Weekly SEO news: 17 August 2010
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Having high rankings for the right keywords will have a big impact on your revenue. In this article, you'll learn how to judge the financial value of your keywords. You might be surprised.

In the news: Google removes the organic results in some local tests, scraper sites sometimes rank higher than the original sites, can a link from Apple help your rankings and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. How much money can you make with a single keyword?

Search engine optimization is so popular because it enables webmasters to get a great return on investment. High rankings for the right keywords can have a big impact on your revenue.

The following instructions make it clear why it is so important to choose the right keywords for SEO. You can make a lot of money by choosing the right keywords.

How to find the financial value of your keywords

  1. Start a Google AdWords campaign for the keyword, select "exact match" and point the ad to the page on your website that is most relevant to the keyword.

  2. Track the impressions and the conversion rate of the ad. To get useful data, you should track at least 500 clicks. With that data, you can make a guess about the value of a visitor that finds your website through that keyword.

Here's a concrete example

  • Your ad might have had 10,000 impressions during a week and 200 visitors have clicked the ad to visit your website.

  • 6 of these visitors purchased something on your website and the total profit was $500.

The keyword delivered 200 visitors and 6 buyers to your website. As the total profit was $500, the average single visitor who finds your website through that keyword is worth $2.50 to your business (200 visitors created a profit of $500: $500/200 visitors = $2.50/visitor).

What does this mean for your search engine optimization campaigns?

The average number one ranking for a keyword has a click-through rate of 40% (according to several studies). In the example above, your ad was displayed 10,000 times.

While your ad was only clicked 200 times, you would get 4,000 visitors per week if your website was listed in the regular results on the top position.

As the average visitors adds $2.50 to your profits (see above) you would earn $10,000 per week with that keyword.

That is $520,000 per year with a single keyword! That is why businesses love search engine optimization.

This sounds unbelievable but search engine optimization makes it possible. It's simple maths and it really works.

Our popular tool IBP helps you to get your website in the regular top 10 results on Google's result pages for the keywords of your choice. If you haven't done it yet, test the latest version IBP 11.7.5 now!

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Google removes organic results in local tests

"Yesterday, for the first time, we saw a standard Google web search results page, without any standard web search results. That is, a search for 'car rental nyc' returned a Universal Results page showing a map alongside results from paid, local, and books categories (see screen shot below). Not one standard organic result appeared on the first page of results."



CopyingDiscussion: Google sometimes ranks scraper sites bigger than the original site

"The website [uses] 70% of the content of [original] website. And with his mayor keyword the site is on the first page for 'hosting'. Now after 2 month the copied pages are all in the top of Google also with the most competitive keyword. And we dropped to position 53. How is this possible?"

Editor's note: this is probably related to Google's Mayday update that seems to prefer popular sites over popular pages.



Discussion: what to do if other sites hotlink the images on your website

"I'm torn between continuing to allow the hotlinks because something in my head says the hotlinks contribute somehow to the site's rankings, or preventing hotlinking completely through a rewrite of some sort.

There are certain times of day when the server slows down momentarily because of the load, so blocking hotlinks would help that. If they have any value for SE ranking, though, I'd rather find another solution to the server issues."



Boost Discussion: can one link boost your rankings?

"About a week ago I got an inbound PR7 link from Apple, and despite the flood of traffic from them, I'm not seeing anything measurable from Google. How long might it take to even see a 10% boost? I have a relatively new site as of January this year, that receives perhaps 50 people a day in organic traffic."

Editor's note: possible reasons are that Google didn't pick up the link yet and that it just needs some time. The link might be nofollowed or blocked. Google might also block links from certain sections of a website.



Search engine newslets

  • Can Slense be the Blekko of Europe? Launches customizable search engine.
  • Are there any plans to implement a "negative keyword" meta tag?(video)
  • Total Recall: Sentimnt lets you search and retrieve information from your social feeds.
  • New Google Buzz API features, including a garden hose.
  • Sorry mobile web: users prefer apps.
  • Google cracks Rubik's Cube by proving only 20 moves are ever needed.
  • Google introduces voice actions for Android.
  • For Google, the cloud is its mobile future.
  • Has the Bing advertising campaign been worth it?

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3. Success stories

"IBP is jumpstarting our revenue."

"Premier Home Rentals, Inc. a luxury home rental company in Beaver Creek Colorado has been operating successfully since 1998 and online since 1999. We have always enjoyed a trickle of traffic to our site SkiHomeRental.com but found this past year to be more competitive in closing the calls we were getting.

I ran my first ranking report with IBP two months ago and now we have 54 new search engine listings, 30 on first pages, including 5 lucrative Google keywords on first page.

Not only have calls increased, the quality of the inquiry is more specific to our product, resulting in higher conversion and higher spending per client.

One call has just resulted in a record breaking deal! After 11 years in business IBP is jumpstarting our revenue and alleviating my concerns about another lean year. Not to mention it's fun to run the reports and see improvement each week, thanks for creating such a powerful tool."
Kristen Nye, www.skihomerental.com



Tell us how IBP helped your business and 250,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

Click here to tell us your story.



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4. Previous articles

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