth? Due to limited market attention and the self reinforcing nature of networks anything that costs a few credibility points will have an increasing cost as time passes, but because it is a cost you don't see you may not be aware of it. If a reporter does not call you will you see that costs? How many other reporters may have called you but did not because you did not get mentioned in that first article? Did you miss out on business or life changing relationships or feedback because your site was too focused on the short term?

Anyone Can Steal Attention:

The cost may not matter now, but when you want to spread ideas it is going to be much harder to do if people do not already know an trust you. The guy who copied my about page (who even came off as a liar in his apology) is blogging about how his Alexa went up (temporarily) and how smart he thinks he is, but it makes me wonder When you have to steal to get exposure do you think it makes you look smart or worth trusting?

It is easy to lie or cheat or steal once or twice or to do it anonymously, but it gets much harder to do repeatedly to people you know. And you surround people who think and act like you do, so if your foundation is based on stealing you are fighting an uphill battle.

Perception is Reality:

It is not an issue of who is better than who, or even who is right or wrong - but do people trust you? Many current market leaders are there not because of amazing intellect or great work, but more because of slowly building trust and being around for a while.

Trust & Intense Relationships:

As Seth says

LinkedIn tends to make networks that are sprawling and weak. Web4 is about smaller, far more intense connections with trusted colleagues and their activities.

Imagine violently emotional feelings that make it hard to walk or talk or do anything. People that make you cry or laugh so hard it hurts. To get in those types of relationships people have to trust you. Some people get there from a few lucky home runs, but most people build that trust slowly over time.

Using Affiliates to Lower Your Risk Profile

If you have a strong brand and do not want to risk your brand image or search rankings you can still employ aggressive marketing techniques by using them on white label sites or affiliate accounts. Most people who use white label sites leave footprints that make it easy to associate the site with the main company. The good thing about using affiliates instead of a white label site is that just about everyone has spammy affiliates. Think of how many spammy AdSense sites you have seen...those are Google's affiliates.

You can sign up to be your affiliate and track your performance just like the performance of other affiliates. You can also sign up with different affiliate ID numbers for different websites or marketing methods. As long as your program is well integrated into the web a couple spammy affiliates are not going to make Google want to nuke everyone who is using your affiliate program, plus it can give you more leeway when doing things like bidding on competing keywords, etc. If one of your affiliate sites gets blocked from buying a keyword or removed from the index you still can use the same (or similar) technique(s) on other affiliate sites.

Have You Created Linkbait Recently?

It seems everyone is writing an article about linkbait right now. Hi Todd, Rand, and Nick!

All the articles are great stuff, and today is a great day to get started with linkbait. It can seem a bit overwhelming off the start, but if you try a few times just about any creative person can make the Digg homepage in well under a month. A friend of mine started a Digg account less than 2 weeks ago and makes the homepage almost every day now. And even Forbes is getting into link baiting.

SEO for Firefox Updated

SEO for Firefox was recently updated. The new features are scraping Google cache dates, and allowing you to CSV export the data. What are some cool ways to use SEO for Firefox?

  • Check out how old competing businesses are.

  • Evaluate the competitive nature of a marketplace.
  • Research the backlinks to a competing business to see whch links are their most powerful.
  • Do a site level search on a site to see which pages are most frequently cached, and to check the general health of a site.

What are your favorite ways to use SEO for Firefox? What other features should be added to it?

James Timothy's NerdVille.net - When Someone is a Jerk...

What is the best way to let them know? Recently I read this charming review

all I can seem to think about is the distaste left in my mouth from my last ebook purchase. I bought this seo ebook and it pissed me off so bad I don’t even want to give you an aff backlink for it. ... it took me two minuts on blogs and in the forums to learn just as much as I did in that stupid 385 page book

Hope those forums will teach you a lot about rewriting the content of those you flame, and pawning the content off as your own. You really need a bit more work on that front.

From my about page

Balancing answering emails, blogging, reading blogs and forums, buying and developing sites, working for a couple customers, and running Threadwatch is pretty hard - especially with zero employees. In the past SEO Book was more about posting search news, but since the market has got so saturated on that front and I acquired the Threadwatch community I have decided to keep Threadwatch focused on the latest search news and speculation, and to use SEO Book to answer customer questions and to offer online marketing strategy tips.

From his about page

Balancing answering emails, blogging, reading blogs and forums, buying and developing sites, working for a couple customers, and running my affiliate business is pretty hard - especially with zero employees.

In the past Nerdville was more about posting Affiliate product reviews, but since the market has got so saturated on that front and I have moved on to different industries I have decided to keep posting focused on the latest search and affiliate marketing news and speculation, answer customer questions and to offer online marketing strategy tips.

I guess emulation is a form of flattery.

Normally I wouldn't care much about a few people being jerks, but as my blog has got more popular the human to jerk ratio has drastically changed (especially over the past couple months), and I think the best way to curb it is to remind the jerks what they are from time to time. Coupled with moving across the country and working on some amazing projects I really don't have much time for these jerks, so from time to time I will just mention them that way I don't carry their words with me.

I am sure this is unconventional and against best practices, but if people are going to steal my content then flame me for my content quality I should remind them how lowly they think of themselves. At least they could steal content from a site they like.

Suggest Sites for DMOZ Inclusion

You can now submit your site to the Open Directory Project again. Submissions were down for a while.

Google's Paid Inclusion Model

BusinessWeek published an article about small advertisers being priced out of AdWords. Given quality score adjustments that may boost ads for sites which have strong trust associated organic SEO, it is prohibitively expensive for many businesses to use AdWords unless they are already well trusted in organic search.

What Types of Sites Rank?

The sites which are already well represented in organic search typically fall into one or more of the following groups

  • old

  • has many signs of authority (new and old links, repeat visitors, brand related search queries)
  • associated with a rich powerful offline entity
  • unique & remarkable

News Sites as God

News sites tend to fit all 4 of those categories, plus get additional easy linkage data by writing about current events and being included in select indexes like Google News, and have many other advantages. The bias toward promoting large trusted sites which are already overrepresented in the organic results starts to look even uglier when news outfits are

From the WSJ:

Britain's famously competitive newspapers have a new battleground: Google. ... Newspapers are buying search words on Google Inc. so that links to their Web sites pop up first when people type in a search. ... Paying to put their stories in front of readers by buying Google ads -- a practice the papers say has intensified in recent months -- is different from past marketing efforts

In spite of Google claiming otherwise, there is a direct connection between buying AdWords and ranking in the organic search results. If a news article is read by a few more people and gets just a few more links off the start it will become the default article about that topic and acquire many self reinforcing links.

Why Would Google Trust News Sites so Much?

  • Most news sites have some type of editorial controls and are typical hard for the average webmaster to significantly influence.

  • Most people think what they are told to (and the media is who tells us what to think about). Thus if Google returns a rough reflection of what we should think they are seen as relevant and unbiased.
  • Most news sites are associated with economic macro-parasites - not micro-parasites. Google is far more afraid of death by 1,000s of small cuts than by trusting any given domain too much.
  • It is mainstream media which makes up a large foundation of Google's index and power. Google is killing off many of the inefficient monopoly based business models, and is thus trying to throw the media scraps to keep the media bought into Google's worldview.
  • It is easier for Google to organize information if they allow their algorithms to cause their search results to parallel offline authority structures.

Crawl Delay Has Cost:

Danny Sullivan recently commented about how Digg outranked him for his own headline because his website is newer and less trusted than Digg.

Google has become less willing to regularly crawl and rank sites unless they are aged or have a significantly developed editorial link campaign associated with them. If your site gets indexed slower then your content needs to be much more remarkable to be linkworthy, thus if have not built up significant trust this is a penalty / cost you need to overcome.

Sure Google may say they do not offer paid inclusion, but requiring a huge authoritative link profile or years of aging is associated with costs. They may not have paid Google directly, but Google's algorithms do require that most people pay, in one way or another.

And if you can't get past that crawl delay problem, you can always buy AdWords.

Copy Edited SEO Book

I recently had an editor go through SEO Book and clean up my grammar. If you are a grammar Nazi my book is probably as good as it will ever be today ;)

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