It seems the pagerank update is completed - I have seen an increase in all of my sites and a fair few others:

criTix (this wonderful business blog) - 0 (I never used it) to 3 (pretty good)

Several of my affiliate sites went up - 0 to 2/3

Wheels-Near-U - 0 to 3

RankRace.com - 0 to 4 (anyone want a pr 4 domain/site?)

Several web design projects I expected to remain on 1 forever went up also to 2’s and 3’s.

Seems to me that this update has been very favourable - what I thought was going to be a complete stampede of minus’s worked out ok.

• 3p adword clicks - chasing the long tail monster
• Pagex - Bolt on SEO tools
• Planning web dev centralisation - making your files, classes etc centralised for ease of use

Too many people think seo is the end all of internet business. To what extent should we agree with this idea? should we put google before our customers to get more customers? never if you ask me, but its very easy to fall into the trap of doing things because you are used to them, even if they are not effective or even useful.

SEO is great to learn because essentially its the art of providing a good easy to understand site with good unique content that is of some worth. But its far to easy to get caught in the game. Yes using amazing seo skills can get you millions of viewers but no not hugely easily. The art of seo has exploded in line with online business and now is populated by a fair few million seo practitioners, but how far should we go?

It is possible to get huge amount of traffic, from lots of different places. You can gain better positioning in the serps, get dugg a few hundred times, become facebook fantastic - but the first is the only really stable producer.

Going niche is the obvious choice for those who can - but what if you require the top spot for an insanely competitive keyword/phrase - do you go niche for a few hundred similar phrases or work on that one mass keyword - its a sum up to be made by you.

Ultimately the more competitive the business probably the more time need be devoted to seo and sem techniques. If your in a fairly non competitive market you may only have to provide a good website to your seo dude or company and leave it with them for a few weeks to set up good seo practice, keyword alliteration and then your done. But if your after “cars” it will take a whole lot more to make it up there.

Day in day out you will probably need to provide 5-10+ brand new pages of keyword rich, new, original, appropriate content. Backed up by well designed pages, a long standing domain, customers that chatter endlessly about you elsewhere online and a monsoon of backlinks that could carry donkey.com to the top.

Personally I try to go for a balance - some weeks I will push things more than others, on low budget weeks I might do nothing but create good content or further work on making the current pages more appropriate. To compete with the “cars” serp big boys it probably would take a budget of 60k a year - mainly to pay 3 people to do the work!!!

But in the end does seo mean £££? It takes a lot more than just good seo to get the money in. Remember to make a good site with functional ways to convert clicks to customers and customers to £££. Sometimes its better if we don’t all just follow google around looking for our dish of customers and we just go and get them ourselves!!!!

Clicks are effective viewers, completely targeted and ready to be entertained. You pay google, yahoo or one of the other world dominating company’s to dice up their success and give you a billionth of a billionth of the result.

It almost annoys me that I use google adwords, although with competition as strong as it is you need to use all the tools available to you. Anyway I was not part of the now legendary 1p a click generation - I was online then I was probably just doing something less useful - like command and conquer or writing qbasic. But I am online now, trading and making money. So to get these bums in seats, get people there and looking, snag them into using my sites I use a range of tools - one being pay per click. Pay per click is not by any means my favourite type of advertising. Its effectively well over priced in comparison to the other alternatives, should you know where to look. But for new projects I usually allow a certain amount of play money and some of that gets thrown down the google hole.

But to get the most out of your pay per click, that is spend 6p on a good viewer as a pose to 30p is not actually that hard. First I would recommend diversifying. If your target audience is not essentially british (mine usually are but if yours are not) then you have a vast amount of choice in pay per click sellers.

I would recommend trying a variety of different ppc operators to see which works most effectively for your target audience and keywords. Definitely start with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing (£60 free coupon if you click this link :D) and Looksmart.

For me Looksmart provides very cheap traffic, although I am not to sure at this point how relevant it is in comparison with more british targeting equivalents. Yahoo IMO is quite expensive but only relatively.

Google Adwords - if your not paying attention will be very expensive - prepare to pay 80p per click in a mass market for open keywords and still only hit 2nd place. However I suggest the following to get much cheaper adwords clicks (works with all ppc):

Long tail your keywords - that’s it - simple you say - well yes actually. By longtailing my keywords I am now paying 2p-8p for 2nd/3rd/4th position, more specific relevant clicks. This works in most markets, but requires some time and a regular adjustment. Essentially you want to create 3 or 4 word lines in adsense - e.g. instead of “used cars” you want to get “2nd hand cars in uk” - Depending on your localisation (or Hyper localisation) you can then intersect your locations to provide you with a huge list of 3/4/5 word keyphrases. These longer keyphrases will be used less often but as a result will be a lot cheaper. Spend the time to set yourself up with huge long tail lists of phrases relative to your target.

Here’s how I recommend going about getting cheaper adwords clicks:

• Get a database or list of your products/locations/keywords/descriptives. I say get a database because its a lot quicker if you do so.
• Create a php (or whatever language) script to write you keyword lists. Aim to have each line use at least 3 words. Phrases like “used cars west london” rather than “used cars”, other good examples would be “second hand cars west london”, “cars for sale west london” etc.
• If you have a good list of locations you may end up with a very long list of variated keywords. This is only good, just don’t create 20mb files - that’s too many.
• Stick them into google and run them in line with your current broader ads e.g. run “used cars *AREA*” as one campaign in google and another campaign with just the keywords “used cars”. The used cars one will likely get as many hits as you could want, but at a much higher cost. The more long winded list will achieve modest numbers but for a 2nd position it will cost you pennys.
• Do this with all your static keywords, ones that don’t change with time.
• Monitor them - Some will work well others will be no shows, but eventually almost every one will probably be typed in, depending on how long tail your going! Adjust the bid prices in as much detail as possible. If you have lists of thousands build this into the php script to output the bid value on the line *bid*.
• Sticking at double the minimum bid of 3p or 4p will usually get you top 3 position in my experience (with long tail adwords.)

There are numerous advantages to this, but depending on how much your spending it could be more cost effective to just use the broad term. Factor in your hourly wage in creating the files.

If you manage some low cost per clicks - Post them in the comments here - what’s the lowest cost per click you can get in google adwords?

…ok so the title is a little over dramatic, it is probably not the case that google is completely dropping pagerank. The word on the line is that a large number of websites are experiencing drops in their google pagerank, as if a pr update is in progress, however I am yet to hear of any pagerank increments so I am doubtful that a full update is taking place.

Personally it does make me think that perhaps google are up to something, I mean for example raising the bar? Perhaps in the coming weeks/months/days google will announce a new bar so as web people everywhere can discuss and aim for it. This would fit with the mass consensus of page rank drops without any increases, although as much as hinting a higher bar of entry it could also mark the beginning in the decline in the use of page rank.

After all pagerank is unfortunately used a lot by people buying and selling links to gauge the quality of the link for sale, so I could see google saying ‘abuse it and loose it’. It isn’t a defining factor in buying and selling links but I can see it would be one way they could combat it slightly.

In the end its unknown really how much google are willing to do to combat people selling links, scrapping page rank could just be the start…..not that that’s what’s necessarily happening - no doubt there will be a post from someone victorious as the first raised pr in no time at all.

…lets just hope its me