Yahoo | Search Engine Optimization

How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Article Marketing Campaigns

Posted by: Date: July 04, 2008

I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.

I don’t preach marketing concepts solely for the purpose of selling my products and services. (If you happen to buy my products or services, then awesome, but that is not my point when I share information from my SEO and other marketing campaigns.) I preach the concepts that I have used for myself successfully. Either you can trust me and test the things I recommend, or you can listen to the gurus and drown yourself in pity, when you realize you are not finding the success you seek. (more…)

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How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Article Marketing Campaigns

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Directory Links = Paid Links. Or do they?

Posted by: Date: June 24, 2008

by Stoney deGeyter

As the debate over paid links continues to wage a lot of innocent business owners get caught in the crossfire. They often hear bits and pieces of information and then have to make decisions based on that information. Rarely is the average business owner as fully informed as the average SEO. Heck, even the average SEO is in the dark much of the time trying to parse statements and warnings made by the search engine representatives.

One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. I think a fair argument can be that a payment doesn’t necessarily always have to be monetary. Any quid pro quo on a link can legitimately be considered a “paid” link.

But not to worry, Google and the other engines don’t work that way. In fact, in their attempt to eliminate all forms of paid links from affecting their natural algorithmic search results Google has left one giant loophole in the paid link witch hunt: paid directory links.

Why directories are exempt

The party line is that with directories you’re paying for the site review. The inclusion into the directory isn’t automatic based on payment. In fact, many directories will tell you that payment is no guarantee of inclusion and if your site doesn’t meet their submission standards that no refunds will be provided.

Of course, this begs the question why paid reviews are considered paid links, or why other “paid reviews” don’t get the same treatment. One can only assume that somehow directories have established themselves as a legitimate service business that isn’t easily subject to manipulation. There is a whole other reality to that, however as in recent years a whole slew of spam directories were popping up left and right attempting to take advantage of the link algorithms.

But for once, the search engines didn’t throw the babies out with the bath water. These directories, like any other site, are put to the test by the search engines to determine their legitimacy. Most of the high-quality directories withstood and still maintain their value while much of the junk directories were devalued and prevented from passing link juice.

Spotting quality directories

Of course, you should still be careful about which directory you submit to. Just because a directory says that you are paying for a review doesn’t necessarily make it so. And just because a directory doesn’t charge for inclusion doesn’t automatically make it worthless. Each directory has to stand on its own merits.

The main thing to look for is whether submission and/or payment means automatic inclusion. If the directory you’re submitting to provides a manual review of each and every submission, then that gives you an indication to the directory’s overall credibility. But not all directories that say they review sites actually do. You can usually tell by doing your own review of sites listed in the directory. If enough of included sites look like garbage then there is a good chance the directory itself is junk and the search may already know it.

Another place to find quality directories is within your local area and specific niche. A lot of times you can find good, quality free and paid directories that have very high value, both to visitors and to search engines.

How to avoid the junk directory penalty

One thing to keep in mind with any directory is that if it turns out to be considered a junk directory by the search engines, you won’t be penalized just by being listed. There really is no penalty to sites listed in directories, even if those directories are considered junk. At worst, the directory itself won’t pass any link value to your or any other sites. This is really no different than if a nofollow tag was added to each link.

This gives you plenty of room for error. That’s not to say that you should go out and submit to any and every directory without any consideration, but that you don’t have to fear any type of penalty if you find yourself in a bad directory. As with any link building strategy, what you should be looking for more than anything is not the link value that it passes (though that’s good too) but what kind of traffic that the link will bring you.

If the you feel you’ll get quality, targeted traffic from any particular directory, then having little search engine value or nofollowed links won’t matter a bit. Targeted traffic is what matters more. If it’s link value ‘re looking for then consider the links you’ll get from many of your site visitors alone, not just from any single directory listing.

The directory loophole won’t be closed anytime soon. The search engines know there are a lot of quality directories out there that provide valuable information to web users. In fact both Google and Yahoo have direct ties to the two biggest directories, DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory, respectively. That in itself should say enough about the value of a good directory link, and how they are treated differently than other “paid” links.

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Directory Links = Paid Links. Or do they?

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Projecting Keyword Demand for Free

Posted by: Date: June 24, 2008

by Mike Moran

Is search marketing old enough to have a good old days? If it is, then I remember them. Ah, the days when you could fire up the Overture keyword tool to see how many searches were done in the U.S. on Yahoo! for a particular keyword. Add a little math, and you could estimate the number of searches done across all U.S. search engines in a month. But then Yahoo! crippled that free tool, and we’ve been left with no way to project keyword demand, until now.

Bill Hunt, my co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. worked with his team at Global Strategies International to estimate keywords using Google’s free keyword tool. The good news is that this technique allows you to estimate keyword demand for any country where Google is used, not just the U.S., but the bad news is that it is an arcane and time-consuming procedure that requires you to click your heart out before you extract the information.

If you’re wondering why you’d want to project keyword demand, that’s simple. Keyword demand is the number of searches on a particular search keyword done in a period of time, such as “3,000 U.S. searches per month for the keyword Mike Moran” (I wish). By understanding the number of searches for a keyword, it can help you know which ones are most worth concentrating on.

For example, years ago when I worked with IBM to sell their ThinkPad computers online, it was extremely valuable to know that the keyword laptop was far more popular than notebook because then we could optimize for the word that more searchers used.

But you can do a lot more with keyword demand. If you have an estimate of how many searches are done each month, you can take guesses at how many visitors you might get to your site by improving your search marketing. And you can project from there how many people might buy something. Keyword demand is the basis of convincing yourself that the time, effort, and money required for successful search marketing is worth it.

Before moving on to the procedure, remember that even though we are using Google’s tool, Google is not promising that any of these numbers are accurate—in fact, there’s no real way to test the accuracy of these numbers anyway. But it gives you a good idea of where you stand—better than any other free tool can do.

Oh, and one more thing: What Google giveth, Google can taketh away. eth.

At any moment, Google might decide to change the way its tool works. If that happens, we’ll try to update the procedure so that you can do something else. But as we found out with Yahoo!’s treatment of the Overture tool, it’s hard to know what to do when the old method breaks. At first, the Overture keyword tool became a bit unreliable—it ran slowly and started to time out a lot—then the numbers were frozen in time in January of 2007. Later in 2007, the URL begin to yield 404s all the time. To this day, I am not sure that Yahoo! has made any announcement that the tool was ever withdrawn. The same thing could happen to this procedure that works with Google’s tool.

But, at least it works now, and it is the best free alternative you’ve got. If you’re willing to pay for information, Wordtracker, Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, and other tools provide numbers that help you estimate keyword demand, but my favorite price is always free.

So, check out the free guide to estimating keyword demand. Let me know if it works for you.

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