enjoy…

Blogging Statistics

• 28% of all visits to blogs in 2007 resulted in some kind of action (email signup, contact form, etc.)
• There are currently about 15.5 million active blogs (blogs updated within 90 days)
• Total blogs tracked by technorati: 74 million
• There are 120,000 new blogs being created every day
• 3,000-7,000 new spam blogs (splogs) created per day
  
• Total blog posts created per day: 1.5 million
• 36% of those blog posts were written in English
  
• The Japanese language now boasts more blogs than another language (37%)

Search Engine Statistics

• 75% of Americans use search engines on a regular basis
• 56% of Americans use Search Engines every day
• 40% of all search engine searches are for local businesses and services
• 54% of Americans regularly use the internet instead of the phone book to find local services
• 92% of all local searches will eventually convert into a sale
• Roughly 10 billion search queries made per day
• Google’s share of search queries: 59.2%
• Yahoo’s share of search queries: 22.2%

Related posts:

1. What Sites Are Used the Most for Local Search?
2. Quick Hit –> Top 8 Search Engines
3. How to Break Up With a Search Engine Robot

I wanted to post a brief update on the services of HitTail since I’m such a die hard fan.

I got an email about a week ago from Mike Levin (the creator), talking about the new “plus” service they are now offering:

HitTail’s premium service has been released, and as you are one of our beta testers we want to thank you and invite you to take advantage of the limited time low price for the premium service. The full price for the service is $9.95 per month, but before April 30th, you can sign up for only $4.95 per month or $49.95 per year and lock in the price* on the same low level for as long as you remain a HitTail customer!

A look at their website points out some of the new features:

Most of these updates seem to be good. The email and RSS updates will be a helpful new feature… I tend to forget about hittail for weeks at a time, and am then overwhelmed with all the keyword suggestions.

Well done Mark. I hope to see more great innovations from you guys soon.

Related posts:

1. Hittail.com: a Revolution in SEO
2. http://tools.seobook.com | SEO Tools From seobook.com
3. Competitive Website Research Analysis | 10 Free Tools

Yet another post about search engine marketing… if you get tired of it please let me know!
Google releases huge updates so fast and so often, that they deserve proper attention. They are so funny about new releases… there is never any fanfare or press releases. They just keep on quietly making internet shaking improvements without so much as a peep.

Well, recently, it happened again, although this time it was much easier to notice… Ever heard the term Google Slap? On Feb. 16, Google released an Adwords update that most commentators are calling Google Slap 3.0, since it is the 3rd time something similar to it has happened.

Basically, Google has taken a few factors including: quality of advertisement, % of clicks on your advertisement, and keyword relevancy on your landing page.

Based on those factors, they rate each of your keywords with a “Great”, “Ok”, or “poor” score. And… here is the kicker, based on the keyword and your score, your minimum bid amount will change. If you have a very poor score on a popular keyword, your minimum bid amount could raise significantly. In some cases over $10!!!

To find out your score:

1. Login in to your adwords account
2. Click on a campaign
3. Click the Keywords Tab
4. Click on Customize Columns
5. Click “Show Quality Score”
6. View the score for each keyword

If you have been slapped with a “poor” rating, and your minimum bid has gone through the roof, try the following remedies:

• Improve the language of the advertisement to better reflect that keyword
• Create a custom landing page that includes the keywords you are targeting

This should clear things up for the most part.

I’m still unclear on how successful this will be… from an advertisers perspective, if you don’t have your ads in order, you may get a serious slapping. But if the content on your pages matches the keywords, you should be fine. There is no question that Google will make more money from this, but it should also help advertisers to target their ads in a more direct way.

Related posts:

1. Using Unique Google Queries to Build Incoming Links
2. All Blogs Google…
3. Hittail.com: a Revolution in SEO

What are some of the most popular cities on Craigslist??

The percentage represents percentage of traffic over the entire site, and the 2nd number is the amount of listings they had at the time of this post.

•    sfbay.craigslist.org - 14% - 305800
•    newyork.craigslist.org - 10% - 345715
•    losangeles.craigslist.org - 8% - 192174
•    seattle.craigslist.org - 4% - 135719
•    sandiego.craigslist.org - 3% - 103321
•    boston.craigslist.org - 3% - 138512
•    vancouver.craigslist.org - 3% - 150304
•    chicago.craigslist.org - 3% - 107877
•    orangecounty.craigslist.org - 3% - 161288
•    portland.craigslist.org - 2%
•    atlanta.craigslist.org - 2%
•    washingtondc.craigslist.org - 2%
•    phoenix.craigslist.org - 2%
•    denver.craigslist.org - 2%
•    lasvegas.craigslist.org - 2%
•    toronto.craigslist.org - 2%
•    sacramento.craigslist.org - 2%
•    dallas.craigslist.org - 2%
•    minneapolis.craigslist.org - 1%
•    austin.craigslist.org - 1%
•    miami.craigslist.org - 1%
•    houston.craigslist.org - 1%

Instead of calculating in terms of reach per million users as they did in the past… they now offer you a percentage ranking based on total internet users. It’s a subtle but effective change. For example, yesterday, Google reached 25.85% of all internet users.

They still continue to give their famous “traffic rank” (Google is #3), but this now shows the data from yesterday… not today. Which is helpful. It appears that they may have taken some tips from Quantcast.Alexa continues to have many critics, but I still find the stats interesting… mostly for higher traffic websites where there is more data to go on. And it can be a good way to spot trends in certain websites. Simply visiting the homepage will give you an idea on major trends for that day. For Example, Anna Nicole Smith’s site is up 18,000% in traffic from the last couple of days.!!

Related posts:

1. Competitive Website Research Analysis | 10 Free Tools
2. Interesting Search Engine & Blogging Statistics
3. A Rare Look Into the Mind of Google…

Google - 50.8%
Yahoo - 23.6%
Windows Live - 8.4%
AOL Search - 6.1%
My Way - 2.4%
ASK - 2.1%
Earthlink Search 0.5%
Dogpile - 0.5%

Related posts:

1. The Ultimate Guide to Internet Business Branding on Search Engines
2. Interesting Search Engine & Blogging Statistics
3. Google Launches New Blogger Friendly Search Service

“I think it’s the right call: the incentive to create spammy links on Wikipedia has been massively reduced. Over time, I believe Wikipedia will probably find ways to remove nofollow from links that are more trusted.”

Related posts:

1. A Rare Look Into the Mind of Google…
2. SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #14
3. SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #3

“While viewing the Quintura Cloud, you can visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently! ”

“The map shows only those words that have close contextual relationships with the keywords in your query. Click a word to change your query and get relevant results that will comply with your new query. The size of a word shows its significance in relation to the query. The larger words have a strong contextual relationship with your query while the smaller words do not.”

I would bookmark this one and keep an eye on them. They are using some new technology that really makes searching easier. If you get a chance, play with it for a minute or two. Once you get the hang of it, it really makes searching faster as you can find things rather quickly without much effort.

Have you ever tried to search for something but just didn’t know what terms to use? The context cloud method makes things a snap, as it is basically teaching you which terms are related.

Now all they need to do is clean up their interface a little, and they will be a serious contender for quality search…

The obvious question is, when/if Quintura does strike it big, will they offer sponsored results? How do you optimize to score high in their results? Will we need to start rethinking our SEO efforts based on the new latent semantic indexing technology? Maybe we will start thinking more in terms of keyword context and term relationships as opposed to single keyword phrases.

The successful SEO guru will learn how to adapt.

A famous man once said: “Blessed are the flexible”

Related posts:

1. How to Break Up With a Search Engine Robot
2. Search Engine Marketing Questions & Answers
3. Hittail.com: a Revolution in SEO

Is anyone as sick as I am of receiving reciprocal linking requests in the form of spam emails?  I read a fantastic article by Mike Banks Valentine of SearchEngineOptimism.com.  Yes the article is a bit controversial, but that’s what makes it a fun read!  The title is: “Reciprocal Linking is Dead”

Here are some excerpts that I thought were excellent:

“I will link, but I will not “swap links” with anyone now. I require content in the form of articles, press releases and news, quotes, testimonials or some form of content.”

“What was it that ruined strict reciprocal links for me? It happened when I received a polite link request from an apparently well-meaning reciprocal link partner and, as always, clicked through to his requested linking URL. I was forwarded immediately to an affiliate program page which this scammer hoped to slip by without my noticing.”

This part was great… he has a form letter that he uses to reply to those spam emails:

“I’d be happy to link to you, but my current method of linking is through articles, not links pages. If you’d like to contribute an article for publication, I’d be glad to link to you through the resource box.

Take a look at those articles I currently use and send your own articles for linking consideration. Be sure to include a resource box with the linking text included within it.

The articles are the only way I link to anyone now. If you don’t have any, consider writing a couple specifically for this purpose. I’m sure you also know the value of distributing well written articles for use by other web sites and ezines.”

I totally plan on using a letter like this to reply to those reciprocal link requests.  Who knows, maybe a motivated spammer will start writing some good content for me!

Lately, I’ve been getting a few link requests that claim to have a 3 way linking strategy that are supposed to guard against reciprocal link penalties and give a decent backlink.  The one problem is that most of the links in the requests are completely unrelated to my services.  People just don’t get it that a link from a casino website to a real estate website isn’t going to help your ranking.  In fact, it may even hurt your ranking if you have too many unnatural links from unrelated sites.

Bottom Line: If you’re going to use reciprocal linking… don’t do it just for the sake of getting more links.  Do it because you think your customers will find value in that link.  And for goodness sake, don’t spam people for reciprocal links. And finally, make sure to only accept links from sites that have content related to yours.

Here are some other helpful links on the subject:

Healthy Website Linking Practices

Threadwatch.org

SEW thread

eZine Article

Links arguing that reciprocal linking is still alive and well:

easywebtutorials.com

1stSearchEngineRankings.com

Related posts:

1. Healthy Website Linking Practices
2. SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #12
3. SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #15