feed hat blog

When I found a to-die-for pizzeria hiding in plain sight across the street from my apartment building, it was bittersweet. Obviously, first-class New York style pizza in my backyard is a total win. But at the same time, I was bummed that Tony’s Pizza wasn’t showing up on the online search radar.

Just last week Paula was lamenting the loss of a printer in the area that had closed its doors. For years the company relied on word-of mouth advertising, which flourished thanks to friendly staff and competitive prices. Unfortunately, the company had some serious SEO issues — they’d claimed no local listings and had an all-Flash site. For all they were doing right in the store, the boat couldn’t stay afloat during last year’s economic storm.

And here’s another one. This morning Susan sent out this tweet:

She’d run across an artist’s work online and, interested in buying her work, she searched for the artist’s site. But being a patron of the arts wasn’t in the cards for Susan today, as she hit a wall when the artist’s pretty site was also pretty unusable.

…Another one bites the dust.

Okay, so you get why I become frustrated watching awesome small businesses folding due to a lack of understanding. But here’s where we take it to another level. I had my understanding of Internet marketing objectives taken to an exciting new place on today’s episode of SEM Synergy. From the show:

Susan: It used to just be […] if the content was right, it was the best answer. Now it’s, if the content is right and other people agree that it’s right, you know, links, then it was the best answer. Now it’s, if the content’s right but everybody else has the right content too, and everybody else has links too, so are you going to give it to them as fast as possible, which is where site speed comes in. Are you going to give it to them when they’re on the go, which is where mobile comes in. Are you going to give it to them in multiple ways so that different kinds of learners can learn it, which is where engagement objects come in. It’s becoming more complicated in the areas of attack, but the core is still are you delivering the best answer.

Bradley: And then the social media aspect, which is are you ready to talk about this subject with the people who want this information? Are you going to be authoritative, are you going to stand on your principles and really think about what the questions are asking?

My response (paraphrased): Whoa. You just turned on my light bulb! I see how the puzzle pieces fit together. Does everybody know about this?

No, everybody does not know, so let’s not keep this info all to ourselves. Spread the wealth. Tell your family dentist. Tell your cousin who owns a book store. Tell the organic avocado farmer you visit at the weekly farmers’ market. Send them this blog post. Send them to the Google Local Business Center. Say something! Spread the word!

Thanks to today’s guest Des Odell, director of Bruce Clay Australia, for spreading the word on the podcast. Check out Bruce Clay Australia to learn more about the SEO training classes coming up in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and to read the recently released SEO Factors & Trends Report. Plus, be sure to check out BCAU’s newsletter article on the the state of the Australian search market!

Turning On the Lights — SEM Synergy Extras was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

Read the original here: 
Turning On the Lights — SEM Synergy Extras

I spent most of 2007 hanging out with Curtis Jackson, better known as Fifty Cent. Together we wrote a bestselling book about hustling, fearlessness, and power.

I’d like to share a couple of insights that arose from that collaboration.

After the remarkable success of his first two commercial albums, Fifty Cent stood on top of the music world. But his very success was starting to corrode his musical ability.

His sense of connection, so vital on the streets, was fading in this new environment he now inhabited.

He was surrounded by flatterers who wanted to be in his entourage, managers and industry people who saw only dollar signs in him. His main interactions were with people in the corporate world or other stars.

At the same time, he could no longer hang out on the streets or get firsthand looks at the trends that were just starting up.

All of this meant that Fifty was flying blind with his music, not really sure if it would connect anymore with his audience. Other stars didn’t seem to mind this; in fact, they enjoyed living in this kind of celebrity bubble. They were afraid of coming back down to earth. Fifty felt the opposite, but there seemed to be no way out.

Know your environment from the inside out

Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply. Do not be afraid of people’s criticisms—without such feedback your work will be too personal and delusional. You must maintain as close a relationship to your environment as possible, getting an inside “feel” for what is happening around you. Never lose touch with your base.

~ The 50th Law

An experiment in reconnection

In early 2007, Fifty decided to start up his own website. He thought of it as a way to market his music and merchandise directly to the public, without the screen of his record label, which was proving quite inept in adapting to the Internet age.

First, he decided to experiment. As he prepared to launch a G-Unit record in the summer of 2008, he leaked one of the songs on to the website on a Friday night, then the next day he refreshed the Comments page every few minutes and tracked the members’ response to it.

After several hundred comments it was clear that the verdict was negative. The song was too soft. They wanted and expected something harder from a G-Unit record.

Taking their criticisms to heart, he shelved the song and soon released another, creating the hard sound they had demanded. This time the response was overwhelmingly positive.

He put up the latest single from his arch-enemy The Game, hoping to read the negative comments of his fans. To his surprise, many of them liked the song. He engaged in an online debate with them about this and had his eyes opened about changes in people’s tastes and why they had perhaps grown distant from his music. It forced him to rethink his own direction.

Creating a radical connection

To draw more people to his site, Fifty decided to break down the distance in both directions. He posted blogs on personal subjects, and then responded to his fans’ comments. They could feel they had complete access to him.

Using the advances in technology, he took this further, having his team film him on their cell phones wherever he went; these images were then streamed live on the website. Made dramatic by Fifty’s flair for confrontation, membership grew by leaps and bounds.

As it evolved, the website came to strangely resemble the world of hustling that Fifty had created for himself on the streets of southside Queens.

He could produce testers (trial songs) for his fans, who were like drug fiends, constantly hungry for new product from Fifty; and he could get instant feedback on their quality. He could develop a feel for what they were looking for and how he could manipulate their demand.

He had moved from the outside to the inside and the hustling game came alive once more, this time on a global scale.

Four keys to the fearless approach

The public is never wrong. When people don’t respond to what you do, they’re telling you something loud and clear. You’re just not listening.

~ Fifty Cent

Fifty’s approach isn’t just for pop culture icons. His insights into rebuilding connection are universal.

Most of us live in a society of apparent abundance and ease. We lack a sense of urgency to connect to other people. In such a melting pot as the modern world, with people’s tastes changing at a faster pace than ever before, our success depends on our ability to move outside of ourselves and connect to other social networks.

At all cost, you need to continually force yourself outward. You must reach a point where losing this connection to your environment makes you feel uncomfortable, even vulnerable.

The following are four strategies you can use to bring yourself closer to this ideal.

1. Crush all distance

In this day and age, to reach people you must have access to their inner lives — their frustrations, aspirations, resentments.

To do so, you must crush as much distance as possible between you and your audience.

You enter their spirit and absorb it from within. Their way of looking at things becomes yours. And when you recreate it in some form of work, it has life. What shocks and excites you will then have the same effect on them.

This requires a degree of fearlessness and open spirit. You are not afraid to have your whole personality shaped by these intense interactions. You assume a radical equality with the public, giving voice to people’s ideas and desires.

What you produce will naturally connect in a deep way.

2. Open informal channels of criticism and feedback

When Eleanor Roosevelt entered the White House as First Lady in 1933, it was with much trepidation. Denied an official position within the administration, she decided to work to create informal channels to the public, on her own.

She traveled all over the country — to inner cities and remote rural towns — listening to people’s complaints and needs. She brought many of these people back to meet the president and give him firsthand impressions of the effects of the New Deal.

She opened a column in The Woman’s Home Companion, in which she let her audience know, “I want you to write me.” She would use her column as a kind of discussion forum with the American public, encouraging people to share their criticisms.

Within six months she had received over 300,000 letters, and with her staff she worked to answer every last one of them.

She began to see a pattern from the bottom up — a growing disenchantment with the New Deal. Every day, she left a memo in her husband’s basket, reminding him of these criticisms and the need to be more responsive. And slowly, she began to have an influence on his policy, pushing him leftward. All of this took tremendous courage for she was continually ridiculed for her activist approach, long before any First Lady had ever thought of such a role.

As Eleanor understood, any kind of group tends to close itself off from the outside world. From within this bubble, people delude themselves into thinking they have insight into how their audience or public feels — they read the papers, various reports, the poll numbers, etc.

But all of this information tends to be flat and highly filtered. It is much different when you interact directly with the public, hear in the flesh their criticisms and feedback. You create a back-and-forth dynamic in which their ideas, involvement and energy can be harnessed for your purposes.

3. Reconnect with your base

We see it again and again.

A person has success when they are younger because they have deep ties with a social group. Then slowly they lose this connection.

In his own way, the famous black activist Malcolm X struggled with this problem. He had spent his youth as a savvy street hustler, ending up in prison on drug charges. Out of prison he became a highly visible spokesperson for Nation of Islam, channeling his emotions into powerful speeches that gave voice to those who lived deep in the ghettos of America.

As he became more and more famous, he made an effort to inoculate himself from the psychic distance experienced by other successful leaders in the black community.

He increased his interactions with street hustlers and agitators, the kind of people from the lower depths that most leaders would scrupulously avoid. He made himself spend more time with those who had suffered recent injustices, soaking up their experiences and sense of outrage.

I knew that the ghetto people knew that I never left the ghetto in spirit, and I never left it physically any more than I had to. I had a ghetto instinct; for instance, I could feel if tension was beyond normal in a ghetto audience. And I could speak and understand the ghetto’s language.

~ Malcolm X

The goal in connecting to the public is not to please everyone, to spread yourself out to the widest possible audience. You have a base of power — a group of people, small or large, who identify with you. Keep your associations with it alive, intense and present.

Return to your origins — the source of all inspiration and power.

4. Create the social mirror

Instead of turning inward, consider people’s coolness to your idea and their criticisms as a kind of mirror that they are holding up to you.

Your ego cannot protect you — the mirror does not lie. You use it to correct your appearance and avoid ridicule.

The opinions of other people serve a similar function. You view your work inside your mind, encrusted with all kinds of desires and fears. Through their criticisms you can get closer to this objective version and gradually improve what you do.

When your work does not communicate with others, consider it your own fault. You did not make your ideas clear enough, you failed to connect with your audience emotionally. This will spare you any bitterness or anger that might come from people’s critiques. You are simply perfecting your work through the social mirror.

About the Author: Robert Greene is the bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War. His collaboration with Fifty Cent, The 50th Law, spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold about two million copies. His blog is called Power, Seduction and War.

Here is the original post: 
Four Things 50 Cent Can Teach You About Connecting with Your Audience

If you subscribe to the adage “Lies, dang lies and statistics,” maybe numbers aren’t worth much to you at all.

If you’re a search marketer or business owner, numbers likely hold a major stake in the decisions you make every day.

For the sake of this post, let’s assume the latter, shall we? That numbers — be it click through rate, conversion rate, total sales, and so on — contribute to the information we use to make informed decisions when marketing a business or managing a marketing campaign.

And so I present to you the following studies, one on searcher behavior and one on search advertising trends.

Long-Tail Searches on the Rise

Wag those tails, pups!

Word on the street is that longer searches are on the upswing. During August, the number of six-word queries increased two percent. Seven-word queries saw a three percent bump while queries of eight words or more increased six percent. Queries using five words or less held steady.

There are several causes for this new searcher behavior that come to mind. I’ll share my thoughts here, and I hope you’ll add your interpretation of the findings in the comments below.

Expansion of the content pool: With more and more content producers entering the arena every day, the pure generation of content is on an exponential incline. A searcher who is trying to find a single fact or story in an ever-growing pool of content may be unable to find the exact content they’re looking for with shorter, generalized queries. Faced with irrelevant results, a searcher may refine their query with additional words in order to narrow down the results pool.

Increased savviness of Web users: Alternately, a searcher may forgo the shorter queries altogether. Experienced searchers may realize that the chances of finding the content they’re looking for increases when queries are qualified by additional descriptors and long-tail searches. Searchers have moved beyond a familiarity with search to become advanced-level searchers, not content with having to search several times to find what they’re looking for. So, savvy searchers end up using every possible descriptor they can think of to find the right information on the first search.

Increased adoption of optimization practices: It was suggested to me by Anand Srinivasan of Tech Crunchies (thanks, Anand!) that long-tail query growth may be attributed to businesses’ mounting adoption of search engine optimization. Armed with the methodology and tactics for increasing Web visibility through targeted content, businesses and brands are optimizing their sites for a range of relevant topics. Knowing the value of providing useful information to their consumers, commercial Web sites are being built as a resource on their topic of expertise. Similar to the first point, the greater availability of content may cause a searcher to refine their search and use a long-tail query to filter out content that doesn’t meet their exact needs.

Judging by the evidence, the long-tail represents a growing opportunity for highly relevant search engine visibility and for avoiding the back clicks of searchers who end up on a page deemed irrelevant by them — which brings us to our next study on the maturity of the search marketing industry.

SEM Industry Hits Early Stages of Maturity

From blossom to full bloom

According to an AdGooroo study, the search marketing industry has reached the third (of five) stage of the high-tech maturity cycle. In the first stage, new adopters discover a new technology and that technology is adapted for commercial uses. In stage two, the technology becomes a product leveraged by an “early majority” of commercial organizations. During stage three, growth slows down, and from that, success is redefined from percent of growth to percent of market share.

If AdGooroo’s theory is sound, we’ve reached this third “late majority” stage. As a result of the maturing marketplace, we’re seeing the search engines actively seeking to differentiate themselves from one another. Indeed, the strengths of Google, Yahoo! and Bing are clearly differentiated today.

Google is the volume leader. Attracting roughly 70 percent of U.S. searches (according to the Hitwise study linked to above), the engine can afford to charge a premium for its ad space. Competitor Yahoo! offers less expensive clicks and higher conversion rates than Google, but at a lower volume (more than 16 percent).

Bing, meanwhile, captures just below 9 percent of U.S. search volume and boasts a better conversion rate than both Yahoo! and Google. Consider as well the exceptional performance in the categories that Bing has focused on, such as comparison shopping and travel.

There seems to be a definite momentum shift in the trends around searcher behavior and the search marketplace. Queries are getting longer while we marketers are getting older — ahem, more mature. With maturity comes wisdom, and if numbers are knowledge, what do these findings mean to you?

Read the original here:
Searcher Behavior and Search Marketplace Mature

Good afternoon from the Big Apple. Ready for an amazing session? Amazing PPC Tactics is a safe bet, wouldn’t you say? Roll call:

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Speakers:
Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Brad Geddes, Founder, bg Theory, LLC
Dan Soha, CEO, Five Mill, Inc.
David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing

Brad Geddes’s up first and he’s going to look at location targeting, specifically for national companies. He asks the audience who advertises across the country. A majority. Do you write ads tailored to the location? Just a few hands go up. This presentation is for those with their hands up for the first question but not the second.

Have you heard of Coca Cola Light? You can’t get it in the U.S., where we call it Diet Coke. Meanwhile in Japan they sell diet beer, and no one would buy that in the U.S. There’s a city, state and country level of cultural differences.

“Convenient locations near you” doesn’t speak to people in rural Pennsylvania but speaks well to NJ consumers. A Geographic Report in Google AdWords helps you see this. See the metro areas, the ad spend and the conversions.

Google Analytics Map Overlay helps you drill down into goals per location. Google Trends is a good place to look for info on local targeting. An area that searches most for a product often has a higher conversion rate for that product. When you have a limited ad budget, target just the areas where you have high response rates and create campaigns based on those geographies.

About 1 in 3 people live in top-20 metros. If you have a limited budget and want to reach a broad audience, increase your budgets in the areas where you have high ROI. Or, find promising locations with low conversion rates and re-tailor your ads for those markets.

Dan Soha steps up.

Did you know:

• With “broad-phrase” match, the order of the words does affect your results.
• Headlines are usually 25 characters but 28 character headlines can be created with dynamic keyword insertion.
• Google always gives you one chance. When you’re advertising with a domain that Google has not seen before, your ad will always get a chance. Google will assume your ads perform at the CTR of the average ad on the page. Even if your ad is malformed, no matter what your landing page, you’ll get a chance even if you use a new account, new user, new credit card, etc.

Yahoo! Adgroups

• The Quality Index is at the Adgroup level. You’ll benefit from highly targeted adgroups. Keywords should be similar to each other as well as the ad.
• There is no broad match. Advanced match is not the same as broad match. The more keywords the better.

Divide and conquer:

1. Analyze keywords’ CTR performance in an adgroup. Note the ones with high CTR relative to position and ones with low CTR relative to position.
2. Pause all low CTR keywords.
3. Duplicate adgroup.
4. In the new adgroup, delete the active keywords and unpause the remainder.
5. The result is a higher CTR adgroup. If done properly the Quality Index of this campaign will increase.
6. Hopefully you can find the common denominator between these keywords and write/find an ad that is more appropriate. Analyze the search landscape on these keywords and you’ll probably find commonalities.

Yahoo! Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Why would you want to use DKI? DKI will increase Quality Index because Yahoo! gives extra credit to DKI. With two exact same ads where one has DKI and the other doesn’t, the one with DKI will have a higher Quality Index. He gives us several examples of this at work.

And next is David Szetela. He’ll be talking about winning at PPC content advertising. He asks who in the audience ever advertised on Google’s content network, if they’re still advertising on Google’s content network, and if they’re making good money advertising on Google’s content network. Hands went up high for the first question and gradually decreased along with the questions.

While Google’s content network has not traditionally performed that well, he says content advertising doesn’t actually suck.

Why care about contextual advertising?

• Growing faster than search click inventory.
• Clicks are cheaper.
• Faster/easier to create successful campaigns.

Google’s ad network just doubled in sized and over the last few years, most advertisers have seen their CPC for the program go up. While the cost of paid search advertising is going up, it’s staying steady for contextual advertising.

Why content advertisers lose money:

• Ads appear on irrelevant pages and get bad clicks (low conversion rates).
• Ads don’t distract attention from site content.
• Search and content should never exist in the same campaign.

Contextual is not search:

• Readers are not searching for you.
• More like banner or print advertsing.
• The first job of your ad is to distract.

Three AdWords content flavors:

• Keyword-targeted
• Placement targeted
• Enhanced (combination of first two)

Keyword-targeted campaigns:

• A keyword-targeted ad group’s keywords should describe the kinds of pages where you want your ads to appear.
• Keyword list = the words that appear most frequently on such pages.
• Keyword list need not — and frequently should not — include names of your products/services.

Keyword considerations:

• No more than 2 to 10 keywords per ad group
• Match types are irrelevant (except negative)
• Individual keyword bids are irrelevant
• Negative keywords are almost the same

Google Placement Performance Report shows performance (clicks, conversions) by site where ads are served. Use the site exclusion tool to remove your ad from sites where you’re not getting quality leads.

Addie Conner is going to talk about, well, Matt says, we shall see… Her presentation is going to be way over my head, isn’t it?

ANOVA: Analysis of Variance. It’s a statistical technique for comparing means for multiple (usually 3) independent populations. It’s used to answer the question: are there any main effects or interactions between three independent variables?

A three-factor ANOVA (analysis of the variation) has seven significance tests: 3 mean effects, 3 two-way interaction effects, and 1 three-way interaction effect. To make it simple, we restrict each factor to have only 2 possible designs. In this case, we have 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 possible “appearance” of the ads. We then start to collect the data of their conversion rate.

Take your data and create a graph, where the control the Title is controlled so you can see whether body text and image interact. If there are two parallel lines, there’s no interaction between the two factors. If the two lines aren’t parallel, there is likely to be interaction.

Reasons to split by match type:

• Uniform bid either understates or overstates value leading to inefficient bidding.
• Bidding on a more granular level allows you to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

Did you get all that? I see fellow liveblogger Marty Weintraub covering this session for Search Engine Roundtable as well, so there’s a chance he’s got some complementary info that might help you get a more complete picture of the presentation.

Read more here: 
Amazing PPC Tactics

Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts I found and read during July. If you’re new to this blog, this is a monthly feature that began way back in 2007. You can find earlier “Best Of”s for each month in the archives: 2008 Best Posts and 2007 Best Posts. I never include my own posts in these end-of-month recaps.

Local Search

• Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea: Google Geocoding, Ambiguous Locations, and My Maps Submitted Data
• David Harry/Search Engine People: Geo Targeted SEO: The Technical Review
• Mary Bowling/ClickZ: Advertising and Local Search

SEO

• Peter DaVanzo/SEO Book: Marketing Driven SEO Strategy
• Bruce Clay: SEO is in the Details: Bruce Busts the Boondoggle
• Vanessa Fox/SEL: What Site Owners, Web Developers & SEOs Should Know About The Yahoo Microsoft Deal
• Glenn Gabe/SEJ: Great Headlines, Poor Rankings – Why Clever Headlines Don’t Beat Optimized Title Tags for SEO
• Andrew Goodman/Traffick: Most of SEO a Boondoggle? Jill Whalen Sticks to Her Guns
• Jill Whalen/SEL: Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?

PPC

• Brad Geddes/bgTheory: Microsoft adCenter & Google AdWords Resources to make your life easier when Yahoo Search Marketing is replaced by adCenter

Link Building

• Pete Caputa/HubSpot: The 5 B’s of Bad Link Building: Borrowing, Begging, Bartering, Bribing and Buying

Social Media

• Meryl Evans/Web Worker Daily: 34 Ways to Use YouTube for Business
• Nick O’Neill/All Facebook: 9 Rules of Facebook Promotion Every Small Business Should Know
• Samir Balwani/Left the Box: Twitter Marketing: A Small Business Guide
• Vince Blackham/Primary Affect: How To Integrate Viral Marketing Into Your Small Business
• Lisa Barone/Small Biz Trends: How to Get the Most Out Of Facebook Fan Pages

Blogs & Blogging

• Darren Rowse/Problogger: 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It]
• Barry Welford/SEO Scoop: Five Ways To Turn Blog Comments Into Conversations

Reputation Management

• Marty Weintraub/aimClear: Reputation Management Crises? 8 Crucial Priorities

Online Marketing/General

• Adam Singer/Online Marketing Blog: Use A Creative Commons License As An Online Marketing Tool

Rants

• Andrew Shotland/Local SEO Guide: Yellow Pages v. Social Media Marketing: A Rebuttal To The Lazy, Lying Mainstream Media

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.

July ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Related posts:

1. May ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts
2. June ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts
3. March ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Here is the original:
July ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Over the last few days I’ve read a few comments here on Problogger from bloggers who are feeling low because they’ve noticed a plateau or even a decrease in the traffic coming to their blog.

While we all want to see our traffic rise the reality is that every blog has days, weeks and even months where traffic levels out or even decreases. This can be quite distressing for bloggers who have big hopes and dreams for their blogs.

Today I’d like to look at some of the reasons a blog’s traffic might decrease and suggest some ways forward for each of them.

1. Seasonal Traffic

If you’re still in the first year of your blog you are yet to see what a full calendar year looks like in terms of traffic for your niche. Most niches have natural rises and falls in traffic.

For example (see below for a chart of visitor numbers) on my photography tips blog we see spikes in traffic in December and January. December’s traffic boost is generally to do with people researching new cameras to buy and January is generally associated with people working out how to use cameras that they got for Christmas. On the flip side we often see dips in traffic over August to October.

What to Do: The first time you see a seasonal rise or fall in traffic it can be quite confusing - however the key with it is to not panic when you see a dip but to identify opportunities to maximize the rises and to minimize the falls.

For example it might be that you need to tailor your content for certain times of year and what people are doing in relation to your niche.

For me on my photography blog this meant writing content in November-December on how to buy a digital camera (to capitalize on the Christmas buying trend), writing beginner photography tips in January (to capitalize on the trend of people looking for tips on how to use their new cameras) and during low seasons (like July when it’s summer in the US) writing topical tips like Beach Photography Tips or How to use a camera in the Bright Sun.

Another Tip - one great free tool for looking at seasonal traffic is to use Google Trends to analyze what people are searching the web for. For example if I type in ‘digital cameras’ I get this chart:

There’s lots of interesting stuff in this (the downward trend for starters) but it clearly shows what I’ve observed above - more people are searching the web for that term from November-December each year. This information could confirm a suspicion you have or help you identify a trend to capitalize on in your niche.

Further Reading: Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture it for your Blog.

2. Topical Interest

At other times of year traffic events can be triggered by other current events. For example I know one music blogger who has had a lot of traffic this past few weeks simply because they’d previously had a lot of content that ranked well in Google on Michael Jackson. Of course in coming months as the news of Jackson’s death subsides it’s likely that they’ll see some declines in traffic.

What to Do: The key with topical rises and falls in traffic is to try to capture as much of the rush of traffic as you can so that when the decline comes you’ve got new subscribers/readers to your blog (see further reading below on ’sticky blogs).

It’s also important to be aware of upcoming events in your niche and writing content in anticipation of that. This can be hard in predicting the death of a mega pop star like Jackson but in different niches it’s possible to predict events.

For example - before the Athens Olympics I was involved in running a blog where we wrote a post in advance of the Olympics for every single event in the games. The posts included athletes names and any information we could get on the events. We updated the posts with results once they events had been run. As a result we were consistently ranking very highly for ‘Event name Results’ when people were searching for winners of events in Search Engines.

Further Reading: How to Create a Sticky Blog

3. Posting Frequency

One common reason for lulls in traffic is that a blog has had a lull in new content being published. I saw one blogger writing a post recently about how their blog was failing to gain traction and in the comments of the post a reader pointed out that the blogger had hardly been posting. The reality was that the blogger had produced very little to be read and so people were not visiting.

What to Do: Posting more doesn’t guarantee extra traffic but it can be a factor to consider. Chart your last few months of posts and see if there’s any correlation to rises and falls in your traffic - you might identify a trend!

Worth noting is that some bloggers report that when they post LESS that they actually get more traction with readers. I know of one blogger who was posting 10-20 times a day and when he dropped things back to 2-3 posts a day he noticed not only increases in comment numbers per post but that his posts were being shared more on social media sites. At 10-20 posts a day posts were coming off the front page of his blog so much that readers hardly had a chance to read and share them.

Further Reading: What is the Ideal Post Frequency for a Blog?

4. Shifts in Search Rankings

Many blogs see the way that they are ranked by Google (and other search engines) rise and fall over the years.

Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts I found and read during June. If you’re new to this blog, this is a monthly feature that began way back in 2007. You can find earlier “Best Of”s for each month in the archives: 2008 Best Posts and 2007 Best Posts. I never include my own posts in these end-of-month recaps.

Small Business

• Don Campbell/Expand2Web: Google Voice – An Opportunity for Small Business Owners
• Janet Meiners Thaeler/Small Biz Trends: Practices of Top SEO Companies for Small Businesses
• David Mihm/SEL: Do-It-Yourself SEO Advice For SMBs

Local Search

• Ash Nallawalla & Fabienne Rabbiosi/Mihmorandum: The Guide to Australian Citations for Local Search
• David Mihm: The Guide to UK Citations for Local Search
• David Mihm: The Guide to Canadian Citations for Local Search
• Miriam Ellis/SEO Igloo: The Great Wall Of Google – A Short Essay On Communication
• Eric Enge/SEL: Clean Up Your Local Data!
• David Mihm: Requests for New & Improved Google Maps Features

SEO

• Russ Jones/Google Cache: The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization
• Aaron Wall/SEOBook: SEM Training: Do You Make These 14 Common SEM Errors?

PPC

• Andrew Goodman/SEL: The Long Tail of Paid Search Account Effort
• Brad Geddes/SEL: Beginners Guide To Creating Mobile AdWords Campaigns

Links & Link Building

• Ann Smarty/SEJ: Link Building Worksheets – Organize Your Campaign

Social Media

• Lisa Barone/Small Biz Trends: 8 Ways To Find Relevant Followers On Twitter
• Brian Carter/Search Engine People: The 6 Spheres of Social Media Marketing
• Callan Green/Mashable: Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies

Blogs & Blogging

• Steve Sherron/Blogger Lens: How To Make It Easier For Google To Find Your Hyperlocal Blog
• Darren Rowse/Problogger: 13 Tips for Marketing Your Business With Your Blog
• Jim Cronin/Real Estate Tomato: The Easiest Way To Write 30 Real Estate Blog Articles Every 30 days

Rants

• Lisa Barone/Outspoken Media: Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals
• Michael Gray/Wolf-Howl: How Google Profiles SEO’s

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.

June ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Related posts:

1. May ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts
2. January ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts
3. February ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Read more here: 
June ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Haven’t done a Neat Tricks and Hacks in awhile. Here’s one to remind DIGG and Stumbleupon users to up your shit.

PHP

<?
$sites[’stumbleupon’] = ‘Glad you stumbled upon us. Please leave us a nice review if you enjoy the site!’;
$sites[’digg.com’] = ‘Glad you found us on Digg. Please Digg up if you like!’;

if( !empty( $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’] ) ) {
    $data = parse_url( $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’ ] );
    foreach( $sites as $domain => $text ) {
        if( strpos( strtolower( $data[’host’] ), $domain ) !== false ) {
            echo ‘<script type=”text/javascript”>alert(”‘.addslashes($text).’”);</script>’;
            break;
        }
    }
}
?>

PERL

$sites{’stumbleupon’} = ‘Glad you stumbled upon us. Please leave us a nice review if you enjoy the site!’;
$sites{’digg.com’} = ‘Glad you found us on Digg. Please Digg up if you like!’;

if ($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} ne “”){
	foreach $key (keys %sites) {
		if($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} =~ /$sites{’$key’}/) {
			print qq~<script type=”text/javascript”>alert(”$line”);</script>~;
		}
	}
}

*PERL code is untested, I just translated it off the top of my head. Probably made a mistake or two… I always do. Am I the only CGIer left in this world?

Javascript
Source: Top News Trends

I just started testing this method today, so I couldn’t tell you how well it works yet. I’m going to start with Stumbleupon because I’m willing to wager I’ll have better results with them than the Digg crowd but who knows? Let me know how it works for you in the comments.

More here: 
Stumble and Digg Begging