Happy New Year, everybody!

Stuntdubl, in his 2006 Predictions Review, used the term “defensible traffic,” which he picked up off of the Scoreboard Marketing Blog. Defensible traffic is basically traffic with a barrier to entry.

Anybody with a basic knowledge of PPC and a bank account can buy traffic for their website. And if their account is big enough, they can steal your PPC traffic by paying more per click. Therefore, the only way you can defend that traffic is to pay more per click and cut into your ROI. Furthermore, if you’re using PPC for arbitrage, shifts in the PPC algorithms (meant to combat arbitrage) can completely destroy your ROI, thus eliminating your traffic’s usefulness completely.

On the other hand, a well-optimized site with carefully developed content, quality backlinks, good domain age, etc. that ranks well in the SERPs has a huge advantage over newer contenders in the same space. It’s much easier to maintain traffic from such a site, because anybody who want to compete with you in that space will have to develop a site with more relevant backlinks or better content, which is a lot more difficult than simply upping the bid on their PPC dashboard.

While the idea of defensible traffic has long been an argument for whitehat SEO development, it’s nice to have a handy dandy industry phrase to attach to it.

technorati tags:defensible, traffic, seo, sem, ppc, arbitrage

I’ve decided that for the new year I’m going to add a bunch of SEO/SEM blogs to my feedreader to try them out. Among the mix are blogs that I’ve had in my reader in the past, but ditched (maybe they’ve gotten better, or maybe I’ll be more mature) as well as new blogs that I’ve just learned about.

So here’s the plan:
I’m sticking all the new blogs in their own folder, and as time goes on, I’ll be reading them, tossing out the ones that have a high noise to information ratio, and moving the really good ones into my daily must-read folder. I’ll try to give a shout out on the blog to those blogs that make it into my daily reads folder, along with my reasons for placing them there.

In addition, I’ll post when I find a new blog that I’m adding into the experiment group.

Here’s a fairly comprehensive list of the blogs I’ve added. I’ve also thrown my daily must-reads in to the mix to see how they hold up to the rest.

• Search Engine Land
• SERoundtable
• Matt Cutts
• SEO Book
• Graywolf
• Marketing Pilgrim
• Threadwatch
• SE Journal
• Lee Odden
• Bruce Clay, Inc.
• SEO Scoop
• Cre8PC
• Google Blogoscoped
• Copyblogger
• Stuntdubl
• SEOEgghead
• FreshEgg
• Creating Passionate Users
• Dan Thies
• Guy Kawasaki
• Webmaster Central Blog
• ProNet Advertising
• SEO by the Sea
• Jim Boykin
• Tim Converse
• John Battelle
• Yahoo! Search Blog
• Jon Mendez
• TallTroll
• Shoemoney
• SEOPedia
• Eric Enge
• Sugarrae
• DaveN
• JenSense
• Seth Godin
• SEO Researcher
• MindValley Labs
• SEOIdiot
• SEO Black Hat
• Traffick
• Link Building Blog
• PR Squared
• Jeremy Zawodny
• Xan Porter
• Search Engine Lowdown
• Daggle
• IR Thoughts
• Joe Morin
• SEORockstars
• Official Google Blog
• Ask.com Blog
• MSN Search Blog
• ClickZ Blog
• Pearsonified
• Cartoon Barry
• Greg Linden
• Greg Boser
  
• Mike Grehan
• LinkMoses
• Ian McAnerin
• Jarrod & Co.
• Mr. Hooley
• SEW Blog
• Oilman

Enjoy!

technorati tags:blogs, rss, seo

I just read Rand’s latest post over at SEOmoz, in which he bravely posted his company’s financial information. First of all, I was surprised at how little Rand and his crew are making. As (in my mind) one of the top-flight SEM companies out there, it seems like they should have been making a lot more.

However, I think that some of the reasons for this surprising lack of cash are why I admire the hell outta Rand. First, he’s hired several new employees this year, some of them with little or no SEO experience. His rationale for doing this? It’s easier to find and train a good employee who is smart and fits well with the rest of the team than it is to find an experienced SEO who fits the same requirements. So far it seems to be working for him.

Second, apparently he has chosen to turn away far more clients than he took (took 25, referred around 300 to his recommended list). He acknowledges that he could have done a better job of monetizing those potential clients. I’m sure that he could have taken the time he uses to post to his blog, write articles, and speak at conferences to work on more clients.

Third, it seems that Rand has chosen to put the money back into the company in order to fuel continued growth rather than writing fat bonus checks.

Now for the interesting part.

He announced that in order to better compensate SEOmozzers, he’s going to start offering paid content on SEOmoz.

We’ll NEVER shut down the free material we provide via the blog, themany articles and the tools (in fact, we intend to expand all ofthese), but we are going to be wrapping some of our best advice intocomprehensive, digestable packages and providing some special featureson the site to paid members.

I, for one, will be exteremely interested to see how much this costs. Provided the price tag isn’t TOO prohibitive, (see SEOBlackhat Forums) I’m pretty sure I’ll subscribe.

technorati tags:seomoz, financials, seo

Today I ran a rank check on our selected keyword and our page came up 15 in the Google SERPS, which is cool because before this week, we were nowhere to be seen.

Interestingly, we’re still buried in Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!. I guess it’s because I’ve been using the GooglePray tag, but have neglected to do my Ask devotions, MSN processionals, and Yahoo! incense.

I subscribe to several copywriting blogs and newsletters, and the thing I notice the most about them is that as a consumer I wouldn’t read any of the lengthy copy examples they give.

I don’t think that I’m alone when I say that I don’t have the attention span to sit and read through a lentghty sales pitch online. I want to see the most cogent information as quickly as possible. I want to see exactly why I should buy your product or service with a minimum of time and effort.

We live in the age of pop-up blockers, TiVO, and search. People are
becoming less and less likely to listen to people telling them what to
think about a product or service, and more likely to already have a
pretty good idea of what they want.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t provide valuable, in-depth information about your product or service. However, rather than distracting the customer with a hard sell, it makes a lot more sense to put it on additional pages that interested customers can get to if they want to know more.

So rather than writing a long, boring sales letter to post on your website, create a compelling, useful product that fills a need (a product that creates need is a different story. More on that another time). Briefly explain the benefit of your product USA Today style (lots of pictures and short, concise sentences - sound bites, if you will). Oh yeah, and keep it brief.

technorati tags:copywriting, sales, letter, copy, internet, marketing

We just initiated SEOFest at work, which should be really interesting. We’re targeting a relatively generic term which should be fairly easy to get, especially with as many people as we have working on it. I’m going to start posting some linkbuilding tips up on the blog as a resource and also as a refresher for my fairly weak “link ninja” skills.

I’ve been having problems with Firefox 2 freezing on my MacBook Pro. I finally found a solution for the problem, so I figured I’d post it to make it a little more accessible, as Mozilla hasn’t put anything on their site regarding this problem.

Apparently the Google Toolbar is what causes FF2 to hang. While before I removed the toolbar Firefox was crashing every ten minutes or so, after I removed the toolbar, I haven’t had Firefox 2 freeze since.

Google has been apprised of the situation and is working on a fix. Until then, ditch the toolbar. Here’s instructions on how to do so:

1. Go to Tools>Add-ons
2. Click the “Extensions” tab
3. Click the Google Toolbar add-on and click “uninstall”
4. Enjoy freeze-free Firefox2!