Check out this new blog we are creating

Hello,

Please visit this new blog we are creating.

http://gototom.blogspot.com

It explains the reasons why and the topics it will cover.

Google Webmaster Central

Google has added a lot of good information to this page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

You should read it several times and use the free tools Google provides.

Links are like Diamonds and Wine

Please click on and read this information below.

http://gototom2.blogspot.com/2006/09/80-of-webmasters-are-wrong-about-seo.html


This is still one of the best articles for people to read to understand many details and complex issues involved with SEO.

Search Engine Marketing Data

North American advertisers spent $9.6 billion on search engine marketing in 2006. I do not have the current worldwide numbers. I wish I did have worldwide numbers for this report. 84% of this $9.6 billion was invested in paid search. E.g. Google Adwords, Yahoo and MSN PPC, etc.

So only 14% went to natural search engine optimization (SEO), Yahoo's paid inclusion scam accounts for 1% or $96 million. We hope the FTC stops Yahoo from this paid inclusion scam against the general public and gives Yahoo a huge fine for this advertising scam.

1% for agency fees and in house development account for 1%.

So my question is why is natural SEO still such a low percent of the total. I think it will increase in the future as Google's PPC prices have gone though the roof. Keyword terms that we used to pay $2 for are now $10. At some point people will start to shift more of their Internet marketing dollars to SEO I think. 75% of businesses use some SEO efforts to promote their businesses. For many years people have said they want branding however they generally are still more focused on measuring direct response rates. TV advertising , print ads and newspaper advertising have been dropping and Internet marketing and advertising are growing, we see a significant shift of how corporate budgets are invested. We predict this trend will continue for many years, as the Internet is still a young child.

More from Matt Cutts of Google

I do not see Matt Cutts comment in very many blogs. I might feel a little nervous if I knew Matt was reading my blog on a regular basis. Sometimes I am critical of Google and ....

Anyway Matt has always been helpful to me and responds to my emails very quickly. I do not send him many, I try to keep a low profile with Google, and only talk to them as a last resort. This in itself sets Google head and shoulders above Yahoo (I strongly dislike Yahoo) or MSN.

It is wonderful that a $10 billion dollar a year company has a senior Ph.d level engineer who responds to people like me :) :)

Below is a comment Matt made in some other guys blog.


Matt Cutts Says:

December 20th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
I think you put this pretty well, Eric. Search engines want links to be real: editorial votes based on quality and merit.

With Yahoo, you’re paying for the reviewing service; Yahoo rejects plenty of submissions.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Tom Forrest Says: This is the same with our Directories, we reject about 85+% of people who submit their listings to us. There are tons of Spammers trying to get into quality Directories and web sites like ours.
We just keep deleting them.

This is an interesting article and funny too.

Please click on the link to this article, it is very interesting to read and may make you laugh.

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

The SPAM problem just keeps getting Worse

I really hate Spammers, I find they are generally frustrated and unsuccessful people, venting out in a sick way at the world.

Anyway I had to delete and turn off the comments on this Blog for a while, because of problems with Spammers leaving a bunch of garbage in the comments.

Please email me at: tomforrest@htpcompany.com if you want to send me any comments. I use www.cloudmark.com as a SPAM filter and it works well and reports the Spammers to a database, so that is why I can give out my email and not worry about SPAM.

54% of all emails sent today are SPAM, and unfortunately it seems to be getting worse not better over time.

Learn about SEO and Internet Advertising.

Below is an email we sent to one of our clients to explain the pros and cons of Paid Google ads (PPC - sponsored links on Google) VS. Google approved methods for building natural or organic rankings in Google.
Hello Steven,

We set a limit on how much we spend on Google ads per day. This is for several reasons. First we are limited by your budget, and we also need to place ads on authority web sites to build up your natural rankings (non paid). So after the Google ads reach the daily limit then they turn off for the day and then start the next day. So if you check early in the day USA time you will see the Google ads we put up for your sites.

We suggest we check and monitor your bookings as there are different types of Google ads. There are ads only on the Google search engine, ads on other search engines Google provides search results for like AOL, etc. Then there are ads on travel related sites in the Google network (content ads). We try all of these and monitor your results and see which type has the best conversion ratios, this is an ongoing process and takes many months to optimize.

The best results come from achieving top natural rankings. This will happen faster on the Chicago site as it is older and has a good PageRank already. It takes many months to build up on new sites as Google does not let knew sites rank highly quickly. We have some proprietary methods to work around this.

Regarding your budget question:

Yes giving us a bigger budget will increase your traffic even more, we suggest you think long term and plan on keeping all the SEO services.These are for building the natural rankings, the longer we build and keep the links up the better the results will become. It is like wine and diamonds for the links. Links are like wine because the longer they are aged the better (more effective they are). Also once you lose them you have to start the aging process all over again.

This is not the case with the sponsored PPC links (paid Google ads).

SEO link building: are like diamonds, because links can vary greatly in value and quality just like diamonds vary greatly in value and quality.

Please click here and read this article for more details and technical background information regarding text link ads.


So while we would like you to increase your budget with us, we would to be careful and monitor the results and make sure you stay with this long term.

The biggest mistake we see people make is to do SEO (non PPC ads) and then run out of funding before they achieve the best results.

We do not know how much knowledge you have regarding these topics, so if we are explaining things you already know please understand we are trying our best to help you.

So the benefit of the paid Google ads (PPC = Pay Per Click) is that we can turn them on and off quickly. The disadvantage is they can be expensive and they are not as powerful as the natural or organic listings. Natural or organic are terms used for the non PPC ads.

Perhaps the best way to explain this to you is by example.

Let’s use htpcompany and htp company as the examples.

So if you type htpcompany on Google you see us on the left (natural listing) and on the right side of the page under sponsored links (sponsored links equals PPC).

Being on the left is much more powerful (5 to 30 times more valuable than the PPC listings on the right) , however it is still good and useful to have both. That is why we do both for our own sites and our client sites.

If you do not understand some of this let us know and we will try to explain better. Sometimes it is more difficult to explain via email, we know this is the best way for you, however it can be more difficult to explain sometimes.

Now if you type htp company with a space on Google you see another example of being on the left and righ side of the page.

HTP Company

HTP Company ( Phone: 805-493-4450 ) provides the best Internet marketing company, Internet advertising and SEO services in the world.
www.htpcompany.com/ - 26k - Cached - Similar pages


Any way this email is getting to long and the bottom line is we are happy to have you increase your budget as long as you can afford to stay with this long term. We do not want you to spend too much too fast and run out of funding. Again we are trying to give you good advice and help you.

Apple Computer's SEO ranking - funny story

For years SEO experts including myself have used the keyword computers as an example when teaching classes about search engine optimization. Apple's title tag was just Apple and they were # 1 on Google for the keyword computers.

This is an example to use to show how powerful text links and PageRank are. Not having the keyword in the title tag and still being #1 for such a competive keyword. Then about 6-12 months ago I saw Apple drop down to #2 or #3.

Meanwhile Google has been adding multiple title tags for web sites in their search engine. They do this for HTPcompany.com also. I can find our true title tag showing in the Google index sometimes and the one Google assigned us for other searches. Now Google is doing the same thing for Apple. Search for computers on Google to see what I mean. So now Apple is #1 for computers on a Google search.

The funny part to me is that when you search for computers and click on the first listing (Apple), you do not see anything about computers, it is all about selling you an ipod.

It seems like Google should also question why is our #1 listing for computers, not about computers, however it is all about selling you an ipod :) .

Can one link still make your site a PR9 ?

Google is currently doing a PageRank (PR) update. I found some very interesting data from this current PR update. Google has blocked so many web sites from passing on link juice (see post below); that I wondered if it would even be possible to get a PR10 or PR9 link that even worked today.

First there are not many PR9 or PR10 sites. Most of which would not give out any links to anyone. E.g. try to get a link on www.msn.com ...etc.

Then there are all the high PR blocked sites like counter sites, weather sites, newspaper sites, television sites, etc. that have been blocked from working by Google for years. Look at www.webstat.com as an example of a site that has been blocked for years. If you see the 20 footer links at the bottom, you see just how many people do not know what they are doing and are just wasting their money buying worthless text links.

Back to the title question - Can one link still make your site a PR9 ?

Yes.

I have seen people purchase ads on a web designer site in the past and I track thousands of sites long term to see how they are doing. This site just went from a PR7 to a PR9. Extremely unusual and rare today. So I studied the sites backlinks and found a PR10 site linking to this web designer site making it a PR9 and 5 other sites a PR9. Wow, a PR10 link that works. Now we will track it and see how long it works. We also noticed one of the newly created PR9 sites can also pass PR and make a sponsored office products and photocopier sites PR8 home pages. Finding this is to an SEO, is like an archeologist finding a rare fossil, a true feeling of excitement.

Now we will track and report back to you about how this plays out. The PR9 site is for sale if anyone is interested let me know. The site was a PR7 site until this recent update and it is a nice site with thousands of natural links, not just the PR10 link.