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The Disconnect in PPC vs. SEO Spending Posted by randfish on Tue (10/21/08) at 12:21 AM Paid Search Ads There's a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight: Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013. - Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008 OK. So companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO? SEO: $1.3 billion (11%) - Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008 According to SEMPO's data, it's 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM technologies and s turn to Enquiro: Organic Ranking Visibility (shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location) Rank 1 - 100% Rank 2 - 100% Rank 3 - 100% Rank 4 - 85% Rank 5 - 60% Rank 6 - 50% Rank 7 - 50% Rank 8 - 30% Rank 9 - 30% Rank 10 - 20% Side sponsored ad visibility (shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location) 1 - 50% 2 - 40% 3 - 30% 4 - 20% 5 - 10% 6 - 10% 7 - 10% 8 - 10% Fascinating. So visibility is considerably higher for the organic results. What about clicks? Thanks to Comscore, we can see that clicks on paid search results has gone down over time, and is now ~22%. Conclusions: SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets. Questions: * Why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollar

Oct 22, 2008 at 10:55am Eastern by Paul Bruemmer Two Ways To Justify SEO In Uncertain Times In House - A Column From Search Engine Land During uncertain economic times like these, our advice is to always stick with the fundamentals to maintain business efficiency and progress. No matter what your business model, performing the fundamentals will keep you on-track and in-line for leveraging future success. If the C-level executives in your company are having any doubts about the value of SEO and are hesitating to release more funding, it's time to perform a cost-benefit exercise. It's your job as an in-house SEO manager to reestablish their confidence in the value of SEO as well as your value and the value of your team. When funding gets in the way, having a narrow focus, putting it on the table, and describing company goals you are committed to are all very important. 1) Leverage Your Paid Search Data To demonstrate implicit value for SEO, start with a baseline. Show where your key terms currently rank in organic and multiply by the cost-per-click value. Run the numbers for the value of direct clicks with high search intent. One way to go about this is to calculate an Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) for your organic listings: 1. Access the Keyword Tool within your Google AdWords account. 2. Type your best performing (for instance, 20) keywords. 3. Select descriptive words or phrases and synonyms. 4. Click Get Keyword Ideas. This will produce a report; select Exact within the "Match Type" field and click on Approx Avg Search Volume. 1. Look at the Cost-Per-Click column to acquire the CPC value (let's assume it's $2.00). 2. Go to your web analytics data and identify the number of organic clicks for these keywords (let's assume 20,000/month). 3. Multiply the two (CPC times the number of organic clicks (in this case $40,000/mo)). 4. Create a spreadsheet with your best performing keywords and make the statement, "if we

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include: * An Index of the World Wide Web - 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape * Linkscape - a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value. * A Fresh Design - that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience * New Features for PRO Membership - including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more. Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion: Check out the Linkscape Comic SEOmoz's Index of the Web For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics: * Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site. * 1.83%

Google Says Domain Registrations Don't Affect SEO, Or Do They? Sep 9, 2009 at 2:01pm ET by Matt McGee Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry Schwartz writes about the latest comments from Google about domain registration and its impact on SEO/search rankings. In this case, it's Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn't look at the length of a domain registration: A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates - how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time :-). But let's look at some more evidence. Earlier this year, Danny spoke with Google's Matt Cutts about a variety of domain/link/SEO issues. In light of the claims from domain registrars that longer domain registrations are good for SEO, Danny specifically asked "Does Domain Registration Length Matter?" Matt's reply: To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling. But wait, there's more! Shortly after the Q&A with Danny that we posted here, Matt published more thoughts on the matter in a video on the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube. If you don't have time to watch the video, Matt says, "My short answer is not to worry very much about that [the number of years a domain is registered], not very much at all." He reiterates that the domain registrar claims "are not based on anything we said," and talks about a Google "historical data" patent that may or may not be part of Google's algorithm. He sums it up by saying, "make great content, don't worry nea

Google Says Domain Registrations Don't Affect SEO, Or Do They? Sep 9, 2009 at 2:01pm ET by Matt McGee Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry Schwartz writes about the latest comments from Google about domain registration and its impact on SEO/search rankings. In this case, it's Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn't look at the length of a domain registration: A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates - how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time :-). But let's look at some more evidence. Earlier this year, Danny spoke with Google's Matt Cutts about a variety of domain/link/SEO issues. In light of the claims from domain registrars that longer domain registrations are good for SEO, Danny specifically asked "Does Domain Registration Length Matter?" Matt's reply: To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling. But wait, there's more! Shortly after the Q&A with Danny that we posted here, Matt published more thoughts on the matter in a video on the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube. If you don't have time to watch the video, Matt says, "My short answer is not to worry very much about that [the number of years a domain is registered], not very much at all." He reiterates that the domain registrar claims "are not based on anything we said," and talks about a Google "historical data" patent that may or may not be part of Google's algorithm. He sums it up by saying, "make great content, don't worry nea

Oct 6, 2008 at 8:06am Eastern by Barry Schwartz SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz announced they have been working for about a year on building out an index of the web, in order to be able to provide SEOs and SEMs with a toolset they have never had before. SEOmoz has crawled and built a 30 billion page index of the web. Rand explains this index is still growing and is refreshed monthly. The purpose, "to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape." Part of the indexing was to build out a new tool named Linkscape. Linkscape gives SEOs "online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value," said Rand. I hope to play with it more after the SMX East conference, but with a quick trial, it seems pretty comprehensive. SEOmoz also launched a new design and has given PRO members more options and features. To read all about these features and the tools, see Rand's post.

I wanted to explore the world of SEO pricing models from both sides of the issue, so let's dive right in. First off, we'll take a look at how SEO companies commonly price their services, then look at how businesses and organizations should expect to pay for SEO. The 7 Most Popular SEO Pricing Models * Hourly Consulting The simplest way to price a project is to charge by the hour. Rates in SEO vary with the lowest, entry level folks around $40-50, mid-tier consultants around $100-$200 and high-demand firms & people from $300-500. SEOmoz is obviously actively trying to limit our clients by going way outside the norm and charging $1000 / hour.

"Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets: 3 Ways Compared"

The Nofollow Link & Social Media Published by Your SEO Mentor under SEO, Social Media Aug 23 2008 There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. "Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it." First of all don't worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results. The NoFollow link (e.g. ) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, "nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place." With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn't mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to

Current Top 20 Social Bookmarking sites that Dofollow

Rel="author" and Rel="publisher" are the solution Google is adopting in order to better control, within other things, the spam pollution of the SERPs. If you are a blogger, you will be incentivized in marking your content with Author and link it to your G+ Profile, and as a Site, you are incentivized to create your G+ Business page and to promote it with a badge on you site that has the rel="publisher" in its code. Trusted seeds are not anymore only sites, but can be also persons (i.e.: Rand or Danny Sullivan) or social facets of an entity… so, the closer I am in the Social Graph to those persons//entity the more trusted I am to Google eyes. As we can see, Google is not trying to rely only on the link graph, as it is quite easy to game, but it is not simply adding the social signals to the link graph, because they too can be gamed. What Google is doing is creating and refining a new graph that see cooperating Link graph, Social graph and Trust graph and which is possibly harder to game. Because it can be gamed still, but - hopefully - needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice. Wake up SEOs, the new Google is here As a conclusion, let me borrow what Larry Page wrote on Google+ (bold is mine): Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience […] because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly. This means baking identity and sharing into all of our products so that we build a real relationship with our users. Sharing on the web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff. You'll have better, more relevant search results and ads. Think about it this way … last quarter, we've shipped the +, and now we're going to ship the Google part. I think that it says it all and what we have lived a year now is explained clearly by the Larry Page words. What can we do as SEOs? Evolve, because SEO is not dieing, but SEOs can if they don't assume that winter - oops - the

"Content marketing is the most sought-after SEO service for 31.3% of SEO pros, followed by keyword strategy (30.8%) and web design (25.5%)"

Interesting...further strengthens the position that "content is King" and we should continue to encourage clients in that direction. Value to the audience first, play nice with the search engines second.

Google; You can put 50 words in your title tag, we'll read it Blurb by Shaun Anderson Note - This is a test, testing Title Tags in Google. Consider also Google Title Tag Best Practice. We recently tested "how many keywords will Google read in the title tag / element?" using our simple seo mythbuster test (number 2 in the series). And here's the results, which are quite surprising. First - here's the test title tag we tried to get Google to swallow. And it did. All of it. Even though it was a bit spammy; HoboA HoboB HoboC HoboD HoboE HoboF HoboG HoboH HoboI HoboJ HoboK HoboL HoboM HoboN HoboO HoboP HoboQ HoboR HoboS HoboT HoboU HoboV HoboW HoboX HoboY Hob10 Hob20 Hob30 Hob40 Hob50 Hob60 Hob70 Hob80 Hob90 Hob11 Hob12 Hob13 Hob14 Hob15 Hob16 Hob17 Hob18 Hob19 Hob1a Hob1b Hob1c Hob1d Hob1e Hob1f Hob1g Hob1h Using a keyword search - hoboA Hob1h - we were surprised to see Google returned our page. We also tested it using - Hob1g Hob1h - the keywords right at the end of the title - and again our page was returned. So that's 51 words, and 255 characters without spaces, 305 characters with spaces, at least! It seems clear Google will read just about anything these days! ************** Update: Qwerty pointed out an interesting fact about the intitle: site operator in Google. Google results with the intitle: command…..results as expected. But next in the sequence returns the following, unexpected result….. Google results with the intitle: command So what does this tell us? Google seems to stop at the 12th word on this page at least when returning results using the intitle: site operator. Another interesting observation. Thanks Qwerty. ************** We're obviously not sure what benefit a title tag with this many keywords in it has for your page, in terms of keyword density / dilution, and "clickability" in the search engine results pages (serps). 50+ words is certainly not best practice! When creating your title tag bear in