SEO Strategies For New Domains

Ranking for 3 and 4 word phrases is still easy – look for the popular ones by using Google’s Adwords Suggestion Tool.

The order of the words in the phrase is very important. You shouldn’t scramble this around to find a domain name, it needs to be exact. Once you’ve searched 25 of these phrases and finally found an available .com domain name, register it on a 5 year registration.

If you want to make your life easy you’ll have your web host install a free copy of wordpress for you to manage your freshly created site. The free SEO plugins for wordpress are easy to find and free. If you’re lucky you control panel may have a one click installation button.

The meta-title of your site’s index page should be the same 3 words in the same order as your domain.

• The first 3 words that should appear on this page are – you guessed it – the 3 words of phrase you registered for your domain. Typically this will be a bold H1 title of your page within the body of your site (different from meta-title).
• Next, include an image of some sort under the index page title. This image should be named yourkeywordphrase.jpg (obviously you replace that with your keyword phase), you should use alt text=”your keyword phrase” for the image as well.
• Mention the keyword phrase in the page’s body text 3 or 4 times throughout the page. Separate from this, scatter the words from your keyword phrase throughout your page’s content in a very natural manner. Let your keywords choose your pages content direction and just naturally focus on the things that are important to getting the right type of visitors to your site.
• Don’t generically insert keywords and write horrible content to achieve certain density goals. Do try to keep checking and revising your content to make sure your keywords hit 2-4% density. Use a free keyword density checker to make sure you’re right. Free Firefox addons like SEOQuake have this tool included.

With all the information above taken into consideration, the real key to unlocking SEO is to just be yourself and write your own content. Whatever is coming to mind put it down. Over time your mind will be more SEO focused and your content will naturally rank better. You’ll start doing keyword research before you choose your blog post titles and new page titles. Many things will snap into gear the first day you really investigate search optimization for a few hours.

Overall the most important thing to remember is that Google and other search engines are improving everyday. This means that eventually the best content will be ranked higher, so just focus on effective writing and providing good information.

The best advice I’ve ever heard in my SEO career was from Shoemoney (said randomly in one of his youtube videos) went something like “SEO is making Google look smart for ranking your site first”. Always think about your site from Google’s prospective.

Look at the first page results and see what you will have to do to genuinely make your page better than theirs. SEO is not magic, it’s just not being completely ignorant of the simple concepts that determine where your pages rank.

It’s very important to spend time researching the keyword phrase you decide to register for your domain name , etc. It’s critical that you are registering a phrase that receives enough search volume to warrant the work to build the site and get 15% of the searchers clicking thru to your site from the result page.

As your site gains reputation by receiving more links from other sites, social profiles, etc you will naturally start ranking for the 2 word phrase possibles inside your target group of words. For example “BostonEmergencyPlumber.com” might start to rank for “Boston Plumber” and “Emergency Plumber” if it was able to gain enough reputation. Think about sub phrases within your 3 word phrase and try to find optimal combination.

Using these strategies will help a legitimate website get much higher rankings in Google. If you are attempting to build spam sites or sites about topics you really don’t care about or have knowledge of, this information won’t help you.

Neverblue’s Banner Rotators Auto Optimize

Neverblue’s Banner Rotators are adding more value to publishers sites by automatically optimizing the ads you’ve enabled to run in that particular rotator. This means you can setup a new rotator for each of your sites, select 14 or 15 products to rotate banners for, then after a month the banner software will automatically be displaying the most profitable ads more often.

Neverblue isn’t really clear about how the ads are optimized. this is what they’ve put on their site

“What is a rotator optimizer? : A rotator optimizer automatically optimizes the individual weights of the creatives contained in a rotator, based on their performance relative to the other creatives in that rotator. ”

I hope this is optimized for overall ecpm, and not epc. High EPC is great but if the CTR is horrible you could make more on a higher ctr, lower epc ad. There will be more updates to come on this, but I recommend setting up a banner rotator in one of your blog’s sidebar and see how it works for you. I’ll ask our AM when she gets back from Adtech what their optimizer does specifically and post an update here.

I remember hearing late last year Clickbooth was dedicating more employees to their optimization/rotation department. I’m looking forward to seeing if there have been any recent improvements to their rotation system, or if they are all distracted with Affiliate Apocalypse at SF Adtech this week and their Mega Office move coming in a few weeks.

YouTube Layout Changes Disappoint Users

The new YouTube layout changes have been met with a lot of criticism from users for a good reason. I have to admit for a week I thought something I changed in my browser settings was causing YouTube’s layout to break .. but then I realized it was showing this way for everyone, on purpose.

A few weeks has passed and I’m still amazed no changes have been made. I decided to do a quick search on google for anything posted in the past 24 hours related to Youtube Layout Changes. This forum was near the top of the results and I clicked it. Notice how every single post is negative? Here are some posts I’d like to highlight:

Furburt: “Let me just say this here. Youtube is the worst (noticeable) online community there is. Worse than 4 chan, or Something Awful or Gamefaqs. As a video sharing website it’s fine, but as a community, you could not do worse, unless you search for bad communities intentionally. ”

FFS-dontcare “The previous system was good enough. We should be given a choice between this new system and the old one by way of selecting it in account options or something, not be forced to use the new one. The old one was more than adequate, and it was easily straight-forward.”

Samurai Gumba “YouTube would have to dispense diamonds onto my keyboard before my experience would be measurably improved.”

Alucard “I dislike the new layout, I dislike the new rating system, and I especially dislike the new Beta channels that they thought necessary for all users to have. My “related videos” are not even related to the stuff I like to watch either, or at best only tangentally related. With each “improvement” it gets worse.”

Is anyone at Google noticing the dislike to what YouTube is Doing? Some people are starting to get the feeling they aren’t. Are YouTube’s legal issues distracting them? Maybe the continued financial losses are just killing morale?

Sooner or later jobs will be lost over this at YouTube one way or another. The backlash and negative impact can’t be avoided now. A mistake this big can’t be swept under the rug. Google has to realize the YT devision is backfiring more than a 83 Gran Torino and it’s only a matter of time before they put in a new pit crew.

My hope is the fresh group that comes in has a better understanding of easy design improvements can be if they build them around community suggestions and listen to user feedback. Call me overly optimistic, but I think their ability to lose more money than anyone else for more years than anyone else in the entire video space gives them about 25 more lives.

The 80/20 Rule for Effective Social Networking

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other social networks that provide or feature status updates from users have taken the internet by storm over the past several years.

MySpace helped lead the Web 2.0 revolution before it crashed and burned. Now Facebook seems like it could be headed down the same path.

Originally, the first huge wave of Facebook users embraced the network mainly because of the value add factor. It was possible to be more aware of your competitors, get useful tips from people you trusted, and discover new and emerging trends by monitoring the socialsphere. In some ways, we were building Web 2.0 together.

Recently Facebook is a relaxing area where the last thing they think about is business or growing their personal network. I get the feeling most people aren’t measuring the ROI of status messages left by their friends, and basically you end up coming out of the whole situation knowing what everyone is drinking, eating, and watching on TV. This data is already available from a variety of sources so I don’t really need to get it from Facebook.

So what is the 80/20 Rule of Social Networking?
One of my associates that introduced me to Facebook in 2008 explained the value add factor – simply put, 80% of your posts need to add value to your readers, while at most 20% can be about your breakfast or your plans for the afternoon. If you violate the 80/20 rule you will not gain followers who value their time.

Rarely do people calculate the real cost required for others to read their updates. These are people I unfollow. There are many friends I have in the real world that I enjoy to hang out with during non work hours, but that I don’t necessary want to read updates from everyday of the week, all year long. This isn’t because I value their friendship less, I just don’t have the capacity to read what 45 people had for lunch, what they are planning to do that evening, or what type of wine they just opened.

With over 25,000 friends, subscriptions, and connections between Youtube, Tumblr, LinkedIN, Facebook, and Twitter, the value of the information I receive has been in a steep decline. Perhaps if I was spamming commercial products this would be a more ideal setup, but I’m simply there to consume and analyze information. This is 7 times more people than live in my hometown!

How to Unfriend your Grandma on Facebook
The recent South Park espisode featuring Facebook spelled out clearly what many of us have been thinking for the past 6 months about Facebook. For the past several weeks I’ve typically unfollowed/unfriended 25-30 people per day acrossed all networks I participate in to help keep the noise level down. Sometimes, these accounts I unfollow may be people I value relationships with in Real Life, and their feelings get hurt, or they get mad, or just don’t understand how I could unfriend them.

The problem is growing larger now that most people who primary used Facebook for business in the past are following their parents, siblings, mate’s friends, people from the bar, etc. The reason is simple – how the hell are you supposed to reject friend requests from blood relatives and people you really value without them feeling hurt in some way?

For the most part, I’ve been inactive on my personal Facebook account for the past 6 months because it just costs to much to use timewise. I’m not the only one. Professional networks such as LinkedIn are experiencing record traffic levels as Facebook’s traffic starts to level off after giant gains recently. Business people may seek more niche driven networks to increase ROI on time.

If you unfollow/unfriend me because this message cost $40.00 of your time to read and wasn’t helpful I understand. That’s how the world should work.

Bad Economy Great For Affiliate Marketing

While companies trim the fat off their marketing plans in attempts to survive the tough economy, one segment of their ad budget is increasing. Pay Per Performance marketing spend is up as big business is starting to understand how simple it is to leverage huge bases of skilled affiliate marketers.

The ROI driven mindset of the affiliate world is providing traditional media advertisers with a simple way to run and scale effective campaigns to the 36,000ft level.

As companies shift spend from “Branding” spend to “Performance Based Spend” they suddenly end up with a magical row of numbers at the bottom of their advertising spend report – Profit per Dollar Spent – return on ad spend in black and white. Finally something we can graph, optimize, and improve on.

Because advertisers only pay affiliates when a certain set of actions are completed by a surfer (submit contact form, place an order, etc), money is only spent when a sale or lead is generated, something most ad executives still can’t get their head around.

Publishers (websites, blogs, etc) stand to benefit as more advertisers shift into pay per action models. New ad networks for publishers that self optimize ads to your content based on profitability are on the way. Profits will drive progress in the technology. The difference between the have and have nots will start to become more clear as complex traffic management will be required to optimize earnings on the affiliate offers you’re promoting.

For Advertisers to properly leverage affiliate marketing, business owners need to determine their own internal cost per sale first. If you find it takes you $50.00 of combined effort and marketing spend to generate $100.00 of profit you should be happy to pay me $45.00 for every sale I can generate. If I can generate 10 times more sales than you because I’m a professional affiliate and you’re a professional widget maker, you can focus on your new clients widgets and I can focus on driving traffic and sales.

The key to scalability in your marketing plan is finding 5 – 10 – or 100 affiliates just like me who can provide the volume necessary to meet your revenue and profit goals.

The Affiliate Marketing world has taken control of almost every ad platform. Having an affiliate program is not just about scalability – if you aren’t using affiliates who are competing against each other to market your products, you’re effectively competing against the whole world alone, and you will not win. Take advantage of the competition between affiliate marketers and only spend money for profitable sales.

AOL Ready to Dump Bebo

Just 2 years after AOL paid an estimated $850 million for Bebo.com, the company says it’s ready to sell or shut the service down.

BEBO, largely known as a spamorama to anyone who ever used it, seems to have gone into a sharp downward spiral over the past 6 months.

Too many email notifications, lack of captcha protection for key features, and an overall complicated layout may have been a few of the largest coffin nails for the social network. Traffic has dropped more than 50% in the past 180 days.

The news of AOL’s desire to shed Bebo comes only 6 months after Yahoo closed down it’s free GeoCities Service (Yahoo paid $3.6 billion for Geocities in Jan 99)

MyLife.com Drops Ads from Facebook

Has MyLife.com banned the use of Facebook and MySpace as sources of traffic in their affiliate program?

I received the following email on April 6th from one of my associates that seems to indicate it’s true:

“Dear Valued Affiliate,
Effective today, all MyLife affiliates are restricted from advertising on Facebook and MySpace. Please make the change on your end immediately. Your cooperation is appreciate”

Is this the end of an era or just a nasty hoax of some sort? The MyLife offer helped launch several careers and assisted many networks with their social advertising initiatives. This leaves me with just one huge question, how on earth will people find out who has been searching their name now??

YouTube Trades Star Ratings for Likes and Dislikes

YouTube has traded in the 5 star rating system for a Like/Dislike system. Off the bat, it seems to devalue search results (no longer can see the rating of each video) by only indicating which videos are most liked and not displaying any ratings information for the other 90% of videos on the page.

YouTube has been busy changing their site and user experience every week for the past month. Half the time i’m wondering if my browser is misfiring. Did they test all these layout changes with certain users before making them public so quickly?

They are changing the user experience so fast it seems like it would be impossible to measure the effects of each new variant to optimize and learn from each change.

Here is what the new Like/Dislike display looks like for a video AFTER you vote:

I’m not sure if it’s just the “Friend this user / Subscribe to user” mystery that still annoys me or if YouTube is continuing to do things that just don’t make much sense? I guess they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

With nearly a $1.5millon/day shortfall on revenue, a horrible social networking experience, and basically no evolution for 3 years; I think somehow I have to count these recent blunders as progress.

Maybe Google moved the old YouTube crew over to Google Buzz, always keeping the same people on projects that are years late to market and years behind.

Ask.com Posts Giant Traffic Increase

Ask.com nearly doubled their each over just the past two months. This is exciting for marketers who are already taking advantage of Ask.com’s self serve advertising platform.

Traffic has increased much faster than advertiser competition and the traffic is cheaper than anything I’ve seen on their network in years. The traffic seems golden for several niches because toolbars are driving an increasing amount of Ask.com’s traffic. Affiliates have a special place in their heart for folks who like to download and install toolbars.

IAC, owner of Ask.com, has been on a war path of acquisitions over the past year. Their current portfolio of companies is breath taking. It’s amazing to sit down and look at just how many of their offers are paying a huge percentage of bills in the affiliate industry.

Blogger.com Traffic Explodes, Media Looks Foolish

Blogger, a popular blogging network, is blowing up it’s overall reach. Look at the ramp they have seen in the start of 2010

Near the end of 2009, many mainstream media outlets were reporting blogging was becoming less popular..blah blah blah. I think they understand bloggers are putting them out of business and a propaganda campaign was their only weapon. Turns out they were way off base. A month later, most blogging networks are at or hitting new traffic peaks.

Is it a coincidence ABC News laid off 25% of it’s editorial staff a month after Blogger and other blogging networks posted these monster gains ?

You can just feel the momentum continuing to flow away from cable news and into the blogosphere.

Are bloggers cashing in? Mostly not. It’s rare to be a good blogger, CEO, advertising account rep, and billing staff all in one person. Bloggers don’t need cash coming in right now to keep up their work ethics, while ABC news does.

The illusive pot of gold jackpot at the end of Web 2.0 rainbow should keep bloggers going for at least a few more years. Expect more job cuts at ABC.