Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog

Interesting, no doubt.

From this basic data, a high ranking for any given query in Google is worth roughly four times that of a visible AdWord link for the same query. Stated another way –

You have to show four PPC links to create click-through opportunities equal to one organic ranking.

Imagine you were trying to decide where to spend your online marketing budget – do you spend 100% of it on a PPC campaign (arguably predictable, more measurable, and guaranteed) or do you balance it with alternative SEO expenditures to create organic results.

Imagine though you could create tens of thousands of unique key phrases that rank organically high. Could you achieve the same in a PPC campaing? Probably not, and if you could, what would be the true cost of such a plan?

Blogs tend to create tremendous visibility in the long-tail by helping authors focus on specific subjects for each post. Indeed, they are one of the best solutions to creating organic visbility. And for every way that your blog posts can be found (and are found), they are roughly four times more valuable than PPC equivalents.

Read more at Blogging for Organic Visibily vs PPC Campaigns

Google just keeps going and going … almost puts the Energizer Bunny to shame. Google market share gained another 2ppts in March. So here’s a question. If Google gains one more point in market share, will we lose our veto power? That’s right, for all intents and purposes two-thirds of the 6.4 billion web search queries in the US pass through the Google servers.

Read more at Compete.com

On another angle, specialized vertical search is growing.

The generic applications cover a wider spectrum, but specialized applications excel in their niche – because they have an intimate understanding of the semantics of information in their topics.

In the end, there will always be place for generic search – because it may not be economical to have a vertical search engine for every vertical. However, in major verticals, specialized search engines might take a big bite out of the generic search engines’ market share – including Google’s advertising pie.

Technorati turned blog search into a portal, a playground and an all around useful site for bloggers, techies, marketers and statisticians. You can use Technorati to find top blogs, links to your blog, popularity by topic and many other things.

If you like to see how the future of semantic search is shaping up check out some of the dozen or so reviewed at readwriteweb.com

So far Technorati is to blog search at Google is to generic search. The clear leader. BTW, if you like these posts, click the link in the sidebar and add me to you Technorati favorite. Thanks.

Highlights: Business Week survey says executives believe investments in search marketing has the best ROI of all marketing activities.

Blogs are the “human voice of marketers”.

Long tail optimization. David shows us HitTail. I’ve come across this too, and want to implement it as soon as I can. It monitors your search terms, and mines the fragments…the search phrases with one or two hits…and identifies the trends in these aggregated, unique phrases. Looks very useful, and last time I looked it had a free basic version. I expect it is much easier to use and more effective than the Excel app I built last semester to aggregate and categorize keyphrases from my AWStats.

Search is more than having good keywords and site structure. The “inter” in internet is becoming a powerful force, and behaving in ways that we didn’t see just a few years ago. It’s an evolving, rich area of challenge and opportunity that warrants a little extra homework creative experimentation on the part of marketers and business owners.

Social media integration. Possible linkups could be search, to the official site, to the blogs, which goes back to the site. The site may lnk out to social networks, which link back; likewise with the video sites…and they ALL go back to the search engine. Did you get that? The point–there is no single path to you, and no single source for your information. Tie it all together and increase the chances that people will find the things you want them to see.

Think outside the search box!

Good food for thought. That reminds me. Have you set up your LinkedIn profile yet?
Read this tip sheet from Guy Kawasaki on how to maximize the traffic to your site with a properly set up LinkedIn profile. Hint: it’s all about the anchor text.

If you want some link love let me know. I have 1.3 million in my network. I’d love to hear your experience with LinkedIn so please comment away.

The days of passive Internet use for basic information and day-to-day research have been eclipsed by an active Web that can be used to drive traffic, build awareness and establish credibility.

Mastering the intricacies of this new generation of the Web, and the even more detailed intricacies of search engines, are critical elements for creating, maintaining and growing your presence online.

The key to overcoming this terribly difficult process is effective search engine optimization (SEO).

Having your company or service atop the search engine rankings of Google or Yahoo! is akin to being the first plumber listed in the phonebook—your site will be visited most often, when users are in greatest need of information and their interest is highest.

There currently exists a unique confluence of PR, advertising and marketing efforts all seeking to reach an already-engaged audience via organic (i.e. natural) search.

With the wider-than-ever reach of the Internet growing broader by the second, the Web is the undisputed future of these industries.

Because of this, no amount of coverage garnered through traditional PR, or attention generated by marketing and advertising, can compensate for a company lacking visibility on-line.

This visibility is determined by how well a site is ranked when consumers turn to a search engine and begin a search with the intent of finding products, services or information provided by your organization.

The good news is small business now have the means to compete effectively against the mega corporations by selecting their niche and using blogs and HitTail to gather those page 1 organic search engine results (SERP).

He gets to the point with this:

How They Link, Not How Many Links, Influences Ranking

As you can see, the data is great information. The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors — often the most important factor — for how you will rank in Google.

Let me repeat that. The anchor text used to link to your pages often is the most important reason you’ll rank well for particular words.

People still continue to mistakenly think that doing well at Google is about getting as many links as you can. It’s not. It’s about getting quality links from important sites and ideally, very descriptive links — links using the terms you want to rank for in the anchor text.

If you’re trying to show up for some key phrase, the new data will show you if people are linking to you that way, as seen by Google. If not, then you understand that a lot more targeted link building work may need to be done.

Technorati Tags: Danny Sullivan, anchor tags, Google rank and links

Time. Money. Knowledge.Those are the three biggest challenges a small business must overcome to achieve search marketing success, and the three things that make small business search marketing unique. Many small businesses have one or two of those, but not the third. And some small businesses don’t have any of the three, making their road to search success even harder to travel.

Time. As any search marketer can tell you, there are no short cuts to success, no quick fixes when it comes to a broken web site or unsuccessful search marketing campaign. SEO is a process that demands time, and that’s often in short supply at small businesses. According
to the MasterCard Global Small Business Survey 2006, small business owners worldwide work an average of 54 hours a week. That’s 11 hours a day for a 5-day workweek. So, for every small business owner that dared to only put in a 40-hour week, someone else was on the clock for 68 hours. For many, trying to run a business and execute a search marketing campaign is easier said than done.

Money. According to the same MasterCard survey, only half of small businesses owners worldwide are confident they’ll meet their financial goals in 2007. The U.S. Small Business Administration cites a 2005 study that says only 44% of new small businesses will survive four years. The National Federation of Independent Business cited the financial impact on small businesses when it opposed the recently approved minimum wage hike in the U.S. Money is obviously a Big Issue for small businesses. $50,000+ SEO campaigns and 6-figure PPC budgets just aren’t realistic for many small businesses. When you’re small, the challenge is how to get more bang from less budget.

Knowledge. I shared an anecdote in last week’s column about David Wallace finding only 2 of 20 small business owners he spoke to doing search marketing. The other 18? Not doing it, or completely unaware of search marketing altogether.

Read the rest at Search Engine Land.

If you are a small business owner that falls in that group of 18, contact me for my free white paper that will help get you up to speed on what you need to know and why it make sense to start ASAP.

Google is a powerful company through arbitrage. They arbitrate which sites are found on which terms, and this is power. It’s the oil of the information age. It determines who gets what business. They are the ultimate middleman, taking their cut. It’s almost as good as the Credit Card business who gets their 3% on every transaction, then payments against interest. And it’s quite a bit better than protection rackets.

To live in the world of SEO means getting one over on this middleman. But they need you to get one over on them. They just want to make sure that those doing it are not intentionally trying to do so, thereby gaming the system, and unintentionally insulting the power broker. If everyone can game the system, the system is ruined. Gaming the system is a matter of getting the right sort of visitor traffic (potentially qualified customers) without paying for it.

Therefore, if you wish to get your traffic for free, you must game the system without overtly doing so. You must be a good neighbor, respectful of the system, and still win at the edges. No one will begrudge you staying in business through your own hard work, so long as that hard work doesn’t cut into their interests. And if your hard work happens to result in getting more potentially qualified visitors to your website without paying for it, you win. If you produce truly quality content, that the power brokers actually NEED to keep the system stable, then everyone wins.

There is no product to let you live in this edgy moral high ground. No product, that is until HitTail. OK, this diatribe on the state of search instantly deteriorated into self-promotion. But people need to know that if you don’t get your traffic for free, then you have to pay for it. And all the paths leading to getting your traffic for free are full of pitfalls laid by big media companies, designed to make you pay anyway. So, you either need a pre-existing reputation to leverage, or you have to reach escape velocity on your own. Reaching escape velocity can be an expensive proposition if you pay for the fuel (advertising). But you can also take the slow and steady tortoise route, and reach orbit through a relentless series of strong platforms (blog posts). Some of the blog post topics are chosen with HitTail. Others are chosen as a result of your own strategies.

But in the end, you reach where you want to go. You’ve built an effective long tail marketing strategy, with one post standing on the back of the next. It’s turtles all the way down.

That is the penultimate endorsement of the blogging approach I have been advocating for a while. Now the exact next steps are clear. Thanks Mike.