Ever since the famous AOL data leak of 2006 people have been endlessly quoting the same old figures when asked for amount of clicks a particular ranking gets.

Recently the data has become a lot more accurate thanks to the release of click data in Google Webmaster Tools and a new study by the Chitika ad network.

From the AOL data we can see that first place gets 42% of traffic, compared to just 11.9% for second place. That seems too high to me.

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The original PageRank model used a random surfer model and assumed that people moved randomly throughout the web. Crucially every link on a page had an equal chance of being clicked as all the others.

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.

The problem with this is that all links are not equal – some are much more important than others. In 2004 Google created the Reasonable Surfer Model which attempts to algorithmically determine which links are more important than others.

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow some of the links with higher probability than others.
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First of all sorry about the lack of posts recently, if you want some SEO information take a read of the latest Q&A with Google to see what Matt Cutts thought of the Daily Express selling links.

Now back to the point of this post – to tell you all about a product we have been testing on some of our business to business clients sites. Anybody who has done B2B SEO will know that it’s a different ball game due to many factors:

• Not much traffic to go around
• You compete with consumer facing brands
• A lot of your visitors are sometimes not your target customers
• Products & services are normally more expensive so conversion rates are lower
• Every lead is worth a lot of money

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Although we use a number of tools here at Branded3 I’ve never been a big fan of most of the SEO software available today. The market seems to be always slightly behind the times and although companies such as SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Enquisite (who are funded to the tune of $17m) and a multitude of keyword research and keyword spy tools have made great strides in the last 2 years it sometimes feels like we should have been here in 2008 rather than 2010.

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NMA has recently released their annual Marketing Services Guide detailing the turnover and staff levels of 36 UK search agencies and it makes very interesting reading. The guide doesn’t split natural search revenue from PPC revenue in the main table but if you click on the company name the split is listed in the profile page.

What I find interesting is looking at the number of staff some agencies have in comparison to turnover, useful for figuring out how important search is to their revenue stream. It’s also interesting that a lot of “big” agencies that appear to specialise in natural and paid search don’t really make much money from it.

The list isn’t particularly comprehensive, I can think of quite a few that would make the top 20 on here.
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There has been a lot of talk recently about how TopSEOs.com might not be the “Independent Authority on Search Vendors” they claim to be. I’ve not followed all the blog posts about it but today I decided to see just how much it would cost to get Branded3 listed on TopSEOs for all the services we offer.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the $500 monthly fee for each category adds up to a nice $15,000 per month fee for being listed. TopSEOs state that this fee is for “research and time is spent on reviewing your organization and talking to your clients” and in the next paragraph state that “unfortunately, some firms do not make their way to the final list. In such a case you will be reimbursed.”

Google is increasingly starting to personalise search results for users and they even have a feature called Starred Results which allows users to make a note of their favourite sites for a particular search result.

We assume that when you “favourite” a site by clicking on the star it gives that site a boost in your personalised results but what isn’t clear is whether it gives the site a boost for every search user.

I would like to do an experiment and need your help in doing this so if you could follow the steps below that would be fantastic.

• Make sure you are logged in to your Google account
• Search for “search engine optimisation” on Google.co.uk
• Click the star on the right hand site of the result for Blogstorm (shown in the screenshot below)

I will report back on the results in a week or so.

Thanks for your help.

The single most useful way to find high value keywords has always been to look at the exact search keywords driving sales via AdWords and copy them. Looking at the keywords you are bidding on is useless, looking at the keywords that people are actually searching for is very important.

This month Google is finally going to add a report to Analytics which shows the exact search keywords for AdWords campaigns in your reports, previously this was only available via AdWords (great if you have access, not so great otherwise) and by a filter which was quite hard to implement.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs.

You can see a video of the new reports below:

Interestingly the asynchronous tracking tag is now out of beta and will be the default option for new users.

We’re down at Internet World this week and I’ve just done a seminar on Off Site SEO for Ecommerce Websites, if you want to get the slides click here for a PDF.

The sites I mentioned in the presentation are the excellent SEOmoz and their Open Site Explorer tool.

Come and see us on our stand for some free SEO advice.