Caydel’s SEO Blog

A recent post at SEOmoz once again brought up consider the plight of the Search Engine Optimization industry; as effective and needed as SEO consultants are, blackhats and webspammers have given the industry a black eye.

People see the search community in two camps: Search Engines (good) and Spammers/SEOs (bad). The way they see it, the search engines work diligently to reduce spam, and show the most relevant results for their queries. On the other side of town you have the SEOs and spammers, who try to make sites rank for their own ends, therefore throwing off the good, pristine search engine results.

What the public needs to realize is that real SEO isn’t about making pillspam or other useless garbage rank - SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries. For most site owners, there is little or no value in ranking for non-relevant queries. Often, the pursuit of rankings by SEOs forces them to review the content, make it more relevant and of better quality to induce links, and all around creates better websites and an overall better user experience on the Internet.

I think the SEO community needs to reach out to the public in some way to raise our profile in the public eye, differentiating ourselves from the communities of webspammers and other devious characters. We need to present ourselves as a legitimate, valuable industry. I think that we are on the right track as far as it goes, but more has to be done.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to better clean up the SEO image? I would appreciate your thoughts.

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I spoke with one of my clients this morning, and he told me about some recent successes they have been having through email marketing to a mailing list targetted at a tightly defined mailing list.

You can read more about it at my (other) blog: Tried, Tested and True: the Mailing List

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Back in January, I wrote a piece on whether the newly-popular Blogkits blog ad network lived up to their claims of outearning Adsense on blogs. My feeling at the time was that they did not even come close, but I was willing to give them more time to prove themselves.

Nearly five months have passed since I wrote the original piece on Blogkits; by now, Blogkits has been on my blog for nearly six months. Before someone points this out in my comments, I must admit that I did cheat on the blogkits challenge a bit; rather than removing Adsense and completely replacing it with Blogkits, I ran both ad networks side-by-side.

So, what are the results?

Blogkits
Impressions: 50,716
Clicks: 286
Leads: 0
Payout: $0.00

Adsense
Impressions: 22,340
Earnings: $39.64

Within the six-month time period, Blogkits has not earned me a dime, despite nearly 300 clicks. This indicates horrible conversions on their part. Meanwhile Adsense was been quietly accumulating the whole time.

Of course, we should not forget that a single sale on Blogkits has the potential to generate more earnings than Adsense; it could just be a string of poor luck that I have no conversions yet. On the other hand, I think enough time has passed to show that Blogkits is not a particularily effective blog monetization solution.

One interesting point is the fact that Blogkits reports twice as many impressions as adsense for the same time period; neither ad network correlates well with the pageview statistics shown by my analytics / stat programs.

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Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man - wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

• Blogging and social networks - People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.
• Branding - Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.
• Affiliate Marketers - can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list - one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

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So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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A friend of mine recently let me into an early beta of MFABlocker, a new service he is developing.

The Problem of Low Paying Clicks

Any webmaster or publisher who employs Adsense or any other form of PPC advertisements in order to monetize his sites has no doubt been frustrated from time to time with the miniscule revenues some clicks often generate.

The problem lies in the fact that much of the inventory advertising in Adsense is composed of MFA (Made For Ads) pages, which are often nothing more than pages full of ads. The people who run these sites will often bid very low on a large number of keywords in the hopes that people who click to their pages will click on higher paying ads. This is the concept of ad arbitrage.

While many consider this a legitimate form of business, there is no doubt that the practice warrants lower advertising revenues for the average webmaster.

MFABlocker - the Solution

Enter MFABlocker - a great tool to fight low paying clicks!

MFABlocker takes a list of your sites along with an Adsense publisher ID in order to determine which advertisers are showing ads on your sites. They then follow these ads, and analyze the resulting pages in order to determine whether they share any of the characteristics of MFA pages. If they do, they are added to a blacklist which you can then add into the Adsense competitive ad filter.

The Results?

So how well does it work? In the past week that I have been using this tool, I have seen my Adsense revenues jump by 25-30%. This is a welcome jump, although I admit that it may just be regular flux considering I have only been using it for a week. But there’s something, at any rate.

The Future

MFABlocker is still in early beta, but it is already showing some promise. The interface is quite rudimentary, and there is no help section yet. However, the service is developing rapidly. In the two weeks or so that I have been in the beta, I have been seeing major feature updates daily.

Keep an eye on this - it will be a great service!

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LinkedIn has been generating a signifigant amount of buzz in the last few weeks. First, a lot of noise was made over the launch of the new LinkedIn Answers section, then Guy Kawasaki’s great ‘10 Ways to Use LinkedIn‘ post.

Where is the value of LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a network of over nine million professionals, with full profiles on them including their education, their industry, and their work histories. In short, LinkedIn has control over a staggering amount of data. This information is a goldmine for data mining purposes, market research, or any one of a thousand different uses.

But that is only the smallest part of the value of LinkedIn. The real value becomes apparent when you go to Account Settings > Advertising in your profile and read the following text:

LinkedIn is developing or has developed a method to serve ads based upon the content in your LinkedIn profile. Any time you are logged into LinkedIn, the ad code they are developing will likely read a cookie in your browser to gain the stored profile ID, then delve into your profile to pull out the information to serve ads.

Think of the value in this - they know your industry and your work experience. They could tune advertisements exactly to what you as a professional want and need to see. This technology could be worth potentially millions to the Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing programs. For all we know, LinkedIn is already licensing out this data to other companies for marketing purposes.

Before too long, we will likely see LinkedIn purchased by either Google or Yahoo! in order to get control of this data. It could potentially form a large part of the algorithm of either company when determining which ad to display on a site to a given end user.

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