Seo Alchemist

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk at the eMetrics summit in San Francisco. A search marketing perspective can often seem “refreshing” in the context of the discipline of marketing in general; it even seems to go against the grain a bit. I’ll be telling the eMetrics audience a bit about how I use core stats in paid search to iterate much more rapidly than most analysts are used to. In other words, I won’t be talking about the fancy stuff you get from analytics reports, but the bread-and-butter stuff, like CTR and even initial Quality Scores (yes, that’s a statistic!).

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Microsoft decided to pull back their Yahoo! bid. How much will Yahoo! shares be worth tomorrow? Please vote on the blog.

Most locally-oriented sites focus their natural search optimization efforts
on the big cities of the world — metros like New York, Chicago, and Los
Angeles. Yet there is a lot of traffic to be found in the long
tail of search queries involving the many tens of thousands of smaller towns
in the world. Only problem is, Google’s local ranking methods seem to particularly
prefer specific types of local sites for small town name queries. Here’s one
approach that can jump you past the competition and into the desired first page
of results for small town searches.

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Google and Yahoo! may partner up on a non-exclusive ad partnership arrangement.

Everyone managing cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns lives by three magic letters that can make the difference between a friendly pat on the back and a hefty push on the back… out the door. Those letters are ROI (return on investment). Put another way, are you bringing in more money from your CPC campaigns than you are paying out in clicks?

I say “everyone,” but maybe I should clarify: everyone who actually has something they can measure their ROI against—be it product sales, lead generation or maybe just newsletter signups. But what if you don’t have a hard measurement—what if your aim is purely brand visibility?

How can you get your site to appear in relevant search results, not for any financial gain but to simply achieve even more awareness and exposure for your brand?

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I just wrote a ~15 page article aimed at helping SEOs estimate how much a top rank in Google is worth. I would appreciate any feedback you have on making it better, as well as any mentions or bookmarks.

In the US marketers may use competitors’ trademarks as keywords, so long as they don’t appear in the ad text itself. Previously Google used a more restrictive policy in the UK, not allowing use of competitors’ trademarks at all. Last month the company changed its UK rules to conform to the more liberal US policy.

Accordingly, UK marketers are promising to sue when the new policy is implemented. One legal expert interviewed about the change suggested that UK regulators will ultimately be compelled to step in to resolve the anticipated dispute.

PBS’s MediaShift recently covered the field of SEO.

Whenever people say there’s a new Google penalty, often there’s not confirmation from Google that such a thing exists and even other webmasters may disagree that the penalty does exist. But with the -60 penalty that’s going on, there are more clues that make me think this is indeed real.

First, let me start by explaining that I believe the minus 60 penalty isn’t an exact 60 spot rank reduction. I believe it comes in various forms, from -6, -30, -60, -150, -950, and variations in between. Overall, I think what causes such a Google penalty is a trust factor. If Google loses trust in your site, on some level, you might be hit with such a penalty.

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Summize is a cool free search engine which allows you to search Twitter in realtime.