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This it the home of the archives of Above The Fold, my search engine marketing newsletter.

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Above The Fold Articles

Article Archives

ABOVE the FOLD Vol. 2 issue 21.

sections:

tool of the week *** book of the week ***what would you like ***around the web: Quality Content & SEO forum news *** random funny

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Around the Web (news):

Article: What is Quality Content?

Many people tell you to use "quality content," but I have never found a good legit answer to what it is. So I tried to explain it as best I could. An exclusive article for the Internet Marketing Research network!

http://www.internet-marketing-research.net/quality-content.php

 

SEO contest first month winner announced. Merkey forums. Check out SearchGuild to keep up to date with the latest contest info.

http://www.SearchGuild.com

 

SearchEngineWatch has a new forum.

http://www.forums.searchenginewatch.com

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Tool(s) of the Week:

Split Tester: helps you determine if you have collected enough conclusive evidence to determine if the outcome of a split test.

http://www.splittester.com/

 

Google Toolbar for the Mac & Mozilla (with PageRank) http://toolbar.nickstallman.net/

this hack adds display PageRank to the popular GoogleBar Product, (http://googlebar.mozdev.org/), though some people might see some privacy concern issues.

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Book of the Week: <hard sale>
Reupdated my super duper absolutely wonderful ebook with all kinds of yummy and nummy info.

search any major search engine for
SEO Book

and buy from the #1 listing result. :)
</hard sale>

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What Would You Like

This newsletter will only be good if I can offer what you are interested in. Please send your SEO questions or any ideas you have for things I should put in here.
mailto:aaron@search-marketing.info

Question:Hi Aaron,
I purchased your book and have a question. I've been interested in SEO since 2000 when I first bought an eBook from Ken Envoy. I've also purchased WebPostion Gold and have performed many on page optimizations over that last several years. It seems to me the more I read and try to optimize my web sites the more confused I get. Thanks to you I have installed the google toolbar and now can see the page rank but this confuses me also. I understand page rank when I do searches I find page ranks all over the board for the first 10 listings (pr6 - pr4) and I move to page 5 and I see a really high page rank (pr7). I look at the display of the key word I searched (i.e. Lamps in one case) and I do not see a consistant pattern for on page optimization either.

Is there something I am not understanding that would shed light on this?

Thanks for your time (and book).
Dan Torkelson

Answer:Hi Dan
Glad to hear my book is helping.

Sorry for any confusion. Let me try to clear some of this up.

PageRank is a measure of link popularity. If a page with a high
PageRank links to you then it parses some of it's PageRank through to
your site and your PageRank will go up.

PageRank is only one small part of Google's overall ranking algorithm.
Page copy, page title, and the text in the links pointing at your site
are all extremely important.

Some pages are part of a really powerful website and have a bunch of
PageRank but may not be well optimized.

Other pages may be well optimized but not have as strong of a PageRank.

Because PageRank is a factor independent of other ranking elements the
search results may contain a huge variety of various PageRank's mixed
in them.

please let me know if that explained it good or if you still have questions
thanks
aaron

Follow up question:Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the quick response!

I'm still a bit confused. I think I understand how page rank is calculated:
damping factor(.85)*sum(pr/links) + .15 where pr is the page rank for a page
that links to my site & links are the number of links on page.

I also am aware of keyword prominence and density in the various parts of
the web page (body, links , title ...), work count on the page etc ...

I search in Google on Lamps and I see the first ranked page with pr6 and
keyword count of 52 scattered throughout the page (mostly in link text). I
view number 7 with a pr4 and the work lamp in the title (the page has
frames) and lamps only appearing a few time in the 2 frames. I look at
number 39) and see a pr7 and Lamps appearing many time mostly in links just
link number 1.
I look at other pages and get different combinations of pr and page
optimization. I don't see any consistent patterns that I can apply to my
SEO efforts. I see a bunch of anomalies i.e., poor page rank and seemingly
poorly optimization pages ranked high and visa versa.

I'm thinking there must be some perspective that will make this all make
sense.

Thanks,

Dan

Follow up answer:Hello Dan
here is a newer tool I intend to add to the SEO book in the next couple days.
it shows the PageRank of a page next to each result

http://www.webmasterbrain.com/prog/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=lamps&num=100

for semi competitive and competitive single word searches the anchor
text will become the single most important factor. a good article
wrote by my friend Chris Ridings explains this concept very well.
http://chriseo.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=62&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

this search shows where sites rank based on anchor text. sites which
have the words "lamps" in a bunch of the inbound links will rank well
using this test.

http://www.webmasterbrain.com/prog/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=allinanchor%3Alamps&num=100

there is no clearly defined rules as to what percent each part plays
into the ranking of a page. by mixing it up search engines make it
much harder to manipulate their rankings.

did that help?
thanks
aaron

follow up question: Yes that helps a whole lot! Thanks very much.
So in my example the #7 appeared as #5 when looking at inbound links with
the keyword in the text of the anchor tag even though the pr was 4. that
probably made up for poor "on page" optimization.

The article by Chris Ridings pertained to "on page" vs "off page" factors
and the importance of getting people to link to your site based on content.
I didn't see much about importance of inbound anchor text. But it was very
interesting never the less.

Again thanks for our help.
Dan

follow up: Hi Dan
I thought Chris's article would do a good job to explain why links
were so important in this particular instance.

anchor text is EXTREMELY important for ranking well on generic one word phrases.

can I use our chat here in next weeks newsletter :)
thanks
aaron

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Question:Hi Aaron,
I have been asked to find information and comparisons on different SE business models for a friend and am delighted to have found your site. It is very informative and detailed. I was just wondering if you could tell me how recently you researched and wrote this information, in particular about advertising with SEs, eg. Google AdWords. I assume from the 2004 copywrite that it is fairly recent but would just like to make sure. Thank you for your time. Kind regards.

Answer:
a couple of the pages might be a bit out of date (few months) but not
much more than that.

as far as businesses and technology models there are 8 going on right now.

1.) Teoma (http://www.teoma.com) is owned by Ask Jeeves and looks for
local web communities using a system of hubs and authorities. they
currently only provide about 5% of the domestic US search market. they
have site submission price of $30 and also place Google AdWords ads in
their search results.

2.) Google is primarily a mathematical company that believes in the
concept of understanding the web as a whole. they have a link
popularity measurement by the name of PageRank which makes pages with
many important links into them very powerful and able to redistribute
this power throughout the web to other sites. they have not strongly
implemented any clustering technology like Teoma uses. late last year
google introduced some semantic algorithm changes but had to undo many
of them. google does not have a paid inclusion program.

in addition to providing completely free search results google has an
ad system by the name of AdWords google keeps the ads separate from
the search results in a separation of church and state type belief.
what is really unique about the AdWords system is that it allows
searchers to define the relevancy of an ad. the effective bid price
for an AdWords ad is its

bid price * clickthrough rate / standardized click through rate

this means that really relevant ads will not need to bid as much to
compete as irrelevant ads do.

google also allows other websites to place these google ads on their
site and get a share of the revenue. they have big partners such as
aol and Teoma/Ask Jeeves, and they also have smaller partners (like
me)

3.) Yahoo! bought out many search technologies (I need to update the
pages of Inktomi,AllTheWeb,and AltaVista) last year. they acquired
altavista and alltheweb through their purchase of the #1 pay per click
search engine Overture.

Yahoo! tends to blend pay per click ads into the page display instead
of keeping them strongly separated. the overture pay per click model
is completely open and you can see exactly what your competitors are
bidding. with overture the highest bid wins and they place exact match
listings above broad match listings.

Yahoo! also edits their search results to take out duplicate and low
quality type listings. they use editors to make up for Google's
superiority in mathematics. they also have a paid inclusion program
(similar to teoma), except Yahoo! charges review fees and incremental
cost per click charges.

Yahoo! also distributes its search results and overture ads on other
sites to gain profits. MSN, for example, uses Yahoo!'s technology
currently.

4.) there are some search engines which only provide pay per click
search results and provide these search listings to third party
vendors. FindWhat is the #1 us company running this business model,
but it is nowhere near as profitable as being the company owning the
traffic.

5.) some portals lease Google's technology and get a cut (like 90%+
sometimes) of the click price from the AdWords ads that appear on their
sites. some other sites use overture and get a smaller cut in the
profits.

6.) some sites are meta search engines. they mix the results of some
of the top search engines together and then provide ads with them too.
WebCrawler is a good example of a meta search engine. meta search has
faded a bit since there are only a few major players in the search
market currently. Infospace owns many meta search sites.

7.) some companies (such as Northern Light) offer custom crawlers or
enterprise level search (google, fast, and many other sites offer
enterprise level search) for a set custom fee.

8.) IBM WebFountan aims to figure out upcoming trends to figure out
the proper amount of a product to make. basically the more buzz
something has the more people will chat about it and this new
technology aims to streamline the product manufacturing and
distribution channel (kinda like what i2 tech does, but from a
different angle). most search engines do not search live chat
channels, but IBM searches many odd corners of the web and does
lighting quick refreshes. their first customer was a CD manufacturer
if memory serves.

hope that answers your question.
thanks
aaron

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Random happening of the Week: My roommate was fixing his car and it rained ALL WEEK LONG. He parked in the dirt driveway and not the grass...fun fun stuff :)

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