But some blogs are not really good. Not good at all.

What makes a good blog?

What makes you read blogs? You can read things you will never be able to read in any ‘official’ publication. Blogs and any other ways of the users contributed content like the social networks, bring the personality of the people in their postings. And that is what makes the majority of the blogs interesting. You really see the world trough someone else’s eyes.

What makes a bad blog?

Edgar Allan Poe wrote once:

We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake [...] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

And this is exactly how some of the blogs are constructed. Tons of words, miles of sentences, and a meaning lost somewhere in between all that content. When you read a blog post on such a blog you get to the end, realise you did not really understand what was it about actually, and hind your eyes glazing into the title and the first sentences to try to get that word you think you skipped reading and it took away the whole meaning of the article. But that key word is not there. It never was. There never was any meaning. The blog is just written to acquire traffic. The blog is just the huge mass of the content submitted to the search engine to attract audience. Any audience. It’s…

L’blog pour l’blog

You can sense the pain the author went through to craft the sentences to find the words to fill the gaps between the predefined keywords. You can sense the lack of overall idea, sometimes even the styles vary from one sentence to the other that is stolen from another author. L’blog pour l’blog has a unique content, and absolutely no meaning, no message for you. We call it a splog since it is a pure spam fed to the search engines to attract the long tail searches.

L’blog pour l’blog leaves a bitter taste in the mouth after you leave it. L’blog pour l’blog is a ‘Bounce Magnet’ since you will leave it from the same page you have landed, rarely clicking on anything else there. L’blog pour l’blog attracts traffic left right and centre and makes money for the advertiser in some extremely low click through way. Huge organic traffic + low CTR = some survival revenue. And an opportunity missed. And opportunity to capture the visitor with a high quality content. To convert the visitor to the subscriber, and a buyer eventually.

L’blogging pour l’blogging….

Where did he came from?
What search phrase he used?
Where did he land on your web site?

The free questions above are the key of understanding your traffic. I lots of cases you will have to drill down further and answer questions like:

Where geographically is your web site visitor from?
What was your rank in the SERP for the phrase he was searching for?
How was your site represented in the SERP for the search phrase he was searching for?
Where did he go on your site?
Where did he go next?
How long was he on the site?

We all know that Google Analytics is the most used online web site log analyzer today. It is free, and Google is ingesting a lot in improving it constantly. But anyone who used it knows very well that although it is probably the best overall service it still lacks the capability to answer half of the questions listed above.

The result is that if you really want to understand your visitors you will have to use multiple web log analyzers. Especially if you have an active site where the content is dynamic and ever changing you will require a real time display of the activity on your web site to understand what do people actually read, when and why. The same article published in the different times of the day will not attract the same numbers of visitors. That and number of similar situations is where you are 100% helpless with just Google Analytics since it’s data is really far from real time, and is not even intended for such use (it is best used as an overview of the historical data).

There are number of tools that can help you to work with the real time data. You can analyse your raw log files yourself with software packages like WebTrends, or you can use the online services. There is a long list of them and each has a number of nice features so your choice will depend on what exactly are you looking for. The online web site visitors tracking services are usually free to begin with and then paid for when your traffic grows.

The ones I can recommend are StatCounter and the one with interesting features for bloggers is FEEDJIT.

IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report Shows First Half of ‘08 Up 15.2% From Same Period ‘07.

The following data highlights key first six-month revenue data breakouts; dollar figures are rounded. ($ millions if not indicated):

Internet Advertising Revenue

Search engine marketing (SEM) companies such as Didit and Reprise Media report that third-quarter search budgets were up, mainly due to a shift from more traditional marketing to search advertising.

Will the economic downturn put a stop to this? Google that is by far the leading channel for search marketing saw its shares halved in price last week, from their top ever value (bask in 2007). Interesting times ahead!

Yahoo has a bit strange ‘Go To Market’ strategy in letting only a limited number of users to it. Their message printed between the lines is that if you become an advertiser with the Yahoo Search Marketing – ‘apt’.

And this is where Yahoo got it all wrong and missed a huge opportunity. Yahoo is here just chasing the direct revenue, with giving a free Yahoo Web Analytics to those who pay for advertising in their channel. What they should have done instead is to use the same carrot on the stick approach and give it free to the publishers of their ads. It would widen their ads network and made it more interesting to the advertisers.

But then again, Google with its the largest online advertising channel AdWords, is giving Google Analytics for free to anyone? Yahoo should have a much better product to create a compelling reason to switch.

Google has the Advertising program called Google AdWords. It is extremely easy to use and instantly starts delivering results – and therefore spending your advertising budget. Google enables you to publish your adverting on the right sidebar and above the search results on the relevant Google search results pages.

Google also have the program for the web publishers canned Google AdSense that enables them to resell advertising space on the number of other sites that are the part of the Google AdSense program. Google shares the generated revenue with the web site publishers that publish your ads.

Since with the Google AdWords program the advertiser is charged only when someone actually click on the ads, and a brought directly to the advertised web site, the program and the model is called Pay Per Click or simply PPC. Again since this is the only widely used service often is the Search Engine Marketing in Ireland reoffered to as just PPC.

I only got the short sample but an interesting chart in it already about the Irish PPC market. It is the breakdown of the industries that people are using PPC most (Does it give you an idea what your next AdSense rich Blog should be about?). If you have the full copy of the whitepaper, I would not mind reading more about the PPC, so send it on!

Ireland Search Engine Marketing Report 2008
April, 2008

The research has been supported by the Irish Direct Marketing Association (IDMA) and the Irish Internet Association (IIA).

Table of Contents

1. About E-consultancy 4
2. About research sponsors 4
2.1 About ICAN 4
2.2 About Cybercom 5
2.3 About Interactive Return 5
2.4 About RingJohn 5
3. Executive Summary and Highlights 6
4. Introduction 8
4.1 Introduction by ICAN 8
4.2 Methodology and Sample 9
4.2.1 Methodology 9
4.2.2 Turnover 10
4.2.3 Business Sector 10
4.2.4 Is search done in-house or by an agency? 11
5. Survey Results 12
5.1 Budgets 12
5.1.1 Percentage of total marketing budget spent online 12
5.1.2 Breakdown of online marketing budget by digital channel 13
5.1.3 Search engine marketing budget split 14
5.1.4 Do you expect budgets to increase or decrease? 15
5.1.5 Search engine marketing spend 16
5.1.6 How much are search budgets going up? 17
5.1.7 Allocation of paid search spending 18
5.2 Objectives and effectiveness 19
5.2.1 Primary objectives from search engine marketing 19
5.2.2 Relative importance of paid search and SEO on brand 20
5.2.3 How digital channels rate for return on investment 21
5.2.4 Return on investment (ROI) from Search 22
5.2.5 Tracking return on investment from Search 23
5.2.6 Effectiveness of ROI tracking 24
5.2.7 Use of web analytics tools 24
5.2.8 Rising click costs (CPC) 25
5.3 Search Engines 26
5.3.1 Search engines used for PPC 26
5.3.2 Best search engines for ROI 27
5.3.3 Is dominance of Google a threat? 28
5.4 Search problems and issues 29
5.4.1 Paid Search problems 29
5.4.2 SEO problems 30
5.4.3 Availability of training 31
6. Market overview 32
6.1 Market valuation and growth 32
6.1.1 Key sectors 33
6.2 Market trends 34
6.2.1 Advertisers seize opportunities as market matures 34
6.2.2 Search advertisers get more savvy as competition increases 35
6.2.3 Polarisation between sophisticated and unsophisticated 37
6.2.4 Google dominates as other search engines fail to step up 38
6.3 Barriers to digital marketing growth 41
6.3.1 Slow uptake of broadband 41
6.3.2 Traditional mindset of marketers 41
6.3.3 Skills gap and lack of understanding 41
6.3.4 Lack of transparency in market 42
6.3.5 Other barriers 42

RED FALGS while choosing the SEO SERVIES! The following is the list of things to avoid at all costs in order of importance.

1. Getting involved with a SEO company based on the nice email you just got in your mailbox, that has a report about your site linked and a nice thumbnail screenshot of your front page is going to get you as much good to your business as getting involved with any other SPAM email your get every day.
2. We can rank you on top for the single word phrase of your choice. – when a SEO service company offers you something that sounds just too good, it probably is – just too good to be true. Do not expect to get on top of the search for any commonly used English word. Web sites that get that high have a team of SEO gurus working in house and managing a number of external SEO service providers.
3. Guaranteeing anything in SEO is just childish. It is rally easy to invest in the marketing with a tangible and measurable results. Unfortunately you cannot ‘Purchase SEO by Units’. Traditional marketing formulas do not work here. It is not back page of the Sunday Times, or the supplement in the magazine printed in X colors, on X pages in X copies. When a SEO service provider gives you guarantees of their future achievement, that is a almost certain guarantee you will not renew their contract!
4. Your SEO company is not going to tell you what are they going to do? Run away! It would be nice to just outsource your SEO Service to a vendor and forget about it, wouldn’t it? There are several layers if issues there. First is that your newly acquired traffic might simply disappear when you stop paying. Second is that you might even be penalised by Google for the actions of your SEO Service provider, and your site banned from the Google index for a long time.

SEO Service is many different tasks, and not all web sites necessarily need all of them. Also different SEO companies offer a different SEO services that in some cases do not overlap even marginally. Every SEO company will try to sell you the service they have on offer. Find a SEO company that sells the SEO service you want and need.

Do not talk to the sales people. As with any vendor, you need to talk to the people who will do the work for you or their management. Not the sales people. The sales guy you might spend an hour talking to might have been selling cars yesterday, and learned what SEO stands for yesterday.

Check your web log analyser and you will see the same!

You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog search engines.

Outsourcing Blogging or not - you need a blogger who understands your (target) market and your niche. A local blogger will write in a local language, about local topics. That is far easier to read (especially in a blog) than a PR structured articles released by the professional PR agencies.

Blogging Costs - an hour or two a day to start with. That will give you a meaningful (measurable) results in a month or two. You need to decide what your targeted SEO result is. In a number of relevant visitors per day. Relevant meaning, that come from the search engines for the phrases you want them to come (relevant to your business). Scope depends of the size of the market. Google.ie is much smaller than Google.co.uk, that is much smaller than Google.com. Therefore it is most likely (depending on the industry or niche), that you will achieve much more in a smaller market with the same budget.

Their SEO ranking tool is missing the Internationalisation that they support quite well in the Payd Keywords analysis, and that is the major drawback on the usage for of the KeywordSpy for the International search engine optimisation.

This is what the KeywordSpy marketing blob says about themselves:

Find which keywords your competitors are using!
Increase your Ad Campaign revenue by finding the most profitable keywords.
Get access to over a billion keywords in our database.

KeywordSpy is certainly the one to keep an eye at, since they are adding new and interesting features fast as well.