Three patents granted today to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all describe how each of the search engines might take a close look at page addresses, or URLs on dynamic web sites.
I wrote about the patent from Microsoft back when it had just been published as a pending patent application, in Microsoft Creating Rules for Canonical [...]
View post:
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Patents on Interpreting Dynamic Page URLs
Earlier in the week we looked at the importance of ‘niches’ when it comes to building profitable blogs. Today I want to extend the topic and gives the process that I tend to use when working out if I want to start a new blog in a particular niche. I hope you find it helpful.
Many factors will come into play when it comes to choosing a niche to blog about – but the following are those that I tend to pay most attention to:
I started out blogging on topics that interested me – but as I began to see the potential to make money from my blogs began to experiment with topics that I had less interest in but which I thought would be profitable.
What I discovered in creating these blogs that had potential for profit, yet which I had little interest in, was that I couldn’t really sustain them. I had little to say on the topics and when I did write something I suspect that those who read my content could tell that it was a topic that I was not passionate about. As a result the traffic did not come, I did not become known for the topic, nobody linked up and the blogs were far from profitable.
On the flipside of this – the blogs that I did have an interest in and a passion for have flourished. My interest in the topic is not the only factor that made them successful but I suspect it is a fairly important one that underlies much of the success and profit that I’ve had.
One question to ask yourself in choosing a niche is ‘What are YOU about?’ Choosing a topic that reflects you means you’ll be in a position to be able to find enough to write about and you’ll write it in a way that engages with the topic and your readers.
You can have all the interest in the world around a topic but if nobody else shares your interest you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle to build a blog that gets much traffic.
This doesn’t mean you need to choose the most popular topics going around – in fact they may not be a wise choice due to the competition also targeting those niches – however you will want to choose a niche that has some level of demand for content.
There are many ways to do research on this whether topics are popular – here are three that I use:
Ultimately you’re looking for topics that people are interested in, passionate about, want to learn more on and/or that people want to talk about and interact in a community around. There is an unlimited number of topics and ways to tap into them. Watch TV, talk to your friends, head to a local library, read a newspaper – see what people are into and you could just identify a topic worth exploring.
One of the factors that I see some bloggers failing to acknowledge in the choosing of a niche is how much competition (and how strong the competition is) in their potential niche.
The danger in choosing some popular niches is that you might be competing against some very powerful sites in those niches. While this isn’t always going to be a factor to stop you exploring a niche it should definitely be considered and it can perhaps help you to shape your niche to be something that will give you a competitive advantage.
There are a variety of ways of assessing the strength of competition in niches.
One of the simplest is to simply do some searches on Google to look at how many sites exist for keywords on your topic. This won’t give you an indication of the power of the competition – but it will give you some indication on the ’size’ of competition and it will identify some sites that you will want to be monitoring.
Market Samurai (mentioned above) is one tool that can take your analysis a little deeper. As highlighted in my recent optimising posts on your blog for SEO post it has a module that will not only show you how many competing sites there are but also how strong they are (around a number of factors). It’ll also identify what type of level you’ll need to get to in order to compete with them.
As you begin to assess your potential competition in a niche don’t be completely put off by niches with lots of strong competition. Instead as you analyse what other sites are doing look for opportunities in two areas:
Another factor that I see some bloggers neglecting in the choosing of a niche is consideration of whether the topic is one that they’re able to sustain.
This partly relates to the interest and passion that the blogger has for the topic – but it also relates to the topic itself and whether it is dynamic enough to have content written about it on a regular basis.
A number simple exercises to help assess the sustainability of a blog (depending upon the type of blog you’ll be developing):
Got the picture? Really it is about doing a little analysis of the topic to see if there is enough in it to keep producing new frequent and regular content. If there’s not enough – perhaps consider either another topic or a different format for your site (blogs tend to do best when they’re updated but you could create a more static site).
This won’t appeal to everyone as not all people want to monetize their blog but if it’s a goal to make money from your blog then you’ll want to assess the potential for profit before you start.
There are a few ways to get indications on whether a niche will be profitable – including:
Previously when I’ve covered the topic of how to choose a blog niche I’ve stopped after exploring some of the above points. However there are almost always a number of other factors that individuals bring to certain topics that can make those niches more sensible choices.
I guess ultimately it comes down to looking at what you have at your fingertips that you will be able to leverage to help you get your blog up and running and working really well.
There are many factors that might come into play including:
This list could quite easily go on and on. Essentially you need to do a bit of a SWOT analysis of the topic and see what strengths and opportunities that you uniquely have that will help you to get a leg up into this topic.
My last advice on choosing a niche for your blog is to take your time and don’t act too hastily. While you don’t want the process to drag out too long – I look back on the 30 or so blogs that I’ve started over the years and wish I’d taken a little more time going through this process. I went through a phase where I impulsively started a series of blogs that I quickly knew were not right for me – if I’d only given the ideas a little time to breath I might have discovered before I started that perhaps there were better ways to use my time going forward.
So take your time – share what you come up with with a trusted friend or two – do a little research into the topic and then, when you’re ready and are in a good position to make a decision – ACT!
Also keep in mind that you might need to go through this process with a number of topics before you find one that fits for you. You’re unlikely to find a topic that fits all of the above criteria perfectly – but hopefully something will stand out to you a little to help you make an informed decision.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
How to Blog: How to Choose a Blog Niche [6 Tips]
That was one of the topics of Luther Lowe’s presentation Tuesday at the annual SearchFest conference in Portland. Lowe — Yelp’s Manager of Business Outreach — gave a generally clear description of what the company says are the benefits of advertising on Yelp. I say “generally” because he said that advertising on Yelp gets a business owner “SEO,” but he really meant to say “visibility.”
These are not the same examples he used during the presentation, but they show the same points he made.
1. Visibility on Yelp search result pages
Advertising on Yelp gives a business the opportunity to show up above the regular search results for category/city combinations, like this search for dentists in Los Angeles.
2. Visibility on other business profile pages
A Yelp ad may show up on a competitor’s business profile, like in this example here.
3. No competitor ads on your profile page
Using the example above, no competitors’ ads will show up on the profile page of that dentist because she’s advertising. She’s essentially paying to keep competitors from advertising on her profile page. But note that Yelp still does show other competitors on the page under a “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed” heading.
4. Added content options
Yelp advertisers can also add extra content to their business profiles, such as a photo slideshow and an extra content spot to post alerts or discounts.
5. Promote a “favorite review”
Yelp sponsors can also choose one review of their business and mark it as a “favorite.” In doing so, that review will show up first on the business profile page, as seen here.
Before his presentation, Lowe called out the 800-lb. gorilla in the room: the recent lawsuits from small business owners who claim that Yelp has offered to remove negative reviews in exchange for payment. I don’t recall his exact wording, but Lowe rejected the claims of the lawsuit, saying that the alleged behavior — if it were true — would cause Yelp to lose the trust of its users and advertisers.
But from several conversations I’ve had at conferences over the past two weeks, that trust is on shaky ground with some. This isn’t the first time Yelp’s been accused of taking money to remove negative reviews (see Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 from last year), and some are wondering if the phrase “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is appropriate.
One suspects that, as long as Yelp offers a way for business owners to manipulate reviews in exchange for advertising (see #5 above), they’ll continue to run the risk of lawsuits — no matter if the lawsuits are justified or just the result of misunderstanding.
Advertisement: Improve your website rankings and traffic in just 15 mins/day! LotusJump will show you how to do your own professional-grade SEO. Find Out How Today!
This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?
Related posts:
Excerpt from:
What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?
The 4th annual SearchFest conference is in the books, and this one was a lot different than previous SearchFests. The venue was bigger, the crowd filled it, and — for the first time — there were three tracks running concurrently. I’m hoping to do another post on one content-related element from the show, so this post is only going to be a link to my Flickr photoset and an embedded slideshow below. (Disclaimer: The lighting made photography exceptionally difficult, so don’t be alarmed if some of these look … different.)
Advertisement: Try Site5 Web Hosting free for 30 days! 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and our customer’s love us!
This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
SearchFest 2010 Photos
Related posts:
Excerpt from:
SearchFest 2010 Photos
If you’re reading this while at SearchFest 2010, a big welcome to you. Thanks for visiting SmallBusinessSEM.com. In my presentation, I mention a few web sites that you may not have had time to jot down while I was speaking. If that’s the case, here are all the references I made in chronological order:
If you have any questions or feedback about my presentation or the session in general, feel free to leave a comment below. There’s also a Contact button at the top of the page. I’d love to hear from you!
Advertisement: Never miss another fax again! Starting as Low as $6.95 mo. Nextiva vfax is a professional-quality virtual faxing service that you can access from anywhere you have internet access! Including most smart phones and Microsoft products, you can even use your existing fax machine! Visit www.nextivafax.com for more details.
This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
Welcome SearchFest Attendees
Related posts:
More here:
Welcome SearchFest Attendees
Last week’s SMX West conference was a unique one for me. I didn’t get to sit in on many sessions as an attendee because we were a bit short-handed at Search Engine Land, and I was pretty much working constantly on a variety of things for SEL. I live-blogged the keynotes, did the daily coverage roundups, wrote up a bunch of news stories from the conference, and kept up with the daily SearchCap articles.
I also managed to shoot a few photos here and there, and those are now finally on Flickr. You can either see the set on Flickr.com or just use the slideshow embedded below.
This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
SMX West 2010 Photos
Related posts:
Read the original here:
SMX West 2010 Photos
In a couple of weeks I will be heading out to New York with Becky to attend and speak at SES New York. New York is one of my favourite SES conferences to attend and this year promised to be another great show.
The Search Engine Strategies conference runs from Tuesday 23rd March to Thursday 25th [...]
Speaking at Search Engine Strategies – SES New York is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.
Related posts:
See original here:
Speaking at Search Engine Strategies – SES New York
Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance.com
Speakers:
Rich Devine, Director of Search, ZAAZ
Dennis Hart, Vice President, SE Jones, LLC
Ryan Lash, Vice President, Search, ymarketing
Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent Interactive
My last lunch of SMX West hit the spot. This session is sure to do the same. Dennis is up first.
He wants to challenge us to think of the goals of your site before you set up an AdWords strategy. They categorize customer needs with some of the first questions they ask them. How many hits can we get? Not a great sign. How can we get more data? Also needs coaxing to get them thinking in the right direction.
What is User Engagement?
Observations
Analytics Planning Strategies
Here are some search KPI examples (note: all KPIs assume across time)
The info in the slide above doesn’t show you compared to what, over time. Plus with new technologies, a single KPI could change meaning over time.
Instead of looking at ranking, it can be better to look at “Breadth and Depth”:
Ryan is next. He says there are lots of metrics that can be measured and he just threw out 20 different acronyms. So much data, so little time. So what to do about it?
Did you say audit? They take a long time and can be painful. But it gets results. So what to expect?
WoW
MoM
YoY
With an audit you come up with an actionable plan based on analysis of results.
The PPC scorecard:
Here are 20 questions that speak to 1 and 2 above.
Now tally up your score.
D: 20-50
C: 51-70
B: 71-90
A: 91-100
Rich takes the podium next. They focus on the intersection of creative and data. You can be both, and here’s a new hybrid approach.
Agenda:
When we succeed with clients, 5 characteristics pop out
Identifying stakeholders :
Business goals dictate site goals, which inform other digital channel goals.
There’s a lot of site traffic but only a small portion of that is measured as success. All the other activity also has success, so they try to understand the value of it. They build models that define the money value of micro-conversions. They are custom-built performance models.
Examples:
Use monetization to guide project or optimization priority. Score each project for size of opportunity, ROI, and business priority. Weight each score to determine an aggregate weighted score. Use score to guide decisions, not as an absolute rule. As revenue / cost estimates are revised, so is the monetization model.
What’s the opportunity cost of in-action? This is very effective for justifying longer-term, higher-cost projects.
Ian is our final speaker. (BTW, check out our awesome interview from this week’s SEM Synergy!) He says he’s going to get into the weeds. Who has seen a raw log file? A good number of people have, so he says this shouldn’t be too awful.
If you stick your head in the sand, the only thing you can out of is your bum. With organic search, worry about three things:
Opportunity and competition are about optimization, improving rankings on terms you want. Attribution is about keeping your job, showing evidence that what you’re doing is working, and if you need to do more of one thing or another.
Keyword driven research isn’t bad, but you have to look at other things first. You’ll miss opportunities for keywords that are almost on page one. You’ll miss the opportunity gap. If you can follow that up with a narrow competition gap, that’s a good position to be in.
Step 1 is to determine opportunity. Start by looking at pages, which pages are getting the most pages from organic search. For each of those pages, look at which organic keywords are driving traffic to those pages. Now look at keyword data. If you see 2,900 searches for your keyword, and 250 visitors from that term, there’s an opportunity gap. The question now is, can I compete. He recommends the Keyword Difficulty Tool or SEO for Firefox that show you how hard it is to compete on a term.
Now you can optimize the ranking page. Link to newer content to drive people to updated content on your site. A tool that will show clicks from page 2 and one that will show pages with no clicks, will help you.
The only way to do attribution is to learn to love your log files. Scrub the log file so all you have are pages, and sort traffic by cookie and IP address.
I betcha Ian will post these on his vimeo!
[Ian also shared his Google Analytics Cheatsheet. --Susan]
Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.
View original here:
Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
Patrick Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.
Ralf Schwoebel, CEO, Tradebit, Inc.
Brian Ussery, Director of SEO Technology, Search Discovery Inc.
Maile’s first. Here’s her agenda:
Need for Speed: Increased Conversions
Side-by side testing of an optimized site vs. the original version. They found a faster site resulted in higher conversions and higher volume for average conversion. Delays under half a second reduces a visitor’s average searches/day even after the delay is removed.
Good News: Faster on a Budget
The Performance Golden Rule: 80-90 percent of the end-user response time is spent on the front end. Start there.
Tools: Site Performance
It’s a lab tool. It will tell you how long it took on average for a page to load. It tells you how slow it is in comparison to other sites. It will tell you average load times for specific pages, as well as specific clues to make it faster.
Available Google Tools: Page Speed
It’s a Firebug plugin to use on any URL. It prioritizes ways to speed up your site.
Established truths about ranking:
As of today, performance is not a factor in organic ranking. If performance becomes a signal, we expect to notify webmasters. But, hint: Google is pushing the importance of speed.
3 Steps to a Faster Site
A faster site is proven to increase conversions, pages views and time on site while lowering bounce rate and operating costs. That’s measurable SEO value. Check out more at google.com/speed. She closes saying, “So you understand that speed is a priority. Good luck making the Web faster!”
 |
Next Patrick takes the podium. Is site monitoring part of your SEO budget? Search for “website uptime monitor” and the tools can help you identify speed problems on your site.
What are some hints in analytics? Certain KPIs can shed light on bottlenecks:
Create a custom report to watch performance KPIs. They’re good indicators of whether or not the site is functioning properly.
What’s the ROI?
This tool gives a performance grade to a site and lists important components that are in play.
Okay, my site is slow. Where should I start? It’s important to have a good host.
CSS Sprites: Create one image that holds all of your CSS background images, buttons, etc. This means a lot fewer HTTP requests.
When should I stop?
 |
Ralf steps up next. He’s coming from an e-commerce background.
Focus on speed when SEO is done. Speed influences ranking.
Using Open Source Tools
Embrace the Squid
Divide and conquer: put the statistics into cache, lower server load.
Go Global
Conclusion
Brian is next. Consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. Speed is not in analytics, so what do you do? Use the Webmaster Tools Maile talked about. The more data points there are, the more accurate it is.
Speed 2010
The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.
Go here to read the rest:
The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
Brian Boland, Manager, Direct Response Solutions, Facebook
Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Michael Kahn, SVP, Marketing, Performics
Will Scott, President, Search Influence
Facebook’s Brian is starting the session. He’s going to give an overview of how Facebook ads work. About half the audience is using Facebook ads now.
Mission: Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
Product vision: identity, connections and sharing
Facebook scale: Rapid growth, the top daily reach of any site, including Google and Yahoo, they’re number one in the time spent on a site.
Direct response: Standard ads
Facebook Ads and Search
1. Users are at a different point in the sales funnel. Comparing a Facebook ad to a search ad and you see they’re very different. Facebook has a broader swath of users. Facebook ads will have an impact at the highest level of the funnel, demand generation, as well as the end with demand fulfillment.
2. Targeting is based on user interests, not keywords: take advantage of interests and connections. You can specify targeting for age/gender/location, authentic interests (not “keywords”, they’re changing that next week).
3. The ad environment and ad units themselves are very different.
Optimizing Facebook ads is between an art and a science. There are demographics reports that provide information about users viewing and clicking on ads. There are responder profile reports which tell you common characteristics of the users clicking on your ads.
Try it out. For new accounts or accounts created in the last 90 days, $50 coupon to test and learn with Facebook Ads. Limit 150 uses. Code: SMX50
Next Michael will talk about performance based advertising on Facebook and some applications that are being used to optimize Facebook advertising.
Performance Based Advertising
Facebook social ads are text and image based ads that appear in the right-hand rail of Facebook user’s profile pages
Bought on a CPC or CPM basis
Trigger by demographic
Benefits:
Increase brand exposure
Drive acquisitions/sales
Generate fans
Capabilities:
CPC auction-based media to target audiences on social networking sites and manage campaigns to optimal CPA, click or impression goals
They learned that Facebook is a fertile and welcoming promotional environment, with the right offers.
Case Study: Threadless
Facebook Application Development
Moxie Interactive developed an app for driving movie sales. It fetches movies or gifts your friends may like based on their profile interests. Select your Facebook friend in the “fetch” box. Users could add it to their profile. Users could share their fetch result with their network.
Benefits of a Facebook connection with your consumer:
Post ad for product 27%
Link to ad for product 37%
Purchase product 44%
Talk about product & recommend product, combined 46%
Will is next. He works with local businesses, almost all small businesses with small budgets. He’s going to compare search and Facebook ads with small budgets. He’s generally finding the same level of success on Facebook at a third of the price of the major search engines.
Display ads are earlier in the cycle. You can talk to them before users know they have a need.
Facebook Demographics
Facebook is like the third-largest country, or it rivals it in size. It’s also the third of the population with money to spend (they have computers, after all).
They’ve seen a huge savings on a cost per lead basis with Facebook. The advantages of Facebook are a lower CPC that traditional PPC, there’s great demographic targeting, and you get magazine-like editorial ads. Keyword filters allow tremendous targeting opportunities.
You can target fans of affinity groups. For instance, show ads of high-vanity product to fans of Victoria’s Secret. You can also show ads to fans of your competitor.
Facebook Advertising Benefits Summary:
Addie takes the podium next. She loves Facebook ads:
Who’s Advertising on Facebook now?
Finding Your Audience
It’s not search — it’s demand creation:
Testing is awesome:
They did a test of 6 ads for the same thing, same text, different images.
From here you can do a headline test. They saw up to 120 percent difference in unique CTR, 101 percent difference in conversion rate.
Challenges: Constantly evolving marketplace
How to Win:
Fears: Her mom is on Facebook. Facebook might not be that cool anymore. But she hopes it lasts because it’s a great platform and it’s getting better every day.
Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.
Continued here:
Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers
En esta parte podrás poder cualquier cosa sobre ti ó sobre tu sitio, una pequeña introducción ó algo que desees hacerle saber a tus lectores. elsonar.es
Three patents granted today to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all describe how each of the search engines might take a close look at page addresses, or URLs on dynamic web sites. I wrote about the patent from Microsoft back when it had just been published as a pending patent application, in Microsoft Creating Rules for Canonical
SEM Synergy this week will be live, and Bruce Clay will be talking to callers and answering questions on the show! People that hang out in the WebmasterRadio.FM chat room during SEM Synergy each week (and really, why aren’t you there?) know that I’m asked “Is this live?” about once per episode. How excited am I to be able to say “YES!” this time around?! SEM Synergy , our weekly radio show and podcast here at BCI, is actually going live for a very special reason: our 100th episode! (Pay no attention to the episode count on iTunes. It’s a little thrown off because the episode from SES San Jose 2008 was eaten alive by technical issues…) In the 99 episodes that have happened since the first show came together in April 2008, we’ve been privileged to interview some of the SEM industry’s most respected authorities — privileged not only because our industry’s experts are fun, witty and beyond bright, but they’re also exceedingly generous with their time and knowledge! (And if you needed more proof of the SEO community’sgenerosity …) I mean, I’m always amazed when I consider the SEM Synergy library is chock full of brain nuggets from the likes of Avinash Kaushik, Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, Danny Sullivan, Bryan Eisenberg, Tamar Weinberg, Michael Gray, Marshall Simmonds, Dr.
Look out, Big Apple. Search Engine Strategies is coming to town
Moderator: Matt Van Wagner , President, Find Me Faster Speakers: Meagan Rochelle , Search Solutions Specialist, Microsoft Nicholas Ward , Product Manager, Range Online Media How many people are using Bing Cashback, Matt asks? About a quarter of the audience raises their hand. The rest are interested to find out how it might work for them.
The first big search conference of the new year, Search Marketing Expo West , is just around the bend. SMX West takes place March 2-5 in Santa Clara, California. Bruce Clay, Inc.