Over the last year, the search industry has seen a large rise in horizontal content sites. According to Lawrence Coburn, the President of RateItAll, Inc., these horizontal sites are trying to dominate the tail of search. At PubCon Las Vegas, Coburn spoke to WebProNews about the implications of these sites on independent webmasters.

According to Coburn, multiple businesses in the search space have struggled to find particular niches to make money, but now large businesses are coming in and trying to do everything.

To back up just a little bit, a horizontal content site is a site that is broad with no specific target market. One specific example of this type of site is Wikipedia. Instead of being a site that contains encyclopedia information about history, it is a site with past, present, and future information about everything.

Demand Media, a strong advocate of these sites, created an algorithm that reveals various long tail keywords. They take publicly available data and add in their own algorithm and keyword values, which allows them to construct priority lists for content they need to produce.

The rise of these horizontal content sites is scary for webmasters in the SEO community. In speaking of the implications on the search industry itself, Coburn said:

“I think the implications of this is that the tail of search is going to become more competitive as more of these big companies come in and that webmasters like us are going to have to find different sources of traffic where it starts to bring in things like social…”

What potential implications do you think these sites might bring for the industry?

Internet video is continuing to grow by leaps and bounds. While this growth has provided advertisers with many opportunities, it has also raised the bar for the level of quality and engagement that advertisers must reach with video. In an interview with WebProNews, AJ Vernet of the Digital Broadcasting Group talks about current trends and misconceptions regarding advertisers and online video.

While advertisers realize the need for customized and engaging content, they do not always understand that their video may not go viral. Vernet said a viral video is “a real moment happening.” Although competing with viral cat videos is difficult, advertisers can succeed by using creativity to create good online content.

The 30-second spot doesn’t work online. Instead, advertisers need to look beyond traditional tactics and look for new opportunities. Vernet said:

“I think what advertisers have to do is start thinking outside the box and say, how do I associate my brand with a cool piece of content or a theme…”

In the future, Vernet sees users going directly to the Web for content and being able to find a particular show on multiple sites across the Web. He believes the future is online and advises advertisers to invest more money toward online advertising and targeted video content.

Posted by jennita

It has been a couple weeks since PubCon and yes, it’s taken me this long to recuperate! Bare with me here as I reminisce about my favorite tidbits over the 3 days of sessions. PubCon does an amazing job of putting together a schedule that covers a multitude of tracks and topics. Which usually means that I often end up with a case of "session envy." You know, when you’re sitting in a session and you start to see tweets about how great another session is. It doesn’t even mean that the one you’re in is bad, it’s just that you want to be in two places at once.

Many people were live blogging the event and obviously there have been quite a few recaps of PubCon as well. I realize I’m a little late to the game.   But, let’s get to the good stuff! While there were many great speakers and presentations there were a couple that stood out to me. What I was looking for were answers to questions that we often get either through comments on the blog or through Q & A. With that said, these are my favorite take-aways from PubCon 2009.

Day 1 – How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?

This was a great session, full of valuable information. The biggest takeaway for me, came from  Bruce Clay. He took the road of sticking to a very specific topic, image and video content and explained how to get them indexed.

Since these are topics that come up quite a bit in Q & A I was excited to get some specific information on interesting ways to index images and videos. Thanks to Virginia Nussey over at Bruce Clay sending me the actual presentation (woot!).

Case Study – Indexing Images

The first thing Bruce spoke about was a case study they did involving getting images with text indexed. Here are the steps they took:

• Take a newspaper article
• Scan it to create a jpg
• Include that image into a PDF
• Submit that PDF to Google
• Search for info in the article as a PDF and the article is found.

So what happened? Well the PDF was indexed AND the text from the image was also indexed. Take a look at this SERP.

Obviously this isn’t going to work for you in all cases, but it’s an interesting way of getting images indexed and could be useful in a number of scenarios.

Case Study – Indexing Video

Next, Bruce went through another case study where they got a video indexed. Here are the steps they took.

• Take a Video
• Run it through our processor
• Edit the text transcript and save with the image
• When playing the video, search for words
• Jump into the Video

You can see this most clearly at Google audio indexing in the Labs section. Do a search for "economy" then notice how it shows you where in the video the word "economy" is spoken. I can see this being the wave of the future. How awesome would it be to have your videos come up in a search for words that were spoken within the video. Yea, pretty cool.

What I really liked about this presentation was that the information was displayed as a case study. If you read SEOmoz often you know how much we like to test theories out and put them to action. And although indexing images and video in this way may not be new to everyone, it’s new to some people and could be a great way to enhance your sites.

Day 2 – SEO/SEM Tools

This was seriously one of my favorite sessions. The speakers (including Rand) had a ton of great information but the one that really stood out to me was Jim Boykin of We Build Pages. He gave away some really great tips but the one I liked the most had to do with how to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to take:

• Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Enter in the URL of your competitor’s sitemap
• check box for " Include other pages on my site linked from this URL"
• When you get results, Change "Match Type" to "Exact Match"to see actual searches and volume for specific phrases.

Obviously not only does this help with checking out which keywords your competitors are focused on, but it can also help you make sure you’re site is also focusing on the right keywords.

Day 3 – The Search Engine Smackdown

For me the third day was my favorite. I actually wanted to attend every session in the first slot. I ended up watching the first part of the Link Buying session and the second part of the site review with Matt Cutts. I have to admit also that I loved the fact that the PubCon team programmed Matt Cutts doing a site audit at the same time as the Link Buying session… pretty darn ingenious if you ask me! Rand posted information about the site review, so I wont go into detail but it was a great session.

Although I think the best part came after the session when Matt took to shaving Evan Fishkin’s head due to a bet they made while at the SEOmoz Werewolf party earlier in the week. And although that alone was pretty great, I loved the fact that while Matt was shaving Evan’s head, people were asking him questions and he was answering as if it were a regular Q & A. Here’s a short clip of the shaving!

Ok, ok back to the Search Engine Smackdown. I should admit that I debated whether I should head back to the hotel after a long 3 days or go to the final session, and I’m glad I went! These are the topics I found most interesting… and yes they’re all from Matt Cutts.

Google Social Search
Here’s the information straight from the site:

Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called "Results from people in your social circle."

To see even more social content you can click the "Show options" link at the top of the results page and then click on the "Social" link.

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about social search.

I can see myself using this quite a bit. Most of my job is about "social searches" in general,so this one is right up my alley! It was a fun find for me.

Testing for Speed

As Rand mentioned in his post, Google representatives have mentioned several times that page load time is important and Matt himself said at this session that although they haven’t used speed as a ranking factor in the past, that they’re thinking about adding it in the future. He gave some resources on how to check the speed and ways to make it faster.

• http://code.google.com/speed/ - Ways to clean up your site’s speed
• webpagetgest.org – Let’s you input a URL, select test location and other configuration options, then test!
• http://code.google.com/closure/ - a JavaScript compiler

Wrap it up

I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter you know quite well how I feel about Vegas. I really wish there was a good way to clone myself so I could attend multiple sessions at once. With up to 7 tracks going on at the same time, it’s difficult to pick one. In the end PubCon was a hit, and it was great to meet many of our SEOmoz members and see some old friends. See you again next year!

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Posted by randfish

The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail - gives some stats:

…the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic

The truth is my research is still greatly understating the true size of the tail because:
• The Hitwise sample contains 10 million U.S. Internet users and a complete data set would uncover much larger portions of the long tail.
• The data set I used filtered out adult searches.
• I only looked at 3-months worth of data (which were some of the slower months for search engines).

To help put this in perspective, I made a few spiffy charts that can help to illustrate these points:

In this first chart, you can see a representation of Hitwise’s data from the four chunks Bill broke down.

In this next representation, I’m showing the classic "long tail" style curve, but color-coded to help show the various areas of keyword demand. Note that you could conceptually say that the 9,000 of the top 10,000 terms should technically fit into the chunky middle. Bill classified them thusly in his post, but I tend to think that at those demand levels, we’re still talking about "head" of the curve figures.

For both of these graphics, there’s a large, high-res version available by clicking the chart. You can find lots, lots more on our Free Charts page

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Time for another reader poll – this one is on a topic that many bloggers are getting into – monetizing your blog by selling something of your own from it.

Many bloggers make money by selling other peoples products with advertising or affiliate programs – but do you have something of your own to sell and are you doing it?

What you sell might include an e-book, membership are, consulting services, training, a DVD, real hard cover book, T-shirts….. anything!

Once you’ve voted and if you’ve said ‘yes’ – I’d love to hear what type of product or service you sell!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Do You Sell a Product or Service of Your Own from your Blog? [POLL]

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Earlier in the year posted here on ProBlogger 11 lessons that I’d learned on the way to making over $100,000 with the Amazon Associates program (I wrote a followup post with 10 more tips too).

In that post post I posted a version of the following chart of my Amazon Associates earnings:

In the previous version of the chart I didn’t highlight the holiday seasons but I did want to point it out explicitly now as we are currently in one of the key times of year if you’re an Amazon affiliate (or for many other affiliate programs).

As you’ll see in the chart – all but one of the 4th Quarters that I’ve been promoting Amazon have been record periods for me. From what I can see – while the economy is certainly down at the moment – this current quarter looks like being yet another record for me.

I post this chart for one reason and it is this….

If you’re going to promote Amazon this Christmas – you’ve got to start now. The buying season has started. Yesterday I saw a big day of sales on Amazon and the kinds of products being bought indicate to me that much of it is gift buying.

In the coming week we’re going to see Christmas shopping start in earnest with some of the post Thanksgiving sales that stores like Amazon put on. As a blogger – you need to be positioning yourself to capitalise on this buying.

Here’s three things that you should do:

1. Get People in the Door – Amazon optimizes its site brilliantly to convert people into buyers who enter the site – so your goal is to get people in the door and let Amazon do its job of converting people. This doesn’t mean just linking to anything – you want to keep your links into the store relevant – but if you’re going to do some reviews or promotions of Amazon products – now’s the time
2. Watch What Amazon is Promoting – at this time of year Amazon puts on a variety of sales and runs specials on many products. Keep an eye on products in your niche, watch for what they are promoting and when they promote something relevant to your industry – take advantage of that opportunity to point it out to your readers.
3. Run Christmas Related Posts – this is a great time of the year to put together a few posts that highlight lists of products related to your readers. 10 Stocking Stuffers for Photographers will be a post on DPS in the coming week (based upon this question that I asked my readers). You don’t want to let this kind of thing over run your blog but a few fun posts like this both gets people in the door at Amazon but also gets them thinking about buying and in the buying mood.

There are plenty more tips in my previous post on making money with Amazon Associates Program (and the followup post) but those are three that I think are particularly relevant for this time of year.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

3 Ways to Make More Money with Amazon’s Affiliate Program This Christmas

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Near the end of September, Yahoo began a new branding campaign in an effort to re-shape the Internet giant’s image. WebProNews caught up with David Roth, the Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo, to talk about the re-brand and specifically, the paid search element of it.

Roth said the purpose of the new campaign was to re-engage users with Yahoo. The campaign put a new face on Yahoo and gave it a new slogan: “It’s You!” The tagline’s intention is to put a focus on users and show that Yahoo has something for everyone.

Since Yahoo is trying to re-engage its users, Roth saw the need to incorporate paid search techniques. Although people talk constantly about true value lying in branding and awareness, any time a person pays for something, he wants to know what he gets in return. As a result, Roth and his team had to essentially apply revenue by creating metrics for measuring the engagement.

They did this by placing pixels all over the site for things such as pageviews, calls to action, and even hard conversion points like making Yahoo a homepage and downloading the toolbar. In addition, they conducted ad-hoc analysis to look at all the Yahoo data.

Although it has been a challenging process for Yahoo, Roth said it has been a good experience.

Posted by randfish

I’m a big Google fan – my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I’ve even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this.

Here’s what Google themselves has to say on the matter:

You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page URL.

To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Your site on the web, click Links to your site.

Note: Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.

Here’s what Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) had to say in a video on the subject:

The short answer is that historically, we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because web search was the main part and we didn’t have a ton of servers for link colon queries and so, we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample. It’s a relatively small percentage. And I think that that’s a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone’s rankings.

Google themselves is telling us not to pay too much attention to the link command, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping folks. Let the myth busting commence.

Myth #1 – The Google Link Command Returns Accurate Numbers

Nope. Not even close. Google themselves say the numbers aren’t accurate and that they’re showing a small sub-sample. The numbers show this as well. Check your link counts with the Google link command vs. the number inside Google’s Webmaster Tools (when you verify your account, you’ll see them shown). Here’s the stats for SEOmoz, for example:

Google’s link command claims 1,590 links. Let’s see what Webmaster Tools says:

Hmm… 381,403 seems slightly larger than 1,590. In fact, the link command is showing me 0.4% of what Webmaster Tools says exists. Running this analysis on another few domains that we have access to in Webmaster Tools, I saw numbers ranging from 0.1% to 4.4% (meaning there’s not even any consistency between in the percentage of links from the two counts). 

Myth #2 – The Google Link Command Returns Important Links

Tragically, a long time ago (pre-2004), Google did show only important links via the link: command, which created the myth that exists to this day. In fact, the links shown in the link: command have no particular importance or relevance. They are truly a random sample, including links that are nofollowed, links from pages that have had PageRank penalties applied to them as well as links that do pass link juice and value.

Myth #3 – The Google Link Command Returns Links in Some Kind of Order

No one in SEO has been able to show any ordering of any kind in the Google link: command’s results. Important, well-known websites may be listed on page 2 or page 20 of the results, and it is likewise with spam, scrapers and low quality sites that Google’s likely not counting. In Site Explorer and the web results, Yahoo! appears to do some type of ordering, tending to show more important links, pages and sites before less important ones (though not with great consistency). Unfortunately, many SEOs suspect that, should Microsoft’s deal to power Yahoo! with Bing results go through, Yahoo! is unlikely to maintain their own web index (and thus, link, linkdomain and site explorer will be gone).

As exemplified above, Google appears to be very random indeed when showing link: results.

Myth #4 – The Google Link Command Returns a Numerically Representative Count of Links

This is possibly the myth that’s most disturbing of all, primarily because so many operators in the SEO field belive it and track the link: command count as a reliable, useful metric. Nothing could be further from the truth – and here’s some data to help back it up:

Root Domain	Google Link: # (external + internal?)	Yahoo! Linkdomain # (external only)	Linkscape Count (external only)
Yahoo.com	3,650	331,000,000	201,681,667
Recovery.gov	7,550	328,000	155,780
Facebook.com	165,000	567,000,000	116,748,934
Real.com	11,400	4,600,000	5,596,165
Adobe.com	51,200	124,000,000	78,550,468
Reddit.com	18,300	128,000,000	29,071,291
Twitter.com	224,000	515,000,000	132,528,763
Salon.com	12,300	3,420,000	1,535,342
SEOmoz.org	1,590	957,000	486,405
NYTimes.com	7,990	21,200,000	12,884,758
TurkeyDayRun.com	3	68	22
Ninme.com	539	42,000	3,149
Burgerking.com	942	106,000	23,761
Alaskaair.com	1,010	44,000	38,358
Smashingmagazine.com	8,730	1,130,000	592,054
Smithsonian.org	4,860	25,700	14,545

I collected the data above spur of the moment, so I won’t try to claim great statistical integrity. However, looking at Google’s link: command results, the best I can say is that Google has some relationship to the others within 1-2 orders of magnitude, though they may be directionally inaccurate much of the time as well. Just look at the NYTimes.com for example – Google claims they have 2/3rds the links that Salon.com has, yet Yahoo! and Linkscape agree that, in fact, NYTimes.com has 6X+ Salon.com’s link total.

These are not numbers you want to hang your hat (or any crucial business decisions) on.

Myth #5 – The Google Link Command Tracks Accurately Over Time

Unfortunately, I don’t have data points I can show, but our observations over time indicate that Google’s link count in Webmaster Tools might rise, along with the Yahoo! and Linkscape link counts, yet the Google link: command will show lower numbers. The reverse is sometimes also the case. Without directional consistency, even when compared against their own counts, it’s very hard to take the Google link: count seriously.

Myth #6 – The Google Link Command is Up to Date

Most SEOs & webmasters have noticed that the Google link: counts update infrequently, inconsistently and most often in correlation with toolbar PageRank updates (another data point I’ll need to takcle in a future post). These updates from Google occur every 2-10 months with little warning about when they’re coming or have happened. If you watch sites like <a href="http://www.seroundtable.com"SERoundtable closely, they’ll report many of these as they occur.

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The next time someone tells you their Google link: command numbers as a metric for SEO, competitive analysis or anything else, make sure they read this post. Google’s not nearly as up-front with the information as they should be (honestly, removing the link command would save so much time and effort for poor site owners who get needlessly confused), but hopefully as a community, we can help build more awareness around this issue.

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Posted by RobOusbey

Introduction

We’ll often rattle off various metrics quite casually in conversation, but it’s easy to forget that others (such as your clients!) might not know whether these are big numbers or small ones. For example: “We’ve just published a guest post on a site with Domain mozTrust 5.67. Mr_Gadget mentioned it to his 64 thousand followers, and it managed to get over 1,000 Diggs.“

This post should be useful to anyone who needs to orientate themselves around such numbers. The Website Benchmarks section shows metrics for around half a dozen sites from ten different niches (based on the list originally prepared for comparing SEOMoz Trifecta data.) This is followed by Social Media Benchmarks, to give an idea of the impact and influence of votes and people on three popular social websites.

Links and Traffic: Website Benchmarks

This section uses three particular metrics:

• Domain mozRank: the strength of a website, based on the sites & pages that link to it,
• Domain mozTrust: the trustworthiness of a website, based on links from trusted sites & pages,
• Unique Vistors: Compete.com’s estimate of the number of monthly unique visitors to a site.

N.B.: The ‘moz’ metrics use data exposed by SEOMoz’s Linkscape, and are on an exponential scale from 0 – 10. Data collected in 2006 suggested that the no visitor metric – Compete included – could be used to precisely estimate unique visitors to blogs at the time.

Arts & Entertainment

Business

Economy & Politics

Health

Home & Housing

News & Media

People & Society

Science

Sports & Recreation

Technology

Social Media Benchmarks

Digg

Reddit

Twitter

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Over on my main blog – Digital Photography School – we have today launched our first ever ebook – The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography.

We’re launching with a 25% discount so if you’re interested in improving your portrait photography it’s well worth checking out – however I thought I’d jot down a few notes in a post here about some of the process that I’ve been through in putting the ebook together. I’ve been documenting the launch (and pre-launch) in the ProBlogger.com forums for weeks now but here are a few of the reflections I’ve made condensed into one post.

The ebook came about largely out of a lot of emails from readers who were either:

• asking for information on portraits
• asking for recommendations of books/resources on portraits
• asking for us to pull some of our best posts together into a condensed form

Content

Much of the content in this ebook is previously posted content from the DPS blog. We’ve published hundreds of posts on the topic of portraits so the challenge was pulling together the best of it, updating it and editing it so that it read better in an ebook rather than as blog posts. I also commissioned some extra content on topics that were lacking a little and also approached 6 Pro Photographers to be interviewed for the Bonus Section.

The other challenge was finding images for the ebook. Most of them were found from Creative Commons commercially available images on Flickr

Bonus Section

As mentioned above – I decided to approach a number of photographers to get their input on this ebook. They were largely I had relationship with previously and I did it for a number of reasons. Firstly I think it improves the book and adds a dimension not already in it with just the ‘theory’ in the first section. The interviews bring in other voices and also practical examples of portrait photography.

Secondly it brings in some credibility – most of those chosen have names in the industry and this helps sell the book to have them associated with the project.

Thirdly – having a ‘bonus’ adds value and gives extra motivation to buyers.

Design

One of our writers on DPS (Neil Creek) is married to a great designer (Naomi from StarFishBlue) who I commissioned to pull together this ebook. Naomi pulled together all the content and images and also arranged for the book to be professionally proofread.

E-Junkie

I’m using E-junkie (aff) to serve the ebook and act as shopping cart. I’ve chosen ejunkie largely based upon my experience with it with the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook. While not the most feature rich option out there I find it more than adequate for my needs and considering it only costs me $5 to set up an account it’s a bargain.

Launch

This is the first ebook that we’ve sold from DPS so the waters are untested to some degree as to how the community will respond. I’ve been building a little buzz about it for a month or so now, mainly in our weekly newsletters but also in passing in a few of our posts and on Twitter.

Over the weekend just gone I did a bit of a preview launch on Twitter to do some testing and gather a little feedback on the product. The feedback was useful and has been really positive and we also sold 50 or so of the books which basically means that all my expenses are already covered for the book before even launching it (always a relief).

Today we’re launching with a multi pronged approach including:

• Email to our Community – an email has just been sent out to our newsletter list
• Post on the DPS blog – this went live about an hour ago
• Forum Members – we’ll push out some promotions in our forums in the coming day
• Twitter – we won’t push it too hard on Twitter as we’ve already tweeted it a few times and don’t want to go overboard but we will tweet it a bit today
• Facebook – the DPS community on Facebook is pretty active so it’ll go live there
• Affiliates – I have a few people signed up already to promote the ebook as affiliates (by the way if you’d like to join the affiliate program you can do so via e-junkie here).
• ‘Favours’ – I’m pulling in a few owed favours today with some fellow bloggers and Twitter users.

In the coming week or two we’ll do a few followup promotions – particularly towards the end of the week when we end the 25% discount.

And Now We Wait…. and Adapt

Now comes the part of the process where the product is launched and I wait…. nervously wondering if anyone will buy it and if all the effort has been worthwhile? Like I say above – we’ve already pretty much broken even on the project in terms of the dollars put into it but it’d be great for it to sell well so that we can push some of the income back into DPS an keep improving the site.

Time will tell how it goes! I’ll update you in the coming week or so.

PS: Anyone want to buy a great portrait photography ebook at 25% off?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The Insiders View of How I Launched My New Ebook

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