In December 2008, 40% of respondents said they got most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, up from just 24% in September 2007.

Pew said it was the first time since it started surveying that consumers relied more on the Internet for news than on newspapers.

Television was still the main source for national and international news, at 70%.

For young people, however, the Internet now rivals TV as a news source. Nearly six out of 10 Americans younger than 30 said they got most of their national and international news online; the exact same percentage said TV was the main way they got their news.

Don’t Swap Links When…

Things just aren’t fair
Making a name for a new website amongst the already heavily saturated field can be hard and leave you frustrated. It can leave you feeling like Earl Boykins trying to get a rebound against Shaquille O’Neal. It seems insurmountable at times. Shaq isn’t going to just let five-foot-five-inch Earl Boykins have the rebound because he feels sorry for him; it doesn’t work that way. Shaq’s going to make him earn it — and no big dog website is just going to link to you out of sympathy; you’re going to have to earn it.

If it’s just about the PageRank
I don’t believe in swapping links solely for the purpose of passing link juice from site-to-site. Swapping juices is alright if you’re with a lady, but it doesn’t make much sense to me if I give you some of my juice in return for some of yours. That’s called a push and nobody wins. And if the sites don’t have the same PageRank then someone wins and someone loses. That’s just not fair (see above).

No link farms
Link farms seem to be a thing of the past because nowadays everybody knows to avoid them like the plague.

Swap Links When…

It’s a win-win situation
So when do I think a link swap is a good idea? When both websites benefit. I believe this can only happen between two already established sites that share the same topic of interest. The principal behind this is that both websites have a steady stream of traffic and so site A says to its loyal viewers, “Hey, check out website B, you might like it!” and in return, website B says to its loyal viewers, “Hey, check out website A, you might like it!” Both websites can then gain new readership — this is a win-win situation. If either website A or B has no viewers then it won’t work because you can’t send viewers to another website until you have viewers to send. It goes without saying that if both A and B have no viewers then what’s the point – zero from zero is zero.

So a link exchange can work if both websites have a steady stream of viewers. Each website should also share the same topic. It wouldn’t be polite to send your viewers to a site they have no interest in. That’s just being rude to your viewers. If they come to your website to learn about ASP.net and you recommend them to a site about gambling then you’re wasting their time.

Lastly, if you’re going to ask for a link swap you might consider only asking for a temporary swap; perhaps just a six month swap? That’s sufficient time to introduce your viewers to the other site and the other site to introduce its viewers to your site. After that, move on and swap links with another site. Just remember, it’s not about passing PageRank. It’s about both websites gaining new readership.

This is part 2 in the “Do It Yourself SEO” series. In part 1 we tackled the issue of whether you should do your own SEO or hire it out. In doing so we looked at four questions and now in this article we will revisit those questions and take a closer look at what it will take to make your website successful.

Before we begin it’s probably fair to give my background as it pertains to search engine optimization. For starters, I am not the smartest guy in the room. I hold no certifications or formal training in SEO/SEM; everything I know has been learned in the trenches over the last eight years. So what follows are some observations that I have learned during my call of duty.

You won’t find advice in this article like: “use heading tags in your copy” or to “make sure you have keyword-rich title tags on each page” or the “significance of landing pages” — while all are good advice, this would turn into a book if I went that route. Instead we are going to look at the skill sets involved in making a website successful. My hope is that by the end of the article you will have a greater appreciation for SEO/SEM.

Let’s first start by revisiting those four questions we addressed in the first article:

1. Do I really have time to take on the development and promotion of a website?
The amount of time it takes to make a website successful is hard to gauge. First, you have to define success. What does it mean to be a successful website? Is it measured by the number of visitors to your site? Or your search engine rankings? Or how many widgets you’ve sold? Or how many people have subscribed to your feed? Or how much AdSense revenue you’ve made? It may be all of these — or none of these. Depending on how you define success it will play a roll in how many hours you can expect to work.

Also, keep in mind how you define success today may not be how you define success tomorrow. Today you may be happy with 2,000 visitors a day, tomorrow you may want that number to be doubled. Today you may be happy that you rank in the top 5 in Google for one of your keywords, tomorrow you may want it to be for five keywords. Typically, people are never satisfied once they have reached a defined level and only then look to redefine success.

I can’t accurately tell you how many hours you’re going to need to work to make a successful website. But, you can safely assume that the more time you put in the more likely your website will be successful.

2. How much is my time worth?
Once again, only you can answer this question – there’s no formula to plug in. For me, I always keep in mind that the time I spend doing one job is time away from another job. That’s why I almost always turn down side jobs. If I were to do SEO work on the side that would mean time away from my wife, daughter and golf clubs. That time is too precious to me. So you have to ask yourself what your time is worth.

3. How strong are my web development skills?
Anyone in the SEO business knows that there are two sides to the SEO coin: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. Put another way — the development and the marketing. Let’s first look at the development side:

Web Development
I’m going to also break web development down into two sides: client-side code and server-side code. Client-side code is code that’s interpreted by a web browser; HTML and JavaScript are examples of this. Server-side code is handled by a web server which executes the code and spits it out to a browser. So in the end, server-side code ends up being client-side code; ASP.NET and PHP are examples of this.

Since SEO is only concerned with client-side code that’s what we’ll focus on here.

Client-Side code is then further broken down into three more categories often called the separation of concerns:

• Content: the words on the page are so much more.

  It’s often been said that content is king and no one should know this better than a search engine optimizer. Content is the life-blood of any website. It’s the reason why people come to your website in the first place.

  So being a good copywriter is an essential tool in the SEO belt. The ability to write fresh, relevant content that people will find useful and want to share with others is key. In addition, a good copywriter should be able to write in a language that’s easily understandable for a global audience and allows for easy scanning of important concepts.

  Lastly, the copywriter should be able to research and define keywords relevant to the websites market and incorporate those words into the content to appease the search engines without detracting from the human readers experience.

  I would add that I believe copywriting is one of the most under-appreciated skills on the web — it can make or break a website — and so I believe this may be reason enough to hire a professional.

  Now that you have your content you still need to get it on the page and that is the job of HTML/XHTML. Thankfully, learning HTML is pretty easy and should not take too much time. But like most things in life that are easy, people can have a tendency to get lazy. Don’t write lazy HTML. Your HTML should strive to convey the meaning, or semantics of the content on the page; but that’s another article…

  Once you have your well written content properly marked-up it’s time to make it look good, bring on the bling-bling, I mean the presentation layer.

• Presentation: making the plain look good.

  How a website looks should be entirely attributed to CSS. Your HTML code should only serve to define the content and in no way change how it looks as that is the sole job of CSS.

  While CSS adds many benefits to a website, for this article I only want to talk about the benefits of CSS as it pertains to SEO.

  Search engines like Google and Yahoo send out their spiders or bots to crawl web pages and then index the content retrieved on those pages. These spiders care only about content, not code, so all that is indexed is the text. People often times get this confused, if you want to see what a spider sees, try this spider simulator.

  So at this point you may be thinking, how is CSS going to help our website with SEO if all that the bots see is content and CSS is used for presentation? That’s a good question and there’s only one answer: CSS allows our content to visually (in the browser) have a different order than what is actually coded in the HTML. This helps because search engines tend to give greater importance to content the higher up it is in your code. Put another way, the content closest to the HTML body tag is deemed most important.

  There’s really nothing else as far as presentation goes that can help your SEO efforts, because as we’ve just said, search engine bots are all about content, not looks. It’s we humans that can appreciate beauty, not the bots.

  With presentation done we can now talk about the behavior layer.

• Behavior: controls the behavior of your content.

  Thus far we have used copywriting skills to create interesting and unique content which we then semantically mark-up with HTML to create our web pages. We then visually breath life into our pages by using CSS. Lastly, we have the option of giving our pages a layer of interactivity and dynamic behavior by introducing our pages to elements like JavaScript, Ajax, or Flash.

  Many of these interactive technologies can greatly enhance the user experience, but if not properly implemented can pose a real challenge to the search engines. So an SEO should know how to properly work with these technologies to increase the user experience without diminishing the search engines ability to index the content.

At this point we are now done with the on-page optimization. I know some of you may be thinking, but you didn’t talk about <h1> tags or <title> tags, what gives? Remember, we aren’t talking about specifics here, those tags are HTML tags and we can assume when you learn proper HTML you learn the significance of such tags.

So let’s move on and look at the other side of the SEO coin — off-page optimization.

4. How good are your marketing skills?
Believe it or not, that was the easy side of SEO! Web development can take days, weeks, or months, but once you’re done you start the marketing side and that should last the lifetime of your site.

Once again, we are not going into specifics today; we can do that some other time. What we are after now are the skill sets you need to learn in order to promote your website. What follows is a list of marketing skills you will want to learn:

• Cost Per Click (CPC) / Price Per Click (PPC) Advertising: This is where you research keywords and set up advertising networks like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter.
• Link Building: Obtaining incoming links from other websites to yours is an important element of SEO and there are many ways to go about it; but that’s another article…
• Directory Submission: Submitting your website to directories is always a good idea. The major directories include: DMOZ, Yahoo! and Best of the Web Directory.
• Buying Links: Paying for advertising can be a good ROI if you know where to do it. Locating quality websites within your websites industry to buy advertising can be time consuming.
• Viral Marketing and Social Media Optimization: There’s nothing better than creating content so compelling that others want to spread the word for you. This is called viral marketing, much like a virus moves from host to host, a well written article can spread from blog to blog. Social Media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are like hotzones — they alone can spread the word to thousands.

So now that the website is up and running and the links are coming in, it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Wrong! Just like playing video games, standing still will get you killed! You now need to get yourself a web stats resource like Google Analytics or W3Counter so you can track and analyze your website’s behavior. Making heads or tails out of your website’s stats is again another article for another time, but it’s most certainly something you will want to be learn.

This may not be an all encompassing list, but it’s a good start of some things you will need to learn if you wish to do your own search engine optimization. I’m sure that you guys will let me know if I missed some stuff!

Review
Hopefully this article has given you a greater appreciation for SEO and you won’t be so quick to offer up the advice of just do the SEO yourself, because as we’ve just seen, there’s a lot that goes with it.

So let’s review the skills a good search engine optimizer should posses:

• Copywriting: the ability to write original compelling content that your websites visitors will find useful and hopefully share with others.
• HTML / XHTML: the markup that defines your content and puts it in the language used by browsers.
• CSS: is used for presentation and allows our web pages to look beautiful.
• Marketing and Promotion: build it and they will come is not an option on the web. You need a marketing plan.
• Analytics: allows you to know more about your website’s visitors and what parts of your site are working and what parts are not.

They are to websites as sunlight and water are to flowers.

With this in mind it is critical we all understand how to attract links. There are several strategies, from begging other webmasters for links through to viral marketing. The problem is many people get stuck at the begging stage and become frustrated with the whole thing and then never make it past this initial stage.

I believe there is one main cause of this and I think I can clear it up in a sentence …

It’s not all about you!

Really, this is the best advice I can give on generating tons of inbound links to your site.

Put your ego in a jar and lock it tight. You can get it back out after your links have arrived. For now, ignore the ego monster, instead listen to your audience.

• What does your niche really need?
• What do they already link to?
• What do you link to?
• What gets attention from social media?
• What has worked before?
• What is evergreen, consistently attracts links over time?

In a nutshell, think about what your audience wants, not what you need.

The more you give, the more you get back.

Since there’s no Chapter 11 for blogs to file – we really can’t measure the success rate of a blog. What we can do is look at some common reasons why your blog might be struggling.

1. Hopelessly Devoted To You

It doesn’t really matter the event: golfing, dancing, chess or blogging. If you want to find success you have to be devoted. Tiger Woods has said that he often hits a thousand balls at the driving range a day. Folks, that’s devotion!

There’s no doubt about it, lack of dedication is the number one reason for struggling blogs. How many hours do you devote to your blog a day?

2. Going Solo

Did we learn nothing from Roger Waters or David Lee Roth?! Sometimes going solo is not a wise choice.

If your blog is of the more personal nature where you show off family pictures and give your opinions of movies then it makes sense that you would go it alone. However, if you are taking on a more commercial subject you may be kidding yourself trying to do an adequate job alone.

You may need to put your pride in check and get some help. This blog was created to provide webmasters with information on all aspects of the web including: design, development and promotion. That’s a huge task! The best move I made was bringing in others that specialized in areas where I was weak.

According to Technorati, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day. It’s a saturated field and it’s only getting worse. It’s my opinion that the blogs of the future are going to be run by teams, not individuals.

Yes, I am aware there are some highly successful blogs out there run by individuals, but people like Guy Kawaski, John Battelle, Darren Rowse and Brian Clark are rare; these guys are pioneers. It’s not that it can’t be done, but the odds of long-term success are lower.

Also, remember what we talked about with devotion? Having a team can help you pick up the slack. Together we stand — divided we fall.

3. You Gotta Serve Someone

Who knew that when Bob Dylan said, “You gotta serve someone” he would be giving such great blogging advice? Who is your blog serving? Really, if you struggle to answer the question then I’m betting your blog also struggles.

If you can fill a niche or solve a problem, people will beat a path to your door and hold it open for others!

4. It’s Not About the Money

Whenever they say, “It’s not about the money” – it’s about the money!

Far too often people start blogs simply for the monetary gain. When it comes to blogging, I don’t think money is a good motivator. I think that if you lack passion for what you’re talking about your viewers will notice. Intrinsic motivation is always stronger than extrinsic motivation.

Don’t get me wrong – making money from your blog is not a bad thing, but if that is your sole motivation I don’t see your blog standing the test of time.

I would also caution you on using Adsense on your blog. I agree with Rand Fishkin when he says:

“I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That’s not to say that contextual advertising can’t work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don’t get me wrong – it’s unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you’ll have the same impression – low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don’t. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they’re sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link – you definitely don’t want that limitation while you’re still trying to get established.” [1]

5. The Bandwagon Is Not a Good Ride

You might be tempted to post that big industry news story on your blog because it fits in so well with your blog’s subject, but I would caution you on that. Unless you can add something to the story I’m not so sure I would post it. Nobody wants a dozen stories about Apple’s iPhone or whatever the hot news is in their RSS reader — especially ones that say the same thing as the first entry they already read. This can get people to unsubscribe to your feed — not good.

It’s been said before and it will be said again — there is no substitute for well written original content. To quote Seth Godin, “Cover bands don’t change the world…”

6. Give The People What They Want

The beauty of the internet is the ability to track everything in real time. Using tools (often free) like Google Analytics you can see things like: how many visitors your site received, which pages of your site are the most popular and the average time spent at your site. You can also see things like what your viewers searched for within the search engines; how many pages on average your viewers read on your site; how much time they actually invested in your site, and whether or not they are a new visitor or a loyal reader. Simply put, you can know your visitors — what they like most — and give it to them. Any other medium: TV, radio or newspapers would kill for that type of information available to them via a handful of mouse clicks. Make sure you are using it!

I think the article How to Promote Your Blog may also be worth reading on this issue.

7. Prune Your Website

When you prune plants you cut back parts of the plant to better shape it and improve fruiting. Your website should see a considerable amount of pruning too. One of the more powerful features of a website is the ability to rapidly change something that isn’t working. As we already talked about in point six, we have the ability to track everything and know if something is not making conversions.

You wouldn’t or at least shouldn’t leave dead parts of a plant still attached, they should be cut back to allow the parts that are still alive to thrive. The same is true for your website; either fix or remove what isn’t working so that the parts that are can thrive.

I will expand on this point in a future post…

8. Use An Editor

Find yourself an editor – anybody – just get one! An editor is someone who will look over your post before it goes to publication.

A good editor will find and fix punctuation, spelling and grammatical mistakes. They can tell you if something doesn’t make sense, if you need a better transition, if you should restructure a sentence or cut away an entire paragraph that’s deemed unnecessary or if you are being too braggadocious and need to tone it down. Simply put, they can clean up your post and improve upon them greatly.

It doesn’t matter if the editor is your wife or a friend; they can help! Of course you, the author, should be the first editor, but you should not be the only editor. Editing your own work is most difficult. This is because the mind can trick you! When you read over your own work the mind fills in the gaps for you. This is because in your mind you know exactly what it’s supposed to say, regardless of what it really says. So when someone else reads it – anybody else – they don’t have that problem and can see the mistakes.

An editor can mean all the difference in the world…

9. RSS Feeds

I have talked about the significance of RSS feeds on this Blog Critique post and the WordPress – From Install to Pimped Out post before. So let me summarize the key points here.

Thanks to RSS and feed readers it’s become common-place that your blog’s content gets read from a source other than your website. Because of this, you should optimize your feeds. Here are my recommendations:

• Some people estimate that half their bandwidth goes to RSS feeds. Let FeedBurner take the hit for you by offloading your feeds to FeedBurner. Try the FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugin. This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to FeedBurner so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Enable FeedBurner’s FeedFlare feature – It’s located under the Optimize tab once logged into FeedBurner. FeedFlare allows you to place a footer at the bottom of each post with such choices as to Digg this post or to add to Technorati or del.icio.us. FeedFlare is certainly worth checking out.
• In the WordPress Admin Panel, under Options – Reading, make sure the ‘Full text’ radio button for Feed Syndication is ticked.

10. Post Titles = Title Tags

The rookie blogger will often times create snappy post titles that are fun and humorous to humans. But, after the post is off the front-page and well into the archives the best chance it may get of being read is from the search engines.

Because of the significance of title tags on search engines one must be mindful when selecting a title for each post. This is not to say that you should neglect your human viewers in order to please a bot; never do that. A balance must be struck.

The next time you are thinking about titling a post think about the keywords that may be used in the search engines later to find it. Then try to create a title that’s still pleasing and appropriate to humans, but also includes keywords for the search engines.

For further reading on the importance of Title tags read “Title Tags – A Search Engine Optimization Cornerstone.”

If you have a blog that is struggling, try implementing some of the suggestions given and hopefully you’ll start seeing it spring back to life.

References:
[1] 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

Did you like this article? If so then subscribe to Search-This and get more articles like this one delivered to your door… or feed-reader! The link below allows you to subscribe – you can even subscribe via email! So what are you waiting for?

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in blogging (or on any website for that matter) is to not fully utilize your title tags. The title tag has been and will continue to be one of the most important elements in search engine rankings. Title tags are the over-arching descriptor for the page; they communicate with the search engines telling them what each page is about.

So then why is it that so many websites fail to optimize their title tags?

Without question the biggest mistake made by websites is to simply use their blog or company’s name as the title. Take Zales as an example. They are one of the biggest diamond stores around and yet what do we find in the title of their homepage? Nothing that mentions diamonds! Compare this to Luxurien’s website and notice the title of their page.

Luxurien’s title tag is fully optimized with their most important keywords: “Fine Jewelry”, “Titanium Rings”, “Bracelets”, “Tungsten Rings”, and “Gemstone birthstones”. These are keywords for which they would like to place highly in the search engines. So it comes as no surprise that they rank second in Google for the keyword titanium rings.

You might be thinking, “Yes, but what if someone types the name of the company in the search engine? Don’t we want to rank first for that too?” Of course you do, but that is pretty easy to achieve. The competition for the keyword “Luxurien” or “Zales” is pretty low, right? The competition for “diamond jewelry” or “titanium rings” is fierce.

Besides, if someone is searching for Luxurien in the search engines it’s reasonable to believe that they already know who you are as they are already seeking you out. In other words, that fish is already on the hook.

Often times people think they are being smart by putting their keywords first in the title tag and then at the end including the company or blog name. I still don’t recommend this! The reason is because by including the name along with your keywords you have lowered your keyword density.

The website that uses “Internet Marketing” as its title has a higher keyword density than the one that uses “Internet Marketing by Search-This“. If you’re in a competitive market then you need all the edge you can get so I would recommend you drop the name and just stick with the keywords.

It’s believed that the keywords in the beginning of the title tag are weighted more than those in the middle or end. So be sure to place your most important words in the beginning of your title tag.

Finally, it’s also believed that a character limitation exists and is set to around 60 characters. So again, keep your title tags short and focused.

For review, your title tags:

• should contain the keywords for that particular page
• should not include your blog or company name
• should be short and concise
• should have the most important keywords first
• should not include words like “the”, “by”, “that”
• should be unique for every page

My answer: “One post at a time…”

It’s not sexy, it’s not a quick fix, it’s not a secret URL that you submit to and the rest is done for you. I’m sorry – I have no secrets for you – I wish that I did. The only way that I know how to make your blog a success is “one post at a time”. I will say that I think there’s more to this answer than meets the eye. The answer actually consists of two parts – that’s what we’ll look at in this article.

Part 1. – Content Is King, Really?

Give people what they want and do it consistently. You do that and people will visit you – and – continue to visit you.

When the “How do I promote my blog” question is asked in forums it usually doesn’t take long for someone to reply with, “Content is king.” Really? Is content king? All websites have content – even the dancing hamsters is content. I would submit to you that giving people what they want is truly king. If that be content, then have relevant content. If it’s driving directions, then give good directions. If it’s discount prices on jewelry, then have quality jewelry at low prices. If it’s nude pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt then she best not be wearing clothes. And if people want to see dancing hamsters, then give it to them – give the people what they want.

There’s a reason your visitors came to your site. Are you fulfilling their expectations? If people visit your blog one day and you’re talking about PHP coding techniques but the next time they visit your blog you are reviewing the movie you saw over the weekend, you may find yourself having a hard time building a steady core of followers.

It’s not that you can’t do that with your blog; you can. That’s exactly what I do with my personal blog. I blog about anything I feel like blogging about: movies, music, Jennifer Love Hewitt, whatever. The problem is that blogs like that have no niche to fill. With no niche you have no target audience. That’s ok, if you don’t want expansive audience.

Give people what they want and do it consistently. Being a one-hit-wonder in a band or in blogging is not a good thing. I take that back, being a one-hit-wonder in a band can still make you millions these days, but in blogging it’s no good. Try and have quality content on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be daily, just on a regular basis. You may decide to post once a week or twice a week, whatever, just be consistent. If you post three times a week for a month then that’s what your audience will come to expect.

I would encourage you to post quality over quantity. Don’t post just for the sake of posting. If everybody else has covered the unveiling of Apple’s iPhone then you may want to let it go. Ask yourself, “What can I bring to the table?” If you can take an angle that you feel hasn’t been covered then by all means, continue, but if you are just going to post a “me too” post, skip it.

Give people what they want and do it consistently. You do that and people will visit you – and – continue to visit you.

Part 2. – One Post at a Time…

It also needs to be said that if you are going to comment for the sole purpose of trying to appease the search engines, you can skip it.

“One post at a time…” I never said that the post had to be on your own blog! Get out there and visit other people’s blogs. Be friendly and comment. I visit about half a dozen blogs a day, I usually comment about four times a day. Again, don’t just post for the sake of posting, have something to say.

If you’re just going to post something like, “Hello, nice blog, please visit my blog”, then skip it. Try and contribute something to the conversation at hand. If you can’t do that, then maybe you should not be in the business of blogging.

Also, commenting on other blogs is a great way to sharpen your blogging tongue. I often find myself returning to my own blog spurred on by something I read on another blog. I will often comment and then expand upon my comment back in a new post on my own blog.

It also needs to be said that if you are going to comment for the sole purpose of trying to appease the search engines, you can skip it. Most blogs add the no-follow tag to links there by neutralizing the value of the link to the search engines. So once again, bring something to the table.

There’s no quick fix for promoting your blog. It takes work, good old fashioned blue-collar work. If you like your blog’s topic enough then there’s a good chance you won’t mind putting in the time and it won’t feel like work at all. Making a successful blog starts with one post at a time.

HEADS UP: In 2008, we are going to have a new blog post every month dedicated to blog promotion! If you’re looking to maximize your blog’s potential then subscribe to Search-This today.

640-863 640-863 CCDA Free Practice Exam

ZenithOptimedia, a media planning and buying firm, said it expects the Internet to account for 8 percent of the world’s total advertising spending in 2008, compared with 7.9 percent for radio.

Ad spending on the Web is expected to grow six times faster than traditional media between 2006 and 2009. ZenithOptimedia said apart from the Internet, only cinema and outdoor advertising are expected to grow faster than the market to 2009.

[ more here ]

I wonder what percentage is Google AdWords / AdSense? Whatever it is, it’s too high…

Search-This received 22,633 unique visitors that day; about 20 thousand more visitors than normal! On day two we received 10,798 visitors and on day three we were almost back to normal with 2,837 visitors. You can see this in the charts below:

In addition to all the new-found traffic we also had many new subscribers to our RSS feed. FeedBurner showed an increase of 321 new subscribers the same day the article broke on Digg. However, it’s been steadily decreasing ever since.

I must say that I find this a bit interesting and disheartening. It means many people added our feed only to read the article, “No Margin For Error” and once they were done reading it they removed us from their feed list. Seems like a lot of work to read only one article. Why didn’t they at least give us a week and check out our other articles before ending their subscription?

The image below shows our FeedBurner spike and then decline:

In closing I’d like to share with you some of my thoughts on the Digg spike. It’s easy to say that the new-found traffic was great. If it introduces people to what I think is a great blog full of valuable information that allows them to make their websites better, then I’m all for it.

However, I think as a blog we need to guard against becoming addicted to the quick and easy ‘fix’ type of traffic that Digg provides. I don’t want Search-This to take the path that some blogs have, where they don’t create any real content. Instead, they create quick and simple lists mostly made up of screen shots from other sites. These simple lists seem to do well on Digg, but do little to teach the blog viewer. These type of sites seem to concentrate their efforts more on getting “Dugg” than offering their viewers any real solutions.

As a blog dedicated to providing solutions to webmasters, we will continue to create articles that inform and teach first and if they then get “Dugg”, that’s great. We will not create articles for the sole purpose of Digg trafficking.

Health insurance leads can help you grow your business through a good return on investment.

“The newspaper industry is expected to lose roughly $890 million annually in advertising revenue to the Internet through 2007, according to a March, 2006, report by Citigroup Investment Research. And much of the 1.4% growth in advertising overall this year is expected to come from a more than 15% gain in online revenue.”

[ more here ]