Category: News & Trends

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Thoughts on Blogspot Blog Hosting

From some very preliminary research I am starting to believe that when you archive your posts at Blogspot versus using FTP blogging you do not appreciate the full search engine benefits that you do when you archive them back on your own domain.

I am doing a full blown two month test on this topic and so far just in the first week when comparing traffic results between my two blogs I am finding that hosting your blogs at Blogspot is second best.

One of my big concerns so far is that I can not see some of my posts on my Blog-World Watch where from the same day I can see my posts from Web-World Watch appear in the SERPs. Plus I do a weekly Google Sitemap for my Web-World Watch blog, but can not do one for Blog-World Watch as it is hosted at Blogspot and have no server access.

So my hypothesis is “You will not appreciate any significant search engine benefits from hosting your blog files at Blogspot and will when you use FTP blogging and archive posts back on your own web server.”

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AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding Analysis

You’ve probably seen this new type of bidding in your account by now – preferred cost bidding versus maximum cost per click bidding. But should you use it?

I tried the settings on my own account for a week and this is what I found. I got:

25% less clicks
16% less impressions
8% less click throughs
a 4% higher overall average cost per click
I spent 5% more overall

For me preferred cost bidding increased my costs and decreased my performance.

When would I even consider using preferred cost bidding?
If you have a product that you are selling online that is a set price and you want to have a set advertising cost to hard code in for your ROI equation, then I feel preferred cost bidding would be right for you. Would I recommend other advertisers change to preferred cost bidding. You may want to try it like I did, but Google did not make a billion dollars in profit last quarter for nothing. I just don’t think that this new option will replace the maximum Cost per Click bidding that is used more frequently. I think that in the long run to have a set average bid will cost you more and not deliver the clicks and impressions that you want when tested over time.

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New Ghost Blogging Pricing and Options

We’ve just posted our new ghost blogging pricing and options. Of note is our choice of new blog set up options; Custom FTP Set Up, Blogspot Set Up with a Custom Domain, and Blogspot Set Up.

We’ve also dropped our five day a week blogging service. It is simply too draining for us to blog cost effectively at our low prices five days a week without an additional research time charge.

We’ve added a new program for confidential executive ghost blogging that is quoted on a job basis.

Our prices have not increased much, but we have added some new services such as monthly Google Sitemaps for your blog, Google Analytics installation for blogs just to name two. Click the post title to review all our new details.

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Blogging for Organic Search Placement?

Question: Can you prove that blogging will improve my organic search placement?

Answer: That is very difficult to quantify for a website and is part of an overall strategy for organic page placement. Google alone has over 150 different factors that it uses to determine page rank so there is no one answer that I could give you that would say “blog and move up 10 positions on Google.”

What I do know is that blogging adds content to your site on a regular basis which keeps search engine spiders coming back, blogging when done on keywords provides ways for visitors to enter your site through blog posts and then into your website, blogging as it adds the the number of pages on a narrow topic for your site over time adds authority to your site which is one of Google’s evaluating site factor for page rank.

Wish there was a magic formula to say yes, we can prove that blogging will help you get to the number one spot, but honestly no one can say that. It is a good practice policy that speaks to many of the elements that improve your page rank on Google and the other search engines, but will it help YOU move up, that depends on many factors, your marketplace, your keywords you are targeting, your current site, your overall strategy, your current content freshness, spiderability of your current web site, your current site’s performance in the organic SERPs.

What we do know from historical data is that traffic does improve from a special case study that we have done and that sites that do blog will have a higher traffic level than sites that do not. We know that blogs add to the stickiness factor of a site, and we know that blogs feed the search engine the content and some of the parameters that they are specifically looking for when they determine page rank.

For you, you may want to consider doing a three month test on your site to evaluate if blogging works for your market and viewers and builds your traffic and site over time. Blogging is considered an organic help and organic placement of a site by its very nature is not a quick fix but a long-term process. You will find that most Search Engine Optimization companies are recommending a blog as part of an overall strategy for improvement.

Your question may be a good one for a white paper, but has one been done that I can point you to – not that I can find on Google. You may want to do further research on blogs on the Web to identify if a blog is right for your needs.