All About Content

OneStat.com this week reported that fewer and fewer people are conducting single keyword queries as the Internet population as a whole is getting more sophisticated. In fact, in the United States, searchers are predominantly using 3- and 4-word search phrases. According to the OneStat study, search behavior broke out like this:

1. 3 word phrases 28.83%
2. 4 word phrase 22.28%
3. 2 word phrases 20.43%
4. 5 word phrases 11.97%
5. 1 word phrases 6.19%
6. 6 word phrases 5.76%
7. 7 word phrases 2.59%

Any good SEO will have been optimizing for search phrases all along, but given that only about 6.19% of U.S. Internet users are conducting searches on single words, and more than half are using more than two words, that gives us more ammunition when faced with the inevitable “Why aren’t we ranked #1 for [insert ridiculously competitive keyword here]?” Not only is optimizing for single keywords not very effective, nor do single-keyword searches result in quality traffic and conversions, but there also are now so few people are doing them that optimizing for 2- and 3-word phrases can no longer be considered chasing “the tail.” (Think of it like this: The tail is the new black.)

I can only assume “Daqmey pat” means “the Web” and “tlhIngan Hol” is “the Klingon language.” Of course, Google in Klingon, that’s what the Web’s been missing! How else would a Klingon search for adult naghmey beQ?

See for yourself: juHDaqlIj mojlaH Google! (translation: ??)

Be careful about clicking around on the links; I think one of those links sets Klingon as your default language.

It’s not on the Nielsen/NetRatings website yet, but the company’s latest press release summarizes marketshare of June’s search traffic.

In the words of MarketingVox (why put this all in my own words if someone else has already summarized it): Google searches totaled an estimated 2.67 billion, up 31% from June 2005 and accounting for 49.4% of all U.S. searches conducted in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo followed with 23.0% of searches, or 1.24 billion, up 29% a year ago. MSN was third with 10.3% of searches, or 556 million, an increase of only 3% year over year. AOL and Ask.com rounded out the top 5, with 371 million and 126 million searches - and 6.9% and 2.3% share - respectively.

All the Web’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;
They have their Egos and Alteregos,
And 76 percent of Bloggers blog about Themselves…

According to the latest study released by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, titled Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers, 37% of bloggers say they are their own favorite subject. About 76% claim their personal experiences as a reason, if not the reason to blog (although many of them do so anonymously), summarizes WebProNews’s Jason Lee Miller.

Okay, so let’s get back on topic: me and my blog.

My Blog and My Name
This month I finally accomplished one of the goals of this blog — to push that embarrassing “I am a comment spammer” page off the first results page on searches for my name. It took 9 months, a blog, a Flickr account, a couple of profile pages, and some well-placed comments on or contributions to other sites. Obviously I could have done it faster, but I wanted to see how long it would take to happen “organically.”

Monetizing My Blog
I got my very first check for money I made off my blog. It’s a commission from LinkShare.com, whose ads I had placed on my site (in the previous “design”) to give me better insight into how people interact with advertising. LinkShare is also the program my company uses for affiliates, so I wanted to sign up and understand the user experience, see how the creative was presented, and so on. Didn’t sell anything for my company… well, actually… turns out I didn’t sell anything at all. I signed up for Netflix using one of the affiliate links, and got paid a commission for that. (Is that against the TOS? I think that’s fair; that’s not like PPC click fraud since I actually purchased something, right? If anyone at LinkShare disagrees, let me know and I’ll give you the nine bucks back.)

Shameless Self-Promotion
Keep leaving comments folks, and link to my blog, why dontcha. And if you don’t have anything better to do, check out some of my photography on Flickr.

I recently asked the g00gl3r at g00gl3r.com to add me to his (or her?) blogroll. And he/she agreed in exchange for a post where I link to him/her. A blogroll link for a single post? Oh yeah, baby, the g00gl3r must have been impressed with my PR5 homepage. [ed. Apparently it didn't come across that I was trying to be a little ironic. I think Toolbar PR is silly and is actually fairly meaningless.]

Okay, done. Now let’s see if my link gets added to another SEO blogroll. Now you’re probably asking, “Is that all it takes? Isn’t that too easy? Why don’t you just do that a few dozen times with a bunch of obscure blogs and then you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of inbound links?”

And that would be a very insightful question/comment on your part. The truth is that it wouldn’t be worth the work. Back in the bad old days before Google (and cohorts) got wise to link spam farms that was one of the first and easiest SEO strategies to address, but the data show that sheer number of IBLs is not as important anymore.

Quality, Not Quantity, of Links Counts
A recent case study by Fortune Interactive shows that the quality of inbound links, not quantity, is the most important factor in SEO.

In fact, the report says, “IBL Quantity is of least relative importance among the off-page factors across the board.”

WebProNews explains:

For Google, it’s not about how many people you know or how many people seem to like you. It’s about, mostly, who points to you and says “there’s a person worth visiting.” Fortune Interactive’s reverse engineering to decode how search algorithms work suggests that one weighty somebody is worth more than a multitude of nobodies. …

Though each engine weighted IBL quality differently, Fortune Interactive determined with its proprietary SEMLogic technology that what happens off the webpage is more important that what happens on the webpage. In fact, IBL reputation was more important than even IBL relevance.

The fact that link building is important in SEO efforts is hardly breaking news, but now that reputation counts über alles, there really is very little you can do cheaply and easily to manipulate your link juice significantly. The only sure-fire strategy: Write killer content and get important people to link to you. If you write killer content consistently then you might get added to a “worthwhile” blogroll. Or, even better, get slashdotted.

Today some representatives of a major search engine visited us to demo the new PPC ad platform the company (let’s call it Y) will be rolling out later this year. The meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement so I can’t talk about anything (specific or otherwise) but I was given the go-ahead to mention the meeting and the fact that it was about a new PPC system. Luckily — and I believe it violates neither the spirit nor the letter of the NDA for me to point this out — other people have already been chatting about the system (here and here) and things I can’t mention (like possible similarities to products by algo-driven competitors. Or not.)

The move to a new system follows the recent termination of a relationship with another search engine, let’s call it MSN, wherein Y provided sponsored search results for MSN. MSN rolled out its own PPC platform in May.

[rant]
Just when I think I have my gag reflex under control when it comes to that overrated behemoth MySpace, I come across this:

Currently, the three largest search related entities are Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Each entity is actually a vast and growing collection of hundreds technologies strung together to form relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines.

MySpace is one of the top 3 search-related sites/companies? How is it search related? And “relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines” is an apt description if you take out the “information” part (in fact, at this particular moment, their search functionality seems to be broken and the few profiles I tried to click on are all currently “undergoing routine maintenance”).

On top of being a usability nightmare, it’s also filled with crap, more crap, and extremely badly designed crap. (Anyone remember GeoCities? That’s what this looks like — without the excuse that we just don’t know any better yet) And most of the audience appears to be children and old perverts pretending to be children. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair; but quality content is more an exception than the rule. Maybe that’s why Google passed on the chance to buy MySpace — after all, their mission statement is about organizing the world’s information, not about indexing every last thought that anyone has ever had. Or am I still being too Pollyanna?

But apparently the surfing (and searching) masses disagree: MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought for a cool $580 mil, claimed 4.46% of all U.S. Internet visits for the first week in July 2006, beating out all three search giants for the No. 1 most visited site according to just-released HitWise data.
[/rant]

Nevermind the whole business of pitching your company’s press release to a blogger and crossing your fingers for a mention and an open dialogue about your story. A new service called Pay Per Post is starting an online marketplace to connect advertisers with bloggers looking to get paid for company-sponsored blog entries.

The pitch to advertisers is this: “Create buzz, build traffic, gain link backs for search engine ranking, syndicate content and much more. You provide the topic, our network of bloggers create the stories and post them on their individual blogs.”

Bloggers on the network will be able to go through “opportunities” like they might RFPs and pick what they are willing to do on their site. As a blogger, you then “create a post on your blog, paying attention to the Opportunity requirements the advertiser has set forth. Then submit the direct link back to us. Our team will review the content and either approve or deny the post.”

After Pay Per Post ensures the requirements have been met, money is taken out of the advertiser’s escrow account to pay the shill blogger for the posting.

As you can imagine, some people are outraged, especially since there does not appear to be any requirement for disclosing that these postings are in fact advertisements. The current issue of Business Week magazine even has a story called Polluting the Blogosphere which warns of a backlash.

Ted Murphy, Pay Per Post’s founder and the company’s blogger this weekend responded proudly: “I am meeting with a few different private equity groups next week to help blow this thing out. I am wondering if all this buzz and controversy is going to be a good thing or a bad thing. I guess the important thing to them is we are making money…”

Well, at least he’s being honest - let’s see if the paid bloggers will end up following his lead.

On Thursday, Mirriam-Webster announced the list of words it is adding to its dictionary this year. Among them: To google, a transitive verb meaning to use the Google search engine to obtain information about [a person or thing] on the world wide web.