Photo by Intersection ConsultingHow best to measure a blogs worth? I have been thinking about the value of a blog post and the content residing on a blog.  More importantly, what value and how do readers and other bloggers treat your posts and in turn what ideas did the original post provoke within the reader and community.

A good blog post is one that is capable of generating new ideas which in turn will generate more good ideas, etc.. A good blog post will generate many “daughter ideas” and a bad blog post will not generate any thought provoking ideas or actionable results.

You may try to apply this “what have you done for me lately” methodology to value a posts worth. What we would measure would not be a blog as a whole but each of the posts to see how these posts have an impact on other posts.

Good blog posts receive comments, trackbacks, post links, and are discussed, expanded, reviewed and criticized in other posts. The blog posts inherent good is multiplied by the net, creating what I would call “daughter posts”, bad posts have no descendants.

By establishing an expertise in a given area, many blogs raise their visibility with their target market. Using your blog to grow groups around a technology, cause, political issue or hobby is also a form of strategic PR, personal branding and just plain old good marketing.

Measuring placements, quantity, media format, quality, sentiment and reach help establish a methodolgy in rating and ranking a blog posts overall worth.

Do your blog posts live on?

Photo by Jason MichaelWhat is Performance Marketing
Lets define Performance Marketing:  the practice of targeted marketing to generate consumer behavior. The behavior may be a purchase, registration, click, forward something to a friend, download a white paper,  click a chicklet, etc.. In this vision, the big difference in branding, is that it aims to generate a positive attitude toward the brand, and then moves the attitude/outlook to become a particular behavior.

Performance Internet Marketing,  is the most interactive and measurable marketing known today! The Performance component in the phrase is the measurement and then optimization to maximize the actions that the user will take, rooted within a campaign.

Long Term Vision
Performance Marketing is focused on clicks and conversions, all the attention, and performance evaluation deals with not just the immediate effects but long term outcome of a campaign and branding strategy as well. A good campaign is fully focused on the long term. In fact, if what is being promoted are records or leads, when calculating the maximum Cost Per Acquisition [CPA] thinking about the Lifetime Value or value of a customer for the lifetime of the product, service or upgrade path is crucial in evaluating the true value of a given campaign.

There are brands that have performance marketing campaigns with the concept of “always on” (always valid), those that manage to not only measure the outcome of each dollar they invest, but also create a permanent brand presence and achieve  indirectly the positioning or what you would understand as the mindset of the user. That’s thinking long term!

The brand-building work
The success of such campaigns rests largely on knowledge and attitude that the audience has towards the brand. How to achieve this? Through scheduled performance optimization and user experience enhancement through every step of the funnel. Brand positioning,  is the set of attributes with which the individual associates the target product/service, is the result of communication you do, whatever the medium.

Performance Marketing campaigns are a proposal for valuable content to consumers, giving the user increasing brand recognition and the marketer the methodological analysis of the users response and response time.

Let’s talk about metrics
When measuring conversions, usually attributed to the success of the medium that last sent the user to the site that generated the action we measure. If I do click on a banner of a newspaper, I interact with a brand of computers, and 7 days later recalling that experience decide to buy a netbook searching on Google. The analytics will show and attribute the sale to Google and not the newspaper. This is a problem called conversion attribution. How do you measure what actually triggered the users actions?

Photo by pangalactic gargleblasterI believe that the “last cookie wins” is the least worse of attributing results discovered so far. C3 Metrics is a media tracking system which claims to prevent over payment, corrects Google’s inherent tracking flaw and properly attributes credit beyond the last click. C3 uses what they call an Attribution Gateway. Maybe Engagement Mapping ends up being a proposal that surpasses the last click, as it suggests. It will not be easy to do in a uniform and comparable way among different media, we will know in time if they can implement their Gateway successfully.

custom alerts: identifying the known unknowns

intelligence: identifying the unknown unknowns!

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

Greg says, “One of the interesting issues in this problem is that Google doesn’t know the first time the content appears. At best, we only know the first page we crawled the content on. It is entirely plausible that we crawl the original content after the copycat.”

Joachim Kupke, Sr. Software Engineer of Google’s Indexing Team reiterated much of what Grothaus said. He also said that Google has a lot of infrastructure for content duplication elimination:

- redirects
- detection of recurrent URL patterns (the ability to ‘learn’ recurrent url patterns to find duplicated content)
- actual contents
- most recently crawled version
- earlier content
- contents minus things that don’t change on a site

Kupke said to avoid dynamic URLs when possible (although Google is “rather good” at eliminating dupes). If all else fails, use the canonical link element. Kupke calls this a “Swiss Army Knife” for duplicate content issues.

Also, do not disallow directives in robots.txt to annotate duplicate content. It makes it harder to detect dupes, and disallowed 404s are a nuisance. There is an exception however, and that is that interstitial login pages may be a good candidate to “robot out,” according to Kupke.

Impressions & Clicks
Joachim repeatedly used the terms ‘impressions’ and ‘clicks’ in the context of a URL in Google’s index. He mentioned that if they see a URL with very few impressions (or none), it will likely take very long to be updated in the index (no surprise there). However, URLs with a lot of impressions and clicks (or on domains that are important and crawled frequently) will be updated quickly.

Infrastructure for Handling Duplicate Content
1. Redirects
2. Detection of recurring URL patterns
3. The contents of a page
4. The link canonical tag (if all else fails)

Historical Record of URLs
Google compares the recently-crawled version with a previously crawled version of the URL

Google + rel=canonical = <3
2 out of 3 times, rel=canonical alters the organic decision

302s work for Canonical Targets
* Because of an internal method for handling the trailing slash on URLs, Google needs to have (and recommends all web developers deploy) a trailing slash on canonical targets and internal links. Without the trailing slash, Google will actually add the slash and update the URL in its index. Now, I’ve found multiple examples of pages where this doesn’t happen, but Joachim was pretty firm that it’s a web problem in general that Google is forced to work around.
* The takeaway is that you should always add the trailing slash to the absolute URL in the canonical target. If you don’t, Google will add it anyway, but adding it proactively should speed up server response times (which may have impact on very large sites).

Google says a common mistake is designating a 404 as canonical, and this is typically caused by unnecessary relative links. So, avoid changing rel=”canonical” designations, and avoid designating permanent redirects as canonical.

Photo by ro_buk [I'm not there]Registering domain names is not as complicated as you might think.

The best thing to do is to find a registrar that is an official Internet registering service and use this to register the domain name. Often web hosting sites will offer registration of your domain name. However, there is some confusion among some of the sites when it comes to ownership of the domain name so the best idea is to register it yourself. Then find a hosting company or your webmaster might host the domain and website as part of their package for you.

Where to Go to Register a Domain Name

Your domain name can be anything that you can think of that describes your site. As long as it is not already taken by someone else, you will be the owner of the name when you register it. There are many choices in the ending of the domain name other than dot COM and those are called TLD’s, ot top level domains, including but not limited to .net, .org, .info, etc…

Find out if your choice is available by visiting http://www.whois.org and search the name you have chosen. Whois is a database that displays information for those searching for domain names. If someone does a search for the one you have chosen, after you register it, this is where the information comes from to show the name is already taken.

For instance, you may do web design for people who do not know how to do their own. The name of your site will be the URL that is entered when people search for a web design service to help them set up their own web site.

Here is a list of sites that host and provide domain names, check em out!

#	Web Host	Website	Price	Setup	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Domain	Money Back	Score	Review
1	Top Rated Host	Visit Site	$3.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free 4 Life	Anytime	99%	Best Overall
2		Visit Site	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	30-Day	96%	Top Service
3		Visit Site	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	30-Day	95%	Top Features
4		Visit Site	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	30 Days	94%	Business Host
5		Visit Site	$5.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	90-Day	93%	Low Price
6		Visit Site	$4.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	Anytime	91%	Best Support
7		Visit Site	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	30-Day	90%	Money Back
8		Visit Site	$4.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	Free	30-Day	89%	Green Host
9		Visit Site	$6.95	Free	150GB	150GB	Free	30-Day	87%	High Quotas
10		Visit Site	$8.95	Free	5GB	200GB	Free	30-Day	86%	Good Starter

Photo by Storm CryptI have hundred of websites and domain names in just about every vertical you could imagine, literally. The websites function as a test bed for my SEO and PPC experiments, a source of income in most instances and best of all, insight to many of the sensors search engines use as Ranking Factors for the  search engine result pages (SERP’s).

The key to my insight is running some form of website analytics on every site.  No one site really tells me what is brewing with any given engine, instead the birds eye view helps me see potential changes to the ever shifting ranking landscape.

After spending considerable time sifting through several dozen reports I noticed a change on or around the 8th of October. Albeit some of the changes were minor and insignificant but I have a bunch of steady Eddy sites that perform very consistently for traffic in some very niche keywords and search engine performance.  I have guidelines and flags set to alert me when something goes wonky and sure enough some of the indicators were off, both positive and negative.

On October 28th I posted to my twitter account the following message to see if anyone else saw something change.

Fully two days later the Google update hit across the board. From SEORoundtable.com  October 30, 2009 Google October 2009 Toolbar PageRank Update

“There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.

The last PageRank update prior to this one was in June 2009, which may have just been a technical quirk because the one prior to that was just a month before in May.

In any event, like I say every time:
Yes, a Toolbar PageRank update means nothing in terms of your ranking changing anytime soon. The PageRank scores shown in the toolbar are outdated and have zero direct impact on your Google rankings. That doesn’t mean that PageRank has no influence, but the toolbar score does not have any influence. Google shows us one thing, but yet uses another thing.”

Forget the complications of extending out the latin 26 character set used for domains currently to include foreign characters, kanji and the like. How will this effect the browsers when you go from English, read left to right as in the URL example here

to something like Hebrew which is read right to left?

This change will be impacting more than just servers around the world. Entire browser infrastructures will need to have their architecture revamped.

In my experience, Firefox has better Hebrew support than does Internet Explorer, Chrome works surprisingly well but gets caught up in translation. Support for bidirectional languages was implemented in Mozilla 3.0, all the improvements and bug-fixes that have been made since are awesome and significant.

Time will tell how the URL bar is handled. How much of the code is capable of handling UTF-8 let alone UTF-16? A simple way to overcome this in browsers (at least in the url bar) is to color space each character according to character set.

The DNS protocol has always been 8-bit clean. UTF isn’t involved in internationalized domain names either. they start with unicode which then gets normalized and encoded as ascii strings. so テスト(test in Japanese) gets translated to “xn--zckzah” as an IDN. a web browser or mail program can in theory then take a domain name like fubar.xn--zckzah and display it in the appropriate script for a Japanese user.

www.arussiansite.рф should be a joy to try and type in

The Internet’s governing body has approved a new domain name process that will allow for non-Latin characters.

The Fast Track Process will launch on November 16, and will allow countries and territories to apply for domain names in their native language with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). If ICANN approves the application, those countries will then be able to start approving registrations.

“The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago,” ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said in a statement. “Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and CEO, speculated that the move could bring billions of more people online – people who have never used Roman characters in their daily lives, he said.

The effort has been in the works for years, ICANN said, but organizers had to get around technical issues, policy development, and global cooperation.

“Our work on IDNs [internationalized domain names] has gone through numerous drafts, dozens of tests, and an incredible amount of development by volunteers since we started this project,” said Tina Dam, ICANN’s Senior Director for IDNs. “The launch of the Fast Track Process will be an amazing change to make the Internet an even more valuable tool, and for even more people around the globe.”

Photo by catatronicI have been working with a company on their website redesign and mentioned that as long as they were going for a complete overhaul of the site would they consider a new domain name.

The old name was truly terrible on so many levels. The domain they had been using for over 6 years only took into account some of what the company was about, the name was too long and had only 1 keyword in the name but worse, the domain name was not a .com.

I use several  research tools to find domain names and hit upon several nice potential names including SEO factors, branding and other forms of measurement.  The domain I really liked was already taken but parked, so I new right away there was a good chance the owner would be willing and ready to sell.  This particular domain name was an “exact match” to their most important keyword phrase The domain name was originally registered in the early 2000′s and  had a clear history.

All they needed to do was pay $17,800 for the domain name. I wasn’t surprised when they got back to me, “we can’t afford $17,800 for a domain name”. “Are you sure?” I asked.

What is the domain name really worth to them

I explained that this particular exact match name generated approximately 1,780,000 searches per month according to a Google search. And upon further investigation into the PPC ads on this exact phrase we knew that a number one organic search engine ranking could get them up to 45% of all of the clicks.  Even if we only had a number two or three ranking we could expect at least a 10 percent click through ratio.

Do the Math

$2.50 CPC times 18,000 clicks a 1 percent click through rate from 1.8 million searches equals $45,000.

In under 180 days the domain would virtually pay for itself!

Having a domain name with the keywords in it does not guarantee you a top search engine ranking. Nothing does, but Google does favor exact match domain names.

In this case, using a 301 permanent redirect, we would be able to redirect a domain name with great history and a great number of quality links to this new domain name.  This new domain also has age, relevant, existing content and pages and links.

The value of acquiring a domain name that has a very popular keyword phrase in it (and a “.com” top-level domain) is that you may also see “type in” traffic. Some people, rather than search for a keyword, type a URL into their browser’s address bar. There are many domain name owners (called “domainers”) who base the value of a domain name off of this metric (type-in traffic), alone.

Domain Value Tips

Is there a keyword in it?
How many people search for that keyword on a regular basis?
Is it memorable?
What is the history of the domain name (number of on-topic links, level of traffic, TLD of the domain name)?
Does it have a hyphen or number in it? Domain names with hyphens and or numbers are less valuable, but may be a good option for SEO purposes because the main keyword may be in the domain name.