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January 2007 Search Market Share - ComScore
ComScore recently released its January figures for search engine market share among U.S. Internet users.
According to comScore's research, Google captured 47.5% of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.2 points from the previous month. Yahoo maintained its second place ranking with 28.1% of U.S. searches, but lost 0.4% from the previous month. With a slight gain, Microsoft search was used for 10.6% of U.S. searches. Ask Network and AOL Time Warner claimed about half that with 5.2% and 5.0% respectively.
Posted by Melanie Phung
PayPerPost Segmentation Benefits Advertisers, Bloggers
I'm still working on that (unpaid) review of the various pay per blog services, but in the meantime, PayPerPost is really trying to get the word out about the upgrades they've made to their blog marketing service.
The most important update allowed for segmentation -- that is to say, for advertisers to narrow down which bloggers could take an ad "opportunity" according to blog topic, Alexa rankings, Google Toolbar PageRank and other criteria.
Unfortunately, the interface was really buggy the first few days after the new release, which is never a good way to launch an upgrade. Advertisers were unable to increase the number of blogs they wanted to recruit for any given ad campaign; bloggers found that their Alexa rankings and Google PR were not adequately reflected in their accounts, so they were excluded from participating in ad campaigns they should have been eligible for.
Luckily nearly all of the major bugs appear to have been ironed out now. And that distraction aside, the upgrade was a good one. Because advertisers now have more control over the quality of sites their "ads" run on, they are willing to pay more for those links. There are some campaigns paying as much as $1,000 per post ... if you happen to have an on-topic blog with PR7 or higher.
These higher payouts make paid blogging more attractive to serious bloggers and is probably attracting bigger, more reputable sites that might not have considered PayPerPost as a revenue opportunity (not when they could get $200 at ReviewMe, and the usual payout for PayPerPost pre-segmentation was less than $6).
I'm pretty bullish on PayPerPost (which has nothing to do with this being a paid post - Scout's Honor!), and if they keep innovating (and keep aggressively reminding participants that disclosure is mandatory) I think the service will continue to attract new bloggers and advertisers.
Labels: link-building, monetizing, paid content
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Auto-Correcting Typos: RAZR not Razor
I noticed this a while ago and thought maybe it was just a test, but Google has started auto-correcting without prompting for certain types of misspellings. In the example below, Google simply assumed I meant 'sprint razr' when I typed 'sprint razor' -- so it's showing me the results to a search different than the one I entered! Very different results if you search "sprint razor" (same search but with quotes) and slightly different even if you choose sprint AND razor (which isn’t supposed to change the results since "and" is supposed to be treated like a stop word).
I’ve also seen what looked like similar highlighting of variations without actual reordering of results. In the example below, I searched for 'cingular razer', and Google's results highlight both 'razor' and 'razer'.
But I think the highlighting of the search term misspelling in the snippet and title is a separate from auto-correcting search queries.
This is a big step forward in the search engines' efforts to "think like a user." Afterall, if a user types 'sprint razor' he's not looking to see how many pages use the term 'sprint razor'; he's more likely looking for the Sprint RAZR product, and that's what the results reflect.
Although I'm sure continual refinements will need to be made and a lot of assumptions will be incorrect at first, I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of cleaning up the SERPs. If this trend continues, it will help businesses avoid having to optimize for common misspellings of their keywords in addition to their regular target search phrases. Even better, it means Google will stop rewarding sites that don't spell things correctly.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Image Hover Text
Random tidbit: Most people know that if you hover your cursor over an image on a web page, more often than not a little bit of text appears describing the image. That description is called the hover text. And many people know that the way to specify that text is to use what's called an image alt tag (with the "attribute" being the value you assign to the tag). The same thing for link titles when you hover over a text hyperlink.
If you link an image and assign an alt attribute to the image AND a title attribute to the <> tag, one of them has to take precedence. In IE6, it's the alt tag that displays when you mouse over the linked image; in Firefox it's the link title that shows up as the hover text.
Updated March 20, 2007: More on the uses and abuses of the link title attribute via a Crea8asite discussion.
Labels: images
Posted by Melanie Phung
SEO/SEM Firms Using Paid Blogging ...
... for themselves.
It seems there's an inordinate number of search marketing firms using paid blogging services like PayPerPost and Blogsvertise to build links to their own sites. Apogee Search, for example, is using PPP to advertise its services for helping small businesses get Top Google Rankings (what seems like it would be a very competitive phrase, but the results for that search don't seem very authoritative). I don't know why exactly, but this strikes me very much like when personal injury attorneys advertise on late night TV -- I guess it's kosher, but it strikes me as déclassé.
Here's an interesting quote from Apogee's site: "Remember there is only 5% of the SEM industry that is worth trusting" (which I'd rewrite: Remember, only 5% of the SEM industry is worth trusting... except I think that's awfully pessimistic.) And another one: "Starting with SEO instead of PPC is a red-flag of common industry malpractice." Say what?
I really don't think fostering mistrust in search engine optimization firms is a great strategy for promoting your own search marketing firm, but there seems to be an awful lot of that going around.
This has been a paid post (filed under Blatant Advertising) via PayPerPost.
Labels: link-building, paid content
Posted by Melanie Phung
Free Keyword Research Term
Overture's keyword suggestion tool, apparently, has been acting up, but now Wordtracker is giving webmasters another option. Check out Wordtracker's tool to estimate the daily search volume for particular keywords and suggestions for alternate phrases to target.
Posted by Melanie Phung
My First PayPerPost Entry
I've blogged in the recent past about doing sponsored postings for Blogsvertise and ReviewMe, but I'd never done a paid posting for PayPerPost, the first company to gain any traction in this advertising niche.
(And too bad I hadn't because I could have earned some pocket money just for talking about it -- right now PayPerPost is paying out for participants to recap how much they'd earned so far -- talk about self-referential.)
Just to keep on this week's topic of text link ads, I'd chosen to do my inaugural PPP post about a site called encyclocentral.com and one of their encyclopedia entries* in particular: Text Link Ads.
I think I get what this site is trying to do: get great rankings for all sorts of different search terms -- like Wikipedia has managed to do -- but to monetize all that traffic with AdSense. Relatively speaking, there are a lot of Google ads on each page. But also quite a bit of copy. Okay, great, so let's talk about the copy. What does this reference site have to say about text link ads...:
"Text Link is a way of organizing material that attempts to come across the inherent limitations of traditional text and in particular its linearity."
Huh? Never mind the typos in the rest of the entry, but just... huh? No one is going to link to this as authoritative information.
Was this written by a random text generation algorithm? (tangent: my favorite random text generator is the Postmodern Essay Generator at elsewhere.org. Just reload for fresh pomo nonsense.)
I really don't intend to make every paid posting an exercise in ridiculing the advertiser, but that entry was just outright strange. The idea behind the site was sound I think, and I don't think it would have taken that much more effort to make the entries readable, so why start spending money on advertising when even just a little lipstick would have made the pig look presentable at first glance? And also, why isn't there any real navigational element on the site? That's the weirdest thing. I guess they are really intent on not letting you click on anything besides the ads.
Verdict: Good idea, terrible execution.
* They give Pharmacy as an example page, but I still need to include a link to that article in here to pass the PPP check.
Labels: paid content
Posted by Melanie Phung
Half Science, Half Art and Half Magic
... that's been how I've described my job as SEO. Now add to that 50% management. (Nothing less than 200% will do!) I resolved late last month that for the next 2 quarters at least, I'm going to commit half my time to management. This includes recruiting and hiring, professional development, and raising the profile of my team and our projects. That sort of stuff.
One of the biggest priorities for 2007 for me, according to a recent discussion with my manager, is building up my team. That's a big change -- up until now I've been very hands-on with all of our projects, ensconced in the minutae of optimizing individual pages, just because I've had a hard time trusting anyone else to sweat the details.
That clearly needs to stop, since there's just not enough time and way too many projects that are in need of some strategic leadership.
The good news is that I've filled one of my openings (the online marketing assistant position), which solves 2 issues: a) less energy needed to fill the remainining position(s) and b) more hands and brainpower to actually execute on the zillion ideas on our to-do list.
Building an SEO team from the ground up is proving to be an interesting challenge, and it will continue to be one as I continue to hire people without a background in search engine optimization, per se.
Any tips from someone who's been in my shoes? Do you think it's foolish of me to hire people with no SEO experience and rely on them to learn on the job?
Labels: navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Text-Link-Ads.com Script Doesn't Work on Custom Blogger Templates
Title pretty much says it all. According to Text Link Ads you need to be upgraded to the new version of Blogger for the script to work, but that's actually not quite true -- you need to use the new version of Blogger and use one of their standard templates. If you have an older custom template that you migrated to the new (then-beta) Blogger, you don't have the option of adding widgets. And the way the script is set up to display the text link ads, you need to add an XML feed to your template via a widget.
I've tried creating a separate blog, setting up the ads, and then copying the code into the template for this one; but that doesn't work because when a widget is created it's specific to a particular blog id... and I haven't even been able to find out what the blog id for All About Content is (did old Blogger sites get blog ids?).
It's probably not that hard, but as a non-programmer, non-coder I've hacked this about as much as I can without having to actually rebuild this blog with a new template (and I don't want to do that!). A reply to my emailed question to the company basically says, "it doesn't work" (or rather: we don't support that).
Okay, so I'm done for now. Never mind that idea.
Update: Just discovered some Blogger help pages that might help me hack this thing some more. It's probable that the old template won't let me use the widget builder (which is a bit like a WYSIWIG) but that I could somehow write the necessary code snippet by hand. That reminds me of some other adjustments I've been wanting to make. Will report back later.
Labels: link-building, monetizing, navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google AdSense versus Text Link Ads
For advertisers, there is a significant difference between contextual ads and (non-ad-served) text link ads. Contextual ads, like the Sponsored Results you see on the side of search engine results pages are all about ROI; whereas text link ads are primarily about (c'mon now let's be honest) buying relevant inbound links that are intended to drive up rankings.
But for publishers, one concern looms larger than all others: show me the money!
After doing some investigating into the whole industry of purchasing text links (not to be confused with paid content or paid blog postings), I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I should migrate away from Google's AdSense system in favor of a text link broker like Text Link Ads, or the equally creatively named Text Link Brokers (both terribly generic company names that serve as ultra-relevant anchor text anytime someone links to them).
So here's the thing, it took me a whole year to get my first Google AdSense check. I look to be on track for another year of the same. Don't get me wrong, I have no real complaints about the program. So why am I thinking of walking away with money left on the table?
Reasons Why Text Links Are Better Than AdSense
- Google's minimum for actually cutting you a check is higher than most other services, but until the money is in your bank account you haven't actually earned anything yet.
- With contextual ads you only get paid when someone clicks, while the simple act of publishing the text links is all it takes to earn money under the other model. And depending on the default level you set for editorial oversight, text link ads can run themselves as easily as the AdSense script.
- While one could argue that visitors to the site might actually be interested in contextual ads and that text links, by comparison, are simply link spam --i.e., that I'd be doing my readers a disservice by switching to text ads -- the truth is that I don't think any regular readers of this blog are too interested in the cheesy contextual ads that get displayed alongside my posts currently.
- Because text link ads don't require anyone to actually click through, there's less pressure to pimp out a site with ads in very prominent locations. (Google advises advertisers to pay attention to eye tracking and heat map studies to make decisions on where to place ads.)
and finally... - Even if I only sold 1 link a month with Text-Link-Ads.com, I'd still be earning more money than I do with AdSense currently.
Whether you think text link ads are "black hat SEO" doesn't really matter if you're the publisher, not the advertiser. Even if there's a possibility that the search engines start discounting your links by virtue of being lower quality, the only reason this should matter to you as a site owner is if the ability to pass PageRank is part of your sales proposition (which means, de facto, that you were already trying to pull one over on the algorithms).
If you're a very large site, text link ads look pretty tacky, so I certainly don't think revenue should be the only consideration when deciding between AdSense and paid links; but on the other hand, AdSense would detract from how seriously I would take a large, would-be authoritative site as well.
If you're interested in selling ad space on your site as well, visit Text-Link-Ads.com.
Labels: contextual ads, link-building, monetizing, navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
New version of Google SketchUp
This falls under the category of cool tools on the Web, i.e., not so much SEO, but here's a bit from this month's Google Friends newsletter:
Design enthusiasts take note: there's a new version of Google SketchUp. This 3D modeling software tool is easy to learn, simple to use, and lets you place your models in Google Earth. One of the cool new features is Photo Match, with which you can trace a photo to create a 3D model of the photographed object or match an existing model with a background photo. To stylize your models, there are features for adding fog, creating sketched effects, watermarks, 3D text, and more. And now the integration between Google Earth, 3D Warehouse and SketchUp is seamless, so that you can easily share and reuse models from other 3D Warehouse users. And as noted above, Google Earth now has the "Best of 3D Warehouse" layer that showcases the highest quality models from SketchUp users.Google SketchUp is available at http://sketchup.google.com/. I haven't used it yet, but it sounds wicked cool.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Consumer Spending on Mobile Data
ZDNet research shows that consumer spending on mobile data services (including cellular data transport, messaging and content) will ramp from $125 billion in 2007 to just over $200 billion by 2011.
Labels: mobile content
Posted by Melanie Phung