Search Engine Optimization Tidbits

The new project I am working on is now live!  Full details here.  Quick overview movie I did below:

I have been working behind closed doors for the last six months with a team of top notch internet marketers and technologists on a product I am truly excited about.  It is more than just a product, its a product based on top of an already great platform we have partnered with.  The problems this product will address:

• What ads will pay my website the most money on each impression.
• Complexity of managing relationships with hundreds of ad networks: sign ups, hitting impression minimums to qualify, minimum payouts, consolidated reporting.
• A dead simple way to implement ads onto your blog.
• A dedicated ad sales team representing your website’s inventory no matter how small your website is.

I have experience making real money for publishers with my Text Link Ads business and now I am aiming to bring that same great customer support and most importantly results to the banner ad space and beyond.  If you are interested in getting a sneak peak on a very limited basis, shoot me an email at pg (at) patrickgavin.com

Many readers of this blog have attended the same SEO conferences I have over the last few years: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Strategies, etc. These are all still great conferences and is where I met many friends in the industry as well as had the rare opportunity to meet clients face to face. I have spoken at a number of SEO conferences over the years and it was a great experience. Recently I have spoken at two really great non SEO conferences: the Right Media Open and the Goldman Sachs‘ Internet Conference.

Both were really great events and a great opportunity to meet folks outside of the SEO circle which is a great exercise. Expanding your circle of friends in the internet marketing world is something that I highly recommend. This video is not a recommended watch but Yahoo/RightMedia put on such a great event and their videos are so snazzy I had to embed it here:

This experiment may only last a few days but http://twitter.com/patrickgavin

FireFox has been my browser of choice ever since Hagans told me it was what all the cool kids used. FF has been in the news I read quite a bit recently. VentureBeat reported how FF continues to gain market share worldwide. FF is more popular than in the US with 29% of all Internet users compared to 22% of US users but it is gaining marketshare in both:

One of my favorite things about FireFox is their Add-Ons platform and how willing they are to promote third party Add-Ons on their web properties. FireFox recently made some changes to the interface of the Featured and Recommended Add-Ons pages (hat tip Chris), these changes were outlined here. Basil’s post gave some great insight into the decisions and metrics behind getting an Add-On featured by FireFox. The recommended Add-Ons pages receive approximately 150,000 page views per day of people specifically looking to customize their FF browser.
Of the some 5,000 Add Ons in their directory they “recommend” about 140 of them and of those 140 about 36 are regularly rotated in the recommended list outside of just being recommended in the category list on their website. The results of being one of these recommended Add-Ons can be staggering with recommended Add-Ons being downloaded 2,000 to 300,000 times weekly! These kind of download numbers can obviously have a huge effect on a business and all thanks to free promotion from Mozilla.

Fred Wilson recently wrote that Delicious hadn’t grown much since it’s acquisition by Yahoo. One of the items Delicious responded with was, “Much of our traffic is through the firefox and other browser extensions, which is not measured by these systems.” This was a very interesting response as web services can grow significantly “under the radar” in the Add-Ons environment which to date has been difficult to track usage. That is also changing at Mozilla as they have released stats for their Add-Ons of which some Add-On owners have made public:

In summary, FireFox does an awesome job in growing third party Add-Ons to their browser. FF users get creative tools to customize their browser experience and tool owners get access to amazing and growing distribution. Well done FireFox!

I admit I have always been an Alexa rankings junkie. I have always known it wasn’t too accurate and definitely skewed rankings for sites in the internet marketing world giving them way too high of a ranking (low Alexa ranking that is since the #1 site is Yahoo.com) but if you consider everything relatively speaking it was a great way for me to know which sites were cranking in more traffic than others in that same vertical. I just noticed today that Alexa has announced a new ranking algorithm.

The first thing that hit me is it seems the sector that was always given way too low Alexa scores (again low is good) the Internet Marketing sector, has been “fixed”. The previous theory was that because internet marketers tend to track Alexa that a disproportionate number of seo’s, site owners, etc install the Alexa toolbar and tend to live on sites related to building traffic, seo, etc causing those sites to appear way more popular in Alexa than their actual traffic warrants. My own Text-Link-Ads.com spent a good year in the top 1,000 of Alexa and recently was around 3,000. It’s new ranking…. 11,465. I wish I had the accurate before/after rankings but a quick spin around some popular internet marketing/seo sites and I am see a huge correction in rankings. Here is a sampling of the new rankings. I am hoping some of these guys can pop by and leave a comment as to what their Alexa ranking was before this algorithm change:

Webmasterworld.com now 2,199
SEOBook.com now 6,740
ProBlogger.net now 12,917
Searchengineland.com now 14,945
JohnChow.com now 17,088
Shoemoney.com now 19,818
Seroundtable.com now 21,202
Wolf-How.com now 82,625

My take is that the new rankings do look much more accurate and this is a great step forward for Alexa but maybe a short term ego blow to the internet marketers who have to wake up to significantly lower rankings (higher scores) in Alexa.

This image from 2006 is getting circulated around the blogosphere right now and for some reason it is the first time I have seen it (credit Seoresearcher.com)

The data represented in the image comes from a Cornell University study on click behavior on search engine result pages. The most interesting point: the difference in clicks between the #1 result and the #2 result is a whopping four times as many clicks for the #1 result! I know from my personal experience with an e commerce website I owned that difference between ranking #1 and #2 for your top keyword can be the difference between breaking even and making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately it is not at #1 as the corporate site it ranked for finally caught up. So while I don’t have hard traffic stats out there for the difference in traffic I know it can have a staggering effect on your business.

The point is if you are lurking around #1 but not there yet it can really change your business to strive to get there. If you are there now you better be doing everything you can to preserve it as search engine rankings are only getting more and more competitive every day and if you don’t think someone is out there building links gunning for you spot you are mistaken. Now this being a controlled study and not “out in nature” I would be interested in hearing your thoughts based off real data on the difference between the #1 and #2 spot on Google, what have you seen?

A question I have answered a few times is “how did Text Link Ads get started?”. From the start here we go…

Bricks To Clicks. I got involved in internet marketing in 2001 helping my family business which specialized in buying and selling antique bricks. At the time pay per click advertising was very young. I was able to quickly and cheaply get exposure for our reclaimed brick business across the major search engines. That traffic helped turn what was a local business into a national business shipping these unique bricks coast to coast. Today Gavin Historical Bricks ships hundreds of thousands of bricks around the country for restoration jobs as well as new construction looking for an old world looks and saves millions of pounds of landfill every year with its recycling model. I learned a lot about business from my Dad who is a brilliant business man and a lot about online marketing in the early days from the brick business. Growing this business online really opened my eyes to the power of internet marketing and the positive effects it can have on business.

I loved the brick business but was really attracted to the internet marketing aspect. The idea of doing what we did for the brick business for other small businesses made a lot of sense to me. I teamed up with my college roommate, Bill Fish, and we started a two man shop doing pay per click management in 2002. We thought we could target companies similar to Historical Bricks, so armed with a supplier database book of some 5,000 prospective clients in the restoration market we were off to help small businesses expand their business and make some money for ourselves at the same time. Thinking too small at the time and not realizing that once you know search marketing there is no reason to limit your client base we launched our business naming it MarketingThePast.com (btw you got to love playing with Archive.org!) Pay per click management was definitely in its early days and we had classic tools as BidRank running on all night on our computers to adjust bids. We generally charged on a percentage of spend basis for ppc mangement and we picked up a number of clients including our first client ever which sold antique pool tables. The funny part about our first client is I sold it face to face on a sales call to this local business. Luckily search terms were relatively cheap at the time and we were able to bid for a number of ppc and search marketing related terms and we were able to pick up a decent number of clients without going door to door.

PPC to SEO. We quickly learned that ppc clients wanted help with their search engine optimization. We re-branded into Positioned1.com and began offering both ppc and seo services. Search engine optimization was a different animal but one we wrapped our heads around quickly as we learned it was all about the links! Link popularity (a measure of the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website) was king then just as it is now. We observed a number of websites that were ranking #1 in the search engines were out purchasing links on other high quality websites. It was a growing practice but a very fragmented marketplace. This presented an opportunity.

TLA is born. Our first crack at this market was in early 2003. We continued to operate under our Positioned1.com name and got an exclusive deal with a company that was a large provider of technology to student newspapers. We took a chance signing a guaranteed deal with this group of newspapers and got busy selling the ad space to our current clients and got on the phone with anyone that was buying these type of ads on other sites. The product worked great and we quickly settled on doing business as Text-Link-Ads.com Here is the 2003 version of TLA in all it’s glory:

Growing the business through technology and great people. Business started to grow rapidly as we expanded our publisher program. Publisher networks continued to come on board throughout 2004 and 2005. We brought on some great people to help grow the business that are still with us today (thanks Brock, Jay, Drew and Stevo!) We were managing the various publisher programs in all sorts of ways: emailing spreadsheets in, FTP access to this network, custom application to get into that one, etc, etc. This was not a scalable approach. Fortunately we teamed up with Barry Schwartz’s company, RustyBrick, (special thanks to Matt and Justin who built the system from scratch and are still working on it today) and started building real technology to automate many of the business tasks we were performing by hand. It took us a full year to release what we called our “independent publisher network” which we first opened the doors to in early 2006. This technology allowed smaller publishers to come in and grab our ad code in a self serve environment. Our publisher count took off and this really was the catalyst for growth moving forward.

Midwest to NYC. With the independent publisher network in full swing in 2006 we were able to bring on thousands of niche websites into our program and the advertisers followed this demand. The business grew fast and in November of 2006 we were fortunate enough to be acquired by MediaWhiz. At the time we had an office in Iowa City, Iowa (my hometown) and in Cincinnati, OH (where we founded TLA) and we packed our bags and moved out to NYC to join the MediaWhiz team.

We have added great people to our team since and continue to improve our core TLA business as well as leverage our great publisher base to launch new ways for publishers to make money. MediaWhiz has been a great place to work and we are working hard to provide great products to advertisers and publishers alike and we have some really cool products coming down the pipeline. It has been a fun ride in online marketing so far and it is just beginning.

Hello, thanks for stopping by. Finally got around to moving this website over to blog. If you would like to subscribe to this blog’s feed you can do so here.