Wow, it’s been a long while since I posted here, and also a long time since I actually left my house and met people face-to-face. Well, face-to-face in terms of a professional meeting, some networking, and talking with other SEO & SEM geeks. Outside of my work I do leave my house. Sometimes. No, really, I do. If I have to.

Enough of my solitary endeavors. Last night I went with two friends to a presentation about SEO organized by Jerusalem Web Professionals, a group founded by Kim Mayroze. Kimm is head of Kimmdesign, a Jerusalem web studio specializing in creative concept development. I haven’t been to any previous JWP events, but I’ll be making a point to go in the future.

After her brief introduction, Kimm turned over the presentation to the three speakers. The first of them, Shimshon Young, owns a web site design company, Excellence Internet Service. His presentations were probably the shortest, but he offered practical tips that would be valuable to many sites; have awesome content, have lots of pages, buy multi-year registrations for your domains, and create a favicon (something I rarely do, and probably should).

Debi Zylbermann spoke next; with long-experience in high tech and QA, she moved into SEO comparatively recently. She’s very dynamic, and a confident speaker … her presentation was interesting but could perhaps have benefited from a dry-run rehearsal for a non “tech-head” friend first. Her explanation of page rank sculpting was fine for me, but my non-geek friend had zoned out within a minute or two.

I’m also slightly dubious about her method of using AdWords for keyword research. The concept is clever — aim your bids for position 9 or 10, and use the impression count for stats — but in practice I have a feeling that the data would not be terribly accurate. It’s hard to derive search numbers from impressions, since it depends on ad inventory for that term, quality score for that advertiser, etc. And of course, it doesn’t give a sense of which words are buying terms in the way that clicks would. I’d be more likely to use paid tools like Keyword Elite and SEO Elite, or even a free service like the SEO Book keyword suggestion tool.

The third speaker was Charlie Kalech, director of Jerusalem web design company J-Town Productions. He opened with the fishing clip from The Frisco Kid explaining the difference between broad search and narrow search … very cute, and put his point across very succinctly: “How hungry are you?”

Two strong themes that I got from his presentation:

• Plan your site structure early in the process in order to use keywords effectively. This will help both Google, and your users, find their way around.
• Know what sort of traffic you’re looking for. Understand the costs and benefits of attracting floods of traffic, versus getting only a trickle of traffic that’s intensely targeted to your content.

I had a good time at the event, and I’m pleased to have discovered Jerusalem Web Professionals. Looking forward to the next meeting so I can leave the BatCave once more before 2009.

Only one fly in the ointment … there were one or two attendees who had clearly come with an agenda of showing their own brilliance and superiority at the expense of the presenters. I mean, I like to hear myself talk as much as the next guy, but this was ridiculous.

One in particular managed to alienate pretty much the whole room within a sentence or two. But it was clear that he was familiar to the presenters, and they addressed him with the same kind of gentle, calming, and dismissive tone that I use on my crazy Uncle Louie … you know, the one who spends every Seder explaining that the CIA is bugging his potato kugel.

But the wing nuts were in a minority, and it was nice to renew a couple of acquaintances. Same time next month?

Today’s New York Times has a short article about Google’s ad quality team. Much of what’s discussed is old news to those of us who buy PPC ads, but it’s an excellent summary to share with colleagues and management who don’t really understand what we do.

For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

One figure jumps out from the article. We all know that Google makes an extraordinary amount of money, but it’s still eyeopening to hear that their revenue “… in this year’s first quarter, came in at the rate of more than $2 million an hour.”

Wow.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I use the name Tuppy Glossop as a pseudonym in order to keep my day job somewhat separate from my extra-curricular business activities.

In an effort to increase the reach of my thoughts, I’m going to begin blogging elsewhere as well as here at Job Is A Four Letter Word. Not much to see there yet, but do stop by and say hi when you have a chance.

It’s a cliche to say it, of course, but Aaron Wall really did write the book on search engine optimization. There are very few people around who know – or share – as much as he does on the subject.

Today he published an extraordinary article called How Much is a #1 Google Ranking Worth? and it’s one of the most thorough, well-researched and well-documented summaries of SEM and SEO I’ve ever seen. It’s going to take much more time than I have to spare currently to really go through it thoroughly, but I wanted to share it with you straight away. Some light reading for the weekend, perhaps?

Thanks Aaron … this really is a valuable article.

Over the last month or so I’ve been learning a lot from Vic Franqui at Blogger Unleashed. He’s largely video-blogging now, rather than writing … it’s always entertaining, and I suspect I learn a lot more this way, but I do regret that it’s hard to search his content by keyword.

He focuses on making money online, but not via the tired path of selling “make money online” products. That’s a whole aspect of online marketing that I’ve always found slightly sleazy, and it’s refreshing to find an expert voice who encourages selling to the other 99.99% of the world who aren’t looking to enter the IM arena.

His style isn’t always “comfortable” to watch, to say the least. Vic can be very aggressive, and he doesn’t hesitate to call out people he thinks are teaching faulty techniques. But he clearly has a tender side too: It’s obvious when he talks about his family, and it came through loud and clear when he described a particularly bad time in his life.

He’s pushed me to take another look at BANS, a package that helps you to build ebay affiliate sites very quickly; my first is up & rolling, and there are more to come.

He’s currently running a contest to become part of a select group of newbies who’ll get to work directly with him and learn the basics of building an online income. The grand prize winner will get join him for an expenses paid trip to Vegas for the BlogWorld conference in September. I wonder if he’ll be willing to pick up an international ticket?

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I’m beginning to worry that some keyword research tools are becoming skewed by too many niche marketers.

This morning I took a look at the free WordTracker tool, using the keyword phrase “tooth whitening”. Here are the top 20 results:

185 tooth whitening
144 oakland tooth whitening
107 tooth whitening california
106 san francisco tooth whitening
98 michigan tooth whitening
96 tooth whitening san francisco
95 new york tooth whitening
93 palm beach tooth whitening
90 los angeles tooth whitening
90 maryland tooth whitening
87 silver spring tooth whitening
82 fort worth tooth whitening
82 tooth whitening los angeles
80 beverly hills tooth whitening
80 tooth whitening colorado
77 rockville tooth whitening

This is insane. Obviously too many of us are doing geographically based searches for hot AdSense niches, as per Court’s Colorado Lasik Surgery case study. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been doing the same thing; I registered three domains like this recently, all based on research from the free WordTracker tool and from Keyword Elite.

One of them is featured above, and I suspect I may have bought a useless domain … sure, it’s targeted, but I have no idea if it actually gets real searches or not.

I can cope with the loss of a few bucks on the names, but I’m frustrated about the amount of time and effort I put into research, and the time I’ve spent building out the first of them. At this point, I’m not sure whether to put any effort into the other two or not … and I’m certainly gun-shy about doing any research for other sites.

So, Court, I’m reaching out to you … do you have any suggestions for keyword research where we’re not going to trip over each other like this?

All the organizers of SphinnCon Israel deserve a big pat on the back, including Search Engine Roundtable; it was a terrific event. I’m guessing there were around 170 attendees all together, and I heard through the grapevine that a lot more people were turned away over the last few days. Organization was very thorough, with excellent food & drink (and lots of it) and it all ran smoothly. A few glitches with mics made a couple of speakers a little difficult to understand, but other than that a good time was had by all.

Barry started with a bang: The big announcement of the day was the possibility of a two-day SMX Search Marketing Expo in Tel Aviv, scheduled for January of 2009. That was greeted with loads of applause, and judging by the responses to SphinnCon, it’ll be a big hit.

Three panels followed, interspersed by networking and more food and drink. (Look, it’s a largely Jewish crowd; we like to eat, what can I say?) Here’s a brief summary of the three panels.

Session 1 – SEO Panel: Paid Links & Penalties

A short presentation by Branko Rihtman (who is clearly in a league of his own – obviously just a brilliant guy) led into a Q&A with the other panelists, Ophir Cohen, Sam Michelson, and Gilad Sasson. Branko outlined the history and importance of links; recent penalties for paid links; the recent controversy over those penalties; and some linking tips for 2008.

The last section introduced what became the recurrent theme of the afternoon: Create good content that’s worth linking to. Of course, it’s not quite that simple, but that’s where it all starts. You need to know the likes & dislikes of different crowds before you aim at them (Reddit isn’t Digg, which isn’t Stumble Upon, etc). Experiment, experiment, and experiment some more. He also highly recommended getting involved in off line activities that will incidentally create good links; sponsor events, speak at colleges (good source of .edu links) etc.

A couple of standouts from the questions that followed:

Q. Does link farming still work in Israel (and by extension, other non-English language markets)?
A. Yes, but it won’t for long; Israel’s about three years behind the US in many things, including the dos and don’ts of SEO. Build your business for the long-term.

Q. What should I do if my keyword disappeared from the SERPs?
A. Immediately, nothing. Wait for a few days; maybe it was a glitch. Use those days to do some analysis, see if you can see what may have caused it if there was no glitch. If you decide it’s really gone; bail, and get a new domain. Yes, there are things that you could do, but they’ll all cost more money than just starting over.

(My personal favorite)
Q. Do you have limits as to which clients you’ll take? Or will you all just whore for anyone?
A. (After a stunned silence, and some giggling.) Decide what sort of business you’re building. In the long-term, you may want to steer clear of certain markets as you build your reputation. But in the short-term, some of these markets are fun, lucrative, and can teach you something. It’s possible to work both long-term and short-term strategies simultaneously, so long as you know that’s what you’re doing.

Session 2 – PPC Panel: Will the PPC Model Hold Up as Click Prices Rise?

Opened by Avi Wilensky, perhaps not the most comfortable speaker I’ve ever heard, the initial presentation (available for download here) addressed the reasons for click price rises over the last year or two. In a nutshell … more players in the market, including some who will over-pay for branding goals rather than sales; limited inventory of advertising; and simple inflation.

Avi went on to a Top Ten list of ways to keep your prices down, including long-tail terms, geo-targeting, and landing page optimization. Two suggestions that I plan to look at more closely, since we’ve done little with them so far; demographic bidding, and day-parting.

Others on the panel included Itai Levitan, Alon Sheafer, Tal Cohen, and Michael G. Samet.

Some of the questions from this session included:

Q. Should I buy direct from publishers, rather than using the content networks?
A. A guarded “maybe”, with the proviso that tracking and reporting will be more difficult.

Q. With a marketing budget of $5,000 how much should go to PPC, and how much to SEO?
A. Lots of answers to this one. One of the two best was from Tal Cohen of Google Israel, who pointed out that with only $5,000 you obviously need revenue quickly. Spend it where you’ll see the best, and fastest returns.

And if I remember correctly, the other good answer was from Itai Levitan of EasyNet, who suggested a very small-scale PPC campaign for research purposes. Once you know which terms are converting for you, then put the balance into SEO for those terms.

Session 3 – Social Panel: Should You Social?

Eli Feldblum opened the final session with a presentation of the what, why, how, should, and whether of social marketing. It was a bit dense, and rather challenging to read some very detailed graphs, but he nevertheless gave a very thorough and well-documented breakdown of how to do social marketing, and how not to.

He was joined on the panel by Tzvika Avnery, Roi Carthy, and Lior Hener. This was arguably the most opinionated and heated of the panels, although it took a while to get rolling. There seemed to be only a few questions, largely since each one got a thorough going-over. One stood out however:

Q. How can social media negatively impact link equity? Can you actually get hurt by a rush of links (the Digg , or TechCrunch effect) that come & go?
A. No. Not if your product is any good. If it isn’t any good, you could get buried.

And that was fundamentally the message of the afternoon. Create good content, content that’s worth linking to, content that’s viral-worthy (a term that’s been copyrighted by Roi Carthy I believe).

Once again, kudos to the organizers of SphinnCon Israel; you did a great job. Looking forward to seeing you all in Tel Aviv next January.

I’ve been looking forward to SphinnCon Israel for a month now … to the best of my knowledge, one of the highest-profile search conferences we’ve had in Israel so far.

it’s rare that I leave the house, let alone go to a spiffy conference in the big city with cool people who don’t wear pajamas all day and who feed me great food and tell me how much they like my work and don’t I look a little like Tom Cruise and would I like another free t-shirt and how would I like to take on this huge freelance gig that only someone like me could do and sure you can have options with that and … and …

Yeah, I’m excited. I don’t really think most of those things will happen, but there are some great speakers planned and I’m hoping to meet a couple of people I currently know only via email or their blogs. The chair is Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and Rusty Brick, and speakers include Sam Michelson, Eli Feldblum, and several other people with impressive sounding titles.

Although I spend much of my day-job-life running PPC campaigns, and I’m sure the panel on PPC will be good, I’m most interested in the session about social networking. I get it on an intellectual level, but I’ve never been able to put it into practice usefully. So many of these sites have a very high signal to noise ratio, and I lack the patience to sift through the dross and find the gold. Although I must admit I’ve seen some nice occasional spikes of traffic from Stumble Upon, so I’m obviously missing something. That said, feel free to Stumble this and I’ll test my hypothesis again.

I had vague thoughts about live blogging the conference, but have decided against it because

• I’m a lousy typist, and
• If there’s WiFi available I’ll end up answering email when I should be listening instead.

And more importantly, Miriam Schwab of illuminea is going to be there and has hinted that she’s going to live blog the event … I suspect she’ll do a much better job than I will, so I’m going to leave it to the professionals.

I’ll be ducking into a phone booth right before the conference, removing my online superhero pseudonym disguise, and going as my real self … so if you suspect you recognize me, pop over and say”Hey, aren’t you Tuppy Glossop?” I’ll be honored to buy a drink for the first person to do so!

I’ve been very busy over the last two or three weeks developing and launching two small sites (which goes some way to explaining why I haven’t posted here for a while). I’ve written a dozen or so articles for those blogs, plus another half-dozen which I submitted to article directories to promote the blogs.

So Eric Giguere’s One Page A Day Challenge came at a good time for me … it’s tempting to sit back and lift my eyes away from the screen for a while, but I know that it’s smarter to keep on track and pump out some more content. The challenge is pretty simple; write an article, blog post, web page every day in February. Given that it’s a leap year, that makes 29 articles in 29 days. I’m planning to alternate pages for my new blogs with articles that I’ll submit to directories. Hopefully the latter will get approved and posted soon enough to count as February content.

I’m cheating a little, since this is going to be my article for day one: But it’s a good incentive to add a little to this blog, which started quite promisingly then fizzled a bit. I suppose it goes with the territory … when I started writing about my goals for earning some extra money online, it inspired me to go and do just that. Good for my cash flow, but it left rather less time to write here.

Eric’s thrown in a couple of sweeteners to make the challenge fun. Everyone who stays the course will get a copy of his excellent Uncommon AdSense book (and I gather there’s an alternative being planned for those of us who already own it) plus we’ll verify our content by posting comments on his blog … since the blog doesn’t use the “nofollow” tag it’ll help us to build backlinks a little.OK, time to head for bed and stock up on sleep so my writing muscles are ready for the challenge.

I’ve been intrigued recently by a case study that Courtney Tuttle did about what he calls keyword sniping. It’s a terrific concept, and I’ve been hard at work finding new niches to work in. But I’ve run into something of a glitch, and it’s because of ugly people from Pennsylvania.

Here’s Court’s idea in a nutshell: You find a tightly-focused sub-niche, of a high-revenue niche, where there are a limited number of results and a reasonable number of searches. It’s an excellent series of posts, and I don’t want you to miss the meat of his work by posting a sloppy digest of it here … go and take a look.

The example Court uses is Colorado Lasik Surgery. In other words, he’s taken a huge niche that would be hard to crack — lasik surgery — and found a sub-niche by limiting it to a state.

So, because I’m remarkably quick on the uptake, I started doing some research by plugging state names into the free WordTracker tool. But it turns out someone may have beaten me to it. WordTracker estimates search traffic from smallish samples, and comes up with an estimated daily search number. I believe they look at the previous 30 days data, although it might be the previous calendar month.

Here’s the first few results from a search I did for “pennsylvania”:

691 pennsylvania lottery
647 university of pennsylvania
569 pennsylvania and gaming
562 map of pennsylvania
462 colonial pennsylvania
417 pennsylvania house furniture
343 pennsylvania department of education
326 pennsylvania map
264 pennsylvania department of transportation

OK, that makes sense I guess. But let’s look a little further down:

245 pennsylvania plastic surgeon
236 pennsylvania cosmetic surgeon
234 pennsylvania colony
227 pennsylvania plastic surgery
225 pennsylvania state police
220 pennsylvania cosmetic surgery

and then a few positions below that:

165 pennsylvania facelift
164 pennsylvania liposuction
164 pennsylvania newspapers
162 pennsylvania breast augmentation
162 pennsylvania breast enlargement
158 allegheny county medical society in pennsylvania
156 pennsylvania breast implants

So according to WordTracker, of the top 60 or so daily searches that include the word “pennsylvania”, 25 of them are related to cosmetic surgery.  There are only two conclusions to draw.

Either enough people are doing niche keyword research that the WordTracker results are getting skewed, so it pays to double- and triple-check your results before building new sites or … there’s an awful lot of ugly people looking for plastic surgery in Pennsylvania.