Pay per click and search engine marketing has gone through a variety of changes and innovations since its early days of existence. Many online marketing companies are always trying to develop a new ways to be competitive in the field of online marketing and blog marketing. SpyFu will be able to help you gain a competitive advantage and really allow you to maximize your advertising spend by allowing you to research through a great deal of statistical information regarding your competitions every move along with who is targeting certain keywords for pay per click. This information can be useful no matter what you are venturing to start online. If you considering launching a blog and looking for a niche SpyFu can help you.

SpyFu can really be used many different ways to help you have a very strong competitive edge with your online marketing campaign. If you want to find certain keywords your competitors are bidding on SpyFu can help you. You can use SpyFu to find competitors bids and keywords so you can map out your plan of attack similar to your competition. SpyFu can help you narrow down your search for niches with high clicks and relatively low competitors. This website can be used as a very important research tool to grow your business. Online marketers are always looking for new and efficient ways to conduct research and SpyFu is a source that doesn’t get much easier. SpyFu shaves away wasted time doing brutal number crunching work by doing it for you. By landing on a website and typing in a keyword you can see who is bidding on that keyword or keyword phrases along with cost and click figures like average daily clicks and quantity of advertisers targeting that keyword phrase. You can quickly find out if this is a keyword you want to target or simply move on and find one less bid on. SpyFu can also be used for keeping an eye on changing and evolving trends for certain keywords, niches and industries giving you a real competitive advantage over many others not participating in this type of information. SpyFu allows you to spy on your competitors easily and safely by downloading competitor’s keywords and adwords.

President and founder of SpyFu, Michael J. Roberts, has always been a number cruncher. He has spent many great years building and learning the fundamentals for the launch of this company and SpyFu continues to impress us all. SpyFu really takes the time to listen to their clients and that is why in June of 2008 SpyFu made the trek over to the UK and launched their services overseas. SpyFu has become the industry leader in website analytic information. For all of those venturing into the world of online marketing SpyFu will help you keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Cell or mobile phones are not only extremely popular, they are becoming extremely sophisticated. There are now millions of phones being used around the world to surf the net. What are they surfing for? For many users, it is no different to being on their computer. They undertake searches, visit favorite sites and read favorite blogs. So, is your blog mobile enabled?

There is no reason why your blog is not mobile enabled. It can be done in a matter of minutes and if you look around, it can be done for free. Is it worth the effort?

My first response; what effort? My second response; can you afford to ignore another avenue of free traffic? If you’re a business then you need to utilize every possible avenue that may deliver traffic. Since the majority of sites haven’t as yet mobilized, the competition is much smaller.

For those that have a bricks and mortar business, having a mobile presence could be a real bonus. People are using their phone now to undertake searches. If they undertake a search and find your business blog with your bricks and mortar details, you may find it helps to generate more visitors and more sales.

Going mobile can be done cheaply - without looking cheap. Most mobile services operate by simply taking and publishing your RSS feed. Nothing could be easier. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain so are you going to go mobile?

Did you participate in the first WordPress 2.7 survey? If you did, you may want to check out their second survey. As with the first, it includes mockups to help find answers to bloggings big question, “how to improve WordPress”.

Survey number two is concentrating on:

• Where to put the search box

• Where to put the Add New Post button/favorites menu

• How to label the Future Publish/Edit Timestamp function

This time around the survey will be limited to the first 5000 responses. The survey covers three possible placements for the search box and includes screenshots.

The second question deals with a favorites menu that will be a dropdown/button that will provide quick access to frequently used screens - your favorites. The third question covers the time stamp feature and includes questions related to previous use.

In all honesty the survey questions are not earth shattering problems requiring mass input. I am sure there are much more important questions that need answering. If you enjoy participating or just want a quick look at some of the new features, then take a look.

Some bloggers make the mistake of diluting their income opportunities by running too many conflicting ad units on the one page. This can be a huge mistake and often cost you money rather than making any.

A good example is affiliate advertising. You go to great lengths to write a good piece of affiliate promotion. It is keyword rich and will hopefully rank highly in the search result pages. However, if you mix in some non-affiliate advertising such as Adsense, you may earn 0.50 or perhaps a $1.00 for the Adsense click, but cost yourself $10 due to the missed affiliate click.

Adsense is a good example. The ads that run on that page are likely to be for related products that compete directly with your affiliate. Users are clicking through to that site instead of your affiliate.

Blogging income, just like any other part of your web site, needs careful planning and implementation. If you don’t plan carefully, your income opportunities may become limited. Don’t confuse the visitor. Have everything in plain sight.

One easy marketing tool that every blogger can use is actually sit right there in front of them all the time. It is the comments section on their blog. This blogging tip goes further than just responding to comments. I suggest you follow them.

When I say follow your commentators, I am not just referring to follow them back to their site. If someone stops by and leaves a comment, follow them home, find a related post, and leave a comment. While your there, check on who else has left a comment and follow them home. Once again, find some related content and leave a comment there.

In effect, you are introducing yourself to the readers of those who read your blog. Not only are you introducing yourself, you are also visiting them and by leaving a comment on their blog, you are introducing yourself to their readers. This has a compounding effect.

To use numbers to demonstrate this point. If five people leave a comment on your post and you follow them back and comment on their posts. You have introduced yourself to everyone of their reader. Let’s assume they each have 100 regular readers - that is 500 readers who will see your comments. If each of those five have three regular commentators and your follow them, that is an additional 15 blogs you have introduced yourself on. If they each have 100 readers as well, that becomes an additional 1500 readers for a total of 2000 readers you have introduced yourself to.

If ten percent of those readers decide to visit your blog in response, that is an additional 200 readers. And what has it cost you? Perhaps and hour or two visiting 20 blogs and reading and leaving a decent comment.

It won’t happen every time. In fact you can leave comments on all 20 blogs and only receive an extra 20 or fewer visitors. Do it regularly and your traffic will grow. Ask yourself, can you acquire around 200 extra visitors virtually for free? When you think about it, not only are you marketing yourself, you are also networking!

There are hundreds of places where you can acquire free blog hosting. The question is, is it really free? Sure, you don’t need to open your wallet to pay for the hosting. The blogs can be quickly and easily established and posting content can quick and easy. Sounds like a real winner to me.

However, free blog hosting does come at a price. First, for a business, it doesn’t sit well to have blog with a URL that includes a hosting company. Where is your uniqueness? One minus for credibility. More importantly, what happens as your business grows and you realize that a blog closely attached to your web site is needed?

Transferring from a free blog host to a paid host with a unique URL can be done, but it does take time and any search rank earned will be lost. Is it still free?

If you are in business then you need to be a business and that means applying all the trappings of a professional business site. These do not include free blog hosting services.

If you are thinking of costs, don’t. If you have a website with a decent host then it should not cost you anymore to have a blog setup as directory of your site. The URL would look like “yoursite.com/blog/”. If you wanted a unique domain, then you will require a separate host. However, the above URL looks a lot better than one with a free host in it.

Writing a blog that is targeted to other businesses rather than the general public requires a different style of blog content. Rather than short whippy content that is easy to consume or share, B2B content is often more involved.

Blog content that is designed for the general public often needs to follow some ‘rules’. For example, one ‘rule’ often quoted is to be careful with your language. Most readers will not be familiar with ’shop talk’ or jargon that is often used within industries.

B2B blogs are the opposite. They need to use jargon and other ‘inside’ language, first for credibility, second for easier understanding. If a green widget is called a gwidget, then you need to use that term. If you don’t, others may doubt your credibility.

Another aspect of B2B blogging that is different to standard blogging is in size. B2B blog content tends to be much longer in length compared to standard blog. This is because these blogs often need to go into much deeper explanations compared to standard blogs.

In a B2B blog, if you write about a specific topic, the reader wants the details - often all of them. With standard blogs, we don’t want the details - we want a brief summary and perhaps a link to more info if we want it.

B2B blogs will be probably be one area of growth in the future. The online society already uses them; you only have to visit one of the many blogs that cover SEO or online marketing to see how much depth they actually provide on a topic.

Technorati has released its annual stats in its ‘State of the Blogoshpere 2008″ report. There are quite a few interesting stats to come out of the report including the fact that 74% of all US bloggers have graduated college.

Many feel the only intelligence required to write a blog is the ability to put a few words together - and make some sense (some blogs leave that to question as well). No, bloggers do have brains. In fact, blogs themselves seem to be becoming more sophisticated. Quick Stats from the report include:

• 66% of bloggers are male
• 60% of bloggers are between 25 and 45
• 44% of bloggers earn between $20k and $75k
• 48% of bloggers live in the US
• 45% have a Technorati Authority number of 1 or more
• Half of bloggers who responded are on at least their second (or 8th!) blog
• 59% have been blogging for two years or more
• Non first-time bloggers contribute to four blogs on average, and the average blogging tenure is three years.
• Female bloggers are more likely to affiliate links (41% v 32%)

Why are these stats important? If you’re an advertiser, you can target your ad placement according to who is behind the blog as much as by who is reading the blog. Blogs that get past the two year mark tend to be stayers and bloggers that get beyond the two year mark tend to have more than one blog. You can draw many other conclusions from the data - the biggest being that blogging is alive and well and being driven by individuals with intelligence - as least, that’s what the stats say?

Many blog owners, and website owners for that matter, spend a lot of time trying to increase their traffic volume. Some blog owners dream of that front page on Digg, or getting a post that goes viral on StumbleUpon. The problem is, if your blog has been created for the purpose of generating some blogging income, this viral traffic will rarely generate much income at all.

You best blogging income resource is already there. Your current visitors. This is where you are more likely to generate incomes, particularly those coming to your blog from the search engines. What you should be doing is considering ways to leverage that existing traffic into an income stream.

There are several paths you can take at the same time. The first is to determine how searches are finding your pages. What search phrase or keywords are being used? From this information you can rework your content to increase it’s value to the reader. More importantly, placing your income generating model in the most the appropriate place along with a good call to action can increase your conversions.

You have the traffic. You have your blogging income stream. It is a matter of bringing the two together. As you refine your content you will find these visitors staying a little longer. They may then follow links to other pages of interest. Leverage your existing traffic whilst working on standard SEO principles to increase your search engine rankings. That traffic is far more valuable than most of the social bookmarking traffic.

Blog metrics is all about measuring and there are a lot of different variable that need measuring. However, if you are writing a post on your blog every day then you need to know whether or not the new posts are being indexed promptly.

It is very easy to check both Google and Yahoo to see how many pages have been indexed at any given moment. If your pages are not being indexed then you will need to investigate why.

To check how many pages are indexed in Google, follow the steps below:

Go to Google.com
In the search bar enter site:yourURL - use the correct URL either with or without the WWW
Click search
In the results screen, you should see towards the top right, “Results 1-10 of about 100 from yoursite”. You should also check the bottom of the screen to see if the words “repeat the search with the omitted results included”.

This will provide you with an indication of how many pages have been indexed by Google. Repeat the search either adding or removing the WWW depending on the first search. If your site has the preference set for using the WWW and there are a significant number of pages indexed without the WWW then you may need to investigate and perhaps incorporate some 301 redirects.

You can repeat the process at Yahoo! using Yahoo.com instead to see how many pages Yahoo! have indexed. Don’t stress too much if the Google shows more pages indexed than Yahoo! This is normal since Yahoo! can be slower at indexing than Google.

What is important is that as you add content, the number of indexed pages should grow. If you know you have far more pages than those showing in the index search, you may need to check on your robots and sitemap files to ensure they sending the Googlebot in the right directions, and that pages haven’t been blocked.

The more content you have indexed, the more traffic you are likely to generate from the search engines.

Google Blogsearch is one area of Google that seems to get bypassed by many bloggers. However, it can also be a very handy tool for your blog marketing.

Blog marketing can be done in a million different ways, at least it seems that way. Most people look at marketing and start thinking Facebook, Myspace or one of the social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. There is even more success to be had at sites like BlogCatolog or MyBlogLog. There is one drawback to using social media for marketing and that is that not all blogs are listed on these sites.

Marketing of course should not be targeted solely towards other blogs. However, if you have a presence on other blogs you may be able to capitalize on their traffic. In fact one of the biggest mistakes many bloggers make is to get their link on as many blogs as possible purely for link juice. They will leave ‘nofollow’ blogs out of their quest. Gaining a presence on another blog is not just about the link juice, it can be a powerful part of your blog marketing campaign.

Back to Google Blogsearch. By using Blogsearch you can find blogs that are within your niche or have targeted the similar keywords to your own. By visiting those blogs and leaving meaningful and helpful comments you are promoting your own blog. Leave comments that show you really do know the subject matter, comments that will have the visitor telling themselves they should visit your blog for more information.

The traffic you gain from each blog may be only marginal. However, over time that traffic will flow, particularly if you keep returning to those related blogs and leave a constant stream of valuable comments.

Commenting doesn’t sound like blog marketing, however, anything that places your blog name in front of others is a form of marketing. Blogsearch is just one more tool that can help you increase your traffic.

If there is one topic area that will always be popular for blog content, it is the news. Whatever is making the news today will almost always bring in readers - if it is well written and not just a copy of what is in the news already.

Well written commentary on the news is one of the most shared content on the internet today. It can be one of the hardest to write as well. If your blog content contains news commentary, there are two important aspects to work on - credibility and authority.

To gain authority you need to ensure that your blog content is fact based. The old saying about ’shooting off at the mouth’ is very true. If you read a news headline then dash of and write a post on it, you may feel rather foolish if the original story was wrong, or printed as joke (many bloggers have been caught out on April 1). You are much better off waiting and finding other sources independent of the first so you can verify the main points.

Credibility comes from your commentary style. You can be a straight reporter. Some blogs do well in this area, but why read what I can read elsewhere? The alternative is to make commentary on the news. Over time, if your comments are credible and add a perspective to the news, you will develop a following. These are often the hardest blogs to develop but once you have that credibility factor you will find a strong reader base.

The bad news for blogger who use news as the base for their blog content, the old saying of ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrapping’ still holds true today. There will not be a lot of individuals searching for your old content. However, develop a strong following and today news could be good news for your blog.

WordPress is one of the most popular blog software packages in use today yet despite all the work that has gone into writing the software, there are still some basic flaws in the package.

One of those flaws is the lack navigation breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs have several benefits to your blog including user navigation, search engine navigation (which helps your SEO) and a general professional look.

Breadcrumbs are the navigation text you often see on some blogs. A good breadcrumb addition will show a complete navigation structure from your categories. For example, the top of the post could show Home > SEO > WordPress SEO indicating the post is in the category for SEO and subcategory WordPress SEO.

If the breadcrumb utility is well written, each component will be ‘clickable’, in other words, a link through to the previous section. There are several plugins available that place breadcrumbs on your single pages (don’t use them on your front page). One plugin that works quite well comes from Yoast and is well worth checking out. A search of WordPress’s plugins will uncover more.

A breadcrumb plugin makes life a little easier on your visitors and may even help keep your visitor a little longer as they click on category link to check other posts. This is one plugin which will not hurt your blog at all, it may actually help.

Internal links can be just as important as backlinks when it comes to blog SEO, the big difference being the amount of control you have over your internal links. You can install a plugin that will add links to related post automatically; however, you have little control over these links.

If you have the time, and if you have a good handle on where you blog has been in the past, it can be a much better idea to add links to your previous posts yourself. If possible, place the links within the content of the post rather than just tacking them onto the end of the post.

As time goes by, don’t be afraid to review some of your older posts with links forward to new posts with relevant content. This can be particularly useful when later posts contain more up-to-date information. The older post is likely to show up in search results so any traffic that flows from those results should find a link to the post with up-to-date information in a prominent place.

Controlling your internal links means you can control where the ‘link juice’ flows. Do this as naturally as possible.

Over on our Search Engine Optimization Journal blog, I discussed crawl rates and the importance of collecting the data. This has lead to many Identifying Crawl Rates As Part Of SEO.

If you have WordPress then you can add a plugin that will record every visit from the search engines and which pages they are crawling.

The plugin, Crawl Rate Tracker, is easy to install and easy to use. By identifying which pages are not getting re-indexed on a regular basis, you can start to optimize the frequent sites with links back to the less frequent sites.

The plugin can:

* Access crawl data for 3 main search engines
* See the exact times a spider accessed any page on your site
* Monitor your crawl rate over time
* Discover how crawl rate is related to PageRank

While it is not an essential plugin, it does provide plenty of useful information that many may find useful.