SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

Almost 3000 Sphinn visits from August 6th until September 5th

August was a very successful month for this blog, especially as it was during summer when many people are on vacation. Business blogging is one of the key methods of reaching an audience for an SEO company. SEO firms can’t rely on the major social sites like Digg, Reddit or even StumbleUpon as the audience there often is wary of SEO already due to the elusive nature of SEO: You only recognize bad, spammy SEO unless you are a search marketer yourself.

So what audience is a “target audience” for a SEO blog or more broadly for business blogging?

1. High profile experts of the trade?
2. Your peers in the industry?
3. Bloggers and social media users, in other words multipliers?
4. Advanced web users and webmasters?
5. Main stream internet users?
6. All internet users?

You have to ask yourself who the people are you want to reach before every post you write. I hate the term “target audience” as I’m not gonna shoot at anybody, I rather say “preferred audience“.

In August I had the unique opportunity to support the very successful SEOptimise blog team with 4 larger lists that go beyond the usual top 10 of this or that. Keep in mind that this blog is one of the most important SEO blogs in the UK according to the Google ranking at least, which in SEO circles speaks for itself. Also internationally it’s more often in the top 10 for “SEO blog” than not. Moreover the blog has more than 1200 subscribers. So it has undoubtedly already an audience.

Nonetheless I was able to reach much larger audiences, 5 to 30 times larger depending on the post. In this post I want to focus on the question why some posts “only” get 5 times as much traffic while others 10, or 30 times.

I experimented with my audiences this month. Although you can’t separate the above mentioned groups in such a clean manner you can decide beforehand which one is your preferred audience. Number 1 is the most narrow one, number 6 obviously the most populous one.

Addressing an audience is often as simple as naming it in the headline/title. Consider these three examples, they could represent the same list. Just the “target audience” differs:

• 100 Resources for Small Businesses
• 100 Resources for Web Developers
• 100 Resources for Geeks

You might want to change the description of each resource slightly but overall you can use the same resources for all three of them. When you use a very exclusive term (in the sense of excluding people) like “SEO” you will end up with a much smaller but probably more targeted audience in contrast to e.g. using “Search”. Which post is more relevant for general users:

“The Future of SEO” or “The Future of Search”?

Again, both can deal with the same topic, the first one will get a few hundred people to read it, the second one can reach thousands or more.

Beyond the headline there are of course other considerations: Do you take acronyms like “SEO” for granted or do you use terms that everybody can understand? Do you explain in a manner people outside the industry can relate to or not?

Blogging for the SEO industry is more difficult than for most others as explained above but still you have some places to reach out to: Niche social news sites for marketing, especially Sphinn for search marketing and beyond. Then there is Delicious representative of the larger web developer, webmaster and advanced web user crowd. SEO tools and resources can get popular there if they are useful enough for more than just the tiny SEO community. In fact most SEO tools and resources are but they fail to make the people believe they need them by disregarding the advice I gave you above.

Call it web tools and you get more people to use them than just the SEO tools.

In some cases you are better off by ignoring some audiences, you can’t satisfy everybody and some people just do not want to be content with your content

Nothing exemplifies that more accurate than the bizarre reactions of some “experts” to my last post on SEOptimise. This post gained 76 votes and had the same number of visits from Sphinn alone but multiplied with 10.

While the headline expressed that the post is about the “easiest” not the most advanced methods of getting links, these people were not satisfied with this explanation and repeatedly argued that the list is “stupid”, “basic”, “not fitting on a social news site” etc. The only thing that was stupid here was that I wasted my time trying to react to them. The sheer number of people approving of the post proved them wrong.

This post was both the most popular submission of mine in votes during my one year of participation on Sphinn (and I’ve been numerous times on the Sphinn fp), the most popular post written by me on Sphinn ever and the most popular SEOptimise post on Sphinn ever. It ended up on top of page 4 of the Sphinn “Greatest Hits”.

So you really have to decide, are you targeting these 5 people whom you can’t satisfy as they want to be “bigger experts” than you are, the 50 peers on Sphinn who approve of your post or the 500 visitors. Beyond that you might want to address the 5000 Delicious and/or StumbleUpon users depending on your topic.

All of the posts got what they deserved, a dozen authority links from blogs too. To be honest I also targeted the real experts of our industry and I got them too So you also can decide for both, 5 and 5k.

Twitter have today removed all link juice from profile bio links and it’s fair to say this hasn’t gone down too well in the SEO industry.

The move follows Dave Naylor’s backlink tip which caused Matt Cutts to notify Twitter founder Evan Williams, appearing to recommend that hyperlinks are removed from profile bio pages.

As I wrote earlier in the week Twitter has become a very important tool in the search industry, and this began to cause controversy because many active users feel that the time and effort they have spent in building up their Twitter profiles should be rewarded with a backlink to promote their own websites.

This tweet from Sugarrae helps to show the general feeling people have about why bio links should be valued by Google:

With a good point made by Graywolf:

And another valid opinion from Rishil:

I would agree with all of the above statements and in my opinion Twitter could learn a great deal from the way Sphinn and SEOmoz reward the active members in the community. Sphinn nofollow all submission links until they hit the homepage and SEOmoz nofollow profile links until you reach 100+ user points.

What do you think, is this wrongly punishing legitimate Twitter users or is this necessary to stop spammers? And, if Google have contributed with advice about how these links are valued, should they be recommending this?

I expect by now most people have heard about Google’s launch of its new web browser Google Chrome yesterday. Rather than talk about Google Chrome itself (as it has been very well covered already), I’ve taken a look at how Google are promoting this to encourage users to download and try out the new browser.

Google.com & Google.co.uk
Both Google.co.uk and Google.com have download messages on their homepages.

Google AdWords keyword bidding
Google Chrome is the top sponsored link listing for queries on both “Browser” and “Web browser”.

Google Organic SERPs
www.google.com/chrome is currently ranking at #70 for “Web Browser”, although this is currently outside the top 100 for “browser”. Both searches feature several articles about yesterday’s launch and interestingly Internet Explorer does not rank in the top 100 for either term!

Promotion Google Content
Google already has a large amount of content indexed which is relevant to or mentions Google Chrome:
site:google.com google chrome = 99,200 Results
site:google.co.uk google chrome = 299 Results
site:google.com download “google chrome” = 882 Results

Google Universal Search
Several Google Chrome news articles are also appearing as a universal search result for relevant queries, such as browser, web browser, Google and Google Chrome. With just the 2349 related articles so far, told you it was well covered!

Google News
Not promoted directly, but the launch of Google Chrome is currently a story featured on the homepage of Google News.

Google Video
Again, this is indirectly promoted but a Google Chrome video (from YouTube, top-right) is currently active on the homepage of Google Video.

Have you seen this promoted anywhere else? I would assume this is something Google have big plans to continue pushing, looking to obtain additional users from services such as GMail, Google Documents, Google AdWords/AdSense/Analytics etc.

Global economic issues are hitting adspend in many arenas but the internet is continuing to grow as a medium, a new report shows.

Aegis Media has revised its global advertising expenditure forecast for 2008 by just over a percentage point. It now expects global promotional spending to grow by 4.8 per cent this year, rather than the previously anticipated 4.9 per cent.

That may not sound like a vast amount but when you consider the epic levels spent in total across the planet, we are talking about a huge dip.

What really interests me, though, is Aegis Media’s assertion that internet-based promotions are driving spending.

Jerry Buhlmann, the chief exec of the firm, said: “With search now central to the planning and execution of any campaign, online media brings a greater level of accountability not just to itself but to TV, print and other forms of advertising.”

It is an exciting time for marketers. Never before has a medium allowed such levels of control and analysis as the internet - it is small wonder growth is so considerable.

Relevant, useful and appealing content is a vital part of any search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign but it is not as straight forward as writing a business letter or a proposal.
There are different ways of writing for the web which may not be immediately obvious to the average business director who has agreed to keep a blog or write an authoritative guide to help their business gain momentum.

Here are a few tips for creating good, readable web copy.

1) Keep it simple, stupid

Online readers are lazy. The human eye finds it harder to read on a screen and people often skip crowded paragraphs.

Write in short, snappy sentences and aim for only around two per paragraph. This will encourage the reader to reach the end of your article - which can be a good place to put an advert or links to other pages.

2) Limit punctuation

Now, I do not mean avoid all punctuation but crowding a sentence with commas for clauses, semi-colons, oxford commas and hyphens (guilty!) can clutter a sentence and cause the reader to stop.
If you are keeping your sentences simple as per point one, you probably don’t need much punctuation.

3) Use a spell check

When you write for the company website, you represent it. Typos wing their way past even the strictest spellers but just running your copy through Word can help flag up any horrific errors.

Newer Word programs even highlight words which are spelt correctly but may be wrong, reducing the risk of mistypes like “Beast Feeding for New Mothers”.

4) Get your grammar right

Readers seem to care less about grammar than they used to and so you should not worry too much about splitting the infinitive (or not. Whichever is right!).

However, some writers have a dreadful tendency to misuse grammar in an attempt to sound authoritative.

Do not use ‘whom’ unless you know it is needed or you will look ridiculous. Do not use semi-colons where you need a comma and remember to stick to one tense when writing.

5) Do not exceed your vocabulary
There is a horrible tendency among new bloggers to write in a more formal style than they would normally adopt. In the same way police officers sometimes tell the press they were ‘proceeding down the street’ instead of walking, new writers often start constructing fabulously complicated sentences.

Do not use words you don’t understand because you risk looking very foolish. Avoid trying to sound formal because the reader may get confused and then bored with your Yoda-like sentences.

6) Have a colleague sub-edit your copy

Sometimes it can be very difficult to check content you have written yourself. Ask a co-worker to cast their eye over your blog post before you put it up and they will often spot typos you had missed.

If you have no one to check your copy, leave it for as long as possible before checking it yourself. Changing the font, text size or colour can also make the information appear new to you, making it easier to read afresh.

7) Links are good

The internet has made us information rich and we like having instant access to the facts and figures we want. If you are writing about a new report, link to it.

Even if the reader does not follow your link, its presence makes your post more trustworthy. One tip, though - if you are linking to an external website, make sure it opens in a new window. You do not want to direct your visitor away from your website!

8 ) Keywords are not the only reason you write

Although blogging is an excellent SEO tool, it is more than that. It is an extension of the company, a way of highlighting the writer’s expertise and the company’s authoritative understanding of the industry.

This means stuffing a blog with as many keywords as you dare without Google slamming you back to page ten is not the answer. If I am blogging for a garden furniture retailer then people interested in garden furniture do not want to read garden furniture in every single sentence, even if they want to buy garden furniture.

It is ugly and can wound a firm’s reputation.

9) Avoid repetition

Do not use the same words over and over in your blog posts, even if they are keywords. The short sentence structure which works so well online makes repetition horribly obvious and it can be quite jarring to the reader.

It is also important to avoid beginning each sentence with the same word. “The” is a common culprit but it makes your post look childish and more like What I Did On My Summer Holiday than industry commentator sharing their expert opinion.

10) Be interesting

I have left the most important thing until last. Make your content interesting, make it insightful and make it informed.

Your company’s reputation is at stake every time you commit comment to blog. Ensure you are accurate and aim to be abreast of your industry. There is no point blogging if the impression you are creating is that your firm is dull.

Most website owners rely on quick website tweaks and the right tools for measurable website success. That’s not wrong but that’s also not enough. Being serious about business, a webmaster must get links to get additional exposure via search engines, of course predominantly Google.

Google still judges a website mostly based on the number and quality of links pointing to it (backlinks). So even today you got to get links, be it via outstanding content, viral campaigns or just conventional link building. Still most people do not take all the measures easily available on the Web today. Some have been around for ages, others just popped up recently. Check the 30 easiest ways to get links and exposure.

Instant Link Building
1. Submit to paid web directories free ones are often low quality lately
2. Submit to a few quality article directories
3. Send out a press releases via a few online services
4. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers etc. and in forums
5. Add resources to user generated content sites like Zimbio, Associated Content or others
6. Ask your friends, family, employees to link to you
7. Add your link to your profiles on Web 2.0 services like MySpace, Twitter (in the Bio) or Propeller

Common Linking Incentives

8. Get a Delicious badge, and display the number of bookmarks as well as the tags
9. Offer a badge of honor, something like “a carbon neutral site”
10. Offer a button for voting to install on other websites & blogs
11. Offer a widget for bloggers, something useful that will spread by itself
12. Stage a contest, it should be fun and the prizes should be worth it
13. Organize a blog carnival choosing a topic that matters for many people
14. Link out plenty, especially to bloggers, some will link back others will bookmark, some links will appear directly as ping and trackbacks
15. Contact people who might link to you (I do not mean a reciprocal link request)
16. Mirror a popular high traffic site, all the webhosters do it that way
17. Give away content with a creative commons license, especially if you can offer images or music (or other audio)
18. Let people translate your content and republish it for free

Link Bait Ideas and Practices

19. Praise experts in your area who have blogs
20. “Pull a Calacanis” - Say something stupid to stir controversy (like “SEO is bullshit” or “Web directories are Web 3.0″)
21. Be the first to break a story, indeed check original sources first before just recycling news
22. Write a useful list, “100 ways of something” always get linked
23. Give away a real freebie, a fee version of your product, should be valuable for users
24. Use images of barely clad ladies, sorry I mean beautiful women to illustrate your point
25. Support a cause, like Blogcatalog does
26. Write something unbelievable, intriguing or that “strikes a chord”
27. Do something useful for the Linkerati, a list of Digg users who blog for instance
28. Create something for the lowest common denominator, best topic is cute cats
29. Declare something alive and kicking dead but in a way it makes sense
30. Say something funny like “SEO is Dad”

Please not that I intentionally did not include some not entirely ethical grey hat methodes like “submit to social bookmarking sites” or “comment on dofollow blogs” as these tend to become spammy in the wrong hands.

It is hard to underestimate the importance of fresh, keyword-rich content for search engine optimisation (SEO).

The internet is a tool for delivering information, and consumers seek relevant and interesting writing.

All search engines want to do is keep their users happy by supplying them with such content.

Portals such as Google and Yahoo! constantly develop their algorithms to make sure they only offer useful content.

This means a hugely important aspect of a website’s visibility is filling it with keyword-rich articles, blog posts, features and other copy.

For many companies, online content creation is a pain. They want to be able to pay a web designer or SEO agency to build a website which will rank highly and then not have to think about it again. However, marketers should remember content can make a big difference to the effectiveness of a website.

Companies can set up a blog, fill it with keyword-rich, relevant content and capture industry interest. Then consumers can easily find the pages through search engines and the useful, interesting information will make them revisit often.

How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.

• Why measure rankings when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?
• Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?
• Why brag about traffic when you can get hundreds of thousands of people visit you via Digg and the likes just to make’em run away in an instant?

The good old days of primitive measurement of website success are finally over. Business people demand more than just traffic and rankings, marketing professionals get more web-savvy than 12 year old kids who almost were born on the Web and new web analytics tools finally make it possible to consider far more and specific metrics than ever before. So check out these 33 website success metrics instead of rankings, Google PageRank and traffic:

Business Metrics

People doing business online, be it with eCommerce sites like Shops, publishing companies, consulting firms etc. do want to see results in Dollars, which in most cases makes sense although blogs for instance do offer ROI which is not easily measurable though. Often it’s more brand recognition, reputation building etc. For most commercial websites measuring revenue is the best possible was of determining success.

ROI
ROI means Return on Investment. If you spend 1000$ on your website and earn 2000$ your ROI is 200%. So calculate the cost and the financial benefits and compare both. There are whole books about that.

sales
ROI sometimes gets difficult to define. What is the investment exactly, is the time spent on social media e.g. an investment or only the work on the site? Thus measuring sales, especially for shops, is much easier. Higher sales = good website optimization of course.

leads
You do not sell directly on your website? You do want users to contact you via your site insetad? Measure leads. A SEO campaign that brought 100 leads is better than one which brought a million page views but no new potential clients.

conversions
OK, you do not sell anything directly and you do not sell services either, but you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter? Measure conversions. You should do it for sales and leads too but even without these conversions make a very reliable website or marketing campaign success metric.

subscribers
While subscribers can be referred to as conversions you can count the sheer number every site should by now offer RSS and track RSS as well as email subscriptions like blogs do. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they do not buy anything. So if you don’t have an RSS/Atom or whatever kind of feed get one now.

Usability metrics

While not every site’s success can be measured in revenue, sales or leads you always can and should measure the sheer usability of your site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty, “having a bigger logo” and some special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While this might look good in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.

returning visitors
This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors (often the same people) are.

pageviews per visit
While measuring pageviews is sometimes futile as bad websites where you have to click more can have higher numbers of pageviews the number of pageviews per visit often will tell you a whole lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless they all click the buy button instantly.

time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in manifold ways but you can deduct from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.

time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or simply a blog.

bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics or Woopra easy to follow nowadays. 100k visitors from Digg with an bounce rate of 95% means that in fact only 5.000 actually visited your site. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is key for a successful site.

form/shopping cart abandonment rate
Forms are the most important parts of most websites in business terms, be it the contact form, or the shopping cart which technically in most cases is a form. Now imagine a super market where half or more of the customers abandon their cart in the middle of the checkout process or while perusing the market. Count these people and try to make them stay. The simplest way of checking the shopping cart abandonment rate is by sending a message to customer support each time a cart or other form gets abandoned. Sometimes you might be able to get back to the potential client with the incomplete data he entered.

next pages
To make people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow. Checking the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or wanted to see more of it. When on your home page the next page is in most cases the search or the sitemap page you’ve got a problem.

links clicked (heat maps)
Modern “Web 2.0″ web analytics solutions sometimes offer heat maps views or at least a site overlay way of checking clicks. This way you can determine where your visitors click or try to click (to no avail sometimes in cases of not linked logos or underlines words which are not links). Do people click where you want them to click or not?

eyetracking
Even better than heat maps of click behavior are heat maps of actual eye movements. You need more than a web analytics package to check that you need real people to take part in a study but if you are large company depending on your website you should check this for sure. Do people look at your main message at all? Do they actually see the “buy now” button?

internal searches
Are most of your visitors clueless or targeted? You’ll find out via the analyzing the internal searches. There is even a widget to do just that. Google Analytics also allows that.

SEO metrics

SEO experts love to measure. They loved measuring PageRank, rankings and traffic and they still need something to follow this urge. Well, there still is a lot to measure beyond strict business or usability metrics. Old school SEO still makes sense in lots of cases, especially with backlinks which still determine above all your success in Google search. I’d concentrate here on Google, but on the US market it still also make sense to check these with Yahoo and others. Also, checking backlinks with Google is not fun (only a fraction of data is released by Google unless you check your own site in Google Webmaster Tools) so you’re advised to measure them with Yahoo tools are tools that measure it using Yahoo data.

number of backlinks
You still need to know how many people or rather pages link to you. especially if this week more or less do it. The sheer number may be meaningless if you have 10.000 links from one site though. So focus also on domain popularity (links from one domain counted as one).

quality of backlinks
Getting a ton of links may mean nothing in comparison to one link from the NYT. So determine the quality of links: Has the linking page many other outgoing links? Has it PageRank? It it an old authority domain etc.?

Google cache date
Many SEO specialists resort to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality and success of a website in Google. If the cache date is older than one month the site is either dead (no fresh content) or has a very low authority with Google. Of course you always should check whether a site has a cache at all. Not cached sites probably get de-indexed (penalized) by Google.

Google bot visit frequency
Your cache might be one week old, but if Google bot visits daily it’s OK in most cases. You can check with most server side web analytics solutions, those relying on server logs or PHP.

Last time Google bot visited
This is almost the same as above but only almost. If you have a new content page and the bot visited yesterday and you’re still not in the Google index something might be wrong (like duplicate content problems)

Pages indexed
It’s seldom as simple as “the more pages indexed the better” but for small sites it often is. If you have 50 pages online but only 20 indexed your site is not successfully spidered by Google. A site:yoursite.com search in Google is enough to find out.

PageRank “pass rate”
While I argue that looking at the actual toolbar PageRank does not make much sense nowadays anymore you certainly want to take a look at the pass rate of PageRank. Google PageRank is passed via the links on your site. A home page with PR 5 should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise you have too many links or your internal link structure is broken.

Alexa Rank
While Alexa is not really reliable or never was many advertisers use it to check your traffic numbers. Also the Alexa traffic estimates can be compared to other sites, other time periods (more or les trafic this year than last?) and to other traffic estimation tools.

Compete Rank
While Compete is said to be more reliable than Alexa it only is for US traffic. This is both good and bad news but at the same time allows, e.g. compared with Alexa, to see where you’re heading. If you server the US market, take a close look at Compete.

Social Media metrics

In the age of social media, user generated content you can’t rely solely on bots and other automatically gathered numbers to collect data on your website success. You have to find out what your users like and what they actually say about you, or at least how often. There ale plenty of ways to find out, these are the most obvious:

bookmarks on delicious
A site or page with a few hundred or thousand of bookmarks on Delicious can’t be that bad, can it? On the other hand a site that has none can’t be that successful can it?

bookmarks elsewhere
While it is not that hard to pay some “SEO India” service to submit you to Delicious etc. It’s still far more likely that a site is a good one if it’s only popular on Delicious but also has bookmarks elsewhere. I’m sometimes surprised how many people bookmark my articles on sites do not even know of.

social news submissions
Do really thinks getting tens of thousands people visit your site is the ultimate proof of being popular? Well, it isn’t, it just proves you’re main stream, political correct and have the best girls on your site while using Apple. Everything else gets buried. If Digg front page popularity reflects real popularity then why is McCain the republican candidate and not Ron Paul? In contrast the number of submissions tend to allow a better assessment unless of course the “SEO India” service is at work. When not, you can see that popular pages get submitted all over the place. Every SEO knows that. You can submit the best SEO relates resource and it won’t get on Digg frontpage due to the “bury brigade” there, the it will get submitted to Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx. My own SEO blog has been submitted to Mixx over 70 times in 10 months and I did it only a few times myself.

tweets (Twitter mentions)
Being mentioned or recommended on Twitter is truly a success because here people communicate with their peers and fans and only links pages their truly recommend. Being linked more then 2 or 3 times means you are huge. It means 2 or 3 people telling 200 or maybe 200 other people that you rock. TweetBeep will send you email each time.

niche social site sites votes
In marketing circles and for SEO blogs it is a widely known fact that the search marketing social news site Sphinn is the destination to submit your work. Being successful here means recognition by experts and a few hundred highly targeted visitors. Each niche has by now it’s own niche social news site, be it Hugg for “green” news, YCombinator for startups and tech, Design Float and Design Bump for, you guessed it design or DZone for web development and programming. Here you get visitors and readers who really care and their opinion really counts.

number of “thumbs up” on StumbleUpon
Other than the almost US only elitist crowds at Digg or Reddit social browsing sites like StumbleUpon are populated by the general public from all over the world. People voting for you on StumbleUpon “like you” if you can offer something for the John Does out there. Other than that you only get a limited number of votes. Whether you have “mass appeal” in the positive sense of it you will find out here, not on Digg.

StumbleUpon reviews feedback
People who review you StumbleUpon really care for you, the StumbleUpon community or the subject. So listen closely. getting 10 or more “awesome” reviews on StumbleUpon means a lot if you want to determine the overall popularity of your website or particular page.

Technorati Blog mentions
A page often mentioned on Technorati is truly popular in the blogosphere. You are part of the conversation if you get linked often by other blogs. The Technorati authority is not reliable though as a metric. It’s based largely on Technorati bookmarks which bloggers can game easily.

Google BlogSearch Links
While the main Google search doe not show you many links the Google blog search is good at it. It’ll show you the legit links by other blogs, not the scraper blogs. Watch out for these, the simplest way to monitor them is by using AideRSS.

Some of you might assume now that all this is far too complex for them but it isn’t. Freely available tools like Google Analytics allow every webmaster to find out much more about a website than just a few years ago where we were the obvious numbers of PageRank, rankings and traffic had to suffice. The real web metrics experts will laugh this list off probably as advanced SEO and web analytics starts in most cases beyond the ways mentioned here.

You are certainly much better off checking these 33 web metrics instead of Google rankings, PageRank and sheer website traffic.

Britons have upped the amount they spend online, according to a new report compiled by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) and Capgemini.

Again.

Every time they publish this report, the news is the same, online spending rises every month as Britons gradually shift their shopping onto the web. I should just publish the same story and update the numbers each time!

The IMRG/Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index August 2008 revealed spending rose to £4.8 billion (£79 per person) in July. The month before that it, the organisation discovered growth of just 24 per cent to £4.3 billion. I say ‘just’ because in May, online retail growth was more than 30 per cent.

What really interested me this month, though, was a comment made by Mike Petevinos, Head of Consulting for Retail at Capgemini UK. He explained growth is rapid, even within the current gloomy economic climate. One reason he gave was “the increased choice, price transparency and convenience that online has to offer”.

It is this choice, ease and transparency which have made the web such a successful place to operate from. However, it doesn’t matter how many consumers are using the internet to shop – if a company cannot be found then it cannot compete. Visibility is hugely important.

Paid-for search advertising “dominates” online marketing, according to the Ofcom.

Its report Communication Nation: UK consumers paying less but getting more found the amount spent on promoting goods and services via the internet grew to £2.8 billion last year.

The watchdog reveals the amount spent on advertising through the web was greater than the total amount spent on marketing through C4, ITV1, S4C and five.

I find this a bit frustrating. Paid search is a useful tool and can have huge benefits for any business. It is easily measurable, easily controlled and easily effective.

However, it is just one of many marketing tools and it is also one which requires an ongoing budget.

Appearing at the top of natural search results will be more beneficial for a company - but it is also much harder to achieve.

I firmly believe it is well worth the search engine optimisation (SEO) work, though, as consumers find natural results more trustworthy.

Furthermore, decent SEO continues to work to an extent even if a firm stops spending money on it.

Ultimately, the best option for any business is to use both paid search and SEO to make sure their online marketing targets everyone.

That way they never risk being dropped in favour of a competitor with better search skills.