Clickfield v. Crazy Egg
By David Golding
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I recently noticed that Crazy Egg is selling a service that measures the clicks of your website. It gives you a heat field view of each web page and other stats. I thought this was hardly worth $99 so I wrote my own cheaped out version and posted it here and on Hotscripts for free.
We ought to give back, right? Well, I feel a sense of satisfaction for having posted something out there for the world wide web to enjoy free of charge. Please indulge me by giving it a try:
Linking Does Not Affect Ranking
By David Golding
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The usual mantra of search engine optimization experts is that “linking drives up ranking.” So, you find your site in need of some ranking boost and you do all this strategic link placement, spend all this money either on time or advertising, to get those links moving for you, and you expect to see some ranking changes. Well, I have come to the conclusion that the number of links, either overall or targeted, has no positive or negative correlation to ranking position.
A fabulous SEO article from SEO Moz reports that linking in general is a disputed factor in determining rank. Additionally, global popularity of the site is the highest disputation among the polled SEO experts of what constitutes a valuable link.
I performed my own preliminary experiment to determine whether or not the number of links has a correlation with a site’s ranking for any given keyphrase.
Methodology
First, I generated a list of 20 random words using simple random sampling. Of those 20 random words, I ran them through Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool and pulled the top 5 phrases for each. My total list amounted to 89 keyphrases (some words had less than 5 phrases).
Then, each keyphrase was run through Google’s search engine and the top 10 results for each was queried using both “allinurl:” and “link:” strings. The total number for each was recorded, as was the rank of each URL. Then, the ranking was compared to both the “allinurl:” and “link:” numbers to provide a correlation value.
Sites [XLS] is an Excel file that contains all the keyphrases and URLs searched. Google’s API capped me off at 534 URLs because they only allow 1000 per day and I met my limit, but hey, we can continue the experiment if desired. However, 534 is a high enough number to make a statistical conjecture.
Results
The results were that there existed no correlation between the number of “allinurl:” or “link:” links for any given URL and ranking among top-ten-ranked websites. (r=-0.07 & -0.04, respectively.)
What this means isn’t that linking must go out the window. There exists enough confirmatory evidence that linking does affect ranking to a significant degree. What it does suggest is that the quality of link is much more important than the quantity of links.
eMarketing Myths
By David Golding
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A close friend of mine began researching the internet and wanted to learn to build websites. Once he could effectively build one, he ran into the problem that every single one of us out there in cyberspace have asked ourselves at one time or another: How do I get traffic? So he did what any rational web surfer would do. He turned to the internet to get answers. In a matter of seconds, he came across a handful of websites that promised lots of eMarketing secrets, sure to provide the “secret” source of traffic for any website in existence. He plopped somewhere in the vicinity of $40 for an ebook and read it all that same day.
We discussed the book at length, and I’ll admit, it sounded too good to be true. The secret this particular ebook mentioned had to do with price positioning. The author claimed that what you had to do was inflate the price for your services. Instead of pricing something in the $10, $20, or $30 range, you ought to push it higher like $100, $200, or $300. He claimed there existed a strange phenomenon on the web that when the price was ridiculously high, users attributed higher levels of credibility to the price, and online retailers actually made more money.
I just read a study that was published not six months ago by Harvard Business School. Not only does this study prove that my friend’s ebook was a total waste of $40, but the whole concept of price both offline and online is something even more serious to consider in forming any kind of marketing strategy for any company both offline and on. This research shows emphatically that users gauge price carefully and will make different decisions based on the perception of the cost. (For example, they show that you can have the same total price for a CD + shipping, but when the shipping cost is higher and the CD price lower, people rate their satsifaction lower. Perceived costs of secondary features like shipping have a significant effect on the perceived total cost.)
This is only one of many stories I’ve seen. I’m here to try to persuade all my readers to avoid the emarketing myths. They are rampant. They can be seen everywhere. The only way to steer clear of them is to focus entirely on the subject matter as a whole. More research is being done by corporations and business schools about the whole of marketing strategy than any one-man-band out there on the net.
Some have tried to separate internet marketing from the mainstream marketing strategies claiming that it’s somehow different and special. That’s like saying algebra is not math because it’s different than overall math, that it’s more “targeted.” No, algebra is math, and math is greater than algebra. If I study all the math I can, I can apply algebra to more than what algebra students can. In the same way, studying marketing as a whole will allow internet marketers to apply their ideas of marketing strategy on the whole to the web more efficiently.
The fact is, internet marketing is one of many disciplines of the whole of marketing. And I vote emphatically for online businesses to focus on the marketing principles on the whole rather than consider their website special or different from a legitimate business venture.
For some additional reading, go see how others have argued the same point not 3 years ago: Search Engine Optimization Myths Debunked.
Yes, do some SEO. Yes, factor in the current internet marketing trends into your strategy. But ignore the current marketing research and overall principles to your own demise.
